The British army did at least adopt emergency measures for the feeding of the civilian population. It took over the Bovril warehouse in Eustace Street to distribute concentrated meat stock,10 and Captain Fairbairn Downie of the Ministry of Munitions, who would soon be called upon to settle the dispute in the building trade, took charge of the Military Supply Depot in Parkgate Street, whence food was distributed to workhouses, hospitals and even some small traders.11
In the city a number of convents used their kitchens to supplement the bakeries in meeting demand for food even while the rising was on. The Society of St Vincent de Paul provided relief in the most distressed areas once the fighting ended, but these resources were not enough to meet demand. Rich and poor alike were forced to queue for bread, and bakeries, including Kennedy’s and Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien’s, restricted customers to two loaves a day. The military kept order ‘to prevent crushing or panic.’ Citizens had little money with which to buy food of any kind. Workers had no wages, and the better off had no access to their bank accounts. The Local Government Board eventually set up thirty-one depots throughout the city for distributing free food.
By 3 May some normality began to return, with bread vans making deliveries to shops and the first vegetables appearing in greengrocers’ shops. The Local Government Board commissioned Patrick Leonard, a former president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, to purchase £4,000 worth of cattle and sheep for slaughter in the Corporation abattoir. The meat was then sold by butchers’ shops at fixed prices. The only sign of a ‘food panic’ was in Kingstown, where shops had remained open during the rising but stocks were low. Supplies were shipped directly to the township, and Howth was supplied from the rural hinterland.12
The National Relief Fund, a British state agency set up at the outbreak of the war in anticipation of the demands it would create, provided £5,000 for emergency relief in the first two weeks of May. The Lord Mayor’s Fund raised another £5,000, of which £1,000 came from a concert given by the Irish tenor John McCormack in New York. Most of these funds went on providing employment on such varied projects as market gardening in Fairview, clearing derelict sites, and knitting socks for the troops. Many businesses reopened on 5 May when the military eased restrictions on movement around the city. Some companies, such as Elvery’s, which had suffered serious damage to its premises in Sackville Street, managed to partly reopen for clearance sales on Monday 15 May.13
The restoration of gas supplies on 10 May and the resumption of tram services and theatres on 14 May were important elements in restoring a sense of normality. But things were not normal. Citizens attending the Bohemian Theatre were treated to the latest newsreels of The Dublin Rising and the Ruins of the City. Matinée performances only were available because of the curfew.
More subtle changes were taking place in unexpected places, such as the hospitals. At the Richmond Hospital, where Liam Archer was recovering from accidentally shooting himself in the foot, all the rebel casualties evaded arrest with the connivance of the staff. Sir Thomas Myles, medical head of the hospital, seemed to approve, although he thought the rising rash. He may have felt partly responsible, as he had used his yacht to bring guns into Kilcoole for the Volunteers some two years earlier.14
Among the rebel leaders there were no regrets. It seemed appropriate that the British army unit that had suffered the largest number of casualties in the fighting, the Sherwood Foresters, would provide the firing squads. The leader of the Volunteers at Ashbourne, Thomas Ashe, would later describe his time awaiting execution as ‘a beautiful experience.’ He told friends that he regretted the commuting of his death sentence to penal servitude for life, because he felt that never again would he be so spiritually prepared for death.
The city’s business community thought in more mundane terms and roused itself very quickly to deal with the damage inflicted on the capital. As usual, William Martin Murphy was to the fore. He organised a meeting in the Mansion House on 4 May of merchants and businessmen affected by the destruction of the previous week. As 70 per cent of the damage was concentrated in the Lower Sackville Street area and, as Murphy candidly admitted, his own business empire was the largest casualty, it was a very focused gathering. The participants decided to seek compensation from the insurance industry, the government and Dublin Corporation for losses due to ‘fire or artillery operations, as a consequence of the Sinn Fein revolt.’ Murphy stressed that the committee was not interested in the causes of the insurrection ‘or anything to do with the past. It was to the future they were looking.’ He was loudly applauded by an audience that might have felt that the rebels were responsible for the carnage but knew they could not pay for it financially.
Other forms of retribution were another matter, and the first executions had begun the previous day. They continued until 12 May, when James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada were the last insurgents to be executed after an infamous editorial calling for their deaths in Murphy’s Irish Independent.15
Meanwhile, as Murphy pointed out to his audience at the Mansion House, they had all been paying taxes, rates and insurance premiums for years. Now it was payback time. A committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Sir Joseph Downes, who owned much of the block that had been destroyed between North Earl Street, Marlborough Street and Sackville Street. It included other leading businessmen and property-owners in the affected areas, such as Charles Eason, William Bewley and Sir Thomas Robinson of the Metropole Hotel. Murphy’s properties included Clery’s department store and the Imperial Hotel. They rejected suggestions of adding local MPs or the Lord Mayor to the committee, possibly because most of the businessmen concerned were unionists but more probably because they did not want compensation to become a political football in the House of Commons.
Confident of their own standing, they promptly telegraphed the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, seeking an urgent meeting.16 Asquith went one better and visited the city on 12 May. It was not the most auspicious day: Connolly and Mac Diarmada were shot shortly before he landed. Asquith ordered an immediate end to the executions. He was horrified at rumours of civilians being deliberately shot by the military and quickly concluded from the information available that the death of Sheehy Skeffington, ‘a preposterous and mischievous creature,’ was nevertheless a clear case of murder. Nor was he impressed to find, on a visit to prisoners at Richmond Barracks, that many of them had not been involved in the fighting but simply rounded up as suspected sympathisers.
He appeared to be more impressed by the political analysis of Father Aloysius, the Franciscan who gave the last rites to Connolly, than by that of the military supremo, General Maxwell. Afterwards he visited the north of Ireland to assess the situation there. He returned to London convinced that the Dublin administration was a shambles, that there was no military solution to the problem and that Ireland was the ‘most perplexing and damnable country’ he knew.17
Unfortunately Asquith did not find time to meet Dublin Corporation representatives and discuss the rebuilding of the city until 6 July, and then only ‘through the good offices of Mr. John Redmond, M.P.’ Apart from the Lord Mayor, the delegation was restricted to those wealthier councillors who could afford the time and expense of the trip. This tipped the balance in favour of the unionist and large ratepayer lobbies. Also present were five MPs for Dublin City and County, who were not to be deterred by the lack of an invitation from the business community: Alfie Byrne, P. J. Brady, William Field, J. J. Clancy and John Dillon Nugent. Joe Devlin, MP for West Belfast, also attended.18
The Mayor told Asquith that Dublin needed a loan so that it could lend money to citizens whose premises had been destroyed, in addition to ex gratia grants. The corporation also needed funds for widening the streets and carrying out improvements. Asquith acknowledged the exceptional circumstances and was as good as his word. The Dublin Reconstruction (Emergency Provisions) Bill was introduced in August and became law in December.
Meanwhile, as early as June, the corporation approved a
request from the City Architect to allow the erection of temporary buildings so that traders who wished to do so could resume business.19
The British government was anxious to see Ireland’s main thoroughfare rebuilt and to erase the memory of the rising, while town planners saw it as an unrivalled opportunity to redesign the whole centre city. However, political and legal complications bedevilled the project from the start. When the bill came before the House of Commons, Sir Edward Carson—who was, after all, a representative of a Dublin constituency—raised the issue of whether compensation should be limited to property or whether civilians would be covered. Another vexed issue was whether compensation should apply only to those who had suffered at the hands of the Crown forces or to those who had suffered at the hands of the rebels as well. Tim Healy agreed that these issues had to be clarified, as did the Irish Independent, which argued that civilians could be compensated through the Prince of Wales Fund. It calculated that Dubliners had contributed £25,000 to the fund and were entitled to a refund. It estimated the cost of compensating civilians at a mere £6,000.
In contrast, 779 claims totalling £2.3 million had been received from property-owners by the end of June, and a further fifty claims pushed the figure over £2½ million in July. The chief fire officer, Captain Thomas Purcell, estimated the real losses at no more than £1 million.20
Inevitable delays saw anger against the rebels being redirected at the British government. One prominent businessman told the Irish Times: ‘As citizens and ratepayers we are of the opinion that the Government should come to the assistance of the firms whose houses have been ruined and whose business has been swept away as a result of lack of firmness on the part of the Irish Government.’
Another, the well-known Quaker employer Charles Jacob, whose reputation for social concern had been tarnished when he locked out hundreds of women workers in 1913, added that ‘life lost is as deserving of compensation as property destroyed.’21
The reality was very different. The amounts paid out to many of those civilians were relatively small, and some of those who sought it most, such as the families of the men killed in North King Street, would never receive compensation, because to concede their claims would be an admission of guilt by the military authorities. On the other hand, the woman with the most clear-cut claim for compensation, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, refused it on principle when it was offered.22
Even where property was concerned there was a wrangle over how the burden should be shared between the imperial exchequer, insurance companies and Dublin ratepayers. As a result of the rising, rates worth £16,000 a year had been lost to a city struggling to cope with critical humanitarian demands on its resources. The final compromise, not hammered out until 1917, was that the corporation would provide thirty-year loans at low interest to any business that needed extra funds to make up a shortfall on the cost of rebuilding after the insurance companies and the exchequer made their contributions. In the meantime ex gratia grants of £742,928 were paid out in respect of 212 buildings damaged or destroyed and over £1 million ‘in respect of stock, fittings, and other chattel losses and minor damage.’ Businesses affected were also given a one-year rates holiday from the time they reopened.
Nevertheless, there were complaints about the miserly approach of the British authorities to Dublin compared with anecdotal evidence of generous grants to English businesses that were victims of Zeppelins and naval bombardments of North Sea ports, such as Scarborough and Hull. That Dublin Corporation was able to reduce both the consolidated and the police rates in March 1917 as a result of the British subsidies suggests that the government scheme was far more generous than generally conceded.23
Predictably, the Citizens’ Association was unimpressed by the reduction in rates, and a delegation told the corporation meeting at which the new rates were struck that many businesses would go under without even greater reductions. It advocated large-scale dismissals of corporation employees, closing municipal workshops and ending subsidies for the Iveagh Market (the corporation’s fruit and vegetable market) as economy measures. By contrast, Tom Foran, on behalf of the trades council, warned that any further redundancies would lead to bread riots. The councillors took heed and kept the reduction to 1s 6d in the pound, or 7½ per cent.
The necessities of the moment also meant that planners’ dreams of civic rebirth were short-lived. Their proposals included the building of a new Catholic cathedral, complete with the large square it was thought such an important edifice required. Another square was proposed around the Custom House in a style complementing Gandon’s masterpiece. This would include the removal of the railway bridge over the Liffey. The other main proposal was the development of a new central artery for the city, running from Christ Church Cathedral to the Four Courts, with Sackville Street relegated to the status of a radial road. However, none of these grandiose plans coincided with those of the city centre’s property-owners, whose primary objectives were to obtain compensation and to rebuild or sell their properties as soon as possible.
Although the Dublin Reconstruction Act gave significant powers to the city architect, Charles MacCarthy, the failure to link compensation to a grand plan for Dublin, or any plan, was a fatal flaw. The delegation that had visited Asquith in London had been reconstituted as a committee to complete negotiations with the government. Nobody appeared to see a conflict of interest in such an arrangement, which resulted in the compensation scheme being administered by a commission chaired by Sir William Goulding, chairman of the Great Southern and Western Railway and a close business associate of several of the claimants, including William Martin Murphy.
Many of the claims were for five and six-figure sums, including £47,000 for Arnott’s department store and £157,000 for the Alliance and Dublin Consumers’ Gas Company. One of the worst casualties from the viewpoint of the Redmondites was the Freeman’s Journal, which suffered a loss of £74,000. Despite fairly generous compensation, it would never fully recover.
In all, the commission made awards totalling more than £1 million, on top of the ex gratia payments already made by the government in the immediate aftermath of the rising, bringing the total to nearly £2 million. Once the money was handed over there was no pressure remaining on those businesses to co-operate with the civic planners.24
Leading property-owners, such as Sir Joseph Downes, resisted attempts to push back frontages, which would lose valuable development space, and even sought to rebuild with cheap imported red-brick fronts. This enraged the Stonecutters’ Union as much as the planning and architectural community. One contributor to the Irish Builder quipped that the destructive powers of the rebels paled before those of the property-owners.
One of the few property-owners to emerge well from the debacle was the Catholic Archbishop, William Walsh. At first delighted at the proposal to build a fully fledged cathedral with a complementary square in the area of Ormond Market, a long-cherished ambition of the city’s Catholics, he regretfully declined, because it would mean the eviction of tenement-dwellers and small business owners in the area.
It took until 1922 to restore most of Sackville Street (now renamed O’Connell Street) to mediocrity. In the meantime the temporary structures permitted by the corporation to enable businesses to trade did nothing to restore the boulevard to its previous glory but only added to the sense of impermanence that would prevail over the next few years. The restoration was completed just in time for the street to become the main arena for conventional fighting in the Civil War. This time it would be the turn of the other end of O’Connell Street to bear the brunt of the damage. The Custom House would be gutted by fire in the War of Independence, and the Four Courts would be the main architectural casualty of the Civil War.25
Unlike other local authorities, Dublin Corporation did not pass a motion condemning the rising. When it reconvened for the first time, on 10 May 1916, the events were too close to home. Dubliners had died on both sides, including a city councillor, Richard O’Carroll of the Bri
cklayers’ Union, and several corporation employees, of whom the most prominent was Éamonn Ceannt. As well as being a signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and commander of rebel forces in the South Dublin Union, Ceannt had been a senior clerk in the City Treasurer’s Department and a member of the Executive Committee of the Dublin Municipal Officers’ Association, one of Ireland’s earliest white-collar unions. Two councillors had received prison sentences, William Partridge, who had been a captain in the Citizen Army, and W. T. Cosgrave, who had served as Ceannt’s adjutant at the South Dublin Union and had been sentenced to death. Several other members of the corporation, including Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin and Councillor P. T. Daly of the Labour Party, had been arrested in the round-up after the rising.
An example of the sheer complexity of local politics and of the personal relations of corporation members is given by the extraordinary lengths to which Alderman Patrick Corrigan went to help the imprisoned Kelly. A slum landlord and undertaker, Corrigan was a pillar of the UIL on the Corporation but was a friend of Kelly and had spoken at protest meetings over the deportation of Irish Volunteer organisers before the rising. Kelly now sent word that he had explosives stored in his business premises in South William Street. Corrigan ‘got possession of a handcart, wheeled it to William Street, loaded it with explosives and brought the cargo away.’ He dumped the material in small batches over time in the Liffey.26
A City in Wartime Page 18