Ironically, there does seem to have been some kind of republican contact with Germany in 1918 – Michael Collins sent one of his trusted men to Ballina to get in touch with a German submarine supposed ‘to be off the north coast of Mayo with arms’, though without success.29 (In Ballina it was believed that German rifles had actually been landed in a cave near Killalligan.)30 But as with later ‘dodgy dossiers’, the real problem was not that the intelligence information was made up, or at least ‘sexed up’, but that ministers were ready to believe it. They assumed that Sinn Féin wanted to work with Germany (and vice versa). It was their underlying mindset that – as with most intelligence failures – shaped the misreading of evidence.
The affair further bruised the government’s fragile credibility in Ireland. As against that, Sinn Féin was knocked off balance, at least temporarily, and the national agitation was visibly quietened. All but nine of the twenty-one members of Sinn Féin’s Standing Committee were arrested, and the organization was ‘harassed continually’ for the rest of the year, ‘its offices raided, its property confiscated and its members imprisoned’.31 By the autumn the head of the RIC could attribute the becalming of Sinn Féin to ‘the firm attitude of the government, the internment of the most prominent and mischievous leaders and organisers’. But in the longer term the arrests of May 1918 rebounded on the government. Most of those taken could, like Arthur Griffith himself, be described as ‘moderates’ (though at the time the British could not see this). The most visible leaders were not necessarily the most dangerous to Britain. Those who escaped arrest were more radical, the Irish Volunteer leaders in particular. Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, Harry Boland and Richard Mulcahy, the Chief of the new General Headquarters (GHQ) Staff just established in March 1918, all remained at large.
The political result of the German Plot arrests was pithily assessed by one of the more ‘extreme’ of the arrestees, Constance Markievicz – a highly visible Citizen Army and women’s movement pioneer, whose death sentence for her part in the 1916 rising (she was widely believed to have shot an unarmed policeman on St Stephen’s Green) had been commuted. After Arthur Griffith had been elected for East Cavan in June, she wrote that ‘putting us away cleared the issues for us so much better than our own speeches ever could’. When she was selected as a candidate for the 1918 general election, she observed that ‘My present address alone [Holloway gaol] will make an excellent election address … Sending you to jail is like pulling out all the loud stops on all the speeches you ever made … our arrests carry so much further than speeches.’32
‘THE MOVEMENT’
The ‘almost inconceivable foolhardiness’ of the government’s ‘pin-pricking coercion’ has been widely condemned, then and since.33 The senior parliamentarian nationalist John Dillon, baffled by the apparent determination of the British to ‘manufacture Sinn Feiners’, was eventually reduced to the conclusion that the government actually wanted to eliminate his party. This, if true, would at least have indicated some deliberate political strategy, however deluded. But simple incomprehension is a far more likely explanation of British reactions. At this critical juncture, when the Cabinet needed to work out how seriously to take the radical nationalist opposition in Ireland, it was not well served by the Irish Executive. Local police downplayed Sinn Féin’s significance, because (as one officer noted) they tended not to see any organization ‘as being of any real consequence unless it was led by what were termed “people of importance” ’.34 Governmental understanding of Sinn Féin was shaped by advisers like the Vice-President of the Local Government Board, Sir Henry Robinson, who assured ministers that ‘if conscription was started and resolutely carried through, Sinn Féin would die at once.’ He based this sanguine view on his belief that ‘the farmers hated Sinn Féin and wanted to be quit of it.’ He admitted that they had to appear to support it, ‘otherwise no-one would deal with them’. (Ministers failed to ask him whether this might indicate that Sinn Féin had wider support than he suggested.) Robinson blamed the trouble on ‘the young shopmen in the towns’. When ministers asked how much danger of ‘outrage and anarchy’ there would be, Robinson said it depended on how the policy was implemented. If the administration was weak, ‘the people would fight to the death against it, but if they saw the administration was determined, they would accept it.’35 This sort of mild Orientalist psychology would reappear in official views as the crisis evolved.
French, unsurprisingly, took a similar line. He was careful not to attribute Irish rejection of conscription to cowardice. ‘I do not for one moment believe that “fear of bullets” is any greater deterrent to Irishmen than to any other nationality.’ Anticipation of danger was not one of the ‘weaknesses of the Irish’, he told his Cabinet colleagues. But ‘their race has one very marked characteristic’ – they were ‘peculiarly liable to be influenced by their immediate environment’. As he made clear, he meant this not in a physical but in a moral sense. In ‘suitable surroundings’ it was easy to rouse them to imperial enthusiasm, but they were just as easily ‘filled with hatred and anger by a few crafty sedition mongers or young priestly fanatics, amongst whom alone they live’.
These experts seriously misread the new resistance. It may not have been a mass movement, but it was truly a movement. Many of its activists, indeed, talked simply of ‘the movement’ rather than any particular group labels. A wide range of people converged around a separatist programme so broad as to be an outlook, an attitude or an atmosphere, rather than a strategy. Patrick Pearse had analysed its dynamic even before the war – ‘a multitudinous activity of freedom clubs, young republican parties, labour organisations, socialist groups and what not … many of them seemingly contradictory, some mutually destructive, yet all tending towards a common objective’. The young Todd Andrews in Dublin experienced that revolutionary psychological dynamic. ‘We … had the universally satisfying feeling that comes from belonging to an exclusive club or to any group of conspirators.’ He and his fellow activists ‘were enthusiasts … we had created for ourselves what was in effect a mystical view of Ireland’.
On the other side of the country, in the unionist-dominated Cork town of Bandon, Liam Deasy recalled (with undimmed intensity half a century later) ‘the thrill of those early parades – the feeling of high adventure, the sense of dedicated service … the secret rendezvous, and the gay comradeship’. All were ‘like signs of the return of the Golden Age of Ireland’s ancient chivalry’. Todd Andrews rejected the idea propounded by Eoin MacNeill and James Connolly that Ireland was not an abstraction but a population (an idea that would also become a crucial element of the argument for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921). ‘Our Ireland was an Ireland which had nothing to do with economics, property, or with how people lived or loved or prayed. It had in fact become a political abstraction’. For him, mythical symbols like the ‘Dark Rose’ and the poor old woman had immediate political meaning: ‘from Caitlin Ni Uallachain, Roisin Dubh and the Sean Bhean Bhocht proceeded the Republic.’36 In 1916, in fact, Eoin MacNeill had felt the need to remind his fellow Volunteer leaders precisely that ‘what we call our country is not a political abstraction’, and that ‘there is no such person as Caitlin Ni Uallachain or Roisin Dubh or the Sean-bhean Bhocht, who is calling upon us to serve her’. He plainly recognized the psychological power of these personifications, even if his schoolmasterish realism was no match for it.37
Andrews knew well enough that not everyone in the movement was a republican. Sinn Féin emerged from disparate elements, and at first its structure was loose. When George Noble Plunkett, a papal count, whose son Joseph had signed the 1916 proclamation of the Republic, was elected as the first independent nationalist MP in January 1917 – with vociferous Sinn Féin support – he tried to create a party organization under his own control. He was persuaded to adopt the Sinn Féin policy of refusing to go to Westminster, and set up a ‘Council of Nine’ in April 1917 to bring all advanced nationalists together, but still went on building his own Liberty Le
ague. Not until the October convention were the groups fully merged. The turning point was the election of Eamon de Valera in East Clare in July. The most prominent Volunteer commander to survive the 1916 executions, he proved an adept navigator of Sinn Féin’s diverse ideological currents. His declaration that though ‘we want an Irish Republic’, he would ‘not put in a word against’ another form of government, ‘so long as it was an Irish government’, paved the way for the formula adopted by the party in October.
Sinn Féin’s flexibility allowed it to pick up many strands of nationalism. It could be vague about its ends, but it had a coherent and persuasive conception of its means. Before 1916 its founder, Arthur Griffith, had elaborated a political strategy – abstention and civil disobedience – shaped by his understanding of the Hungarian resistance to Austrian rule in the mid-nineteenth century. That resistance produced the ‘compromise’, the dual monarchy in which Hungary became an equal partner. For Griffith, that outcome was both effective and attainable – unlike the idea of a republic, which Britain could never accept. This condemned him, in the eyes of some republicans, as a ‘monarchist’. Griffith’s strategy was often called ‘non-violent’, though this negative label hardly captured its ambitious and challenging reach. The name Sinn Féin, routinely translated as ‘ourselves alone’, invoked the idea of self-reliance, and signified a process of recreating an autonomous Irish people from within. (There was a strong echo here of the famous slogan of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘l’Italia fara da se’.) It offered a complete programme of resistance, psychological as much as physical. Part of its appeal was undoubtedly that it offered an alternative to violence, without descending into the flawed strategy of parliamentarianism, which (even in the hands of the most aggressive filibusterers) legitimized British authority. Its third way offered the attractive prospect of paralysing the British state by non-cooperation or passive resistance, and actually building a counter-state while the struggle was in progress.
A perceptive take on Sinn Féin was provided by an outsider, Roger Chauviré, Professor of French at University College Dublin. Fascinated by the phenomenon he saw taking shape around him, he published a series of articles in the Revue de Paris and Le Correspondant (under the pseudonym Sylvain Briollay) analysing ‘The Psychology of Sinn Fein’. ‘What strikes one most in Sinn Fein thought’, he suggested, ‘is its extremist character.’ He knew well enough that ‘the epithet “extremist” annoys the Sinn Feiners’; but he used it in a rather unconventional sense. ‘I mean the clear and deliberate determination to ignore what is, and to take account, nay to admit the very existence, only of what ought to be.’ If you tried to ‘get to the bottom of these men’, he asked, ‘what do you find? Wholehearted faith in the power of ideas, in the irresistible superiority of right.’ He saw this faith as uniquely Irish. The French might seem to have shown the same confidence in ideas, but with them this did not ‘imply the abandonment of a positivism tinged on occasion with irony’. French people, like most others, expected ideas to work by eventually mobilizing superior force – not otherwise. For the Irish, ‘there is between justice and might, not a harmony to be realised in the long run, but immediate and substantial identity’. Sinn Feiners were ‘millenarians … as sure of their triumph as of the rise of to-morrow’s sun’.38
Chauviré suggested that, ‘in the idealism of Sinn Fein, and especially in its uncompromisingness’, there was ‘an enormous element of illusion’. (Its critics would say self-delusion.) The potency of the belief that Irish-America would ensure the liberation of Ireland, for instance, was not reduced by its being quite unrealistic. ‘One must have lived in Ireland to understand the spell cast, in the long run, by the endless repetition of gratuitous statements.’ Illusion was almost the foundation of activism: ‘analysis and too clear a consciousness of things’ would be ‘dangerous … for the leaders’, would ‘cut at the root of their energy’. Realists who ‘pride themselves on … lucid disillusionment’ did nothing for the cause, he thought, just because ‘they say there is nothing to do.’ (Kevin O’Higgins made a similar point when he wrote that ‘the whole history of the world is the triumph of mind over matter. We are backing our Idea against aeroplanes and armoured cars.’)39 Interestingly, though, Chauviré saw only a narrow division between the real objectives of the Sinn Feiners and those of their arch-opponent John Redmond. Redmond’s demand for Irish units fighting under Irish flags in the war, for instance, was intended to produce ‘an army of national defence, available against any enemy’. Redmond’s ‘supreme vision … was the very dream of Sinn Fein’, and the only questions which separated them were questions of ‘method and expediency’.40
The movement’s dynamism was most obvious in the mushroom growth of local Sinn Féin clubs (cumainn) after the party’s election victories in early 1917. In Sligo, which had not ‘risen’ in 1916, the police reported a virtual tripling between June (five Sinn Féin clubs with a total membership of 283) and July (fifteen clubs, 773 members). By September the total had more than doubled again to thirty-two clubs with 1,747 members. Even earlier, in some places at least, the shift of public opinion meant that ‘it was only necessary for anyone with a bit of cheek to stand up after Mass in almost any place and make a speech about Easter Week to succeed in getting a Sinn Féin Cumann started.’41 They took the names of legendary republicans like Wolfe Tone or Patrick Pearse; sometimes an increasingly radical stance was indicated by a change of patron saint – as when Frank Aiken’s club in Camlough, Co. Armagh replaced Eoin MacNeill, the prewar Volunteer leader tarred by his infamous countermand of the Easter 1916 mobilization, by Thomas Ashe, the 1916 hero and 1917 martyr. Often they were the hub of a social network of groups – in this case a Gaelic League branch, a GAA club, a Cumann na mBan camogie league and the ‘Thomas Ashe’ cycling club.42
Still, radicalism was not rampant. Todd Andrews’s Volunteer company in Rathfarnham helped to set up the ‘Brothers Pearse’ Sinn Féin Cumann that met in Pearse’s old school building, St Enda’s. ‘The membership included some very old men, usually tradesmen and labourers, as well as women of various ages and conditions of life.’ What Andrews found particularly noticeable was not just the age, but the ‘astonishingly conservative’ views of the male Sinn Feiners on the issue of women’s suffrage, and indeed on ‘all sorts of social questions’. ‘Social questions such as housing, land division, public health, education, were seldom discussed and generally the subjects for debate were of the “England’s difficulty, Ireland’s opportunity” variety,’ unless they debated the issue raised in a popular ballad of the time, ‘Is it true the women are worse than the men?’43 In Quilty, Co. Clare, ‘frequently there was nothing to discuss at these Sunday meetings,’ and the Sinn Féin organization was kept alive only by ‘getting the Volunteers to attend’ them.44
The movement’s activism thrived on public defiance. At Easter 1917 in Carrick-on-Suir, a committee was formed to collect subscriptions for high mass to be offered for repose of the souls of the executed 1916 leaders. Schools were asked to allow their pupils to attend, shopkeepers to shut their shops on the mass morning. When one unionist refused, ‘a few of us called on him and compelled him to close his doors.’ This committee led directly to the establishment of both a Sinn Féin club and a Volunteer company in the town; ‘invariably it was the same faces one saw at both.’45 Non-violent Sinn Feiners could easily be radicalized by the reaction of the police, which often became physical. After putting up a Sinn Féin poster on the chapel gate at Fourmilewater, Waterford, Patrick Ryan and his comrades wrestled with the police to stop them taking it down.46 After three members of the republican boy-scout movement, Fianna Eireann, got into a fight with police trying to pull down a tricolour from Blarney Castle, they joined the Irish Volunteers. One of them, Frank Busteed, would become a formidable gunman and later a flying-column commander.47 In some places republican manifestations soon became impressive. In June 1917 a group of speakers including Con Collins and Thomas Ashe were met at Rathkeale by a proces
sion claimed to be three miles long, made up of several hundred horse-drawn cars, each adorned with a tricolour.48 In Kanturk, in north Cork, well over a hundred marched to celebrate a Sinn Féin victory on the District Council in November 1917. ‘They were in fours … 16 boy scouts headed the procession followed by 64 girls and 120 men and boys. A Sinn Fein flag was carried in front and about 80 of the men carried pikes.’ (The watching policemen seemed to count the girls more carefully than the pikemen.) ‘Most of the houses along the route were illuminated with lighted candles. The streets were lined with a crowd of men, women and children, who raised cheers several times.’ For Todd Andrews, the liking for demonstrations and torchlight processions was very much a Sinn Féin rather than a Volunteer tendency. Still, old fashioned as it might be, it gave colour to the new mobilization.
This was a ‘movement’ in the semi-mystical sense promoted by German nationalist thought, a Bewegung manifesting an underlying sense of community – a Volksgemeinschaft. British intelligence noted with some frustration that ‘the whole movement is peculiarly well disciplined’ (notably in regard to drink, which had been a fertile cause of information leakage in the past).49 Its social profile was also unusually wide. Its breaching of gender boundaries, in particular, was one of the movement’s most novel features. Young republicans ‘caught up in the first wave of patriotic excitement’ swept aside traditional gender roles. Kevin O’Shiel remembered the ‘big percentage of youth’ in the crowd welcoming Count Plunkett at Carrick railway station during the North Roscommon by-election campaign: not just ‘large numbers of young men’, but ‘more curious still for those days, young women’.50 Although the fact that Cumann na mBan went on as a separate organization preserved in part the ‘separate sphere’ of women’s activity, the reality of common activism outweighed – at the time at least – this formal segregation.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 4