1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  One faction led by O’Mahony plotted to take control of Campo Bello Island, a British holding off the coast of Maine; the other to invade Canada itself. The Campo Bello initiative was scotched by British and American cooperation, but the Canadian invasion went ahead later that year, in June 1866. The Fenian leader, Colonel John O’Neill, at the head of a force of 600 men achieved some success, capturing Fort Erie and defeating a British force at the Battle of Ridgeway. However, bereft of reinforcements, O’Neill’s force, significantly described as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), retreated back to American soil after only two days and surrendered to the Americans.

  The Fenians also planned an invasion and an uprising in Ireland itself the following year. But the police were forewarned and the rebellion was scotched, lasting for little more than a day. However, bomb plots, rescues and failed rescues continued to keep the name of the IRB before the Irish public for decades. In an attempt to rescue the Fenian leader, Colonel Kelly, in Manchester, a policeman was accidentally shot and three Manchester Fenians were hanged as a result. The names of the three, Allen, Larkin and O’Brien, passed into the Pantheon of Irish martyrdom, remembered in one of the most famous ‘scaffold songs’, The Smashing of the Van. One of the most spectacular exploits of the Fenians was to rescue a number of Fenians from Fremantle Jail in Western Australia, aboard the Catalpa in 1875. At the time of writing, one of the biggest pubs in Perth is called ‘The Fenians’. The men sailed back to a hero’s welcome in America where there was a large Irish presence created by the famine.

  The principal Fenian off-shoot was the Clan na Gael, which acted ‘in concert with the IRB’ in Ireland and which at the time of the 1916 Rising was led by John Devoy, an old Fenian who had joined the French Foreign Legion to receive military training. He had supported ‘the New Departure’ of throwing the Fenian Movement behind Parnell, and when this failed, succeeded ultimately in uniting the various feuding factions of the Clan and the IRB in Atlantic City, New Jersey in July 1900 behind the demand for an Irish Republic to be achieved by physical force if necessary. The IRB in Ireland, however, seemed most unlikely to provide that force. It existed in a semi-moribund state, led principally by John O’Leary and Charles J. Kickham, two men who were better known for their literary abilities than their Fenianism. It was the presence of figures like these in the movement which led the poet W. B. Yeats to join them. But insofar as militarism was concerned, keeping alive the memory of the dead and/or attending funerals appeared to be the IRB’s principal activity.

  However, in the early years of the twentieth century this began to change. Mindful of Grattan’s example, two Nationalists, Catholic Denis McCullough and Quaker Bulmer Hobson, founded an organisation called the Dungannon Clubs in Belfast. It preached separatism, attacked recruiting to the British Army, Navy or police force, and in a series of pamphlets, preached Republicanism and extended the hand of friendship to the Orangemen. From 1905 onward the Dungannon Clubs began to intertwine with the Sinn Fein Movement. Hobson and McCullough readily agreed with Griffith that there was nothing to be gained by putting faith in ‘any such myths as English justice or English mercy’ or by the ‘useless, degrading and demoralising policy’ of the Irish Party at Westminster. Griffith inverted the argument of Cooke more than a century earlier, thundering:20

  Ireland has maintained a representation of 103 men in the English Parliament for 108 years…The 103 Irishmen are faced with 567 foreigners… Ten years hence the majority of Irishmen will marvel they once believed that the proper battle-ground for Ireland was one chosen and filled by Ireland’s enemies.

  Although numerically small, the generic title ‘Sinn Fein’ came to be applied to those who supported Irish independence, and Griffith’s general policy as opposed to the Irish Parliamentary Party’s dull, dogged march towards Home Rule. However, under the Sinn Fein umbrella there was a considerable divide between the socialist James Connolly and the capitalist-minded Griffith who disapproved of strikes. The Dungannon Clubs’ Republican theorists also found fault with Griffith’s monarchist ideas. Above all, where the IRB was concerned, Griffith suffered the supreme drawback of being a constitutionalist, not a physical force man, although he ran a newspaper called The United Irishman, named after the 1840s newspaper of Young Irelander leader John Mitchell which had preached Tone’s doctrines. In 1907, a figure much more to the Dungannon school’s way of thinking arrived in Dublin.

  Thomas James Clarke was born in England of Irish parents in 1858, spent his childhood in South Africa until the age of ten, then lived in Dungannon in Ulster until he went to America at the age of twenty-one. Joining the Clan na Gael, he returned to Ireland as a dynamiter, the precursor of the Provisional IRA’s London bombers. He was imprisoned for fifteen years under conditions which drove many of his fellows to death or insanity. Released in 1889, he went to America before returning to Ireland where he opened a small tobacconist’s shop in Parnell Street in Dublin. In 1901 he married Kathleen Daly, daughter of fellow prisoner, Fenian leader John Daly and sister to one of Clarke’s principal officers in 1916, Ned Daly.

  He was co-opted on to the Supreme Council of the IRB which proceeded to take two important steps. Firstly, it appointed Sean MacDermott as a full-time organiser throughout the country. MacDermott (Sean MacDiarmada) was born in County Leitrim. He spent his early years in Scotland and in America before returning to Ireland and became the most important IRB organiser and recruiter despite being lame and weakened by polio. He was an active member of the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association and of Sinn Fein as well as being editor and manager of the IRB paper. The founding of this paper, Irish Freedom, was the IRB’s second important move. Irish Freedom expounded the full unexpurgated Republican doctrine. In 1911 the IRB split over the ostensible issue of control of the newspaper; the real issue was the clash of the generations between the Hobson, McCullough, MacDermott wing of the IRB, and their elders, Fred Allan, John O’Hanlon and P. T. Daly. Clarke supported the younger men.

  The strength21 of the Clarke faction was estimated at a convention of the Clan in Atlantic City in 1912 as being 1660 in Ireland and 367 in Britain. The youth wing of the Movement, Fianna Eireann, led by Countess Markievicz and Liam Mellowes, was said to be 1000 strong and the circulation of Irish Freedom at 6000 copies a month. A sum of $2000 a year was allocated by the convention to further development in Ireland. These figures give an idea of the relative strengths of the forces which would be thought of as rallying to Tom Clarke as opposed to John Redmond.

  However, the influence of the Irish Republican Brotherhood could not be measured in numerical terms only. IRB men had infiltrated the leadership of every Irish Ireland movement of consequence, including the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association and many other bodies. It may or may not have been an IRB man who prompted the vice-president of the Gaelic League, Professor Eoin MacNeill, to write a momentous article in the Gaelic League’s official organ, Claidheamh (The Bright Sword), on the heels of the Ulster Volunteers’ gun-running. The article put forward the idea that if the Ulster Volunteer Force could arm and organise to defeat Home Rule, perhaps it was time for Nationalists to arm and organise themselves to prevent Home Rule being defeated by force. Shortly after the article appeared in October 1913, a meeting to which MacNeill was invited was held in Wynne’s Hotel, Dublin, at the instigation of the IRB. As Irish parliamentary sentiment and pro-British fervour were so strong, the IRB men kept themselves in the background. Only people of impeccable constitutionalist credentials were elected to a committee that decided to hold a public meeting at the Rotunda in Dublin on 25 November, 1913, with a view to founding a Nationalist Volunteer Movement. In his opening speech MacNeill was careful to state that the proposed new body meant no ill towards the UVF:22

  We do not contemplate any hostility to the Volunteer movement that has already been initiated in parts of Ulster. The strength of that movement consists in men whose kinsfolk were amongst the foremost and the most resolute in winning freedom for the
United States of America…The more genuine and successful the local Volunteer movement in Ulster becomes, the more completely does it establish the principle that Irishmen have the right to decide and govern their own national affairs. We have nothing to fear from the existing Volunteers in Ulster nor they from us.

  His fire was trained on the Conservatives. The Volunteers’ manifesto stated that:

  …A plan has been deliberately adopted by one of the great English political parties, advocated by the leaders of that party and by its numerous organs in the Press, and brought systematically to bear on English public opinion, to make a display of military force and the menace of armed violence the determining factor in the future relations between this country and Great Britain.

  The huge attendance at the meeting showed that Nationalists were prepared to resist that menace. Some 4000 men enrolled at the meeting. Amongst them was Eamon de Valera who would live to become the most famous Irishman of the century. The identity of de Valera’s father is a matter of some controversy. What is certain is that he was born out of wedlock to an Irish mother, Katherine Coll, in a foundling home in New York on 14 October, 1882. From infancy he was reared by the Coll family at Bruree, County Limerick. He was educated at the local National School, then the Christian Brothers’ School at Charleville before progressing, via bursaries, to Blackrock College, Dublin. He graduated from the Royal University (changed by Birrell into the National University), eventually becoming a mathematics teacher. Like many young men of his time, he entered the national struggle through an interest in the Irish language and membership of the Gaelic League.

  The new Volunteer force was constituted on democratic lines. Any Volunteer, chosen without regard to class or creed, could become a member of the Committee which appointed officers. In parts of the country the Volunteers selected their own officers. Col. Maurice Moore, a brother of the novelist, George Moore, who was a Redmond supporter and a member of the Connaught Rangers, one of the most famous Irish regiments, was appointed Inspector General of the new organisation. In a letter to Joe McGarrity in America, Tom Clarke described the atmosphere generated by the Rotunda meeting and what followed:23

  Joe, it is worth living in Ireland these times – there is an awakening – the slow, silent plodding, and the open preaching is at last showing results, things are in full swing on the upgrade – and we are breathing air that compels one to fling up his head and stand more erect.

  …The volunteer movement caught on in great style here in Dublin. Such an outpouring of young fellows was never seen. They filled the Rink in the Rotunda Gardens (which holds 7000), filled the adjacent garden, overflowed into the large Concert Hall in the Rotunda buildings and packed the street around the entrances and afterwards 5000 people at least had tried to get up to entrance and had to go back home. The places were packed too closely to enable the stewards to move around inside and have enrolment forms filled, but even as it was there were about 4000 enrolled that night. – Then the drills – every drill hall packed since – too much packed to allow of satisfactory drilling – then the class of fellows who are there – and the enthusiasm and the National note in the atmosphere! – ‘tis good to be in Ireland these times.

  The government had taken alarm and issued a proclamation forbidding importation of arms. I hoped they wouldn’t do so for some months, but the drilling will go ahead and already we know it is not going to cause any panicky feeling among the volunteers – hundreds of young fellows who could not be interested in the National Movement, even on the milk and water side are in these volunteers and are saying things which proves that the right spot has been touched in them by the volunteering. Wait till they get their fist clutching the steel barrel of a business rifle and then Irish instincts and Irish manhood can be relied upon…

  As Clarke’s letter indicates, the British Government had reacted to the Volunteers’ formation by issuing a ban on the importation of arms, although no such ban had followed the formation of the UVF, another clear indication to Nationalists that there was one law for them and another for the Ulster Volunteer Force. This belief was greatly strengthened the following April when the Orangemen openly landed their arms without a hand being raised to stop them. Drilling became widespread, with the Volunteers being trained both by ex-soldiers and by instructors who had gained their expertise as boys in the Fianna. Popular enthusiasm for the new force was such that as Clarke’s letter indicates, recruits came in large numbers, not only from the Gaelic League and Sinn Fein but also from the ranks of supporters and followers of John Redmond. Their principal theoretician, Padraig Pearse, wrote:24

  Personally I think the Orangeman with the rifle a much less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle…in the present circumstances accursed be the soul of any Nationalist who would dream of firing a shot or draw on a sword against the Ulster Volunteers in connection with this bill. Any such action would be an enforcement of a British law on an Irish populous which refused it; would be a martialling under the Union Jack.

  Just what Pearse thought the Ulster Volunteers intended to do with their rifles is a moot point. However, it became standard Republican dogma that somehow if Britain stood aside, the Orangemen would behave reasonably. The view permeated Provisional IRA thinking throughout the entire course of the contemporary ‘Troubles’. However it was, and is, an attitude for which Pearse and those who thought, and think, like him were prepared to sacrifice their lives. As he stood in the dock, knowing that he was doomed, Roger Casement declared before sentence of death was pronounced on him:25

  I know not how all my colleagues on the Volunteer committee in Dublin reviewed the growing menace, but those with whom I was in closest co-operation redoubled, in face of these threats from without, our efforts to unite all Irishmen from within. Our appeals were made to Protestant and Unionist as much almost as to Catholic and Nationalist Irishmen. We hoped that by the exhibition of affection and goodwill on our part towards our political opponents in Ireland we would yet succeed in winning them from the side of an English Party…

  Behind the noble aspirations of the Republicans, there lay the unpalatable and unacknowledged reality, that the outcome of Republicanism striving to be free and Orangeism seeking to maintain its supremacy, must inevitably be conflict. Carson, for one, had made it abundantly clear what he intended the Ulster Volunteer rifles to be used for: to prevent either their holders or himself having to live under a Dublin parliament. With the support of Bonar Law he had taken the question of Partition a step further soon after the UVF’s formation. On 1 January, 1913 he had moved that the entire nine-county province of Ulster be excluded from the operation of the Home Rule Act. Redmond opposed this amendment as did Asquith and it was defeated. But Asquith bowed to the mounting threats of civil war by announcing that before the Home Rule Bill became law another election would have to be held.

  Writing at this remove, it is difficult to grasp the extent to which the Conservative leadership was prepared to sail along the wilder shores of defiance to a point where the waters of politics broke over the reefs of treachery. Bonar Law, for example, in support of Carson’s amendment, solemnly declared that the Ulster Unionists, rather than be ruled by the Nationalists would ‘prefer to accept the Government of a foreign country’. This statement, made in London by the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition as the war clouds darkened over Europe, was clearly designed to be read in Berlin.

  It was echoed by the man who actually sailed in the guns for the UVF, Major Fred Crawford, an officer in the British Army, who said that if Home Rule became effective he would: ‘infinitely prefer to change his allegiance right over to the Emperor of Germany or anyone else who had got a proper and stable government’. Bonar Law also informed King George V that he would advise British Army officers to refuse any orders that directed them to take action against Ulster. Ironically, one of the few figures to stand out against such blackmail was Randolph Churchill’s son, Winston. Far from proclaiming that Ulster would fight and Ulster
would be right, he ordered a squadron to be held in readiness off the coast of Scotland, and so emphatically ruled that Ulster would not be right that he threatened that if Belfast showed fight, he would ‘have the town in ruins in 24 hours’. An opportunity to test the Churchillian bellicosity never arose.

  In an effort to resolve the Partition issue the king called a conference of all the interested parties at Buckingham Palace on 21 July, 1914. For four days, in Churchill’s celebrated comment the conference ‘toiled round the muddy by-ways of Fermanagh and Tyrone’. That is to say, the Irish and English leaders argued as to whether all nine counties of Ulster should be permanently excluded from the operation of the Home Rule Act or whether only the four with large Unionist populations should be partitioned. There was also a proposal before the meeting that ‘county option’ be exercised whereby any county by a vote of its internal majority could exclude itself from the operation of Home Rule for a period of six years.

  Partition was thus firmly on the table. The reality of the situation at this stage was that far from being prepared to make any concessions to Nationalist sentiment, the UVF was on a war footing, only awaiting a telegram from Carson containing the words ‘go ahead’ to stage a coup d’état and set up a provisional government. Sir Henry Wilson had given his opinion that if the Army was told to intervene the result would be that: ‘…if Carson and his Government were sitting in the City Hall and we were ordered to close down the Hall, we would not go’. Not surprisingly the conference ended in failure, by coincidence, on the day the Austrian ultimatum was delivered to Serbia. Asquith was reporting the breakdown to the Cabinet on 24 July when the wording of the ultimatum was handed to Foreign Secretary Sir David Grey. In his book, The World Crisis, Churchill recorded the famous description of how as he heard Gray read aloud the fateful document: ‘The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’.