Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  [14]Ibid., p. 67.

  [15]Ibid.

  [16]Conversation with Mimi Plunkett’s son, Colm Ó Laoghaire.

  [17]Dillon, ‘A Victorian Household’, p. 69.

  [18]NGDPs.

  [19]Ibid.

  [20]Undated newspaper cutting.

  [21]Joseph Mary Plunkett, The Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett, Dublin: The Talbot Press (undated), p. xii.

  10 - A Question of Guns

  The céilís, concerts, drama, Gaelic sport and Irish classes and romances were largely convivial, social aspects of the Irish Ireland dream, yet, distinct from that, with the borders inevitably blurring at times, were the starker features of what was evolving around the country. ‘John’ Gifford wrote of the men and women involved: ‘Some were in Sinn Féin; others in the Irish Republican Brotherhood; others in the Inghínidhe na hÉireann. Still more were in the ranks of the Gaelic League or the GAA. Within a few years these scattered groups had coalesced, and an Irish revolutionary force was in being.’[1]

  These were obvious milestones on the road to rebellion. After 1913, it became obvious that the influence of the republican press, the bitterness engendered by the lock-out strike and the consequent formation of the Citizen Army were slanting events closer to armed confrontation. At the same time, the unionists in the northern counties, reacting to the ‘threat’ of John Redmond’s dream of Home Rule for Ireland, decided to arm. Apart from private purchases from Germany of arms and ammunition by wealthy unionists, £100,000 – a huge sum in those days – was subscribed to buy the arms that were smuggled into Larne, County Antrim, in April 1914. The importers deliberately cut off public communications on the day of the arms arrival, and, in a convoy of motor cars, 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition were distributed across Ulster. No police stopped the convoy, though what they did was illegal. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the Conservative Party, the unionist Ulster landlords – none of them wanted Home Rule either, and this illegal army had their tacit support. Even more significantly, the British army officers in the Curragh, County Kildare, mutinied and refused to march against the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). They resigned their commissions rather than oppose those they perceived to be friends.

  They were to have no such misgivings when the nationalists in the south proceeded to arm. In fact, the UVF did the south of Ireland militants a favour: they pointed the way. Three months later, in July 1914, a nationalist Protestant, Erskine Childers, lent his yacht, The Asgard, to enable the importation into Howth Harbour, County Dublin, of a much humbler cargo than that at Larne. The subscribers of the purchase price of £1,500, in comparison with the north of Ireland’s £100,000, were fellow Anglo-Irish Protestants: Sir Roger Casement, the Honourable Mary Spring Rice (a daughter of Lord Monteagle and sister of a British ambassador), Alice Stopford Green (later a senator in Seanad Éireann) and a Captain Berkeley. In all 1,500 rifles were bought, of which 900 came on The Asgard. That figure made the purchase price approximately £1 per rifle, so it is obvious they were not the best rifles in the world. One might even wonder if they were not relics of the Napoleonic wars. No matter how it is viewed, numerically or qualitatively, this was David confronting Goliath. Apart from the £100,000 UVF importation, the republicans also faced the weaponry of the three official armed agencies supporting unionists, north and south. On one small island there were now nine ‘armies’:

  1. the British army of occupation (armed)

  2. the Royal Irish Constabulary (armed)

  3. the Dublin Metropolitan Police (armed)

  4. the Ulster Volunteer Force (armed)

  On the republican side, minimally or not at all armed:

  5. the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)

  6. Na Fianna (a sort of boy-scout nationalist movement set up in Dublin in 1909 by Bulmer Hobson and Countess Markievicz among others)

  7. the Irish Citizen Army (ICA)

  8. the Hibernian Rifles (a small, exclusively Catholic militia based in Dublin)

  9. the Irish Volunteer Force (which included the IRB)

  Goliath had far superior numbers and equipment. David had 700 years of resentment, a dream of freedom and, of course, 1,500 weapons worth approximately £1 each. It is interesting to contrast the smooth, unopposed importation passage of the huge UVF purchase at Larne with that at Howth, where the gunrunners were almost entirely without transport. The Fianna had brought along a small horse and cart and a trek cart – a very narrow, short, covered cart, manually powered. In a photograph of them running along with their quaint wagonette, it looks like a mobile fruit stall from the Moore Street market. There were also some bicycles, whose crossbars neatly accommodated a rifle, and the rest were just hidden under jackets. While all this compares pathetically with the Larne fleet of cars, headlights ablaze to illuminate the scene, nevertheless the Fianna’s arrangements were adequate for the delivery, and the strange little wagon proved very useful, taking a major stash of the rifles. Darrell Figgis and Conor O’Brien had been involved in the purchase of the guns at Antwerp. Childers’ wife, Molly, in the yacht, was to wear a crimson garment as a signal to the waiting party, which included Mary Spring Rice, Gordon Shephard (an English friend of Childers) and two fishermen from Tory Island.

  Also at Howth that day was Cathal Brugha with a group of his IRB men to guard the shipment. Another group of approximately 800 Irish Volunteers had allegedly made a routine march from Fairview to arrive ‘coincidentally’ at Howth. On the way back to the city with their haul they were stopped in the Raheny-Clontarf area by W. A. Harrel, Assistant Commissioner of the DMP, backed up by a large contingent of Scottish Borderers. He demanded surrender of the arms, but Bulmer Hobson, who was in charge of the delivery, refused. Hobson left Thomas MacDonagh and Darrell Figgis to argue with the Assistant Commissioner while he slipped away to move his men quietly and quickly through fields and round the backs of houses, each carrying rifles. A word of pity may be allowed W. A. Harrel: the man was only doing his duty and he was confronted by two of the ablest talkers in the movement. MacDonagh, the persuasive university lecturer, a wordsmith by profession, and Figgis, a worthy debater in any company, used their ‘blarney’ to give time to the fleeing convoy. In the event, only nineteen rifles were lost. It was an occasion for glee, but unfortunately the day was to end on a tragic note. Dubliners, having heard of the successful manoeuvre, jeered the Scottish Borderers as they marched back to barracks along the Liffey quays. Hasty tempers combined with tired, irate, trigger-happy soldiers, left three people dead: the first casualties, it could be said, of the War of Independence, unarmed and shot without trial.

  Superintendent Brangan, in charge of a contingent of the DMP who had been ordered to Howth, was brought before a tribunal which accused him, because he was Irish, of turning a blind eye to the dispersal of the guns. He was summarily dismissed and deprived of his pension rights. On appeal, his conviction was quashed and his job and pension restored.[2]

  Some Howth residents were given weapons to store. They were instructed to keep the weapons oiled and serviceable. One such ‘minder’ was Molly Brohoon, who eventually went on the run.[3]

  Another very different episode took place the following year, edging Ireland towards use of those imported arms. Words can undoubtedly be weapons, and never were they more so than when Pádraig Pearse stood before those assembled in Glasnevin Cemetery, in 1915, at the interment of the old Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, whose remains had been brought from America. It was, at least partly, an orchestrated exercise in emotional political blackmail, and the conductor was Thomas MacDonagh. The occasion had all the ingredients for drama: one of the revered, though defeated, ‘Bold Fenian Men’, O’Donovan Rossa, had been brought home for burial in his native land. There was dignity and a reverence for the old warrior in the thousands who lined the route and in the marching feet representing every Irish Ireland ideology and every organisation, however insignificant, involved in the movement.

  If the funeral itself was impressive, Pear
se’s oration at the grave was electrifying. Even the cadence of his words was intrinsically dramatic, and the concluding triad rang out unforgettably in the hushed air, challenging the might of England with its simple thirteen words:

  The fools, the fools, the fools: they have left us our Fenian dead.

  Pearse, the poet and dreamer, who was certainly no Sarsfield mili-tarily speaking, mesmerised his listeners with his monosyllabic challenge. It was a defining day in Irish history.[4]

  Reaction around the city was divided, as in the Gifford household: the daughters deeply moved and involved, their mother indignant at such fuss about a Fenian and their father feeling, perhaps, a little uneasy about the future.

  Notes

  [1] Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 40.

  [2]Conversation with Fr Dermot Brangan, SJ, Hong Kong Mission (grandson of Superintendent Brangan).

  [3]Conversation with John Murphy, Molly Brohoon’s grandson, librarian in All Hallows library.

  [4]A lady to whom I spoke was there that day and remembered the hushed atmosphere as the words rang out in the clear air, with the accompaniment of faint twittering of birds and the slight, but audible, shift of gravel near the graveside.

  11 - Enter Cupid Bearing Arrows

  There has been little enough mention so far of the young woman who called herself Grace Vandeleur Gifford. The ‘Vandeleur’ was included as a sort of pride in her ancestor, John Vandeleur, who had started the Ralahine Commune experiment in County Clare to improve the lot of his tenants. Her Orpen portrait – as The Spirit of Young Ireland – shows a very attractive young woman. Nellie described Grace as pretty; certainly she makes a delightful child study in the studio photo with ‘John’, and Orpen’s portrait in oils is arresting.[1] Her niece Maeve said that her face was striking rather than pretty. Of medium height, Grace had tawny red hair and brown eyes.[2] Both she and Muriel represented the quiet side of the Giffords, wedged as they were between the irrepressibles: Gabriel, Ada and Nellie on the one side and the feisty ‘John’, their junior, on the other. Grace had a quirky sense of humour and so marked a talent in art that her parents agreed to Orpen’s advice that she continue her art studies in London.

  Her first meeting with Joseph Plunkett did not develop romantically with anything like the immediacy of the courtship that led to the marriage of her sister to MacDonagh. In their case there were many reasons which would have intruded: for one thing, Plunkett’s debilitating tuberculosis resulted in his being away for a year after they were introduced. Furthermore, he was entirely dependent on his mother’s munificence, and, while she spared no money on his winter health trips abroad, and though he was dressed in the best of clothes (however carelessly worn) and had use of her car and the wherewithal to indulge his numerous interests, this young man in his late twenties, highly educated and highly intelligent, had no career as such.

  After his return from Algiers, Joseph and Grace continued to meet frequently at the MacDonagh home and at the various theatrical and other social gatherings of the movement. It seems, however, that it was the publication of yet another nationalist paper that quickened their friendship. This one, The Irish Review, started off as a more intellectual approach to Irish problems. Professor Houston launched it in 1911, along with James Stephens, Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Colum. Colum took on the editorship for 1912/13 and Plunkett then became editor, when he had to save it from financial ruin. The contributors to this publication read like a roll-call of intellectuals: Joseph Campbell, Lord Dunsany, Darrell Figgis, Arthur Griffith, Professor Mary Hayden, Winifred Mabel Letts, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Pádraig Pearse, John B. Yeats, Standish O’Grady, Professor Eoin MacNeill and Sir Roger Casement.[3]

  Its stated (tongue-in-cheek) policy in the first issue was ‘non-party and non-political’: ‘we will try to deal with them [current politics] with as little partiality and as little bias as is good for people in earnest to have.’

  Soon, however, being very much in earnest about nationalism, they became as nationalist, though using different terminology, as the republican press. During the 1913 Dublin lock-out strike, Plunkett, born into wealth, vehemently took the side of the workers in his paper. In fact, this strike, with its attendant misery, was a great motivating force in his increased commitment to the movement and precipitated the IRB into helping to found the Irish Volunteers in 1913, in a reaction to the part played by Dublin Castle in breaking the strike.

  An article in The Irish Review by Plunkett’s friend, Sir Roger Casement, suggested the raising of a volunteer force to defend Ireland’s neutrality in the event of war. There was also an article in Pádraig Pearse’s Gaelic League journal on the same subject by Eoin MacNeill, a founder of the League and Professor of Irish in UCD. It was called ‘The North Began’. These articles prompted the IRB to arrange a meeting for 13 November 1913, at the Rotunda in Parnell Square. The numbers who turned up greatly exceeded expectations and required an overflow room, but, though this numerical success seemed impressive, it soon became clear that the members of this new force, the Irish Volunteers, did not speak with one voice. The one unifying factor was resentment that Westminster had deferred to the northern unionists, whose Ulster Volunteers had been allowed their arms importation without interference. Having conceded that unity of spirit, there was trilateral thinking in the ranks of these southern Volunteers from day one.

  On the outbreak of the First World War, John Redmond was to recruit 27,000 of his followers to join the British army as a sort of bribe to force the implementation of Home Rule. He called his group ‘the National Volunteers’. A second grouping represented a sort of middle-of-the-road philosophy, questioning the deferral of Home Rule, deploring the unchallenged ease with which the Ulster Volunteers had established themselves and feeling, however vaguely, that it would not be a bad idea for them to arm. They retained the original title of the Irish Volunteers. Eoin MacNeill, one of the moderates, was appointed leader of the Irish Volunteers. They resented the official handling of the lock-out strike and indifference to the starvation and appalling misery of the Irish poor.[4] A third loosely structured entity, and the most extreme politically, was made up of members of the Irish Volunteers and guided, often behind the scenes, by the IRB. They were heirs to the armed separatism of the Fenians and included Thomas Clarke, who had survived the imprisonment meted out to captured Fenians, unlike others, with his sanity intact. This group also included The O’Rahilly, Bulmer Hobson, Pádraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett.

  Those who joined the British army from Ulster sought and received a specially named Ulster Regiment with appropriate regimental regalia and insignia. Redmond sought the same for his National Volunteers but was refused, despite the fact that a recruiting poster appeared with Redmond in the stance of the famous Lord Kitchener original, finger pointed at the viewer and bearing the words ‘Join an Irish regiment today’.

  In all this hurly-burly, in the November 1914 issue of The Irish Review, Plunkett observed, ‘Our entire staff has for some time past been working full time and overtime (if such a thing is possible) in the Irish Volunteer organisation.’ This issue also published a rejection of John Redmond’s pledge to commit the Irish Volunteers to fight for Britain in the First World War. The rejection was formally couched in the form of a manifesto, signed by twenty men, whose names included five of the later signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. This edition also published ‘Twenty Plain Facts for Irishmen’, the last two of which read:

  19. The Union Jack is the symbol of the Act of Union of 1800, by which the Irish nation was deprived of her last rights and liberties.

  20. The Irish Nation Lives.

  No wonder the police confiscated as many copies as they could. This confiscation almost closed the paper, which staggered on a little while longer only through the pumping in of Plunkett money.[5] While it lasted, however, Grace Gifford had found her true métier. She helped with the newspaper’s layout and also contributed some of her delicate, subt
le cartoons. A clever one of actors Micheál Mac Liammóir and Maureen Delaney appeared, and the confiscated issue featured her caricature of the Irish writer, George Moore.

  Working together on The Irish Review, its last young editor and the young caricaturist, both in their twenties, began to find each other very congenial company.

  An example of one of Grace’s cartoons

  Notes

  [1]Sir William Orpen, Art Gallery, Mayfair, London.

  [2]In conversation with Maeve Donnelly in the early 1990s.

  [3]Geraldine Plunkett, ‘Foreword’, in Joseph Mary Plunkett, The Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett, pp. ix, x.

  [4]Ibid.

  [5]Ibid., p. x.

  12 - Nellie’s Burra

  Some sympathy must be allowed Frederick and Isabella Gifford. It was bearable to have a republican professor as a son-in-law, particularly since he had been offered a post and a house in University College, Galway, at £1,000 per annum (an offer MacDonagh refused); it was allowable that another republican, son of a wealthy papal count, should come courting; even ‘John’s’ republican journalism might be borne – after all, she was hobnobbing with some of the Protestant intellectuals her parents knew, and, anyhow, it was unlikely that her parents ever read the journals in which her work appeared.

  Nellie’s involvement with James Larkin, however, was something else. They were unlikely, to say the least, to subscribe to Larkin’s own assessment that he was fighting ‘a holy war’ or others’ assessment that he was a visionary seeking dignity for the poorest or that he would obtain a very special niche in the folklore of Dublin. They read, in fact, in the establishment press, that he was leader of ‘the rabble’. Nellie herself summed up the predicament: ‘Poor mother, she was like a hen who had hatched out ducklings.’ [1] To put it another way, they were unlikely rebels, these Gifford girls.