A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  In July 1901 the Leader published an article describing a wide range of occupations from which Catholics were excluded or in which they were grossly under-represented. This Dublin weekly journal was the vehicle of D. P. Moran, a gifted if somewhat vituperative journalist who encouraged the upward mobility of middle-class Catholics. His articles struck a chord, and at the end of the following year a Catholic Association was established to promote the employment and businesses of co-religionists, even to the extent of boycotting Protestant rivals. The association justified its blatantly sectarian approach by claiming it was simply doing what Protestants had been doing for generations. The association’s handbook told members bluntly: ‘We must fight with all our might until we have laid our hands on as much power, place and position … as our numbers, our ability, and our unabated historical claims entitle us to demand.’

  It enjoyed some initial successes, but its tactics proved counter-productive in the long run, as increasingly did wild and unfounded allegations against various organisations. In 1904 Archbishop Walsh condemned its activities and it dissolved itself. An attempted resurrection as the Catholic Defence Association did not fool Dr Walsh or his fellow-bishops, and the association’s most amenable members were siphoned off to help form the Columban Knights, a new creation by the archbishop. Although initially a Dublin organisation, its aim was to create a discreet national lobby similar to the Freemasons, and in 1915 it merged with a similar northern body to form the Order of the Knights of Saint Columbanus.36

  Such quiet, ‘behind-the-scenes’ stage management was the preferred option of Dr Walsh, who was by temperament shy and intellectual. One of his greatest achievements had been negotiating the creation of a National University with the Liberal government in 1907 and 1908.37 The main offspring of this initiative was University College, Dublin, which was dominated by a Catholic ethos as well as having an institutional and academic parity with TCD that had never been attained by the old Catholic University or its successor, the Royal University.

  Nationalist politics in the city were not as amenable to Dr Walsh’s guiding hand and were riven by divisions. The main nationalist organisation was the United Irish League, which had begun as a rural protest movement but evolved, more by accident than design, into the Irish Party’s main organisational vehicle in the constituencies. Some 70 per cent of the Dublin Corporation were members of the UIL. Publicans, small merchants, shopkeepers and builders formed the backbone of the league in the city. Clientelism provided the UIL’s electoral base, and a reputation for jobbery and corruption made little impact on its electoral dominance before 1914. Like the Unionists, the UIL benefited from the restricted franchise that operated under the Local Government (Ireland) Act (1898).

  The requirement that electors be householders, or lodgers who paid more than 4s a week in rent, and that they have at least a year’s residence in the same premises meant that the great majority of unskilled and semi-skilled workers and their families, living in the city’s tenements, had no vote. Most of these slum-dwellers paid rents of no more than 2s 6d or 3s 6d a week. With more than thirty thousand evictions a year in Dublin, the ‘midnight flit’ by near-destitute tenants was rife, and inclusion in the electoral register seemed an irrelevance. Nor did the seventeen thousand domestic servants—the city’s largest occupational group—qualify for the franchise, despite the fact that they ‘lived in’ for years.

  All these factors contributed to only 38,000 inhabitants out of a population of 299,000 having the vote. The electorate was therefore composed largely of the middle classes and skilled workers.

  But the political resilience of the UIL was wearing thin by 1914. While the Irish Party could claim, with some justification, to have done much to transform the life of rural Ireland, the same could not be said about Dublin. The imminence of home rule and the political crisis this had provoked put unexpected pressures on local councillors whose ward-healing skills had done little to prepare them for the demands that the crisis placed on them. The leader of the Irish Party, John Redmond, emphasised unity above all else in securing home rule. Any dissent in nationalist ranks on secondary issues, such as a woman’s right to vote or trade union recognition, was seen as the lowest form of treachery. This put the UIL organisation in serious danger of losing touch with a younger generation of Dubliners at a time when the city was undergoing social upheaval.

  The inability of the UIL and the Irish Party to deal with urban issues was exposed by the lock-out. When the Lord Mayor, Lorcan Sherlock, proposed a motion at the corporation calling for the withdrawal of police from the city in the aftermath of baton charges on ‘Bloody Sunday’ that left more than five hundred people injured, the UIL councillors split. Those representing wards with a large working-class population, such as the Lord Mayor himself and Dr James McWalter (who spent the afternoon and evening of Bloody Sunday treating the injured in his surgery), voted for the motion, while the majority of UIL members voted against. It was defeated by the relatively tight margin of 26 votes to 21. The twenty nationalist councillors opposed to the withdrawal of police from the city were supported by the four unionist councillors present and by two independents representing the comfortable suburbs of Clontarf and Glasnevin. Supporters of the motion included the six Labour councillors present and four Sinn Féin members, as well as nine nationalist councillors.38

  Whether corporation members would have voted in such numbers to have the police withdrawn from Dublin if there had been the remotest possibility of it happening is another matter. Unlike British cities, Dublin Corporation had no control over the police forces in the capital. Both the DMP and the RIC were under the direction of the British administration in Dublin Castle. The Commissioner of the DMP, Sir John Ross, and the Deputy Commissioner, William Harrel, were based in the Castle. Their force of 1,173 men was sorely stretched by the lock-out, and no fewer than 947 took sick leave as a direct result of injuries sustained during the dispute.39 Order was maintained only with the help of the RIC and the military.

  But far more damaging for the police in the long run than their physical injuries was the antagonism engendered in many working-class districts by strike-breaking activities, including the intimidation of pickets, taking notes of speeches at public meetings for Crown prosecutions, and attacks on workers’ homes. In the years ahead some members of the DMP would pay a high personal price for their behaviour.

  The UIL survived the lock-out intact, for two reasons. One was the defeat of the workers, who had been starved into submission; the other was the poor showing of Labour candidates in the local elections of January 1914. Of ten ‘Larkinite’ candidates only one was elected, for the Labour stronghold of Kilmainham. However, the results were deceptive and due to poor electoral tactics by Labour rather than lack of support. The Larkinites received 12,026 votes to the 16,627 for candidates supported by the UIL and came within 150 votes of winning seats in four constituencies.

  The UIL also faced a threat from within nationalist ranks. If Labour ran ten candidates against the UIL in eight constituencies, the UIL faced challenges from rival nationalist groups in twelve. In one instance, Drumcondra, the split nationalist vote between the UIL candidate and a rival from the Ancient Order of Hibernians allowed a unionist to top the poll. An independent nationalist candidate, Laurence O’Neill, defeated the UIL nominee, Patrick Shortall, in the Rotunda ward. Shortall was a builder who had locked out his workers the previous year, while O’Neill, an auctioneer, was popular and associated loosely with the Sinn Féin group in the corporation.

  The AOH seemed a greater threat to the UIL in 1914 than Sinn Féin or Labour, precisely because it was closely allied to the Irish Party. In fact the AOH had originated as a Catholic electoral machine in Belfast and then spread its organisational tentacles southwards. The introduction of the National Insurance Act by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in 1911 gave a huge boost to the Hibernians: by 1914 the AOH’s insurance section had seventeen thousand members, and even trade
unions vehemently opposed to the order’s activities, such as Jim Larkin’s ITGWU, often lodged their members’ insurance contributions with their more financially adept competitor. The ubiquity of the Hibernians on the insurance front allowed Irish Freedom, the monthly journal funded by the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, to poke fun at former members of Sinn Féin in Dublin who applied for jobs as insurance agents with the AOH.40

  By 1914 the order’s head office had moved to 32 Rutland Square in Dublin, where John Dillon Nugent, a native of Keady, Co. Armagh, presided as national secretary.41 A former bailiff and insurance agent who rose to become a broker, Nugent was a city councillor for the comfortable middle-class suburb of Sandymount and had ambitions to win a parliamentary seat.

  The manoeuvring for parliamentary nominations was particularly intense in Dublin, because most of the six sitting MPs were either old or in poor health. None of them had distinguished themselves during the lock-out, and they refused to take a stand collectively on the issue of union recognition. William Cotton, who had captured the Unionist seat in South County Dublin, was a business associate of the employers’ leader, William Martin Murphy, and predictably hostile to the workers. So was Patrick J. Brady, a solicitor who represented the St Stephen’s Green division and who owed his seat in part to his close association with lay Catholic organisations such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul. After remaining silent during the lock-out, he offered mild criticism of the employers’ tactics at the 1914 annual general meeting of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce but opposed a parliamentary inquiry into the lock-out in a House of Commons debate three weeks later. As he told the chamber of commerce, he did not want the dispute ‘paraded all over the world’ for the benefit of ‘anarchists and promoters of evil.’

  Brady was doubly dammed. He had done little to reassure his overwhelmingly conservative electorate that he was the right man for the job, and in 1910 he had won the seat by the relatively small margin of eight hundred votes from his unionist rival, Lord Sidney Herbert. The fact that Brady had dabbled with Sinn Féin in his youth, before finding its policies too radical, cannot have reassured many Irish Party voters.42

  Joseph Nannetti had represented the College Green division since 1900. He was a printer by trade who helped found the Dublin Trades Council and was the principal adviser on labour affairs to the leader of the Irish Party, John Redmond. Nannetti played no part in the events of 1913, having suffered the first of a series of strokes that rendered him an invalid. He was not expected to live long.

  William Abraham was another ‘labour nationalist’ and former trade union activist who represented the overwhelmingly working-class Harbour division. At seventy-three he was the oldest of Dublin’s representatives in the House of Commons. His chief claim to fame was that he had been the MP who formally proposed Parnell’s resignation as leader of the Irish Party after the O’Shea divorce case in 1890. His Protestant faith (he was a Congregationalist) was probably the reason he had been selected for this role, but it cannot have endeared him to Dublin nationalists, who were strongly Parnellite in sentiment. He was one of that curious brand of absentee home-rule MPs whose devotion to the cause meant that they lived in London and were awarded seats by the party on the grounds of services rendered in the House of Commons rather than having a local power base. Abraham’s seat was safe so long as the Irish Party organisation was strong, and his own health held out.

  John Clancy, MP for North County Dublin, was a lawyer, former editor of the Nation and a veteran of the Land War of the 1880s. His chief claim to fame was as the proposer of the Town Tenants (Ireland) Act (1906), which gave urban tenants some of the rights already conceded to tenant farmers. However, the main beneficiaries of the act were small businesses and shopkeepers rather than Dublin’s 100,000 slum-dwellers. Clancy was sixty-eight and showing signs of his age by the time of the lock-out, and his constituency organisation was in decline and unable to attract new blood.43

  Another Land War veteran was William Field, who had wrested the St Patrick’s division from William Martin Murphy in the bitter election of 1892, when the latter had emerged as one of the leading anti-Parnellites. Field, a butcher by trade, had a colourful career. He was an early and respected treasurer of the Gaelic Athletic Association; he helped found the Knights of the Plough, one of several proto-unions for rural labourers in the 1890s, and represented them briefly at the Irish Trades Union Congress. At the 1895 ITUC conference he successfully opposed a motion calling for the nationalisation of the land, on the grounds that ‘socialism was all right if they had to deal with angels, and not with human nature.’ A self-taught man, he wrote pamphlets on political and economic issues of the day and became a governor of the Royal Veterinary College of Ireland. He also became president of the Irish Cattle Traders’ and Stockowners’ Association, vice-president of the National Federation of Meat Traders of England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, and secretary of the Dublin Victuallers’ Association.

  These positions reflected Field’s successful business career, but he still managed to retain working-class support. This was not just because of his Parnellite past but also from the use he made of his membership of such bodies as Dublin Corporation’s Port and Docks Committee in 1913 to champion the rights of locked-out dockers. His maintenance of rather tenuous links with the IRB, of which he may once have been a member, kept open his lines to advanced nationalists. Described by one contemporary as ‘a venerable figure with a wide brimmed hat and picturesque appearance reminiscent of Buffalo Bill,’ he wrote plays and provided a bohemian contrast to his drab parliamentary colleagues.44

  One figure that every nationalist of standing had to cultivate in Dublin was Archbishop William Walsh. Because of his close interest in the city’s social, economic and political life he was well known to his flock. A poor horseman, he had been an early convert to the bicycle, which he preferred to his motor car because it provided him with a more intimate view of the city. The Lord Mayor, Lorcan Sherlock, enjoyed the nickname of ‘the Lay Pope’ because of his regular visits to the archbishop’s palace to seek spiritual and political guidance.

  It was through Sherlock that the archbishop almost succeeded in setting up an employer-labour conciliation board for Dublin in the summer of 1913. Unfortunately the initiative was scuttled by William Martin Murphy, who was determined to smash Jim Larkin’s union and almost succeeded in the lock-out that followed. Murphy and Larkin were two of the few public figures in the city who would be impervious to Dr Walsh’s political and diplomatic skills. Now the perils of irreconcilable class warfare were to be joined by the rising spectre of a new generation of radical nationalists, armed with a vaguer ideology and guns.

  Dr Walsh, who had shown an uncanny knack for anticipating change and ensuring that the Catholic Church was on the right side from the Parnell era onwards, was coming to realise that the UIL was a spent force, and he had no more time for the virulent sectarianism of the AOH than he had for Larkinism. As one of the archbishop’s wide network of correspondents, the moderate unionist Sir Shane Leslie, observed, Dr Walsh ‘realised that without his Protestant brethren there was no united Ireland.’45

  One positive result of the war with Germany was the removal of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers from the city when they were shipped to France. But the memory remained, and the killings were commemorated in a ballad that rechristened the regiment the King’s Own Scottish Murderers.

  On Bachelor’s Walk a scene took place which I’m sure had just been planned, For the cowardly Scottish Borderers turned and fired without command. With bayonets fixed they charged the crowd and left them in their gore, But their deeds will be remembered in Irish hearts for ever more.46

  Chapter 2

  ‘THE DESOLATING CLOUDBURST OF WAR’

  Dublin before the Easter Rising

  Dublin barely reacted to news of the United Kingdom’s formal declaration of war on Germany on Tuesday 4 August 1914. There was none of the jingoism in evidence elsewhere. Most citizen
s were preoccupied with the horrific events on Bachelor’s Walk ten days earlier, now the subject of a Royal Commission; and they took advantage of the fine bank holiday weather to forget about the succession of conflicts that had engulfed the city over the previous twelve months.

  The rapture, unionist as well as nationalist, that greeted the dramatic pledge by the leader of the Irish Party, John Redmond, in the House of Commons that the Irish Volunteers could be relied upon to defend the country, in co-operation with the Ulster Volunteers, was more in tune with feelings in London than in Dublin. Although Redmond had not consulted his colleagues beforehand, the enthusiastic reaction among the political elite suggested that his speech was not only a generous gesture but a master stroke. Militant separatists were thrown momentarily off balance, while the nationalist and unionist press alike were fulsome in their tribute. The Freeman’s Journal described the speech as a ‘momentous and historic declaration,’ while the unionist Irish Times went further and felt that ‘no Irishman—no man of Irish blood in any part of the world—will read Mr. Redmond’s speech without a thrill of joy.’ It urged the government to regularise the status of volunteers, north and south; and some southern unionist peers offered their services for the training of Irish Volunteer units locally. The Earl of Meath, who was His Majesty’s Lieutenant for Dublin, went so far as to call for a monument to the Kaiser, in recognition of all he had done to unify Ireland.1