Besides, the corporation was too busy coping with the consequences of the rising to carry out a political post mortem. The secretary of the Local Government Board, A. R. Barlas, had written asking it to invoke section 13 of the Local Government (Ireland) Act (1898) so that the North Dublin and South Dublin Unions could obtain overdrafts to relieve ‘the destitution caused by the Sinn Fein Rebellion.’ This appeal was supported by letters from the clerk of the North Dublin Union, John O’Neill, and the clerk of the South Dublin Union, J. P. Condon, who wrote of the ‘exceptional distress … in the City and County of Dublin.’
The Lord Mayor, Sir James Gallagher, proposed the necessary motion, but it was opposed by two councillors, John Ryan, the conservative nationalist representing Clontarf, and Sir Andrew Beattie, the unionist-turned-independent who now served as chairman of the Dublin Citizens’ Association. Both men sought to defend the ratepayers’ interest. Ryan came from one of the districts least affected by the rising. He warned his fellow-councillors that if they passed the motion ‘it would only mean stampeding ourselves into very large expenditure of which they did not know the end.’ He was sceptical of reports of hardship, and the proposal was unfair to the ‘already heavily burdened’ ratepayers when they ‘were in no way accountable for the misfortune.’ Although Beattie represented a ward affected by the fighting, he questioned whether there was ‘any real distress.’ He had heard that ‘very poor children had been coming … for relief from other wards in the city’ unaffected by the fighting.
The High Sheriff, William Delaney, a nationalist councillor representing the Inns Quay ward, one of the areas worst affected by the fighting, felt that, as a victualler, he should know something of the situation on the ground. He believed ‘there might be … isolated cases of distress but … the people would suffer nothing from postponing the matter.’
However, even a meeting from which so many of the more radical Sinn Féin and Labour councillors were absent baulked at parsimony on such an epic scale. Dr James McWalter, whose dispensary in North Earl Street had been at the centre of the storm, said that existing agencies could not cope with a crisis that was affecting between 80,000 and 100,000 people. Without the corporation’s approval of extra funds the Poor Law unions could only help inmates and existing clients.
James Gately, a nationalist councillor on the Board of Guardians (governors) of the South Dublin Union, said that people were seeking relief who had never asked for it before; and the only woman councillor, the nationalist Martha Williams, said her local dispensary in Grand Canal Street dealt with nearly seven hundred cases the previous day. There were still many ‘who shrunk from seeking relief … The system was not perfect but they could not allow families to starve.’ The overdraft facility was approved.27
Chapter 7
THE ‘CALAMITY OF REBELLION’
The first full meeting of Dublin Corporation after the rising took place on 5 June. It was necessary to tread sensitively, as the first item on the agenda was the potentially inflammatory series of votes of sympathy for deceased members and their relations. The choreography suggests that items were discussed well in advance.
The first vote was not contentious. The unionist alderman for Glasnevin, William Dinnage, proposed a vote of sympathy to the family of his recently deceased party colleague John Thornton, who had died of natural causes. The vote was seconded by Councillor James Cummins, a nationalist who represented the same ward.
Councillor John J. Higgins proposed and Councillor Sir Patrick Shortall seconded a vote of sympathy for Richard O’Carroll, the former Labour member and Volunteer officer killed in the rising by Captain Bowen-Colthurst. Shortall, a builder, had been knighted for his contribution to the war effort. Ironically, he had crossed swords with O’Carroll in the 1913 Lock-out, when the latter was secretary of the Bricklayers’ Union and a member of the trades council strike committee.
Alderman William O’Connor proposed and Councillor Patrick Lennon seconded a vote of sympathy to Sir Thomas Esmonde MP, the head of a respected nationalist political dynasty, on the death of his ‘youthful son … through the destruction of His Majesty’s ship Invincible.’ It was the nearest Dublin Corporation would ever come to acknowledging the Battle of Jutland, one of the most decisive engagements of the First World War. The politics of this model for a home rule parliament remained resolutely parochial.
Finally, Councillor Thomas Murty O’Beirne proposed and Councillor Patrick Lennon seconded a vote extending the sympathy of the corporation’s members ‘to the relatives of the citizens who lost their lives during the recent rebellion.’
The Lord Mayor then referred to the ‘calamity of rebellion,’ which had fallen on the city ‘like a thunderbolt.’ He contrasted ‘the steadiness of public opinion and calmness’ with the ‘unprecedented and almost incredible inaction of the Irish Executive.’ The rateable value of the premises destroyed in the city was £33,000, which meant a loss of £16,000 a year in municipal revenue. He announced an embargo on recruitment by the corporation and called for extra financial assistance from the government, ‘which had blown down the centre and most beautiful part of their city.’
Far from introducing any acrimony over the causes or progress of the rising, the corporation unanimously called for the release of Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin, chairman of the Housing Committee. Councillor Coghlan Briscoe, who was deputising for Kelly as chairman of the committee, moved the motion calling for the speedy release of this ‘invaluable member’ of the corporation. There were no similar calls for the release of W. T. Cosgrave or William Partridge; but then Kelly had not taken up arms against the state.
Housing continued to dominate the proceedings as Alderman Alfie Byrne proposed a motion deferred from before the rising that all the extra revenue raised from Dublin as a result of increased land valuations, income tax and duty on the licensed trade be used for slum clearance. The city had 2,288 dwellings ‘fast approaching the borderline for being unfit for habitation,’ on top of the 1,518 already in that category needing replacement. It was a shrewd move by Byrne. Councillor Joseph Isaacs, a well-regarded figure in the business community and the only Jewish member of the corporation, seconded the motion.
Byrne’s next motion was more controversial. He proposed a 50 per cent increase in the old age pension, to 7s 6d, to relieve some of the increase in food and fuel prices since the start of the war, and he proposed a reduction in the age qualification from 70 to 65. Despite opposition from the Lord Mayor, the unionist group and the ratepayers’ lobby, the motion was passed. Again the British government would be picking up the bill if it ever came to fruition.
Another proposal from Byrne was for a weekly war bonus of 3s to all officers of the corporation earning less than £100 a year. This would be an increase of 1s a week on the bonus secured by P. T. Daly for blue-collar workers before the rising. The motion, seconded by Councillor Gately, dovetailed with an earlier proposal from W. T. Cosgrave that no member of the clerical and administrative staff should be paid ‘less than a labourer.’1 The proposals reflected the fact that pay rates were rising faster for manual workers than for their white-collar colleagues, because the former were better organised in unions and better placed to exploit the labour shortage brought on by the war.
Despite sympathy for white-collar employees among corporation members, resistance to the proposal was as vociferous as usual from the ratepayers’ champions. The Lord Mayor said it would be ‘shameful for the Corporation to pass such a motion without knowing the cost.’ The tried and trusted tactic of an amendment was proposed, to refer the matter to the Estates and Finance Committee for a report. This was defeated by 25 votes to 9. Gallagher was almost alone in voting with the unionists to oppose the pay increase.
By August the corporation had extended the 3s per week war bonus to all employees. It then faced a demand from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers for an extra 4s for craft workers, to bring them into line with an increase already conceded by the Dublin Engineers Employers
’ Association in the private sector. This concession led in turn to a similar claim from the Electrical Trade Union on the grounds of internal comparators.2 These were successful, thanks largely to strong support from the Labour group and from Alfie Byrne.
In contrast, the relief provided under section 13 of the Local Government Act for those left destitute by the rising was minimal, as the figures for June 1916 (table 6) demonstrate.
Table 6
Relief paid to those left destitute by the rising, June 1916
Husband and wife 8s
One child 1s 6d
Two children 2S 6d
Three children 3S
For each child over three years of age 6d
Widow or widower 5S
Adult dependant over seventy 3S
Able-bodied single people No relief
Two days after Dublin Corporation passed its various votes of sympathy, Field-Marshal Kitchener perished when the cruiser Hampshire, carrying him to Russia, sank off Orkney. It was a blow to morale in Britain but failed to elicit much interest in Dublin. Even the Unionist Central Council and the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club were too preoccupied with petitions for blocking the implementation of home rule to note the passing of Ireland’s premier soldier, creator of Britain’s modern army and the colonel of the Irish Guards.
For nationalists of all hues Kitchener epitomised the anti-Irish bias of the British military establishment. He had facilitated the reorganisation of the UVF as the 36th (Ulster) Division of the British army but refused to make similar arrangements for members of Redmond’s National Volunteers. ‘Kitchener never liked or trusted the Irish and I always believe that but for him Ireland would have been wholeheartedly in the war,’ the Countess of Fingall wrote many years later. She was one of Kitchener’s few female friends, but this did not prevent her recalling his many snubs to the Irish war effort, including the return of proposed colours for a suggested Irish brigade produced by the Countess of Mayo’s School of Art.
The Irish were distrusted and knew it. They distrusted in their turn … Although thousands of Irishmen joined the Irish regiments … their brothers who might have gone with them joined the Volunteers.3
Nor did the Irish Party mark his passing when it met in the Mansion House on 10 June. It could hardly avoid a vote of sympathy to Sir Thomas Esmonde on the death of his teenage son at Jutland, but it did so in silence. There were no speeches in support of the British war effort, and Redmond even used the opportunity to argue that the Easter Rising had demonstrated the need to bring forward home rule.4
Another indicator of the changing political climate came at the corporation meeting on 19 June, when councillors met to fill the seats left vacant by the deaths of John Thornton and Richard O’Carroll. There had been a tradition of co-opting nominees of the party of the deceased in accordance with the outcome of the last election. But on this occasion Labour and Sinn Féin councillors supported the UIL nominee, Michael Maher, dairyman and cowkeeper, to fill Thornton’s seat. When Alderman William Dinnage, a unionist, protested that Maher did not even live in Glasnevin, his own candidate, Hubbard Clarke, was denounced as the director of a British company. The unionists found themselves isolated, apart from the support of a couple of ratepayer independents such as Sir Andrew Beattie, a former member of their own group, and Alderman James Moran, a nationalist and hotelier from Clontarf East who had a large unionist electorate and was a member of the Dublin Recruitment Committee for the British forces.
For unionists the outcome was worrying. In 1915 the British government had suspended elections for the duration of the war, and if a pact emerged between the UIL, Sinn Féin and Labour on how to fill vacancies, unionists could become an endangered species. Their fears were confirmed when nationalist councillors supported John Long, a Labour nominee, to replace O’Carroll. The unionists unsuccessfully proposed an independent ‘businessman-rates payer’ candidate for the seat.5
A replacement for O’Carroll was a particularly sensitive question, because the man who shot him, Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, had just been convicted of the murders of Sheehy Skeffington and his fellow-journalists after a highly publicised trial. The trial began on 6 June, lasted five days and told a dismal tale of confused command structures in which inexperienced young officers allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Bowen-Colthurst into ignoring all procedures and into complicity in the summary execution of prisoners by firing squad. The fact that most of the officers concerned, including the accused, were Irish and that the court-martial found Bowen-Colthurst guilty but insane added to the general air of disillusionment in the city.6
The corporation was even more exercised by the discovery of the bodies of fifteen civilians in the ruins of North King Street. Among them were those of Patrick Bealen, the 24-year-old foreman of a pub at 177 North King Street, and James Healy, a 44-year-old employee of the Jameson distillery nearby. The inquests were held immediately after the last of the 1916 leaders were executed.
Bealen had been shot six times and Healy twice. The military authorities were unable to establish which units, let alone which individuals, might have occupied this or any other house in the street when the men died. However, the position certainly registered with Major Rhodes of the Staffordshire Regiment, who gave evidence that the regiment sustained its heaviest casualties in four hours of intense fighting around the pub. Fourteen members of the regiment had been killed and thirty-three wounded. ‘I am satisfied that during these operations the troops under my command showed great restraint under exceptionally difficult and trying circumstances,’ he said.
The jury did not agree: they found that Bealen ‘died from shock and haemorrhage, resulting from bullet wounds inflicted by a soldier, or soldiers, in whose custody he was, an unarmed and unoffending prisoner.’ A similar verdict was brought in for Healy.
A specially convened meeting of the corporation condemned the deaths and those of ‘other unoffending citizens’ in the North King Street area. Only one independent, Alderman David Quaid, a solicitor representing Drumcondra with its large unionist electorate, voted against the motion. No unionist representative voted on the issue.7 That a coroner’s jury, selected from the ranks of the city’s business community and normally sympathetic to the authorities, could bring in such verdicts was another troubling sign of the changing public mood. A precedent was being set for many similar inquests throughout the country in the years ahead.
It was this mood of simmering discontent that John Dillon had tried to capture when he spoke of the rising in the House of Commons on 11 May. Although Dillon represented Mayo he spent the week of the rising trapped in his Dublin home in North Great George’s Street with his family, within earshot of the rifle and machine-gun fire and later the artillery.
Few constitutional nationalists living in the capital had been so out of touch with its mood than this old rural radical.8 But he was quick to grasp the significance of the rising, and he wrote to Redmond urging him to try to stop the executions. When that failed Dillon told the House of Commons: ‘It is not murderers who are being executed; it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would have been a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin.’ It was a speech that shocked colleagues in the Irish Party as well as British MPs; but then they had not seen the destruction wrought and had not caught the mood of the citizens, including members of the United Irish League who had come to Dillon’s door pleading for leadership while he was unable to offer even meaningful advice. It was an anger also driven by Dillon’s realisation that the life’s work of constitutional nationalists was being washed away with blood and that men like himself would be ‘held up to odium as traitors by the men who made this rebellion.’9
He did not have to wait long. On 21 May, Tim Healy made a speech that was vitriolic even by his standards. He listed the slights against the Irish regiments, the bungling of the Volunteer question, the crippling tax burden imp
osed on Ireland and the cutting of urgently needed housing grants for Dublin as reasons for so much disaffection. ‘New crystallisations are taking place,’ he told the House of Commons. ‘The jobbery of the official party [Irish Party] disgusted all earnest and unselfish minds amongst the youth of Ireland.’ The corruption and ineffectiveness of the constitutional movement represented by men like Dillon meant that ‘all that was sober, unselfish, self-respecting and self-reliant quitted [the Irish Party] … and joined Sinn Féin.’10
There were other, less exalted political casualties of the war in the city. One was Dr James McWalter, who notified the Lord Mayor in early July that he had ‘received orders from the War Office to take up duty at “some place in the Mediterranean” and therefore I cannot attend the Council for some time.’ McWalter had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in June 1915 and had been congratulated by his fellow-councillors when he appeared in his lieutenant’s uniform at the next corporation meeting. But now, barely noting the contents of his letter, they went on to demand an end to martial law in the city, the release of ‘hundreds of citizens, men, women and boys,’ suspected of having sympathy with the insurgents, and compensation for the dependants of those who had lost their lives during the rising.11
There was even sympathy to spare for members of the staff of the Town Clerk’s office who sought compensation for loss of earnings because of the wartime suspension of elections under the Elections and Registration Act (1915). This meant they no longer had to prepare electoral lists and registers or oversee the electoral process. The loss of earnings ranged from £12 for junior staff to £110 for senior colleagues. The councillors approved the claim and forwarded it to the Local Government Board with hardly any debate.12
A City in Wartime Page 19