I drank the tea with great satisfaction, recalling the time when I had seen the very same refreshments handed to the British Tommies … during the Rising. The tide had turned. We were now the heroes of the people.10
What might be termed the active citizenship of the Volunteers would reach a peak in the 1918 general election, when they provided the electoral muscle for Sinn Féin. Often IRB personnel acted as the conduit between political and paramilitary organisations. The link was personified in this instance by Diarmuid Lynch, the Sinn Féin Food Controller. When he was deported for his role in the pig-slaughtering campaign his prison van was accompanied to the docks by a posse of prominent Sinn Féiners, headed by de Valera.11
It certainly made the traditional lobbying tactics of the Irish Party look anaemic. A few weeks earlier T. P. O’Connor and the veteran Dublin MP William Field led a deputation to meet the Parliamentary Secretary of the Admiralty, Dr MacNamara, to seek more support for shipbuilding and stronger measures against the submarine menace. When McNamara pointed to the very light losses on the Irish Sea from submarines, and said that Irish yards were already receiving substantial Admiralty business, he was inadvertently highlighting the continued indifference of the military machine to Irish concerns and the impotence of the Irish Party in changing that mindset. The exercise also smacked of support for the war effort.12
On 9 February 1918 there were ‘animated scenes’ at the Mansion House when socialists gathered ‘to congratulate the Russian people on the triumph they have won for democratic principles.’ The Round Room was unable to accommodate the crowds of people wanting to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution, which had taken place two months previously. The Supper Room was also filled to overflowing, and the crowd spilled out onto the street. A large Red Flag was brandished at the main meeting to accompany a lusty rendition of ‘The Red Flag’. The president of the ITUC, William O’Brien, acclaimed the revolution for attaining ‘the most complete political and economic freedom that the world has yet seen.’ Cathal O’Shannon of the ITGWU proposed the motion ‘that the people of Dublin are at one with the Bolsheviks and … the Russian interpretation of the democratic principle is the only one that will be acceptable to the people of Ireland.’ Thomas Johnson, former president of the ITUC and future leader of the Labour Party in the early years of the Irish Free State, asked the crowd whether they were ready ‘to follow the action of the Russian revolutionaries and do the whole job at once.’ There were some shouts of ‘No’ as well as ‘Yes.’ Undeterred, Constance Markievicz offered congratulations to the representative of the new Soviet government, Conrad Peterson of the Lettish Rifles, on behalf of the Irish Citizen Army. Other speakers included Maud Gonne, Margaret Connery and the most prominent defector to Sinn Féin from the Irish Party, Laurence Ginnell MP.
Only Dr Kathleen Lynn, who had served in the Citizen Army garrison in City Hall during the rising, struck a more cautious note. She told this band of enthusiasts that
some people were shy of acclaiming Russia for fear of the cry of anticlericalism. That cry had been raised against men and movements which the British government had reason to fear, because it knew that cry was the most potent to cast a slur on any cause in this country and make the ordinary unthinking person afraid of it.’13
Like Constance Markievicz and other Citizen Army members, Lynn had gravitated towards the post-rising reincarnation of Sinn Féin. The independently minded daughter of a Church of Ireland Canon, Lynn could not be accused of undue religious deference, but unlike Markievicz, she was acutely perceptive of the public mood among the middle classes, a mood reflected in the enormous response to the Thomas Ashe fund. Six of the ten largest subscribers to the latest subscription list were Catholic clergymen, and there was an ample sprinkling of reverend mothers. Conservative Catholic Ireland was drawing the Irish revolution to its bosom with a power that a handful of socialist enthusiasts in the Mansion House would be unable to counter.14
Ironically, the victory of the Irish Party candidate, Patrick Donnelly, in the Armagh by-election the previous Saturday was a demonstration of how bankrupt constitutional nationalism had become. Unionists in the constituency voted tactically for Donnelly so as to deny the seat to Sinn Féin. This did not prevent the London Express from asking naïvely, ‘Orangemen and Hibernians have clasped hands in South Armagh: cannot they clasp hands in Dublin?’15
Meanwhile the Russian Revolution was to have more immediate consequences than expected for Irish socialists and nationalists of all complexions. The decision of the Bolsheviks to sue for peace released German divisions for redeployment in the west and a last bid to defeat the allies before the American army made a decisive intervention. That offensive would begin on 20 March, and each German advance brought nearer the threat of conscription in Ireland. Fortunately, the labour movement’s remarkable recovery after the rising left it better placed to meet the challenge than any other organised force. It had arisen phoenix-like from the burnt-out shell of Liberty Hall.16 As in the period leading up to the lock-out, it was the ITGWU that spearheaded the revival, especially outside Dublin. Séamus Hughes, who had fought in the rising, believed that ‘Easter Week saved the union. It … linked up the labour movement with the age long aspirations of the Irish people for emancipation from political and social thraldom.’A former seminarian, Hughes combined a socialist vision with a strong Catholic faith.
Many unions in the city suffered significant disruption as a result of the fighting and subsequent repression, but none more so than the ITGWU. It even had to use the good offices of Thomas Johnson, president of the ITUC in 1916, to recover its records from the British military authorities.17 Yet the union would achieve spectacular growth over the next few years, reaching a peak of 120,000 by the end of 1920, with most of its members outside Dublin in such industries as agriculture, where workers were benefiting from the increase in tillage vital to the war effort. In Dublin the Irish Women Workers’ Union and the British National Federation of Women Workers were the main beneficiaries of growth in employment and the new wartime arbitration structures in such areas as clothing, hosiery and, most importantly, munitions.
Usually the mere threat of a strike was enough to secure intervention by the arbitration bodies and a settlement resulting in pay awards on a par with, or at least related to, the traditionally higher British rates. But there were penalties for workers as well as for employers for defying the state. When sixteen apprentices went on strike at the Dublin Dockyard Company in late 1917 they were fined between £10 and £5 each, although the deductions were deferred until the new year to help them get over Christmas—and demonstrate their compliance with procedures.
It is an indication of the vulnerability of war industries to industrial action that this strike cost the yard £10,000 in lost business. The company also agreed to concede the apprentices an extra 7½ per cent for war work in the yard, even though this forced it to breach the Admiralty list of pay rates. The Munitions Tribunal stated that the fines might be remitted if the apprentices behaved and did not allow themselves ‘to be led astray’ in future. By whom they might be ‘led astray’ is not stated.18
There was much more industrial unrest generally in 1917 because inflationary pressures had become intense. The price of basic items was up by 57 percentage points on the base year of 1900—by far the largest general increase in prices of any of the war years.19 It was against this background that the Dublin Trades Council held a special conference of affiliated unions on 30 October 1917, the largest such gathering seen until then in the city, attended by representatives from other centres, including Belfast.
More than a thousand bakers were once more threatening strike in the city, as were two thousand members of the ITGWU with the Alliance and Dublin Consumers’ Gas Company. Printers and shipyard workers were already on strike, and the newly formed Irish Clerical Workers’ Union had served a pay claim on the city’s employers. Fears of the loss of jobs and of price increases were aggravated by news that the British governm
ent was introducing further punitive taxes on distilleries. A further five hundred jobs would be abolished, and the loss of grain and wash as cheap animal feed for the city’s dairies would renew pressure on milk prices. The debate came down to a choice between a general strike in the city and more effective price controls combined with a conciliation board for dealing with pay claims.20
None of these things happened. In large part the failure to agree a strategy stemmed from deep divisions within the movement in Dublin. The trades council had already paid a price for this conflict when Thomas Lawlor failed to secure the vacant Labour seat on the corporation caused by the death of William Partridge. While complacency appears to have played a part in the debacle, William O’Brien was laying most of the blame on P. T. Daly, the leader of the Labour group, who was his main rival within the ITUC, ITGWU and Dublin Trades Council.
If Daly had been Jim Larkin’s protégé, O’Brien had been James Connolly’s. O’Brien’s long period of incarceration with republican prisoners in England had seen him develop close personal ties with the leaders of advanced nationalism, including Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins and Cathal Brugha. O’Brien had been involved in the Longford and Clare by-elections and had helped to secure for Michael Collins the job of secretary of the National Aid and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund, his first step on the road to power. O’Brien saw his liaison with Sinn Féin and Irish Volunteer leaders as very much in line with Connolly’s political legacy, of which he regarded himself the custodian. Daly too had been interned but for a much shorter period, and he remained a determined advocate of Larkin’s project for a politically independent Labour Party.
When the All-Ireland Convention had been called by Count Plunkett in early 1917 Daly had opposed it. He told the trades council that ‘we have started an independent movement and I will always use my influence to maintain that independence and to be under no circumstances subservient to any other party in the state.’ But a close ally of O’Brien, Tom Foran, president of the ITGWU, was probably more representative of mainstream opinion when he said that ‘if a man could not be a good trade unionist and a good nationalist it was better to have no trade unionism at all.’
O’Brien’s ultimate triumph in the battle with Daly was based in part on the strong alliances he was building between the Dublin labour movement and Sinn Féin, which reflected the rapidly changing balance of power in the city. Up to 1916 Labour had been the main opposition to the UIL. Daly warned the trades council in the autumn of 1917 that Sinn Féin was growing rapidly in the city and was in the process of nominating candidates for constituencies that Labour regarded as its legitimate prizes. But few were listening as the new year dawned. The pressure of events was too great; and the mass mobilisation of workers against conscription, particularly in Dublin, was to be Labour’s finest hour.
Fear of conscription was never far below the surface of Irish life. In 1917 only 3,089 Dubliners joined the British army, and not many more, 5,023, would travel to Britain for work, despite strong incentives and assisted passage from the Prince of Wales Fund. Reports still proliferated of Irishmen being forcibly conscripted in British cities despite exemption orders. In 1918, when the conscription scare was at its height, only 3,370 Dubliners would travel to Britain for work, while the number joining the armed forces would rise slightly to 3,990, although mainly in non-combatant and technical branches.21
There was undoubtedly a lot of truth in the claim by the Irish Times that ‘Ireland has deserted her regiments at the front. She still praises them in her newspapers and talks about “Irish valour” … but it is mere talk.’ The paper predicted that if the war lasted another year, ‘and the Irish regiments receive no help from Ireland, they will have disappeared altogether from the British Army or will be Irish in nothing save their name.’ Two days later the MP for the Harbour division, Alfie Byrne, put down a motion for the city council warning the government that any attempt to introduce conscription ‘would be resisted violently in every town and village … and [would lead to] the establishment of a battle front in Ireland that would not be to the advantage of the Allies.’ Kingstown Urban District Council, which unionists had controlled up to the 1914 municipal elections, voted to oppose conscription, with only four councillors voting against the motion. Even the unionist spokesman in South County Dublin, Sir Thomas Robinson, admitted that ‘this was perhaps the worst time to conscript Ireland.’
The battle against conscription was the most complete victory ever won by nationalist Ireland, and it was won without a drop of blood being spilt. Indeed its triumph lay precisely in its saving thousands of young Irishmen from the pointless bloodletting on the western front. It was also the first time that the new alliance between Sinn Féin and what might be termed the O’Brienite wing of the Labour movement swung into action to secure a common objective.
An early hurdle easily cleared was securing the support of the Executive Council of the British TUC for the Irish stance on conscription. At its own conference in January the TUC had called on the British government to give a commitment that conscription would end immediately hostilities ceased.22 In fact one of the reasons the War Cabinet wanted to at least be seen to be considering the extension of conscription to Ireland was to make measures such as sending eighteen-year-olds to fight in France more palatable to the British public.23
Dublin was the focal point for the anti-conscription campaign. Alfie Byrne and the former Lord Mayor Lorcan Sherlock worked with the incumbent, Laurence O’Neill, to form a national committee. O’Brien drafted a motion for the Dublin Trades Council meeting on 8 April that the Executive Council of the Irish Trades Union Congress and Labour Party should send delegates to any anti-conscription conference, provided that Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers decided to attend. As O’Brien was president of the ITUC, there was little doubt about what the response of the congress would be.24
Proceedings in Dublin Corporation were somewhat more fractious. The language of Alfie Byrne’s motion, calling for a conference to organise resistance to conscription in ‘every town and village in the country,’ alarmed some councillors. However, most were reassured by Sherlock’s addendum that the Lord Mayor should invite the Irish Volunteer and Sinn Féin leaders Éamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith to the conference ‘to arrange a united Irish opposition to conscription,’ along with the new leader of the Irish Party, John Dillon, his Belfast lieutenant, Joe Devlin, and representatives of the ITUC.25
The only member of the corporation to speak against the motion was the independent alderman David Quaid, whose Drumcondra ward contained many Protestant ratepayers. He said that a campaign of resistance to conscription would only earn Ireland ‘the contempt of all the nations of the world.’ When he asked members how they could vote against conscription when they had just passed a vote of sympathy for the families of the Howth fishermen killed by a German submarine he was met with the jibe, ‘Who told you they were Germans?’ When the motion was put to a vote there were only three votes against: Quaid and the two unionists present, Alderman William T. Dinnage from neighbouring Glasnevin and Councillor William M. Coulter from Clontarf West. The other thirty-nine councillors present voted for the motion.26
Once the decision was made, a flurry of meetings followed, and the Mansion House Conference was held on 18 April, two days after the enactment of the new Military Service Act, which extended conscription to every Irish male between the ages of eighteen and fifty. In the House of Commons debate preceding the vote Lloyd George taunted the Irish Party with reminders of its pledges of support for the war, including those of their recently deceased leader, John Redmond. He reminded Dillon that he had said he would support conscription if necessary. Dillon responded feebly that he had done so because he had believed ‘it was [for] a war for small nationalities,’ but ‘we found out that was not true.’ After the legislation was passed, the Irish Party would withdraw yet again from the House of Commons, and in a weaker position than ever.
The Mansion House Conference has
been described as the convening of a ‘National Cabinet’. It was in fact a remarkable gathering of the old guard of constitutionalism about to depart, although not without a fight, and the new guard representing a younger generation of radical nationalists and separatists. Perhaps the biggest divide was the cultural one, with the new guard championing a more assertive and ‘purer’ sense of nationality that was all the harder for the old guard to counter for being intangible.
There was certainly a lot more public interest than there had been in the anaemic Irish Convention set up by the British government the previous July. It had achieved nothing and had met for the last time on 5 April 1918, largely unremarked as public attention turned to the threat of conscription.27 The contrast in public interest with the opening of the Anti-Conscription convention at the Mansion House two weeks later could not have been greater. Crowds gathered long before the opening time of 10 a.m., even though the proceedings were to be in private. According to the Irish Independent, there were ‘young and old, rich and poor, with … a considerable sprinkling of the Unionist element.’While the demeanour of the crowd was orderly, ‘the intensity of feeling caused by Mr. Lloyd George’s proposals’ was shown by the ‘perfect roar’ that greeted the arrival of de Valera and Griffith.28
The meeting adjourned at 1 p.m. to allow a deputation to confer with the Catholic hierarchy at Maynooth. The bishops had already decided to oppose conscription, though they were somewhat divided, between Cardinal Logue and other advocates of purely passive resistance on one side and those prepared to go further, such as Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, on the other. Characteristically, Walsh had been conspiring feverishly behind the scenes to ensure the maximum unity between the emerging generation of radical nationalist leaders and the hierarchy.
A City in Wartime Page 33