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
Page 59
I was anxious, & we occupied ourselves as best we could, by catechising one another in First Aid & Home Nursing.
The gun had returned centre-stage to Irish politics. The UVF, now impressively armed, unwittingly did much to revitalise militant separatism. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, almost defunct at the beginning of the century, recruited a new generation of activists. The Irish Party leader, John Redmond, suspected that republican militants were in control of the Irish Volunteers. He insisted on taking over control of the Volunteers in June 1914, but the IRB were not so easily pushed aside.
If the UVF could arm themselves without retribution, then why not the Irish Volunteers? Erskine Childers, a former clerk of the House of Commons who had written the first modern thriller, The Riddle of the Sands, passionately supported Home Rule. An expert sailor, he and the journalist Darrell Figgis took the yacht Asgard to Hamburg. There he bought a consignment of 1,500 Mauser rifles; almost antiques, these single-shot weapons, loaded with black powder cartridges, were nevertheless deadly.
On 26 July 1914, in a blaze of publicity, the Asgard steered into Howth harbour, just north of Dublin. Some Volunteers openly shouldered rifles on the road. Soldiers made ineffective attempts to disarm them. Returning to Dublin, the troops responded to taunts and stones from a hostile crowd at Bachelor’s Walk by opening fire. Four people were killed and thirty-eight wounded. The impression that nationalists and unionists were being treated differently had been viciously reinforced.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Herbert Asquith faced a bewildering array of problems: suffragettes on hunger strike in prison; a threatened general strike; and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. But Ireland, Asquith was certain, was the most intractable problem.
Asquith might refer to his own ‘masterly inactivity’ and the merits of his policy of ‘wait and see’, but actually he did not know what to do. Then King George V stepped in. He called an all-party conference on Asquith’s Home Rule Bill at Buckingham Palace on 21 July. In his opening address he said:
For months we have watched with deep misgivings the course of events in Ireland ... and today the cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people.... To me it is unthinkable ... that we should be brought to the brink of fratricidal strife upon issues apparently so capable of adjustment ... if handled in a spirit of generous compromise.
According to Winston Churchill, the conference ‘toiled round the muddy byways of Fermanagh and Tyrone’, but there was no spirit of generous compromise, and the talks broke down. Sir Edward Carson certainly thought that civil war was unavoidable: ‘I see no hopes of peace. I see nothing at present but darkness and shadows.... We shall have once more to assert the manhood of our race.’
But it was not to be in Ireland but in France that the manhood of both the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers would be asserted. The generals of the German and the Austro-Hungarian armies were wrong to think that England would be paralysed by civil war in Ireland. On 3 August 1914 German troops began to pour across the Belgian border. That night John Redmond rose to his feet in the House of Commons:
I say to the government that they may tomorrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland.... The armed Catholics in the South will only be too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen.
No wonder the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, replied with profound relief: ‘The one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland.’
Men of both the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Irish Volunteers would fight and die together on the same side in what quickly became known as the Great War.
Episode 215
‘FAITHFUL TO ERIN, WE ANSWER HER CALL!’
On 3 August 1914 the German army swept into neutral Belgium. Next day the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was at war. Redmond’s face adorned a recruiting poster which exhorted:
Your first duty is to take your part in ending the war. Join an Irish regiment to-day.
Carson sent a similar message in a telegram to members of the UVF:
All officers, non-commissioned officers and men who are in the Ulster Volunteer Force ... are requested to answer immediately His Majesty’s call, as our first duty as loyal subjects is to the King.
Recruiting posters festooned gable walls and hoardings:
Fight for Ireland! Remember Belgium!
Have YOU any women-folk worth defending? Remember the Women of Belgium. JOIN TO-DAY.
I’ll go too! The real Irish spirit!
THE CALL TO ARMS : IRISHMEN DON’T YOU HEAR IT?
Daddy—What did you do in the war?
On one poster entitled ‘For the Glory of Ireland’ an Irish colleen, holding a rifle and pointing towards Belgium in flames, asks a young man with a shillelagh under his arm: ‘Will you go or must I?’ And a postcard was issued which showed a child declaring: ‘I’m going to kill all the Germans and make sausages out of them!’
One of the best-known songs of the Great War featured an Irish county:
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go ...
—but it was a long way from Tipperary to the killing fields of Flanders. A massive recruiting drive was launched throughout Ireland, and during August 1914 men of the Irish National Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteers, who so recently seemed about to fight each other, now rushed forward to take the king’s shilling. In Belfast the Irish News published this verse:
Bless the good fortune which brings us together,
Rich men and poor men, short men and tall;
Some from the seaside and some from the heather,
Townsmen and countrymen, Irishmen all;
Faithful to Erin, we answer her call!
The same newspaper carried this report on 10 August:
TYRONE’S FINE EXAMPLE
NATIONAL AND ULSTER VOLUNTEERS MARCH TOGETHER
ROUSING SCENES
The Ulster Volunteers and Irish National Volunteers united at Omagh on Friday night in giving a most hearty send-off to the final draft of the Army Reserve of the Royal Inniskillings, who left the town about half-past nine o’clock, and a scene of an unparalleled description was witnessed when the procession of both bodies of Volunteers and military marched through the town together.... Subsequently, as both bodies of Volunteers paraded the town, they met one another and respectfully saluted.
Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader, declared: ‘England’s difficulty is not Ulster’s opportunity.... We do not seek to purchase terms by selling our patriotism.’
The new Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener, testily remarked that he did not ‘trust one single Irishman with a rifle in his hands one single yard’, but he quickly changed his mind and announced: ‘I want the Ulster Volunteers.’
Carson never liked Kitchener and had been heard to describe him as ‘that great stuffed oaf’, but he called on Kitchener at the War Office. The interview began badly. Kitchener asked: ‘Surely you are not going to hold out for Tyrone and Fermanagh?’ Carson snapped back: ‘You’re a damned clever fellow telling me what I ought to be doing.’
Nevertheless, Carson offered the services of the Ulster Volunteer Force without conditions, and, to his surprise, Kitchener agreed to keep the UVF together, with its command structure virtually intact, in one division—the 36th (Ulster) Division. The problem was that Kitchener—a blimpish member of the Irish landlord class with almost no political acumen—refused to create a separate division for Irish nationalists.
Redmond had already pledged the support of the Irish National Volunteers in the defence of Ireland. On 20 September 1914 he went further. In a speech to his Volunteers at Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow, he said:
I say to you—Go on drilling and make yourselves efficient for the work, and then account yourselves as men, not only for Ireland itself, but wherever the fighting line extends, in defence of right, of freedom and religion in this war (cheers).
This was too much for
some of the Volunteers. They might be prepared to defend Ireland, but they would not fight outside the country for the British Empire. Led by Eoin MacNeill, they left the National Volunteers to form their own organisation, which resumed its original title, the Irish Volunteers. Only 11,000 followed MacNeill; the remaining 170,000 volunteers remained loyal to Redmond and to Irish participation in the war.
By early 1916 at least 210,000 Irishmen had joined up. One-third of those in the UVF enlisted. Although Ulster supplied just above half the recruits for the island, 57 per cent of recruits from Ireland as a whole were Catholic. In the Belfast–Antrim area Catholics were actually more likely to take the king’s shilling than their Protestant neighbours.
Nearly 28,000 men—and, indeed, boys—who had joined up in Ireland were never to return.
Episode 216
THE CONSPIRATORS PREPARE
In September 1914, after a hard day, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith opened his diary and lifted his pen:
The Irish on both sides are giving me a lot of trouble just at a difficult moment.... I sometimes wish we could submerge the whole lot of them and their island for say, ten years, under the waves of the Atlantic.
The Great War was a month old. Irish Home Rule had to be pushed off centre-stage where it had been for so long. What would be his interim solution? Asquith announced it on 18 September. He had already told the Commons that the UVF’S patriotic spirit had made the coercion of Ulster ‘unthinkable’. Now he declared that the Home Rule Bill would become law, though it would not be implemented until after the war. The Irish Party MPs cheered and chanted and waved a green flag in the Commons. Carefully avoiding details, Asquith added that, later on, he would make special provision for Ulster. The Conservative opposition leader, Andrew Bonar Law, made a speech so vitriolic in denunciation that, as Asquith explained in his diary, he and his fellow government ministers left while he was still speaking ‘lest they should be unable to overcome their impulse to throw books, paper-knives, and other handy missiles at his head’.
At that stage Asquith, along with most of the general public, expected the war to be over by Christmas. But as the months rolled by the earlier war of movement congealed into a bloody and inconclusive slogging match in the trenches. In a vain Allied attempt to break the deadlock at Gallipoli, southern Irishmen of the 10th Division fell in their thousands at Suvla Bay in August 1915.
Protected by the Royal Navy and far out of range of Zeppelins, the farms, mills, workshops and shipyards of Ireland strove to meet the insatiable demands of the Allied war effort. Never before had the Irish people been so prosperous. Rarely had Ireland known such peace at home.
Very soon after the outbreak of war the Irish Republican Brotherhood had decided on rebellion. Sir Roger Casement, in America when the war broke out, took the advice of the Clan na Gael leader, John Devoy, and called on the German ambassador in Washington. Casement, a Co. Antrim Protestant knighted for his services as an imperial consul, soon after was in Berlin urging Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to send German arms to ensure the republican rebels’ success.
On 1 August 1915 Patrick Pearse, son of an English stonemason and an Irish mother, and now headmaster of St Enda’s School, stood in Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery. There he spoke at the graveside of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a founder member of the IRB:
Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. 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.
Pearse was the propagandist, the front man. Behind him were the real organisers of revolution: Tom Clarke, a Dungannon-born IRB ex-convict; Seán MacDermott, a Leitrim farmer’s son who had been a tram-driver in Belfast; and Joseph Mary Plunkett, the sickly son of a papal count from Kimmage in Dublin. Plunkett and Casement between them convinced the Kaiser’s government to send arms to Ireland.
On 17 March 1916 a meeting of the German naval high command took place in Berlin. The decision was taken to send to Ireland a vessel loaded with 20,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. The minutes of the meeting record:
The enterprise does not seem to be without hope. Even if the English succeeded in suppressing the rebellion quickly ... we can still count on a strong moral effect.... The attempt must be made to fulfil the urgent wish of the General Staff ... that a substantial force will be tied up in Ireland, far from the European mainland.
In accordance with this decision, Captain Karl Spindler, commanding the Aud, disguised as a neutral tramp steamer, sailed into Tralee Bay on 20 April 1916. But there was a problem: thanks to Russian co-operation, the British Admiralty had cracked the German radio codes. Vigilant Royal Navy sloops cornered the Aud, and after it had been brought into Cork harbour Spindler scuttled his vessel with all its arms.
Meanwhile Casement, brought to Banna strand in Co. Kerry by U-boat, was within a short time arrested and sent to Dublin, where he was identified. The prospects for a successful rebellion were diminishing with every day that passed.
Episode 217
‘WE’RE GOING TO BE SLAUGHTERED’
James Connolly had developed his revolutionary socialist views during a grim upbringing in working-class Edinburgh. In 1916 he was commandant of the Irish Citizen Army, founded in Dublin in 1913 to protect strikers against the police. Though his army numbered no more than 130 men and boys and a handful of women, Connolly prepared for a revolution in Dublin.
Alarmed that a premature revolt would lead to a government crackdown, the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, among them Patrick Pearse, revealed their plans to begin an uprising on Easter Sunday 1916. Connolly had often denounced these ‘wrap-the green-flag-round-me’ republican conspirators. But in January he agreed to join them and accepted the position as commandant of the insurrection in Dublin.
The IRB had kept Eoin MacNeill in the dark. MacNeill, president of the Irish Volunteers—who, unlike the much larger National Volunteers, were opposed to helping Britain in the Great War—refused to support a rising which had no prospect of success. Learning of the imminent rebellion on Saturday afternoon 22 April, he jabbed an old bayonet he used as a poker into his living-room fire and declared: ‘I’ll stop all this damned nonsense.’
MacNeill did his best. He inserted a notice in the Sunday Independent:
All orders given to the Irish Volunteers for tomorrow Easter Sunday are hereby rescinded and no parades, marches or other movements of Irish Volunteers will take place. Each individual Volunteer will obey this order in every particular.
Government officials in Dublin Castle assumed that the rebellion which they knew was in preparation had now been called off. After all, the German ship bringing 20,000 rifles to the IRB had been captured, and Sir Roger Casement—the man thought to be the leader of the conspiracy—was in custody. But the Military Council of the IRB decided to go ahead, postponing action to Easter Monday.
‘Heroism has come back to the earth.... The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields.…’ For Patrick Pearse, this rising would be a blood sacrifice to keep militancy alive:
We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people, but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as a final horror has lost its manhood.... Life springs from death and the nation which regards it as a final horror has lost its manhood.
The other revolutionary leaders nursed the strong hope that the people would join them and that Germany would make a fresh attempt to send help. Nevertheless, as they marched out from Liberty Hall on the quays over to O’Connell Street on Easter Monday, Connolly turned to a Citizen Army man and said: ‘Bill, we�
�re going to be slaughtered.’ ‘Is there no hope at all?’, the man asked. ‘None whatever,’ replied Connolly and then gave the command: ‘Company halt! Left wheel! The GPO ... charge! ’
The military plan was to seize prominent buildings in the centre of Dublin. People protesting that they only wanted to buy stamps were shooed out of the General Post Office, now the insurgent headquarters. The men ran up a tricolour on one flagpole of the building and a green banner with the inscription ‘IRISH REPUBLIC’ on another. At 12.45 p.m. Pearse, the insurgent commander-in-chief, stood outside and read aloud the ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’:
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
Having organized and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organizations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army ... and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe ... she strikes in full confidence of victory.…
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God.…
Dublin Castle had been taken completely unawares. On this beautiful Bank Holiday Monday most troops were relaxing out of the city, many of them at the Fairyhouse races. Other buildings seized by insurgents included: the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, the Royal College of Surgeons, and Boland’s Bakery.