A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  Union growth in Dublin and throughout Ireland in the war years owed an enormous, if unacknowledged, debt to the British government. The state structures established to mediate in industrial disputes and to minimise disruption to war production meant de facto trade union recognition. Because Irish industry was largely peripheral to the war effort, the repressive elements of the system used to curb militancy and to try, unsuccessfully, to suppress the emerging shop stewards’ movement in Britain had no real role in Dublin. Conversely, it was one reason why a shop stewards’ movement independent of official union structures never emerged here.

  While wages never caught up with inflation, the arbitration structures did allow for the emergence of a ‘pay round’ system of sorts. Industries and occupations outside the remit of the Committee on Production used its awards as a basis for their own claims, which, when successful, were used in turn by workers in controlled industries to lodge new claims aimed at restoring their differentials. Unfortunately for the workers, the dismantling of the state industrial relations machinery coincided with the post-war recession, which would see a massive counter-offensive by employers, first in Britain and then in Ireland.

  The delay in the Irish employers’ counter-attack was partly due to the disturbed state of Ireland in 1921 but also to their own disunity, dating from the war years. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce, which had entered the war period greatly strengthened and unified by its victory in the 1913 Lock-out, was now deeply fractured.

  Like Labour, employers were divided by the constitutional question. This eventually manifested itself in the extraordinary scenes at the Chamber of Commerce meeting in June 1918 when E. H. Andrews tried to move an address to Lord French. An ill-advised initiative by an executive still dominated by a Protestant aristocracy of capital that felt the need to endorse legitimate authority in disturbed times superseded the sensitivities of nationalist colleagues. It probably did not help that many of the chamber’s luminaries, such as Sir William Goulding, Sir Maurice Dockrell and John Good, were also leading figures in the city’s Unionist organisations and in the Freemasons.

  Ironically, the most vocal opposition came from such figures as Alfie Byrne, campaigning on a ‘rights of minorities’ principle that they would themselves eschew after independence.

  The alienation of nationalist businessmen from the war effort took place over a relatively short period and sprang from an early realisation that there was no percentage in it for them. They gave Redmond’s gambit the benefit of the doubt, and it might have worked if there had been a quicker and cheaper Allied victory—or even any indication by unionists and their allies in the British political establishment that something of substance would be conceded to nationalists in return for Redmond’s generosity. The Irish Party’s pursuit of the Holy Grail of home rule blinded it to the growing power of the city’s various pressure groups, including feminists, trade unionists, cultural nationalists, and social reformers. Redmond did not bother making many public appearances in the city; when he did, it was to address recruiting meetings. His principal lieutenant and his successor, John Dillon, made even fewer efforts to communicate with Dubliners, although he lived in the city.

  The Irish Volunteers provided an ideal organisation around which advanced nationalists and others disenchanted with the Irish Party could coalesce. The fact that it was not a political party facilitated this role. At the same time its opposition to conscription and its objectives of national unity and the replacement of ‘Dublin Castle and British military power’ with an unspecified form of independent Irish government provided a de facto alternative political programme.

  Right from the split with Redmond, a high proportion of Dublin Volunteers cleaved to the Provisional Committee. After Gallipoli, when the full scale of the sacrifices required by Britain in the war were understood, there was no question but that weekend soldiering and route marches through the city’s streets and its environs were infinitely preferable to the carnage at the front. The Volunteers also provided political education and a forum for debate in a democratic milieu that was inconceivable in the British army, where manifestations of Irish nationality were suspect and the performance of Irish troops frequently denigrated. It is no wonder, given the scant official recognition for the Irish contribution to the war effort, that Dubliners themselves felt little ownership of ‘their’ regiments as time passed and the ranks were filled increasingly from outside Ireland.

  The rising forced Dubliners to choose sides, between continuing identification with the British Empire and those fighting British imperialism at home. The performance of the rebels and the military decision to use artillery made even their inveterate enemies acknowledge their courage. It also exposed the real divisions within Dublin, and Ireland as a whole, when members of the Officers’ Training Corps at Trinity College and the Dublin Veterans’ Corps assisted British troops in retaking the city centre. Irish soldiers serving in British units fighting the rebels had no choice, but in the Trinity OTC and the Veterans’ Corps every man was a volunteer, and many took substantial risks in order to participate in the fighting.

  In August 1916 swords were presented to OTC officers and souvenir cups to other participants in the defence of the college. The presentations were made by Sir Maurice Dockrell on behalf of ‘the citizens and property owners of Dublin.’ Responding, the Provost, John Pentland Mahaffy, recalled that his great-grandfather had received a similar presentation from the citizens 120 years earlier for his role in combating ‘Defenderism’. While Mahaffy took pride in his ancestor’s achievements, he did so ‘with mixed feelings,’ because the Defenders of the 1790s corresponded ‘to the Sinn Feiners of the present day.’ Describing the conflict bluntly as ‘a civil war,’ he declared:

  I am very sorry indeed to think that the virtues of my family should have been shown not in combating an external enemy but the dangers of home rebellion … We did not seek this war; we did not seek this quarrel with our fellow-citizens, the thing was thrust upon us suddenly in the twinkling of an eye.

  Yet quarrel there now was.

  Even without the executions it was inevitable that the restrictions imposed on the civilian population after the rising had been suppressed would alienate Dubliners further from British rule. Even committed unionists, such as Wilmot Irwin, found military rule irksome.

  The appalling parsimony of the British government in providing compensation for civilian casualties was a lost opportunity to retrieve ground. The contrast with amounts paid to businesses and property-owners, especially the extremely generous settlement for the official mouthpiece of the Irish Party, the Freeman’s Journal, spoke eloquently of where priorities lay. Another opportunity to literally repair the political as well as the physical damage done by the rising was lost by the mismanagement of the reconstruction of the city centre. This was an area where the British government should have exercised more, not less, authority, especially when it became clear that neither the corporation nor the property-owners were going to embrace the challenge. Decoupling the compensation payments from the planning process was a fatal error.

  The apotheosis of the rising came with the death of Thomas Ashe eighteen months later. Although largely forgotten today, Ashe came to personify the new nationalism in ways that even conservative elements within Irish society could embrace. (How they would have reacted had he lived is another question.) But of all the post-rising leaders of the advanced nationalist cause he was the only one of a calibre to match de Valera or Collins. In many ways he seemed to combine the best qualities of both, and with a more attractive personality than either.

  Another forgotten figure is Archbishop William Walsh. He managed to bring the Catholic hierarchy, Sinn Féin, the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Party and Labour together in a common campaign to oppose conscription. In the process he reinforced the bonds between all elements of the Catholic nationalist population and their church, from the working-class communities of Sheriff Street and the Liberties to the middle-class townships of Rat
hmines and Rathgar. His diplomatic ability in moulding alliances and his capacity to anticipate problems would be sorely missed during the Treaty crisis and the Civil War.

  All this was happening against the background of constant shortages in the necessities of life, some of which were attributed directly to the military, such as distortions in the fodder market caused by the requirements of cavalry regiments. This in turn affected milk supplies in Dublin. As we have seen, many of these complaints were ill founded. There was no praise for the military, even for its work in feeding the population after the rising or for releasing some of its own potato stock in 1917 to break the grip of profiteering farmers on the market.

  It is true that the authorities were much slower to activate price controls on essential items, such as food, in Dublin than in British cities; when they did eventually act it led to charges of interference and discrimination, even when the results were beneficial. The one occasion when the use of its draconian powers by Dublin Castle might have achieved something worth while was during the flu pandemic of 1918; but it was left to Sir Charles Cameron to take what limited measures he could with the totally inadequate resources of the corporation.

  On 4 February 1919 Mr Justice Moore was presented with white gloves by the county sheriff to signify that there were no criminal cases serious enough for him to hear. He congratulated the sheriff and the grand jury on this state of affairs.3

  There was never a high incidence of serious crime in early twentieth-century Dublin. Yet the dramatic decline during the First World War may not necessarily reflect an improvement in the ‘law and order’ environment—possibly quite the opposite. The 1916 Rising had, in the words of the Commissioner of the DMP, ‘rendered ordinary police duty an impossibility,’ and members of the force appear to have conducted a strategic withdrawal from the city’s streets.

  Given the low rate of indictable offences in Dublin, this retreat can more readily be seen by looking at the number of arrests and summonses served. The total number of summonses fell from 21,618 in 1912 to 11,867 in 1919; the fall in the number of arrests is even more dramatic, from 13,338 in 1912 to 4,394 in 1919.

  Table 19

  Arrests and summonses served, 1912–19

  The decline in the number of assaults on DMP constables and in common assaults would also support the notion of a retreat from the streets, or at least from active law enforcement. After reaching a peak in 1913 during the lock-out, the number of assaults reported, together with attacks on property, theft and public order offences, fell steadily in subsequent years. The more structured forms of protest engaged in by the Irish Volunteers, at least until the rising, appear to have exacted a less serious toll on the DMP than the amorphous disturbances that surrounded the great industrial dispute.

  However, the continuing fall in the number of assaults after the rising mirrors that in the number of arrests made and summonses served. This suggests, therefore, that there was some validity in the belief among senior figures of the British administration that the DMP had become too demoralised by 1919 to enforce the King’s writ. The scene was being set for a direct conflict between the Volunteers, the military and the future paramilitary formations of the British state. The fact that the latter bore the misnomer of the RIC fooled no-one. They would go down in history and popular memory as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries.

  Table 20

  Assaults, 1912–19

  One of the few unambiguous success stories of the war years in Dublin was the emergence of the allotments movement. It provided badly needed nourishment for the city, and the Irish Plotholders’ Union donated produce to the communal kitchens in Liberty Hall during the severe food shortages at the end of the war. By 1919 the area under cultivation had grown to 440 acres and the number of plot-holders to three thousand. Like the Irish Volunteer movement, it was an important educational exercise in civics and local democracy as well as meeting more immediate and mundane objectives. By 1919 Dublin Corporation had two thousand applicants on a waiting list for allotments; but, far from expanding, the movement faced the prospect of shrinking acreage as many of the sites on which crops were grown were awaiting funds for housing development.

  Another success story was the mass mobilisation of women for war work. Unlike some British cities, there was a sharp class division of duties in Dublin. Working-class women went, by and large, into the factories, while occupations for middle-class recruits included nursing and organising hospital supply depots, running soldiers’ clubs, providing meals for the poor and sustaining such voluntary bodies as the NSPCC. If the leading honorary positions in such bodies continued to go to the aristocracy, there was a growing reserve of women with the leadership, organisational and professional skill to provide real benefits to the wider community—as well as the war effort—such as Alice Brunton Henry, quartermaster of the Irish War Hospital Supply Depot. The great majority of these women came from Protestant and unionist upper and middle-class backgrounds. It was the last great flowering of good works by this community before independence.

  There were, of course, prominent converts among this group to radical nationalist politics and social reform movements who were prepared to challenge the status quo, such as Constance Markievicz and Louie Bennett, who involved themselves in the advanced nationalist and labour movements, respectively. Markievicz also converted in a literal sense, becoming a Catholic, one of several prominent Protestant women activists to do so. The desire to more fully legitimise their commitment to the cause of independence with fellow-revolutionaries probably played a role in the process, as well as purely spiritual motivations. This is a phenomenon worthy of more study.

  Of course many Catholic middle-class women, such as Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, played a similar role in nationalist ranks to that of their Protestant counterparts. As with labour, the national question proved the rock on which the feminist movement foundered. It is one of the reasons why the advent of votes for women in 1918 failed to propel them into leadership positions in either nationalist or unionist ruling circles in significant numbers—although there were important structural obstacles to the advancement of women in society as well.

  Many of the obvious changes wrought in Dublin by the war were superficial. If the commercial centre of the city had been gouged out by British artillery shells, it was soon repaired, while within a stone’s throw the city’s most glaring social problem, its slums, stood intact.

  On the other hand, the gathering of the first Dáil in the Mansion House in January 1919 at least showed the willingness of a new generation of political leaders to assert control of the nation’s destiny rather than trust to concessions from London. For the first time since the crushing of the lock-out in 1913, militant hope was a viable political commodity on the streets of Dublin, even if it had assumed a greener hue.

  NOTES

  Chapter 1: First blood

  1. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 1043, Joseph V. Lawless. He subsequently rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Free State army. Captain Judge appears to have been a naturally argumentative individual, as he subsequently managed to fall out first with the Redmondite faction in the Volunteers and then with republicans, resigning his commission and his place on the Executive in December 1914.

  2. The manner in which the guns were spirited away also told a story. The upwardly mobile Kathleen Boland, widow of a Fenian and mother of the future republican leaders Harry and Gerry Boland, hid some of the Howth Mausers in her garden at 15 Marino Crescent while the confrontation with the Crown forces took place a few yards away. Volunteers retrieved them later. Rifles left in the grounds of the ITGWU premises at nearby Croydon Park that day were moved into the union’s head office in Liberty Hall and retained for use by the Citizen Army. Fitzpatrick, Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution, p. 15; Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 1043, Joseph V. Lawless.

  3. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 140–41.

  4. The account of the Howth gun-runnin
g and subsequent events is based on contemporaneous reports in the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Freeman’s Journal, supplemented by Martin, The Howth Gun-Running and the Kilcoole Gun-Running.

  5. British unions and socialist organisations sent more than £110,000 to help the strikers. The Dublin relief fund set up by the Lord Mayor raised less than £6,500 to help the families of non-unionised workers. See Yeates, Lockout.

  6. Yeates, Lockout.

  7. Irish Independent, 14 and 15 July 1914; Keane, Ishbel, p. 201–9; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 69.

  8. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 69.

  9. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 139.

  10. One commentator in 1912 expressed the fear that ‘the Irish parliament will be similar in character to the present Dublin Corporation, which is shunned by all decent men and … is an object of contempt to the citizens.’ John Moynihan, quoted by Ferriter in The Transformation of Ireland, p. 41–2.

  11. Yeates, Lockout, p. 109.

  12. Tenants received only six months’ rent to cover the cost of moving.

  13. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 1, p. 341–3.