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

  In St Stephen’s Green Countess Constance Markievicz, resplendent in her Citizen Army uniform with green puttees, tunic, riding breeches, and slouch hat with ostrich feather, brandished her revolver. Here an elderly guest of the Shelbourne Hotel, Michael Cavanagh, decided to intervene in the proceedings. The Citizen Army wanted his lorry full of theatrical effects, and he was not prepared to allow this. He approached insurgents with a raised finger: ‘Go and put back that lorry or you are a dead man. Go back before I count four. One, two, three, four—’ There was a burst of firing, and Cavanagh fell to the ground. The writer James Stephens ran forward in a vain attempt to help the dying man; in recollecting the incident, he concluded: ‘At that moment the Volunteers were hated.’

  Episode 218

  EASTER WEEK

  During the afternoon of Easter Monday 24 April 1916 a party of Lancers trotted into Dublin’s O’Connell Street to investigate reported disturbances. As they approached the Nelson Pillar, Volunteers in the General Post Office opened fire. Four of the soldiers fell dead. Soon afterwards, Ernie O’Malley, an eighteen-year-old medical student, saw local people looting public houses, while in the middle of O’Connell Street

  Seated on a dead horse was a woman, a shawl around her head, untidy wisps of hair straggled across her dirty face. She swayed slowly, drunk, singing: ‘Boys in khaki, boys in blue, here’s the best of jolly good luck to you.’

  Over much of the centre of Dublin insurgents had seized the initiative. Already, however, the crown forces were recovering control. An attack on Dublin Castle, begun by shooting dead an unarmed policeman in cold blood, had failed in spite of the fact that a mere handful of soldiers had been available to defend it. Only two railway stations had been seized, and the Shelbourne Hotel, looming high over St Stephen’s Green, had not been taken. Military barracks ringing the city now filled up with soldiers returning from the races. Troops were brought in from the Curragh Camp in Co. Kildare.

  Above all, the people had not risen in support. The poor poured out of the tenements and concentrated their energies on looting the shops. The numbers of Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army men and boys numbered less than two thousand. They had no artillery or machine-guns, and their rifles, for the most part, were antiquated single-shot German Mausers.

  South of the city centre, at Boland’s Mills, Commandant Eamon de Valera sent men up to Mount Street Bridge to hold back any approaching troops. Here Michael Malone took command. He ordered houses overlooking the bridge to be barricaded with bicycles, furniture and sacks of flour. On Wednesday morning a column of 2,000 soldiers, most of them recently disembarked Sherwood Foresters, advanced with fixed bayonets from Ballsbridge. With just a few men Malone inflicted devastating fire on the soldiers. Again and again officers with their swords flashing in the sun ordered their men to advance against these hidden snipers. One resident, Mrs Ismena Rohde, witnessed the slaughter: ‘The poor fellows fell in rows without being able to return a shot. It was ghastly for those who saw it.’ An English visitor also left a vivid record:

  A poor girl ran out on to the bridge while yet the bullets from rifles and revolvers were flying thickly from both sides. She put up both her hands, and almost instantly the firing ceased.... The girl picked up the soldier....

  It was a throbbing incident that brought tears to the eyes.... She pushed an apron down his trousers to staunch the blood. He was shot in the small of the back and in the thigh. He was a Sherwood Forester, and the little girl was crying over him.

  The British army deployed the same tactics in the streets as they used on the Western Front—and with similar results. Sustaining around 230 casualties, the Sherwoods eventually prevailed, and Malone was shot dead.

  Everywhere the insurgents were on the defensive, sleepless and suffering heavy losses.

  The government had proclaimed martial law on Tuesday. On Wednesday a fishery protection vessel, the Helga, steamed up the Liffey to shell rebel positions. Artillery pieces in the grounds of Trinity College proved much more effective. On Thursday their shells fell with increasing intensity on O’Connell Street. Snipers on the roofs and squads equipped with automatic weapons closed in on the insurgents. James Connolly was no longer able to exercise command. Severely wounded, he survived on injections of morphine provided by a captured doctor in the GPO. Michael O’Rahilly, better known as ‘The O’Rahilly’, took over command. Pounded by howitzers firing shrapnel and incendiary shells, much of O’Connell Street became engulfed in a firestorm. The O’Rahilly’s nephew, Dick Humphries, fighting as a Volunteer alongside his uncle, recalled:

  Suddenly some oil works near Abbey Street is singed by the conflagration, and immediately a solid sheet of blinding death-white flame rushes hundreds of feet into the air with a thunderous explosion which shakes the walls. It is followed by a heavy bombardment as hundreds of drums explode. The intense light compels one to close the eyes.... Millions of sparks are floating in masses for hundreds of yards around O’Connell Street and as a precaution we are ordered to drench the barricades with water again.... Crimson-tinged men moved around dazedly. Above it all the sharp crack of rifle fire predominates, while the deadly rattle of the machine-gun sounds like the coughing laughter of jeering spirits.

  When during Friday further intensive shelling set the GPO’s roof ablaze, it was clear to all defenders that the end was near.

  Episode 219

  EXECUTIONS AND INTERNMENT

  At 8 p.m. on Friday 28 April 1916 Patrick Pearse, the rebel commander-in-chief, ordered the evacuation of the burning General Post Office in Dublin’s O’Connell Street. The O’Rahilly led a futile charge down Henry Street. He and many of his men fell in a hail of bullets.

  At 12.45 p.m. on Saturday Elizabeth O’Farrell, a nurse who had been with the insurgents in the GPO throughout this Easter week, took a hastily made Red Cross insignia and a white flag and stepped out into the open:

  I waved a small white flag which I carried and the military ceased firing and called me up to the barrier.... I saw, at the corner of Sackville Lane, The O’Rahilly’s hat and a revolver lying on the ground.

  She spoke to a senior army officer:

  ‘The commandant of the Irish Republican Army wishes to treat with the commandant of the British forces in Ireland.’

  ‘The Irish Republican Army?—the Sinn Féiners, you mean,’ he replied.

  ‘No, the Irish Republican Army they call themselves and I think that is a very good name too.’

  Soon after this the insurgent leaders signed an unconditional surrender, and on Sunday the last of the Volunteers and Citizen Army combatants emerged from Boland’s Mills, Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, St Stephen’s Green and Marrowbone Lane. Angry Dubliners spat on them as they were led away.

  For almost a week a self-appointed group of fewer than 2,000 members of the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Republican Brotherhood had fought the forces of the most extensive empire the world has ever seen. The rebellion had occurred in the depths of the bloodiest conflict mankind had yet experienced—and at a time when over 145,000 Irishmen engaged in deadly conflict in the trenches. At least 450 people, many of them innocent civilians, had been killed; 2,600 had been wounded; and much of central Dublin had been reduced to rubble.

  Martial law had been proclaimed on Easter Tuesday, and on Friday General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell arrived to take charge in Dublin. His forces arrested 3,430 men and 79 women, and on 2 May the first courts martial began. Condemned to death, Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh were taken to the disused Kilmainham Jail and, on 3 May, shot at dawn in the Stonebreaker’s Yard. Four more faced the firing-squad on 4 May. The authorities executed seven more on 5, 8 and 12 May. The severely wounded James Connolly had to be strapped to a chair in front of the firing-squad.

  Altogether ninety men were condemned to death. Maxwell eventually agreed to commute all but fifteen of these sentences. Countess Constance Markievicz pleaded at her trial: ‘I am only a woman, you cannot shoot a wom
an, you must not shoot a woman.’ Maxwell agreed. Eamon de Valera, commandant at Boland’s Mills, avoided execution, partly perhaps because he could claim American citizenship. Sir Roger Casement, arrested in Co. Kerry on the eve of the rising, however, was hanged at Pentonville on 3 August.

  The press described the insurrection as the ‘Sinn Féin rebellion’. This was incorrect. Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin was then a separatist party opposed to violent methods. Nevertheless, Griffith, together with Eoin MacNeill, the Irish Volunteers’ president who had attempted to stop the rising, were among those interned by Maxwell’s orders. Most were transferred to Frongoch, a barbed-wire encampment in north Wales.

  Meanwhile nationalist opinion in Ireland underwent a seismic change. The government had carefully avoided inflicting the ultimate penalty on those convicted in the country in the wake of the uprisings of 1848 and 1867. The executions after the Easter Rising, following secret military trials, each announced in a blaze of publicity, shocked the public who had earlier condemned the rebellion. Even the Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, declared: ‘No true Irishman calls for vengeance.’ He recognised that a whole new cohort of republican martyrs was being created. Postcards commemorating the dead sold briskly, and new nationalist ballads, usually set to music-hall tunes, gained a wide currency:

  God rest gallant Pearse and his comrades who died

  Tom Clarke, MacDonagh, McDermott, MacBride

  And here’s to Jem Connolly who gave one hurrah

  And placed the machine-guns for Erin-go-Bragh.

  Meanwhile the position of the Irish Parliamentary Party now became desperate. Its leader, John Redmond, found himself condemned for his unreserved support for Britain in the war. He pleaded for immediate implementation of Home Rule, enacted in 1914 but suspended until the end of fighting in Europe.

  The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, sent over Lloyd George to see if agreement could be forged. But Lloyd George spoke with a forked tongue: to the Unionists he promised permanent exclusion of Ulster counties, but his promise to the Nationalists only temporarily excluded those counties. The fate of the Irish Party was being sealed.

  Episode 220

  SACRIFICE AT THE SOMME

  In 1916 on the Western Front, Tom Kettle, a former Nationalist MP, now a lieutenant in the Dublin Fusiliers, received news of the Easter Rising. In a letter home he gave his opinion of the insurgents: ‘These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down—if I go down at all—as a bloody British officer.’ Shortly afterwards Kettle found himself at the River Somme, ready to take part in a great offensive. And just after dawn on 1 July, in front of Thiepval Wood and astride the River Ancre, men of the Ulster Division waited as the six-day Allied artillery barrage reached a horrific climax. Captain Percy Crozier was there:

  Jimmy Law comes round from Brigade with a chronometer to synchronise the time, as everything has to be done to the second.... ‘Don’t you go and get shot to-day, Jimmy; your mother would never forgive me.’…

  The men fall in, in fours.... A pin could be heard to drop.

  At 7.30 a.m. officers blew their whistles and the men advanced into no-man’s land at a steady marching pace. But the massive bombardment had neither cut the wire nor knocked out the German machine-gun nests. North of the Ancre the attack proved a disastrous failure: troops were caught by crossfire in a deep ravine. One German soldier recalled: ‘We just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them. If only they had run, they would have overwhelmed us.’ Opposite Thiepval Wood, however, the Ulster Division advanced with astonishing speed, reaching the German fourth line. But dangerously overextended, exposed to relentless fire and mistakenly shelled from their own side, whole companies disappeared. By nightfall all gains had been lost.

  ‘Blacker’s Boys’—men from the Armagh, Monaghan and Cavan Ulster Volunteers—returned with only 64 out of 600 men who had gone over the top. Seventeen-year-old Private Herbert Beattie wrote home to Belfast:

  Dear Mother,

  Just to let you know I am safe and thank God for it for we had a ruf time of it in the charge we made. Mother, don’t let on to V. Quinn mother or Archers mother that they must be killed wounded for they are missen of roll call, and tell Hugh the fellow that youst to run along with E. Ferguson called Eddie Mallin he youst to have Pigens if Hugh dus not no him McKeown nows him tell them he was killed, tell them ther is not another grosvenor Rd fellow left but myself. Mother wee were tramping over the dead i think there is onley about 4 hundred left out of about 13 hundered ... Mother if god spers me to get home safe i will have something uful to tell you if hell is any wores i would not like to go to it Mother let me here from you soone as you can.…

  This is all I can say at present from your loving son Herbie.

  Mother xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Father xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Show my Father this letter and tell him to writ

  Emma Duffin, daughter of a Unionist MP, waited to treat the wounded at Le Havre. She wrote in her diary:

  The big push began and the trains came and came.... I was sent on duty on the station platform; if the hospital had not made me realize the war I realized it that night; under the big arc lights in the station lay stretchers 4 deep ... huddled together, their arms in slings, and their heads bound up, the mud from the trenches sticking to their clothes and the blood still caked on them.

  During the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest day in the history of the British army, the United Kingdom sustained over 54,000 casualties. The Ulster Division suffered a loss of 5,700 killed or wounded.

  In fact the Battle of the Somme had only just begun. It raged on inconclusively and bloodily all through the summer into the autumn. In the September offensive by the villages of Guillemont and Ginchy the 36th (Ulster) Division fought side by side with the 16th Division, composed overwhelmingly of southern Irishmen. Lieutenant Kettle wrote:

  We are moving up to-night into the Somme. The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers.... The big guns are coughing and smacking their shells.

  In a trench he wrote a poem for his little daughter Betty, which ended:

  So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,

  And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,

  Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

  Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

  But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

  And for the secret scripture of the poor.

  Days later Kettle himself was lying dead on the battlefield.

  Episode 221

  THE RISE OF SINN FÉIN

  In December 1916 David Lloyd George, who had just ousted Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister, released the remaining Irish internees. Convicted republicans remained in jail.

  In the same month James O’Kelly, MP for North Roscommon, died. He had been perhaps the most colourful character in the Irish Parliamentary Party. O’Kelly had joined the French Foreign Legion, had fought in Algeria and Mexico, had helped to defend Paris against the Prussians in 1870, had been with American troops fighting against Sitting Bull, and had been a military prisoner in Cuba. But O’Kelly had rarely, if ever, visited his constituency of North Roscommon.

  For more than forty years the Irish Party, virtually without opposition, had represented the nationalists of Ireland. Then, in February 1917, those disgusted by the moderation of the party decided to put up their own man in the by election which followed O’Kelly’s death. Their candidate was hardly an ideal choice: George Plunkett, a papal count, who had published a study of the Renaissance painter Botticelli, and who was now described as ‘a very feeble old man’, so decrepit he was declared fit only to be in charge of a Christmas tree.

  But three of the count’s sons had fought in the Easter Rising, and one of them, Joseph
Mary Plunkett, had been executed. Michael Collins and other released internees revived the Irish Volunteers and threw themselves into a campaign to get Count Plunkett elected:

  The West’s Awake! Men of North Roscommon, Ireland expects you to strike a blow for our small nationality and return Count Plunkett as your representative, and free ... your countrymen from prison chains....

  Canvassers had to struggle through snow drifts three metres high. An observer described Plunkett’s campaigners as having icicles hanging from their hair, and one car-driver was frozen so severely that he had to be lifted off his seat. One speaker, after battling eleven miles on foot through the snow, told voters that 150,000 Irishmen who had followed the Irish Party’s advice were ‘feeding the worms in Gallipoli and Flanders’.

  Count Plunkett polled almost twice as many votes as his rival. The Irish Party was shaken to its core. Its leader, John Redmond, was stopped just in time from issuing this despairing statement:

  The people have grown tired of the monotony of being served for twenty, thirty ... or forty years by the same men in parliament.... Let the Irish people replace us, by all means, by other, and, I hope, better men, if they so choose.

  The Easter Rising of 1916 had been erroneously described by journalists as the ‘Sinn Féin rebellion’. But Sinn Féin, a separatist but non-violent party founded in 1906 by Arthur Griffith, had not been involved. However, the name stuck, and those now seeking an independent Ireland had no objection. Immediately after being elected Count Plunkett announced that he would follow Sinn Féin policy and would therefore refuse to take his seat in Westminster.