A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  The retail price of coal in Dublin was now between 56s and 60s a ton, while Londoners paid 30s. The merchants pointed out that allowing in cheaper American coal, even if freight and shipping costs remained the same, could cut prices by 7s a ton. They also protested that shipping rates remained unchanged, despite the disappearance of the German submarine menace.

  Even wholesale customers in Dublin were paying more than household consumers in Britain for supplies, because of the high shipping and freight rates. The corporation’s Electricity Supply Department was still paying 42s 6d a ton in early 1919. As a result, wartime tariffs on customers had to be extended into the second quarter of 1919. On the positive side, many large drapery shops and other businesses had managed to reduce their bills to pre-war levels through cost-efficiency measures.

  Similar discrepancies persisted in prices for other staple items, some of them hard to explain, such as the price of Irish eggs at between 3s 9d and 5s 6d a dozen in Dublin and only 3s in Britain.49

  Meanwhile, Laurence O’Neill was re-elected Lord Mayor for the third time on 25 February 1919. In many respects the election resembled the two previous occasions, not least in that some leading councillors, most notably W. T. Cosgrave, were in prison. O’Neill admitted that practically all his promises to keep down rates, contain costs and build new houses for the working class had not been honoured. He had pushed new housing schemes in Spitalfields, the McCaffrey estate (Mount Brown), St James’s Walk and Fairbrother’s Fields as far as he could without central government funds, and he sharply criticised the failure of the government to notify Dublin Corporation of the availability of grants in aid for housing, unlike its British counterparts. In his own defence and that of the corporation he reminded his colleagues, not unreasonably, that ‘all our critics, whether of the press or public, invariably left out the fact that there had been a war on.’

  The only discordant note came with the vote of thanks to the outgoing high sheriff, Sir Andrew Beattie, whom Tom Kelly criticised for entertaining Lord French in the middle of the conscription crisis. Beattie said he ‘may not have pleased everyone, any more than myself, but I have the satisfaction of knowing I have conscientiously done my duty.’50 It was an apologia for all the aldermen and councillors of the old regime as they awaited the events that would inevitably sweep them away.

  The first step had already been taken a month earlier, on 21 January, when the twenty-four Sinn Féin MPs at liberty met in the Mansion House to constitute themselves as Dáil Éireann and to issue the Declaration of Independence, which gave democratic ratification to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and its establishment in arms on Easter Monday 1916.

  The Dáil, the first legislative assembly to gather in Ireland since the Act of Union, also adopted the Democratic Programme. The idea for such a document, outlining the social and economic aspirations of the infant Republic, had first been mooted by the Dublin Trades Council. The invitation to draft it came from the Sinn Féin leadership, in recognition of the role Labour had played in its own victory, especially in Dublin. The main author was Thomas Johnson, assisted by William O’Brien and Cathal O’Shannon of the ITGWU. It was amended by Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh to meet objections from Michael Collins and other senior IRB members. They wanted the removal of explicit affirmations of socialist principles, such as the right of the nation ‘to resume possession’ of the nation’s wealth ‘whenever the trust is abused or the trustee fails to give faithful service.’ Ó Ceallaigh also had to remove a reference that encouraged ‘the organisation of people into trade unions and co-operative societies.’51

  Nevertheless, the document finally adopted reasserted the claim in the Proclamation that national sovereignty ‘extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation.’ It further reaffirmed ‘that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.’

  ‘In return for willing service,’ every citizen had the right to ‘an adequate share of the produce of the Nation’s labour,’ and ‘it shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.’

  Thomas Johnson would cry as he sat listening to the declaration being read into the Dáil record by ‘the Alderman’, Tom Kelly.52 Whether they would have been tears of joy if he could have seen the future is a moot point; but the fact remains that such a radical document could not have been conjured into existence anywhere in Ireland other than Dublin.

  On the same day a group of Irish Volunteers in Co. Tipperary shot and killed two RIC constables who were escorting a consignment of gelignite. The ringleaders would soon be on their way to Dublin to assist Michael Collins, the man who objected to the Democratic Programme’s socialist content, in bringing the war to the streets of the capital.

  The unfolding situation was neatly summed up in the editorial of the Irish Times on 1 January 1919. ‘We stand on the threshold of a New Year. It is the year of a new order in international affairs, of a new order in British politics, of a new and strange disorder in Irish life.’

  Chapter 15

  A FLICKERING GREEN LIGHT AT THE END OF A LONG TUNNEL

  Dublin was a divided city in 1914. It was divided by nationality, religion, class, culture and conflicting loyalties. All those divisions had deepened by 1918 and resulted in significant realignments.

  The most obvious change was the increasing isolation and marginalisation of the Protestant and unionist community, which was ironic, given that the British Empire had just emerged triumphant from its greatest test. The total mobilisation of state resources to win the war brought significant benefits in the form of jobs and the redistribution of wealth to ‘separation women’ and their families in the Dublin tenements; but Lloyd George’s Government received little thanks.

  The vast majority of Dubliners never saw the war as their quarrel. Indeed the Bachelor’s Walk shootings at its outbreak overshadowed more momentous events in Europe. While a relatively small number of middle-class Catholics joined the forces in response to John Redmond’s appeal for nationalists to fight for the rights of small nations, enthusiasm soon evaporated because of the crass mishandling of Irish nationalist sensitivities by the War Office and the dawning awareness of the awful price that was being exacted in blood at Gallipoli and on the western front.

  Most Dubliners who joined the British army were economic recruits from the city’s working-class communities, for whom the decision had no great political or ideological significance; the first batch of reservists called up did not even have a choice in the matter. Later the chance for unskilled young men to learn a trade and break out of the rigid caste system that governed craft apprenticeships in the city provided a strong incentive to join the technical branches.

  Meanwhile a gap quickly opened between soldiers at the front and civilians at home. Inevitable in any conflict, it was aggravated by the difficulty soldiers had in obtaining leave and by the unique turn of events in Dublin itself. The rising changed everything. The deaths, the looting, the destruction of property, imprisonment and repression happened on people’s doorsteps. Tens of thousands of Irishmen may have perished in Flanders, the Balkans or the Middle East, but that was ‘over there.’

  All politics are local. The fact that so many soldiers who survived the war either never came home or decided not to resettle in Ireland, often abandoning their families in the process, also lessened awareness of cataclysmic events abroad. This failure to return is worthy of more study than the ‘collective amnesia’ theory promoted by some commentators.

  Far from being forgotten, thousands attended annual Armistice Day commemorations in
the Phoenix Park for decades. Free State ministers attended ceremonies in Dublin and London until Fianna Fáil came to power and the political establishment turned its back on Remembrance Day. But forty thousand were still reported attending the 1939 commemoration, twenty years after the war ended. During the Second World War restrictions were imposed on commemorations, as they were in Britain.1 Subsequently, as the collective memory receded, so did the numbers who attended the ceremonies. Their discontinuation at the end of the 1960s was because of concern about the public reaction to events in Northern Ireland, where a unionist tradition of a harsher kind had outlived its political usefulness. Modern attitudes towards Irish participation in the Great War have been more determined by developments since 1968 than by anything that went before.

  Many families in Dublin with a unionist background continued to commemorate their fallen members within their own social circle and religious community. In the wider nationalist population the lack of enthusiasm for commemorations in the immediate aftermath of the war was certainly due to changing political sentiment. The great majority of Catholic Dubliners who served with the British forces were members of the working class, with no particular allegiance to the Crown or the Union. They rarely had a voice outside of organised labour—and organised labour in the city was totally opposed to the war effort.

  The apolitical nature of Dublin working-class involvement in the First World War is demonstrated most emphatically by the failure of returning soldiers to provide a reserve army for the right, unlike many ex-servicemen in other combatant countries. Far from displaying any affection for either unionism or home rule, many ex-servicemen joined the IRA in the War of Independence, and more would have done so, particularly in Dublin, but for the misgivings of some Volunteer officers. J. J. O’Connell, assistant chief of staff of the IRA, testified to their contribution, and a high proportion of those who were accepted into the IRA rapidly rose through its ranks. In Northern Ireland there were no such obstacles to loyalist veterans of the First World War joining the RUC and its reserves when that force replaced the RIC.

  The most important social initiative of the war in Dublin was the introduction of separation payments to support the wives and children of serving soldiers. This was widely denounced as a plan for degrading and corrupting Irish womanhood, especially after it was extended in 1916 to the unmarried mothers of servicemen’s children. The fact that the organisation working most closely with the families of servicemen, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, was unequivocal in its assessment of the beneficial effects of the scheme was dismissed by advanced nationalists, who saw the society as a cat’s-paw of the British establishment.

  Similar disapproval extended to manifestations of independence or self-indulgence by young female factory workers, especially those in munitions factories, who were better paid than many male workers. That they would go out and enjoy themselves, helping to turn Sackville Street into an outdoor ‘low saloon’, outraged their social betters. The filth, the poverty, the prevalence of infectious disease and above all the lack of privacy in the tenements explains not alone the preference of these young women for the ‘low saloon’ of Dublin’s main boulevard but also the popularity of the pubs frequented by their elders. The social benefits of overcrowding in the slums—the camaraderie that brought neighbours together to combat shortages and share hardships—have been much exaggerated. Tenement life also left weaker tenants a prey to theft, threats and abuse by unscrupulous neighbours.

  By contrast, young middle-class women who joined the Volunteer Aid Detachments or Cumann na mBan were spared the censorious scrutiny applied to munitions workers and soldiers’ wives. They too enjoyed a degree of freedom unattainable before the war, and there is no reason to believe they were any more, or less, virtuous than their working-class contemporaries. Yet the women’s patrols established by Anna Haslam were focused firmly on the behaviour of their working-class sisters and the threat this posed to society.

  The threat that most preoccupied the middle classes, of all political persuasions, was the high incidence of sexually transmitted disease, a scourge whose prevalence was persistently laid at the door of the British administration. It was only after independence that it became obvious that the causes ran much deeper than the presence of a dissolute military.

  The enormous amount of energy expended in denouncing the effects of prostitution has to be contrasted with the glaring failure to tackle the slums that bred this and other social problems. During the Great War nearly a thousand tenements were closed as unsafe, and 3,563 of the 4,150 families living in them were thereby made homeless. Only 327 new houses were built in a city urgently needing to rehouse 50,000 of its poorest people. While much of the blame can be laid at the door of the Local Government Board for failing to show greater alacrity in taking advantage of the funds available to British local authorities, the achievements of Pembroke Urban District Council show what could be achieved where the political will existed.

  A similar situation arose with regard to wider social and health reforms. The amalgamation of the two Poor Law unions arose not out of any decision by the city to rationalise and improve services for its most vulnerable inhabitants but from military diktat. More consideration was given to ensuring that workhouse employees’ pensions were protected than to how the opportunity might be used to radically improve services to inmates. Improvements in psychiatric services were introduced by the military authorities at Grangegorman for soldiers suffering from shell shock, but many Irish staff members refused to work with them, so that a valuable learning opportunity was lost. The one great advance achieved by the forced amalgamation of the Poor Law unions was that citizens on the more prosperous south side of the city had to contribute a more equitable share to the maintenance of the city’s poor. However, the policy priority remained minimising the burden on the ratepayer. The level of pauperism in Dublin remained virtually undiminished during the war years.

  A major reason for the unpopularity of the war was that it brought plenty of hardship and only a small fraction of the economic benefits enjoyed by Belfast and British cities. Dublin was unfortunate in that its principal industries did not lend themselves easily to war production. However, far more energy was spent in resisting inevitable tax increases on the drinks industry than in exploring opportunities for replacement enterprises. It was fitting that the last great rally of constitutional nationalism in the city in 1915 was to oppose heavier taxes on alcohol. Nothing better demonstrated the political bankruptcy of that movement.

  The largest employment initiative was the National Shell Factory, which Lloyd George pushed through, despite the rising, with very little assistance from Dublin’s business community. The success of the Dublin Dockyard Company was achieved by two outsiders who saw opportunities that local businessmen had missed and who had to overcome ‘dog in the manger’ resistance from other port companies. Trade unions, anxious to generate jobs, were the company’s strongest supporters.2

  The revival of the labour movement in the city after 1916 was one of the great achievements of Dublin workers. It was all the more remarkable given the punishment inflicted on the movement by the state, with the death or imprisonment of so many leading figures and the near-destruction of Liberty Hall. In many ways the execution of Connolly was a blessing in disguise. While he was a brilliant polemicist and propagandist, his insistence on mastering opponents in debate and his ‘prickly integrity’ led to a career marked by splits and resignations in any organisation with which he was involved. His dogmatism could also breed intolerance at times, as is illustrated by his attitude to the dependants of reservists forced to rejoin the army on the outbreak of war, as well as towards conscripts and separation women. Nor was this hostility very revolutionary: the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia by courting soldiers and nurturing their grievances, not by denouncing them.

  As a martyred leader of the rising Connolly was of infinitely greater value to the movement than he would have been
alive. He provided an icon sedulously cultivated by William O’Brien, an organiser of genius. O’Brien, however, was a follower rather than a leader. During his internment after the rising he became close to the rebels and began forging an alliance with advanced nationalists, especially de Valera, which would lay the basis for the continuing closeness of unions to Fianna Fáil in the decades after independence.

  In many respects O’Brien’s strategy was inevitable in a society that was still overwhelmingly rural. Even in Dublin many trade unionists made it clear during the period before the 1918 general election that they would prefer to vote for Sinn Féin than for Labour candidates. If Labour had run candidates, the results of the split radical vote in the city would have allowed the Irish Party or Unionist candidates to secure seats in Pembroke, South County Dublin and possibly the Harbour division.

  The only alternative Labour leaders to O’Brien were Thomas Johnson and P. T. Daly. Johnson was handicapped by the fact that he was English, spent much of the war in Belfast, and was an ineradicable moderate, despite his brief verbal flirtation with Bolshevism. Daly proved no match for O’Brien as a political infighter, and the principal result of their power struggle was the further incapacitation of Labour as an independent actor in national politics after the rising—even in Dublin. In the wider national context, the need to preserve working-class unity across the sectarian divide prevented Labour taking a position on the central constitutional issues of the day. This inevitably led to its relegation from being the movement of social, economic and national liberation envisaged by Connolly to being a niche party. Meanwhile Sinn Féin moved in the opposite direction, from niche party to national liberation movement.