There was no such ambiguity in Dublin. No element of the labour movement actively supported the war, and most of the leadership strongly opposed it. The Irish Neutrality League was so pro-German that leading Volunteers and IRB members, such as Thomas Ashe, had no problem addressing its meetings. Another leading ally was Connolly’s old friend Francis Sheehy Skeffington, joint editor with his wife, Hanna, of the Citizen, the suffragist weekly. Sheehy Skeffington, however, differed from his comrade in being a committed pacifist, ready to campaign and even die for the labour cause but not to kill for it.
By the summer of 1915 Sheehy Skeffington had addressed no fewer than forty anti-recruiting meetings. At one of the last, in Beresford Place on 23 May, a police note-taker recorded his speech as usual and then arrested him. On 9 June—on the same day that the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, was announcing terrible casualty figures in the House of Commons—Sheehy Skeffington appeared in the Dublin Southern Police Court and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour for interfering with recruitment. Seán Mac Diarmada, a Volunteer officer and future signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, was in the dock with him for a similar speech in Tuam but received only four months’ hard labour. Presumably his speech was considered less incendiary.
Sheehy Skeffington was reported to have urged men to stay at home, even if it meant being shot for defying conscription. ‘If you die at home you die defending your nation; if you die at the front you die doing the dirty work of England.’ Characteristically, he accused the government of ‘despotism’ for refusing to grant him a jury trial. But the authorities knew that no Dublin jury would convict. He also declared, to applause from the gallery, that he would immediately begin a hunger strike, ‘and long before the expiration of the sentence I will be out of prison, alive or dead.’
He not only began his hunger strike but after six days went on a thirst strike as well. The following day he was released under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act (1913)—popularly known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’—previously used against suffragist hunger-strikers. He was due to return to prison in a fortnight to continue his sentence but was not rearrested.
Undoubtedly Sheehy Skeffington’s high public profile and his powerful family connections—including a father-in-law who was a senior Irish Party MP and a brother-in-law who was a former MP and now a leading recruiting officer in Ireland—helped his cause.6 But the authorities were adopting a far less rigorous approach to anti-war agitators in Ireland than in Britain, anxious to avoid creating martyrs. When Geoffrey Dunlop courted prosecution by putting his name on posters declaring that ‘Warfare is murder’ the police magistrate gave him three months’ hard labour and immediately suspended the sentence. When Dunlop tried to read out a long statement to the court the magistrate said he did not question Dunlop’s motives but drew the line at listening to ridiculous addresses.7
While Redmond found it increasingly difficult to keep in step with his unaccommodating British allies, militant nationalists were steadily gaining in cohesion on their march to the Republic. The split with Redmond had seen power within the Irish Volunteers return to the IRB core. The first convention of the organisation was held on 25 October 1914, in the Abbey Theatre. Eoin MacNeill was re-elected chief of staff.
After the compromises and prevarications with the Redmondites, the road seemed clear again. Richard Mulcahy, a Post Office engineer from Waterford who as an adolescent had read the United Irishman, yet another Griffith paper, found that membership of the Volunteers brought ‘a sense of purpose and belonging he had never before known.’ The meeting in the Rotunda Rink to launch the Volunteers had been
a complete and joyous bursting open of a door, not only to the complete Dublin populace, but to the complete body of the patient, silent, suppressed Nationalist element in Ireland awakening them to their strength and inviting them to instruction.
Now that the organisation had been purged of its pro-British Redmondite elements it ‘crystallised’ the network of contacts already in existence through such organisations as the GAA, the Gaelic League and the IRB.8
A member from Lusk, John Devine, felt similarly. He had been recruited by Thomas Ashe to the Black Raven Pipe Band and the Gaelic League. He recalled: ‘Loyalty was intense in the Gaelic League and Volunteers and we would think nothing of going to one another’s aid. We were all one.’9
However, a discordant note was struck at the convention when Connolly turned up and asked for the Citizen Army to be affiliated, with two delegates. This was rejected, for fear that association with the Citizen Army might drive some supporters back into Redmond’s arms. Socialism, and all forms of modernism and materialism, were seen as a threat to Irish identity and culture and the Catholic religion. For men like Mulcahy, four of whose five sisters became nuns and one of whose two brothers became a Cistercian monk, there was no desire to contaminate the movement with such associations.10
There were also differences of opinion within the Citizen Army about developing better relations with the Volunteers. Citizen Army men had disrupted the launch of the Volunteers at the Rotunda Rink because one of the sponsors, Laurence Kettle, was a member of a prominent nationalist farming family that used scab labour during the lock-out. Detonators were exploded and punches were thrown.11 On 24 January 1914 Seán O’Casey wrote for the Irish Worker an ‘Open Letter to the Workers in the Volunteers,’ in which he urged them individually to ‘awake from your sleep and yield allegiance to no movement that [does] not avow the ultimate destiny of the workers.’
James MacGowran, a Citizen Army member, replied, defending the Volunteers. He said that the presence of such figures as Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and Alderman Tom Kelly in the leadership of the Volunteers ‘is sufficient guarantee that the interests of the workers shall not be trampled on.’ But O’Casey was unrepentant, lampooning ‘Honest Tom Kelly’ and accusing Pearse of using trams during the lock-out. He constantly questioned the Volunteers’ nationalism as well as their class credentials.
In May 1914 his worst fears were confirmed when the Volunteers’ incoming inspector-general, Colonel Maurice Moore, said that the movement would assist the police in ‘maintaining order’ if the home rule crisis resulted in civil unrest. The Irish Worker accused the Volunteers of becoming ‘a scab military institution,’ and Larkin expressed fears that the Hibernians would take them over.12
Things came to a head at a meeting of the Army Council of the Citizen Army at which O’Casey, as secretary, proposed that another member, Constance Markievicz, should sever all links with the Volunteers, to which she was attached through Cumann na mBan. The proposal was defeated and a vote of confidence in Markievicz was passed, by a margin of one vote.13 O’Casey resigned. He was particularly hurt by Larkin’s decision to support Markievicz.
Meanwhile Tom Clarke did his best to mend bridges with the Citizen Army, agreeing to its participation in the Volunteers’ parade to Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare, in June 1914. After the break with Redmond, Connolly wrote that the stand taken by the Provisional Committee would send ‘a thrill of joy through the heart of every true man and woman in the country.’ He urged them to join the Citizen Army in a ‘fight to the finish,’ even though ‘some of us’ might end up ‘on the scaffold.’14
Connolly’s attempt to affiliate the Citizen Army to the Volunteers was in line with his declaration, made within a week of the outbreak of war, that Irishmen should welcome the Germans as allies if they landed in Ireland. While Connolly had participated assiduously in many elections, as both a candidate and election worker, he saw them as just one of many means of waging class war. As he famously declared after losing one election, workers need not wait five years for the opportunity to cast another blow against capitalism. This was why he was a syndicalist, committed to using the strength of the trade union movement to advance political and economic causes that extended well beyond the traditional preoccupations of the work-place. In January 1914, when only one ‘Larkin
ite’ candidate out of ten secured a seat in the municipal elections, Connolly appears to have become particularly embittered by the electoral process and the seeming inability of the labour movement to secure victory through it, even in what appeared the most propitious circumstances.15
What the war provided was a unique opportunity, not seen since the days of the United Irishmen, to adopt an alternative revolutionary strategy. But it could happen only if Connolly embraced militant nationalism. O’Casey famously noted the change in The Story of the Irish Citizen Army.
The Labour movement seemed to be regarded by him as a decrescent force, while the essence of Nationalism began to assume the finest elements of his nature … The vision of the suffering world’s humanity was shadowed by the nearer oppression of his own people, and … the high creed of Irish Nationalism became his daily rosary, while the higher creed of international humanity that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was silent forever, and Irish Labour lost a Leader.’16
The first major manifestation of this new unity of purpose came on 1 August 1915, when armed Citizen Army men took their place alongside the Volunteers at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. It was the first great public demonstration of militant nationalism, and an estimated twenty thousand people participated, including all the Dublin units of the Redmondite National Volunteers, unarmed. It was perhaps appropriate that the last great rally of constitutional nationalism in Dublin should have been in defence of the drinks industry, while the new forces in the political arena dedicated themselves to the Fenian ideal.
Not surprisingly, very little of Pearse’s brief but highly seditious speech was permitted by the censors to appear in the national newspapers.17 Tom Clarke, who was now in charge of planning an IRB insurrection through the agency of the Volunteers, had told his protégé to make his speech ‘as hot as hell,’ and Pearse did not disappoint.18 Most newspapers did manage to print at least some of the famous closing lines.
The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think they have foreseen everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.19
It was not the words that mattered to Father Michael Curran, secretary to Archbishop Walsh, who described the funeral in his diary as ‘most impressive, skilfully organised and carried out’: it was ‘a challenge to Dublin Castle,’ and the volley over the grave ‘was a defiance to England by a new generation in Ireland.’20
In 1913 Curran had criticised Dublin Castle for tolerating peaceful protests by strikers seeking union recognition on the same streets. He was now part of that realignment activated by the war, which set him on a convergent path with Pearse, Clarke and Connolly. He might well have concurred with the Marxist propagandist’s belief, expressed in the Rossa Souvenir, that ‘before a nation can be reduced to slavery its soul must have been cowed, intimidated or corrupted by the oppressor,’ and that ‘no bloodletting could be as disastrous as a cowardly acceptance of the rule of the conqueror.’21
Shortly before Easter 1916 the Marxist revolutionary would remind his predominantly Catholic working-class readership: ‘Without the shedding of Blood, there is no redemption.’22 By then the gap in ideology and organisational methods between the revolutionary socialist and the Fenian conspirators was closed completely, and it would indeed be sealed in blood.
The O’Donovan Rossa funeral took place a week before the landings at Gallipoli, where the 10th Division would experience its own Calvary. It was a year since the Great War began. An analysis of the casualties showed that the number of officers in Irish regiments killed had come to 301, a further 451 had been wounded and 102 were missing or taken prisoner. The total was 854. The Royal Dublin Fusiliers had the heaviest losses, accounting for 120, or 14 per cent of the total.23 The regiment still held pride of place in mid-September, when losses among officers serving with Irish regiments had risen to 383 killed, 611 wounded and 119 missing or taken prisoner, a total of 1,113, of whom the Royal Dublin Fusiliers accounted for 170, or 15 per cent.24 No breakdowns were provided for casualties other than officers, but weekly and annual casualty figures suggest that losses of other ranks were at the rate of at least ten to one for each officer in each category. A total of 3,224 men were killed in Irish regiments in 1914, and this figure trebled to 9,878 in 1915.
Worse was to come with the terrible battles on the western front in 1916, in which 13,523 men died. The figure fell to 11,823 in 1917 and to 10,654 in 1918. The total number of men from Dublin listed as dead was 4,884, by far the highest for any city or county in Ireland, comprising 16 per cent of the total. As 25,644 men altogether enlisted in Dublin, this amounts to a death rate of just over 19 per cent.25
While Irish regiments were haemorrhaging in France and the Mediterranean in the summer of 1915, the Irish Volunteers were holding three officer training camps. Richard Mulcahy took his annual leave to attend one at Coosan, Athlone. Commitments to other activities, such as the Gaelic League and GAA, sank into the background, but there was ‘no sense of emergency’ at the training camps. Similarly, the Citizen Army carried out manoeuvres at Croydon Park, the house in Marino used as the ITGWU recreational centre, or, as relations improved, in conjunction with Irish Volunteer units.
Volunteers took advantage of the shooting range erected in Croydon Park and another one in Liberty Hall, where participants were charged 1d to fire three rounds. The presence of police escorts during these exercises only added to the air of weekend soldiering, and participants ignored the ridicule they attracted from many Dubliners.
One Saturday in late 1915 the Citizen Army staged a mock night attack on Dublin Castle, followed by light refreshments at the ITGWU hall in Inchicore and ‘a sing song into the early hours of Sunday morning.’ The refreshments were prepared by the women’s section of the Citizen Army, thus puncturing somewhat its image as an organisation that treated all members equally.
If the rising came as almost as much of a shock to most Volunteers as it did to Dubliners at large, the same cannot be said for Citizen Army members. In late 1915 each member was issued with a mobilisation number and an identity tag so that a body could be identified easily in the event of death in the coming fight.26
The Volunteers attracted the ire of the authorities and the scorn of many families who had fathers, brothers or sons at the front; but the position of the National Volunteers was growing even less tenable, as was shown by an incident on the night of 21 August 1915, when masked men armed with revolvers stole a hundred Martini-Enfield rifles from the London and North-Western Railway yard on the North Wall. The rifles had been bought by the National Volunteers and had been detained by Customs in accordance with regulations on the importation of arms introduced at the start of the war.
John Redmond and his deputy, John Dillon, complained to the Under-Secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan. So did Colonel Maurice Moore, who was convinced that the police were obstructing the investigation in order to embarrass his organisation. (In fact the police officer he suspected of such dirty tricks had retired six months earlier.) Moore was reduced to complaining lamely that it was
very dangerous that such like people should be permitted to seize arms undetected. We always ask permission to import arms but Sinn Fein Volunteers smuggle in considerable quantities and have more arms than are permitted us.
The main suspects were Citizen Army men, who were well organised on the docks; but the authorities refused to bow to Moore’s demand that Liberty Hall be raided to search for the missing weapons. Although General Friend supported Moore’s application, Nathan feared it could lead to a potentially explosive incident. In fact the weapons were probably stolen by members of E Company of the 2nd Battalion of the Volunteers, whose area covered the North Wall.27
The investigation, which dragged on into November, at Moore�
�s insistence, demonstrated the futility of the National Volunteers’ position. They were an army without the means or the will to fight for, or against, anything. Whatever the shortcomings of the Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army as regards means, they would soon demonstrate that they had the will. What was still unclear was what, precisely, they were fighting for.
For the veteran socialist agitator and trade union militant James Connolly, 1916 began with an unresolved strike at the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company. The union was still recovering from the effects of defeat in 1913. Membership subscriptions rose by 1d a week, and death benefit was abolished for the families of members who joined the British army and died in the war: in response to one application Connolly wrote that mortality benefit covered only deaths in ‘Civil Life’ (emphasis in original).28 As many as 2,700 ITGWU members were serving in the British army by early 1915, so the decision had obvious financial benefits for the union. Connolly justified the move on two other grounds: opposition to the imperialist conflict and the fact that army wives and widows received a pension from the War Office.
A few ITGWU men at the front were there because they had been blacklisted during the lock-out as trade union militants, but the vast majority were among the thirty thousand former soldiers who were reservists and had no choice in the matter. As a former soldier himself Connolly would have been well aware of their plight, but this did not prevent him labelling them ‘apostates’ in the Workers’ Republic. ‘For the sake of a few paltry shillings, Irish workers have sold their country in the hour of their country’s greatest need and greatest hope.’ It was a view that few workers shared, or even understood, in February 1916.29
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