A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  ‘Is them ’uns bate?’

  And when I assured them that the unspeakable Nationalists had been beaten by a good majority, once more cheers were raised. I was slapped familiarly on the back by half-dressed ‘Islandmen’ (the shipwrights) with shouts of ‘Bully wee fella!’ as though the defeat of the measure was due to my personal exertions.

  Later in the day, to lament the bill’s failure, Catholics in Belfast set fire to their chimneys. Protestants left their work early, and, while Orange bands played loyalist airs, they lit bonfires and tar-barrels in jubilation. No wonder the Belfast News-Letter noted that the combined result was a pall over the town ‘as thick as a London fog’.

  Differences of opinion on Home Rule ignited a fresh conflagration of intercommunal violence in Belfast on a scale not seen before. The trouble began five days before the vote on the bill when Catholic navvies at work on the Alexandra Dock drove out a Protestant, warning him that ‘neither he nor any of his sort should get leave to work there, or earn a loaf there or any other place’. On the following day nearly a thousand shipwrights descended on the navvies. The few who stood their ground were badly beaten, and others took refuge in the water. One young man drowned. The mayor, Sir Edward Harland, telegraphed Dublin Castle requesting reinforcements. Rural constables disembarking at the railway stations followed Town-Inspector Thomas Carr through a maze of unfamiliar streets to the Shankill Road. Here Protestants had extended their demonstrations against Home Rule to sacking Catholic-owned public houses. In the words of the government inquiry,

  Mr Carr and his party, as they advanced up the street, were furiously attacked by the mob.... The police—a number of whom had firearms—charged, by Mr Carr’s orders, three times; once with fixed bayonets; but the mob kept up the attack with unabated fierceness. Some of the streets of Belfast are paved with small paving stones, popularly called ‘kidneys’, and these formidable missiles were rooted from the street by the women and handed to the men.

  Almost every policeman in Mr Carr’s party was struck with stones, by the tremendous fusillade of these weapons which was kept up by the mob.

  When Carr, himself severely injured, got to his feet, he read the Riot Act. Then he ordered his men to fire buckshot over the heads of the rioters, who at last dispersed.

  Next day, 9 June, the violence reached new levels of intensity.

  In fact the Belfast riots of 1886 had only just begun.

  Episode 200

  THE BELFAST RIOTS OF 1886

  On Wednesday 9 June 1886, the day after the Home Rule Bill had been defeated, a mob of around two thousand Protestants drove back members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The police had been attempting to stop the looting of a liquor store on Belfast’s Shankill Road. Three magistrates, seventy-two constables, several police officers and a reporter took refuge in Bower’s Hill barracks. The besieged came under ferocious and prolonged attack. According to the Belfast News-Letter, ‘kidney pavers’ had been ‘strewn over the road by a number of vicious young women who carried them in their aprons ... and when the stone-throwing waned for a moment girls and women came to the front and uttered the most desperate threats to the men who desisted’. A salvo of paving stones destroyed the telegraph apparatus, and in desperation the defenders opened fire on the mob. Seven of those outside were killed. At 10 p.m. the Highland Light Infantry came to the rescue and found several children unconscious from the drinking of looted alcohol.

  Many Protestants were convinced that Gladstone’s Liberal government was intent on punishing them for opposing Home Rule. On the following Sunday the Rev. Hugh Hanna said from his pulpit in St Enoch’s Presbyterian Church:

  It was right that the loyalty of the land should celebrate as it did that God has given us.... But that celebration has cost us dear. It incurred the wrath of a government that has been traitorous to its trusts.... The armed servants of that government are sent to suppress rejoicing loyalty by the sanguinary slaughter of a people resolved to resist a wicked policy.

  The fact that most of the police were southern Catholics, officered though they were by Protestants, only reinforced this conviction.

  Battles between loyalists and the police continued to rage all through the summer. Fighting the constabulary became a kind of sport. The journalist Frankfort Moore recorded this conversation:

  ‘Who have you there, Bill?’

  ‘A policeman.’

  ‘Hold on, and let me have a thump at him.’

  ‘Git along out of this, and find a policeman for yourself.’

  Sectarian mobs clashed ferociously at the brickfields on 13 July; the police killed two rioters with buckshot; a soldier was shot dead on the Shankill; and a Head Constable was mortally wounded. Later in the summer the return of a Sunday school excursion accompanied by an Orange band attracted a stone-throwing mob in Donegall Street. In retaliation, Protestants attacked Catholic children returning from their outing the next day. Frankfort Moore was there. He had seen riots in Cape Town, Trafalgar Square and rural Ireland, but, he believed,

  None of the principals in these actions knew anything of strategy, compared with those who engineered the sacking of York Street upon that dark night in August, 1886.... Scarcely a light was to be seen; still I had no difficulty in making out the movements of the dense crowds surging in every direction, and shot after shot I heard above the shouts that suggested something very like Pandemonium. Once or twice I was carried along in the rush of people before a police charge.... I felt that I had learned something of the impotence of every arm except artillery in the case of street fighting.

  Thirteen died violently that weekend. On the following Saturday almost all Catholics were driven from the shipyards, and the police, trapped in Dover Street, killed three people as they shot their way to safety. The riots continued until mid-September, when torrents of rain began to fall. As Frankfort Moore observed,

  That rain lasted, as a shower does in Ulster, for three days, and, as a dreadful rascal who had taken part in the campaign told me a long time afterwards, that rain ‘took the heart out of the fighting’.

  The official death toll was thirty-one, though the actual number killed, according to surgical reports on the riots, was probably around fifty.

  Intercommunal violence blighted other Ulster towns, including Derry, Portadown and Ballymena. But these clashes were on a small scale by comparison with those that convulsed Belfast. And yet the official government inquiry on the riots observed that, in normal times, crime in Belfast was lower than in any other comparable urban centre in the United Kingdom. By 1886 Belfast, though still officially designated a town, had become Ireland’s largest city. Its prosperity contrasted sharply with that of Dublin, with its limited range of industries and poverty-ridden tenements. Belfast’s citizens could compare their condition very favourably with that of tenant farmers and agricultural labourers impoverished by atrocious wet seasons and a protracted agricultural depression. One publication of the time, The Industries of Ireland, found that

  Here in these crowded rushing thoroughfares, we find the pulsing heart of a mighty commercial organisation, whose vitality is ever augmenting, and whose influence is already world-wide.

  Official recognition that Belfast was a city seemed somewhat overdue.

  Episode 201

  BELFAST: AN IMPERIAL CITY

  On Saturday 13 October 1888 Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, sixth Marquis of Londonderry and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, made a grand state visit to Belfast to give it official recognition as a city. It was somewhat late in the day. In fact Belfast was now Ireland’s largest city, and by 1900 it would be, after London and Liverpool, the third most important port in the United Kingdom, at that time the greatest trading state on earth.

  This was a city of superlatives. Tall, ornate warehouses in Bedford Street and in Donegall Square signalled that Belfast was the world centre of the linen industry. In 1895 H. O. Lanyon, president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, made this estimation based on the previous year’s
production:

  I find the length of yarn produced in the year amounts to about 644,000,000 miles, making a thread that would encircle the world 25,000 times. If it could be used as a telephone wire, it would give us six lines to the sun, and about 380 besides to the moon. The exports of linen in 1894 measured about 156,000,000 yards, which would make a girdle for the earth at the Equator three yards wide, or cover an area of 32,000 acres, or it would reach from end to end of the County of Down, one mile wide.

  The York Street Flax Spinning and Weaving Company, the largest of its kind in the world, sold fronting linens, interlinings, sheets, printed dress linens and lawns, damask tablecloths and napkins, glass cloths, elastic canvas, drills, ducks, hollands, cambrics, and a great range of handkerchiefs, and clothing for Latin America described as ‘Creas, Platillas, Bretanas, Silesias, Irlandas etc.’

  Skilled men who had served apprenticeships could earn as much as three times the wages of mill workers and so-called ‘unskilled’ labourers. Some sought employment in engineering works making linen machinery, including Mackies, the largest such enterprise in the world. Most found work in the shipyards. Harland & Wolff had become the greatest shipyard in the world, launching the largest vessels on earth.

  Immense crowds gathered adjacent to Queen’s Island on 14 January 1899 to watch the launch of a great liner, the Oceanic. This vessel had been ordered by the White Star Line as a competitor to rival North German Lloyd’s Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and Cunard’s Campania and Lucania in the lucrative transatlantic passenger market. Two guns gave the signal to the shipwrights to stand aside, the general manager waved the launch flag, and—released by a hydraulic trigger—the Oceanic began to move. As the great vessel slid down, the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal reported:

  Pieces of timber as large almost as forest trees rose into the air like chips in a wind and fell in showers on the water. Presently the great hawsers, which held the two immense bow chains in sections, began to break and fly in the air.

  Then the ship settled, the Belfast News-Letter observed, ‘like a gull alighting with graceful curve on the water’.

  Thirteen feet longer than Brunel’s Great Eastern, the Oceanic was the mightiest ship afloat and the largest man-made moving object ever constructed up to that time anywhere in the world. Close by, Workman Clark, known affectionately as the ‘wee yard’, specialised in building refrigerated and whaling vessels, but it too on several occasions launched massive liners.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Belfast also had the largest tobacco factory, tea-machinery and fan-making works, handkerchief factory, coloured Christmas card printing firm, dry dock and spiral-guided gasometer in the world. The city was also a world centre for the manufacture of fizzy drinks, or, as they were then called, aerated waters. This was an extraordinary achievement, considering that the water was obtained by boring artesian wells through the foul sleech of Cromac.

  The products of Cantrell & Cochrane, the biggest aerated waters factory in the world, included: Aromatic Ginger Ale, Fruit Flavoured Lemonade, Sparkling Montserrat, Club Soda and Refreshing Seltzer, Kali and Lithia Waters. One of the firm’s advertisements declared:

  The popping of Cantrell and Cochrane’s corks is heard in the bungalows of the British cantonment in the Far East, and its sparkle is familiar to the Vice-Regal entourage up in the hot season refuge of the Anglo-Indians at Simla. Dons and seignorinas quaff this liquid boon in the tropical climes of South America; the West Indies welcome it as a treasure; Afric’s ‘sunny fountains’ are out-rivalled in their very habitat by its gleam; the Antipodes have taken this gift of the Mother Empire with gratitude.

  Nowhere else in Ireland had enjoyed such economic success under the Act of Union. Three-quarters of Belfast’s population was Protestant, utterly opposed to Home Rule. But three-quarters of Ireland’s population as a whole was Catholic, ever more determined that the island should have a parliament of its own in Dublin.

  Episode 202

  COMMITTEE ROOM 15

  On 2 May 1888 Mary Gladstone, daughter of the Liberal Party leader, watched in admiration as Charles Stewart Parnell skilfully parried questions put to him by the most distinguished lawyers in the state. She recorded in her diary:

  Parnell before Commission. Attorney-General’s manner odious in cross-examination. Insolent, ungentlemanlike, treating Parnell like dirt. He [Parnell] really exhibited all the fruits of the Spirit.... His personality takes hold of one, the refined delicate face, illuminating smile, fire-darting eyes, slightly tall figure.

  The Conservative government had appointed a special commission of three judges to investigate charges made in The Times that Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, had approved of the murders in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882. In a blaze of publicity, the commission sat no fewer than 128 times, examined 445 witnesses and asked 150,000 questions. Then in February 1890 Parnell triumphed: the letters supposed to have been written by him were found to be forgeries. The forger, Richard Pigott, fled to Spain and, in a Madrid hotel room, shot himself.

  Parnell was now at the height of his power and influence. Known widely as ‘the Uncrowned King of Ireland’, he had created the most disciplined party ever to sit at Westminster; he had persuaded the Liberal Party to champion Irish Home Rule; and now he had humiliated his Conservative detractors. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon.

  On Christmas Eve 1889 Parnell had been served with papers naming him as co-respondent in a suit for divorce filed by Captain William O’Shea. Indeed, for the past eight years Parnell had been in a relationship with O’Shea’s English wife, Katharine. He had fathered three of her children, two of whom survived. O’Shea, though not a convinced Home Ruler, had been foisted by Parnell on the constituents of Co. Galway in 1886. But this had not been enough to placate the captain.

  At first Irish Party MPs seemed unconcerned, and they re-elected Parnell as their leader. But the divorce trial revealed unedifying details: how Parnell had adopted false names, disguised himself, and shinned down fire-escapes in efforts to conceal his relationship. Mary Gladstone now changed her opinion of the Uncrowned King: ‘... and he had lived the life of lies all these years! A heartbreaking revelation! Blot out his name!’ Her eighty-year-old father, W. E. Gladstone, observed that he had known eleven Prime Ministers and that every single one of them had been an adulterer. But he had to listen to the Nonconformists, the core support of the Liberal Party he led. The Methodist Times declared that if the Irish kept Parnell as leader, they would be branded as ‘an obscene race utterly unfit for anything except a military dictatorship’.

  Gladstone allowed a letter he had written to the Irish Party to be published. In it he observed of Parnell: ‘His continuance at the present moment in the leadership ... would render my retention of the leadership of the Liberal Party ... almost a nullity.’ Meanwhile Archbishop Croke of Cashel wrote in angry despair: ‘I have flung him away from me forever. His bust which for some time has held a prominent place in my hall I threw out yesterday.’ But the Catholic hierarchy for the present hesitated to make public condemnation. It was Gladstone’s letter which persuaded thirty-one Irish MPs to call a special meeting of their party. After all, without Gladstone as leader, the Liberals might drop the demand for Home Rule.

  The Irish Party gathered round the huge horseshoe table in Committee Room 15 at Westminster on 1 December 1890. Parnell saw with dismay that a team of shorthand reporters from the Freeman’s Journal were there with pencils poised. For six days Parnell, sitting in the chair, defended himself tenaciously. Tempers flared. One MP shouted: ‘Crucify him!’

  At one point it was feared that Parnell would produce a revolver from his pocket to shoot his ablest critic, Timothy Healy. Healy declared that Parnell’s power had completely gone: ‘Place an iron bar in a coil and the bar becomes magnetised. The party was that electric coil, there stood the iron bar. The electricity is gone and the magnetism with it.’ When Parnell’s supporter John Redmond observed that Gladstone was now
master of the party, Healy hissed venomously: ‘Who is to be the mistress of the party?’ His face contorted with emotion, Parnell rose and held his clenched fist inches from Healy’s face, declaring: ‘Better appeal ... Better appeal to that cowardly little scoundrel there who dares in an assembly of Irishmen to insult a woman.’

  That Saturday afternoon in Committee Room 15, on 6 December 1890, Parnell’s fate was sealed. Forty-five MPs withdrew, leaving Parnell with only twenty-eight supporters. The party he had built was sundered. It would remain shattered for years to come. And as for Parnell, he had less than a year to live.

  Episode 203

  ‘KEEP OUR NOBLE KINGDOM WHOLE’

  Ousted as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Charles Stewart Parnell refused to accept his fate. He returned to Dublin on 9 December 1890, and here in the Rotunda a huge audience assembled to greet him. One young woman remembered:

  Everywhere around there was a sea of passionate faces, loving, admiring, almost worshipping that silent, pale man. The cheering broke out again and again; there was no quelling it. Parnell bowed from side to side, sweeping the assemblage with his eagle glance.