Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  On 31 October The Times reported that Redmond’s recruiting campaign had proved pitiful, with perhaps only 10,000 new recruits, most from Unionist areas of Dublin and Cork. It called the poor response ‘of considerable ultimate and moral moment to the future of Anglo-Irish relations.’4 By December, according to notes prepared by J. D. Irvine of the Morning Post for his editor Gywnne, 28,000 Ulstermen had joined Kitchener’s army but there had been just 11,000 from Ireland’s three other provinces. Fiercely anti-Redmond and anti-British propaganda circulated widely, especially in Dublin. Clan na Gael, American sister organisation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, called Redmond a ‘swindler’ and accused him of ‘a deliberate and wanton act of treachery to his own country in the interests of its only enemy.’5 According to The Times ‘a small but venomous group of papers representing the Sinn Féin movement and Larkinism [syndicalism named after James Larkin, the Irish trades unionist] and the original anti-British spirit’ were conducting ‘a violent campaign against recruiting.’6 These papers, The Times continued, compared the act of joining Kitchener’s army with that of Judas, and insisted the fight was ‘England’s war’. There was even the suggestion that Ireland should team up with India and Egypt to secure advantageous terms when Britain was defeated. The claim that the English wanted Irish Volunteers to join up so the Germans could slaughter them became widespread. The Volunteers should not join, republicans argued: but every Irishman should join the Volunteers, and train for the day when they overthrew the British. Irvine’s report to Gwynne at the Morning Post, much of which could not be printed for reasons of censorship, confirmed The Times’s findings. Sinn Féin was conducting ‘open pro-German and furious anti-British propaganda’.7 Young men who might otherwise enlist were being ‘terrorised and threatened by the extremists’.8 He had witnessed fundraising at a meeting in Dublin over which Redmond had presided ‘to efficiently arm and equip the National Volunteers of Dublin City’, even though a proclamation had just been issued forbidding the sales of rifles and ammunition. ‘Subscriptions amounting to £642 were raised on the spot.’ It is not clear whether Redmond’s followers wanted the rifles to arm against republicans or Unionists. Despite the United Kingdom’s national emergency, many Irish seemed to be arming themselves against another enemy.

  Added to this febrile atmosphere was an assumption widely held among the authorities that money pouring in from America for the republican cause was from Germany, and that parts of Ireland teemed with German spies. The Times felt the government’s response was entirely inadequate. It dismissed Augustine Birrell, the chief secretary, as useless. While loyal British newspapers were rigorously censored, Irish ones could ‘preach treason, war on recruiting, and libel the British Army … with complete impunity.’9 It suggested Kitchener should call for the suppression of these newspapers, and for the law to be used against those advocating treason. The loyal Ireland Redmond had promised after the Home Rule Bill had not materialised, but rather one that ‘will suffer from a general alienation of sympathy when the war is over.’

  The economic hardships that had hit Britain were felt far more keenly in Ireland, and led to further discontent. Average pay was already low in Ireland: 78 per cent of workers lived on less than £1 a week, compared with 50 per cent in Scotland and 40 per cent in England.10 That, and the postponement of Home Rule, made Redmond’s life extremely difficult, and caused even moderate Irish people to look for an alternative that might prosecute their interests more actively. Redmond understood he was being tarred with complicity, which was why he refused Asquith’s offer to serve in the cabinet in May 1915; but it did not work.

  Despite their often-professed sympathy for the Belgians, it became clear that, to many, Irishmen joining the British Army was an act of betrayal. In January 1915 Casement was recorded making disloyal remarks, and his pension was withdrawn. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) tore down posters plastered around Wexford that said: ‘Take no notice of the police order to destroy your own property, and leave your home if a German army lands in Ireland. When the Germans come they will come as friends, and to put an end to English rule in Ireland. Therefore stay in your homes, and assist as far as possible the German troops.’11 For a more prominent figure resistance took a form that was passive, but no less direct. In February 1915 Henry James asked William Butler Yeats to write a war poem. His response was pointed: ‘I think it better that in times like these/A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth/We have no gift to set a statesman right;/He has had enough of meddling who can please/A young girl in the indolence of her youth/or an old man upon a winter’s night.’12

  After 16 March 1915, thanks to an amendment by Lord Parmoor, an independent peer strongly opposed to the war who would sit in the first Labour cabinets, anyone in the United Kingdom charged under DORA – such as those promulgating seditious literature – could demand trial by jury. This made it still harder to stop the circulation of such tracts or newspapers, given the reluctance of Irish juries to convict anyone for a political offence. The Irish Volunteers stepped up their propaganda activities: those whose job it was to monitor public feeling were well aware of the shift towards the republicans, and reported back to Dublin Castle. Birrell remained determined to avoid confrontation or provocation.

  On 4 April 1915 – Easter Sunday – Redmond took the salute of 27,000 National Volunteers, as they marched past a crowd estimated at 100,000 in Dublin.13 It was a delusional event: Nationalist support was ebbing, and at Westminster Carson’s inclusion in the new coalition would boost his clout while diminishing Redmond’s. Sir Matthew Nathan, Birrell’s under-secretary and a former Army officer of distinction, noted that by the second half of 1915 the republicans were more confident, and seeking opportunities to trumpet their strength. At a banquet in Dublin on 2 July Redmond spoke, nonetheless, of his certainty that the Home Rule Act – which he called ‘the greatest charter of liberty ever obtained for Ireland all through her history’ – would be implemented the moment the war ended.14 He attacked those who claimed the coalition would renege on the promise; though he admitted his ‘distrust’ for the government, demonstrated by his refusal to join it. He claimed Ireland’s interests would be best served by an early victory – his underestimated rivals in the republican movement disagreed profoundly – and quoted official figures showing that of the 120,000 men to have enlisted, 71,000 were Roman Catholics and 49,000 Protestants.

  On 1 August Patrick Pearse, a fanatical republican (and half-English) schoolmaster, orated at the graveside of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the eighty-three-year-old Fenian, IRB leader and advocate of the use of force against the British, who had tried him for treason in 1865. Tom Clarke, a prominent IRB man who had served fifteen years in English jails for terrorist acts in the 1880s, had cabled John Devoy, the leader of Clan na Gael, on hearing of Rossa’s death in New York on 29 June, to ‘send the body home at once’.15 For three days before the funeral Rossa lay in state in Dublin’s City Hall; and Dublin Castle, to prevent incidents, told plain-clothes policemen to keep their distance in Glasnevin Cemetery. Pearse’s oration ended: ‘They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but, the fools, the fools, the fools! – They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’16 Pearse himself was thought to have a death wish (it would be granted, and for the cause he cherished), and Yeats accused him of having ‘the vertigo of self-sacrifice’, which made him rather a liability to others who wished to be driven by practicality and not romanticism.17 Nevertheless, his words contained a fundamental truth.

  Nathan observed, with mandarin understatement: ‘I have an uncomfortable feeling that the nationalists are losing ground to the Sinn Féiners and that this demonstration is hastening the movement.’18 Birrell did not even get that far; as he read a report of Rossa’s funeral he remarked: ‘I do
not suppose anybody in the whole concourse cared anything for the old fellow, who never cared for anything at any time.’19 It is a perfect illustration of his utter ignorance of a growing current of Irish feeling. During the autumn the Citizen Army, organised by Connolly in the trades union unrest of 1913 and pledged to achieve the ‘emancipation’ of the workers and an Irish republic, started to coordinate its activities with those of the Irish Volunteers.20 The shocking housing conditions of the Dublin working class gave Connolly and his movement enormous scope for agitation and activism, and plenty of recruits. By this stage the Volunteers were believed to be 15,000 strong and to have 1,800 rifles and the same number of pistols and shotguns. The drilling of Volunteers continued; there were training classes for officers and in first aid. However, most leading Volunteers, led by MacNeill, still wanted to use violence only for self-defence; while other republicans resolved in September 1915, at a meeting convened by Clarke, that they would take up arms after a German invasion only if the Germans promised to secure an Irish republic.

  For some republicans the idea of involving the Germans was more than rhetorical. Casement went to Germany and was joined there in late November 1915 by Joseph Plunkett, a poet, scholar and senior IRB man who had travelled via Spain, Italy and Switzerland. The two men tried to persuade the Germans to invade Ireland and join forces with a Volunteer uprising. They also asked that Irish prisoners of war be allowed to join an Irish brigade that would be part of the invasion force. Casement was convinced most Irish who had enlisted had done so to get a job and some prospects, not because of love for King George V. In the end he managed to interest a mere fifty-six men in the brigade. This highly risky mission bore little fruit beyond Germany putting out a statement on 20 November to say that if it ever invaded Ireland it would do all it could to advance Irish liberty. There would be no invasion, and Casement felt used. Asking himself why he had ever trusted the Germans he exploded: ‘They are cads … That is why they are hated by the world and England will surely beat them.’21

  When Casement failed to persuade Bethmann Hollweg, the German Chancellor, to meet him he should have realised the enormous improbability of the Germans opening a second front against the British in the Emerald Isle. The Royal Navy would probably have had an invasion force sunk before it had reached Heligoland, never mind Ireland. Yet Plunkett outlined a plan that entailed the Germans landing 12,000 men (and 40,000 rifles to arm the locals), but on the west coast, presumably after a tortuous journey around the Orkney Islands and down into the North Atlantic. This, thought Plunkett, would allow the Germans to set up a base camp in Limerick and from there occupy the country. The assumptions about the compliance of the Irish themselves (and not just those in Ulster, but what were then the many moderate Catholics with no desire to live under German favours) and the feasibility of German supply lines were breathtaking. Casement was more realistic, urging his comrades in Ireland to stop planning a rebellion when it became apparent the Germans had no intention of turning up for the party.

  In late 1915 recruiting in Ireland for the British Army had plummeted to under 1,100 a week, despite Redmond’s face adorning some recruitment posters. It would by February 1916 drop to 300 – even the higher figure was too little to maintain the desired two Irish divisions with adequate reserves. The disaffection in which Britain, in its supreme crisis, was held by Ireland was unrelenting, even before being exacerbated by the events of Easter 1916; and the low recruiting led to talk of conscription, causing immense disquiet. The Roman Catholic Church, which had begun the war by supporting Britain, was by mid-1915 becoming openly hostile. In July Cardinal Michael Logue, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, attending an industrial exhibition in Dundalk, announced that ‘the government that killed their Irish industries, and forced the people to emigrate, were looking out for men to fight for them, and the men were not there to be got.’22 He was cheered. Logue would, however, after the Easter Rising rebuke priests who gave support to Sinn Féin. At the end of July Pope Benedict XV issued an encyclical demanding an end to the war because of its futility. Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick chose the first anniversary of the war on 4 August to write to Redmond and demand that, as a Catholic politician, he associate himself with the Pope’s message. Redmond wished to be neither the tool of London nor, hoping Home Rule would embrace Ulster, of the Vatican, so replied blaming the Germans. It was not a distinguished performance.

  On 14 September the Council of the Irish Volunteers debated whether to launch an immediate insurrection. The motion was defeated on the casting vote of MacNeill, signifying the potential threat many of his comrades thought the Volunteers posed to the government. Lord Midleton, a former India secretary and leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance, saw Birrell in November and urged him to disarm the Volunteers; Birrell refused, even though Dublin Castle was aware of the Volunteers’ recruitment successes, aided not least by official inertia. By then intelligence sources believed republicans could launch an insurrection if Britain attempted to impose conscription in Ireland. Fearing they would be forced to join the British Army, many younger, unmarried men decided to emigrate to America. In November 1915, the Cunard and White Star lines barred 700 from boarding their ships in Liverpool, because the directors believed they should be enlisting. Redmond observed it was ‘very cowardly’ of them to try to leave.23 This provoked Bishop O’Dwyer to savage him in a letter to provincial Irish papers – Dublin ones had censorship so strict that they could never have printed it – about the rights of ordinary Irish Catholic boys. It was printed on handbills and widely circulated; the power of the Church contributed greatly to the anti-authority climate.

  However, some republicans did not need the provocation of conscription. A plan for a rising in Dublin had existed since May 1915. The IRB had had a three-man military committee discussing the feasibility and execution of such a rebellion: it comprised Pearse, Plunkett – who had devised the original plan – and Éamonn Ceannt, and later acquired Tom Clarke, who had long advocated violent revolution, and Seán Mac Diarmada, like many of his comrades an enthusiast for the Irish language, and born John MacDermott. On 26 December the IRB military council decided to launch a rebellion on Easter Sunday – 23 April – 1916. In January it co-opted Connolly and then, in early April, Thomas MacDonagh. Connolly had spent much of 1915 lecturing Volunteer units on street fighting; he convinced his comrades the British Army would not use artillery in Dublin, a dire misreading of another nation hardened by war and loss. The rebels’ optimism about assuming the role of governing Ireland was also fed by a belief in wholehearted support from the populace inside Dublin and around the country, and the assumption of a quick capitulation by the Castle, neither of which was forthcoming.

  On 8 January 1916 Midleton spoke in the Lords about widespread sedition and the potential for insurrection; Crewe dismissed his fears. Distressed, he asked to see Asquith, who met him on 26 January: having repeated his claims, Midleton was asked to send Asquith a memorandum detailing his information. Nothing happened, partly because a second meeting scheduled in March was cancelled as Asquith was ill. In February the debate on the King’s Speech made no mention of Ireland: so the Independent Nationalist MP for Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell, moved an amendment demanding the Government of Ireland Act be implemented a month later. In Ireland, the Volunteers were becoming more daring; with many of Redmond’s volunteers in the Army, they had the field to themselves; and Dublin Castle remained passive. There were only around 1,000 soldiers in Dublin; Birrell’s forces were outnumbered.

  On 4 March The Times’s Ireland correspondent detailed growing support for those who ‘profess the doctrines of Sinn Féin’ and who were doing all they could to hinder recruitment for the Army in Ireland.24 The openness of the Volunteers’ activities inspired young men to join. Republicans were active in Dublin, Wexford, Cork and Kerry. The Times report described Volunteers practising street-fighting and drilling while the authorities watched; it said that although such antics might amuse someone w
ith Birrell’s sense of humour, they might have a ‘serious side’. This was complemented by the easy availability of subversive literature. ‘It may become dangerous,’ the writer concluded, ‘unless the Irish government deals with it quickly and firmly’.

  When Midleton warned Birrell that the Volunteers were drilling, the chief secretary replied: ‘I laugh at the whole thing.’25 Shortly afterwards Midleton warned Lord Wimborne, the Lord Lieutenant, and other officials, of the dangers of letting the Volunteers continue manoeuvres. No one would listen, although after a blatant incident in Dublin three Volunteer organisers were arrested and deported to Britain. Redmond, too, had received warnings of a rebellion starting in the spring or summer of 1916, its intention being to force the British to crush it, and then to discredit Redmond and his party for assisting the oppressors. As predictions went it was remarkably accurate.

  The military council set the evening of Easter Sunday for mobilisation. A trial mobilisation was planned for St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, when it could be passed off to the authorities as simply parades to celebrate Ireland’s national day. ‘The Dublin Brigade, practically fully armed, uniformed and equipped held that portion of Dame Street from City Hall to the Bank of Ireland for over an hour, during which no traffic was allowed to break the ranks of the Volunteers, Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan [the women’s republican organisation].’26 Although not everyone in parades was armed, the authorities had no excuse to be surprised at the potential for trouble. An estimated one in three of the thousands of Volunteers who marched in St Patrick’s Day parades was armed. Unnoticed on the mainland, and reported in just one Dublin newspaper, was a Sinn Féin manifesto, published on 28 March 1916. It said the organisation ‘wish to warn the public that the general tendency of the Government’s action [to threaten to seize Volunteer arms under DORA] is to force a highly dangerous situation’. It continued: ‘The Government is well aware that the possession of arms is essential to the Volunteer organisation, and the Volunteers cannot submit to being disarmed either in numbers or detail without surrendering and abandoning the position they have held at all times since their first formation. The Volunteer organisation also cannot maintain its efficiency without organisers. The raiding for arms and attempted disarming of men, therefore, in the natural course of things can only be met by resistance and bloodshed.’27 A meeting at Dublin’s Mansion House to protest about the arrests and expulsions of the three organisers ended in a riot, with shots fired from a revolver only failing to wound or kill a policeman because they were stopped by his pocketbook, having pierced his greatcoat.