Major Price said, ‘Some of us think it was a good thing Sheehy-Skeffington was put out of the way, anyhow.’
Nora Connolly had finally made it to Clogher. It was late; she was frustrated and utterly exhausted after covering more than twenty miles.
Ina said, ‘We can’t go on tonight. Better wait till the morning, then we’ll head for Dundalk.’
By 10.30 p.m., the Red Cross party realized they had to leave the Coliseum before it went up in flames.
When they tried the doors, they found them all padlocked. Luckily, they were able to force one. It gave access to a passage leading into Prince’s Street from where they got into Middle Abbey Street.
So bright were the flames, British troops saw the Red Cross flag and held their fire. But they suspected a trap. It was five minutes before a Captain Orr called out: ‘Two men advance and be recognized.’
Father O’Flanagan went with Captain Mahoney. Still the troops were not convinced. Both had brogues; they might be rebels in disguise.
The priest said, ‘Please, we are trying to get the wounded to Jervis Street Hospital.’
A monocled Major fetched a couple of medical students from Jervis Street who vouched for Father O’Flanagan. The rebel group was then allowed to proceed to the hospital where nurses and nuns gave them a warm welcome.
Led by Louise Gavan Duffy, the girls were marched to Broadstone Station for questioning. On the way, Louise told them to say they were students from the nursing school; they had been walking down O’Connell Street when they were forced into the Post Office.
‘I believe you,’ the interrogating officer said. ‘Might I suggest you go straight back to school.’
It was now dark in North King Street, with only the occasional blue flare lighting up the night. The South Staffs had expected this to be a routine mopping-up operation. But they had met with withering fire.
Where was it coming from? Not only from a pub a couple of hundred yards to the west. Every roof, every window seemed to be harbouring a sniper. When they tried to dismantle the barricades they were picked off one by one. Had they been without armoured lorries to drop men off in houses along the street, they would have been massacred. Rebel bullets pinged against the armour-plating of the lorries, deafening the troops inside.
Owing to the incessant firing, Mrs Hickey had not been able to cross the road home. The Corcorans invited her to spend the night with them.
Opposite, her husband, Tom, persuaded Pete Connolly to stay on. Also in the house were the Hickeys’ son, Christy, and Mrs Kate Kelly, their maid. Tom and Christy were to sleep on a mattress on the floor while Kate Kelly took over the bedroom next door.
All that night, while the rebels were tunnelling through the houses in Moore Street, frightened Staffordshires under their small pompous CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Taylor, were doing the same not far away in North King Street.
It had taken them hours to travel a few hundred yards, and at a cost. Before daylight, eleven NCOs and men were dead. Thirty-three men were wounded, including five officers. Of the rest, some went berserk.
For the inhabitants of North King Street, it was to become a night of terror.
SATURDAY
No 172 North King Street was the home of Mick and Sally Hughes. On the top floor lived a blind old man named Davis.
Among the refugees they were hosting were a young couple, John and Nellie Walsh, as well as several women and children. They were all trying to sleep in the ground-floor drawing-room at the rear of the house against a background of street fighting and an armoured car growling nearby.
About 2 a.m., there was a banging on the front door.
Mick Hughes hissed, ‘Don’t open it, Sal, they’ll kill us.’ But the banging got so loud, Sally shrugged and went to unlock it.
Several soldiers burst in, one yelling, ‘Bloody idiot, we were just gonna blow you up.’
Another demanded, ‘Any men in this house?’
Angry and panic-stricken, they searched the place and took away two twenty-year-old men.
In the drawing-room, not one word was spoken. Mick Hughes and John Walsh stood motionless and even the four small children were shocked into silence as the soldiers thrust bayonets into the sofas in the search for arms.
Mick said, ‘I swear to God there’s been no firing from this house.’
‘That so?’ The corporal pointed with a shaky finger to a rip in his hat. ‘Look what a bloody bullet did. Nearly finished me off.’ He turned to his men. ‘Search ’em.’
They went through the men’s pockets. Besides a penknife, Walsh had on him a cylindrical metal case, like a cartridge.
‘Aha,’ the corporal said, ‘what have we here?’
He opened it to find a miniature statue of St Anthony.
From Hughes’s pockets they took two watches, a gold bracelet and some articles belonging to his wife. The soldiers kept them, as well as seven gold rings belonging to Sally which they found in a drawer.
After locking the women and children in the downstairs kitchen, they left young Walsh in the drawing-room while they took Hughes up to the top floor.
Walsh was heard crying out, ‘What are you doing that for? Don’t put that on me,’ as if he were being blindfolded.
Above the drawing-room old Davis had his ear to the floor. He heard Walsh say, in a soft voice, ‘O Nellie, Nellie, jewel.’ Then there was a thud like furniture falling.
Minutes later, a soldier was carried into the house and down to the kitchen.
‘Sergeant Banks,’ an NCO said, ‘he’s copped it.’
Sally Hughes, a kind-hearted soul, did her best for him. ‘Poor man,’ she said over and over.
An Army doctor came and gave him an anaesthetic while the ladies made them tea.
Afterwards, Sally tore down curtains for bandages. ‘There’s sheets upstairs,’ she said. ‘And a nice sofa for the Sergeant. I’ll get them if you like.’
‘Stay where you are, missis,’ the NCO said, ‘we’ll get them ourselves.’
In Hickeys’ place, No 168, the maid, Kate Kelly, was sleeping by herself. At 6 in the morning, she heard picks being used to force an entry through the wall.
She screamed, ‘Someone’s breaking into the house.’
Tom Hickey got up from his mattress just in time to see the wall cave in and soldiers pushing into the room. Tired and tense, they carried bayonets, crowbars and pickaxes.
One of them yelled, ‘Hands up.’
Tom Hickey, his son, Christy and Pete Connolly raised them high.
A sergeant poked a frenzied-looking head through the hole. His eyes were bloodshot, veins stood out like blue rope on his forehead and neck. ‘How many?’ he asked in a strange, grating voice.
‘Three men, sir.’
‘Keep an eye on ’em till I get back.’
Tom and Pete tried to explain that they had nothing to do with the Volunteers. The soldiers listened with a bored expression on their faces.
In No 174, Michael Noonan, a quiet thirty-four-year-old bachelor was part-owner of a newsagent and tobacconist shop. He lived in and rented out the rooms over the store.
First floor up lived an elderly bird-fancier, Michael Smith.
On the second floor, one room was occupied by George Ennis, a fifty-three-year-old carriage maker, and his wife, Kate. An old maiden lady, Anne Fennell, had the next room.
Smith was in his room, the rest were on the ground floor in the back parlour when, at 7 a.m., there was a wallop on the door. Before Noonan could open up, about thirty soldiers burst in, smashing the door and windows, and yelling ‘Hands up.’
Seeing it was a quiet household, the same frenzied Sergeant asked, ‘How many men here?’
When Mrs Ennis told them, a dozen soldiers escorted Miss Fennell upstairs. They searched her room and made sure there was no one else in hiding. They no sooner led her down than they started to shove Ennis and Noonan upstairs.
Mrs Ennis clung fiercely to her husband. ‘I want to go up with my George.’
A soldier pulled her screaming away and pressed his bayonet up to her ear, ‘Shut up!’
‘You wouldn’t kill a woman?’ she gasped.
‘Keep quiet, you bloody bitch. We’re keeping ’em prisoners, that’s all.’
The women were locked in the parlour and warned, ‘Move and you’re dead.’
After the men were bundled upstairs, the women heard soldiers running amok, ripping up beds with their bayonets, knocking over furniture, emptying drawers and cupboards. Noises inside coalesced with noises in the street. Then, as suddenly as they came, the soldiers left.
Mrs Ennis and Miss Fennell looked tearfully at each other. There might be a guard on the door. They sat in dread, not daring to move.
An hour or so later, they jumped at the sound of someone falling down the stairs and crashing into the parlour door with such force that it gave in.
Staggering towards Kate was her husband, George, dripping blood, his eyes rolling. Before he dropped at her feet, she saw the wound.
‘I’m shot, Kate.’
‘Who did it?’
‘Soldiers. Shot me through the heart, as I asked them.’
‘And us?’ Miss Fennell shrieked.
Ennis said, ‘They won’t touch you.’ As they bent over him, he murmured, ‘Someone go for a priest.’
Knowing this was impossible, they knelt and said prayers for the dying.
He whispered, ‘They killed poor Noonan, too. I stayed with him as long as I could.’ With his last breath, George said, ‘Forgive them, Kate.’
In Cogan’s, the Provisional government breakfasted to a background of gun-fire.
The sun shone brightly after a long and weary night. The McKane children had not stopped sobbing over their injured father and their sister lying under a stained sheet in the corner. The wounded were groaning; one of them had a bullet in the lung and was coughing interminably. Without medicines, disinfectant, washing facilities, the place reeked of blood.
After eating, the leaders crawled through tunnels dug in the night to a more central HQ in 16 Moore Street. It was Hanlon’s, a fish-market.
Connolly was carried there in a blanket and made comfortable in a back room with a few more of the injured, including the British soldier picked up the night before. There, the leaders held a council of war, with the three nurses coming in from time to time to assist.
Trapped between the GPO and the cordon in the north, their one hope was to go west and link up with Ned Daly at the Four Courts. For this, they would need to create a diversion.
While Sean MacLoughlain crawled through the various houses asking for twenty volunteers, Pearse went to say thank you to Mrs Cogan. Big in the charity of love, she bore no grudges. Seeing this, Pearse pointed to her eldest son, Tommy. ‘Why not grab a rifle and join us, lad?’
Mrs Cogan’s face clouded over, so that he apologized for his insensitivity. In his mind, he was offering the lad a chance of glory.
MacLoughlain found his volunteers in minutes and drew them up in a yard next to Sackville Place, only yards from the British barricade at the top of Moore Street.
When he and McDermott went to reconnoitre, they saw The O’Rahilly. He was on his back, his brown hair tilted back off his forehead.
The bell was tolling for the 10 o’clock Mass when the Sergeant returned to the Hickeys’, 168 North King Street.
With four of his men, he led all the civilians through the hole in the wall. No 169 was a tobacconist’s over which a Mrs Connolly lived and where a Mr and Mrs Carroll and their daughter had a room. These, too, were taken through the next wall to the vacant No 170.
Hickey said to Mrs Carroll, ‘Isn’t it terrible? So often the innocent have to suffer with the guilty.’
Inside the echoing room of the empty house, Kate Kelly, the maid, called out, ‘I hope they’re not going to kill us.’
A soldier laughed roughly, ‘You’re a bally woman, you’re all right.’
The three women were left there while the three men were taken to another room at the back. The women heard Christy pleading, ‘Please don’t kill my da.’
Shots rang out and Kate threw herself on her knees, crying, ‘O, my God!’ and her lips added in swift silent prayer, ‘Mother of God, pray for us sinners.…’
It was 10.30 a.m. when Mrs Hickey, having spent a sleepless night over at the Corcorans, said she would like to go home.
Mr Corcoran peeped round his front door to ask a British NCO if she could. Around the Hickeys’ house, a dozen soldiers were sheltering from fierce gun-fire.
‘You can if you like, missis,’ the NCO said, ‘but there’s a few stiff ’uns lying about.’
This so terrified her, she went back inside the Corcorans’, only glancing through the window now and again, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tom and Christy.
While the Provisional government discussed options, the injured British soldier was gazing at Pearse as if he were reminded of someone dear to him. He asked Elizabeth O’Farrell if Pearse would have a word with him.
Pearse said, ‘Certainly,’ and knelt beside him.
‘Would you lift me up a little, sir.’
He did so.
The Soldier put his arms around his neck and Pearse held him for a few moments. Then, without a word being said, he gently laid him down again.
When McDermott returned and whispered in Pearse’s ear that The O’Rahilly was dead, he simply nodded.
There was a sudden clatter in the street as horses, released from a burning stable, went charging by.
Minutes later, Pearse saw a publican with his wife and daughter, clutching white flags, flash past the window. Their home had caught fire. From the top of Moore Street, a volley rang out and all three fell dead.
Pearse stood looking vacantly for a full minute, then began to pass the word from house to house: ‘No more firing until further notice.
The Provisional government discussed what to do next.
Tom Clarke was in favour of a fight to the death.
Though Pearse found it attractive, the heart of the President of the Republic was full of compassion for his people; they had suffered more than enough. He turned to MacLoughlain. ‘If your volunteers assault the British barricade, they will all die, right?’
MacLoughlain nodded.
Pearse glanced at the wall where there was a picture of Robert. Emmet standing in the dock. It seemed to give him courage for a painful decision.
Taking a deep breath, he pointed to where the family of three lay dead in the street.
‘For the sake of our fellow citizens and our comrades across this city who are likely to be shot or burned to death, I propose … we surrender.’
Clarke, who had not shed a tear in fifteen years in prison, turned to the wall and his thin shoulders heaved. Winifred Carney and Julia Grenan went to comfort him, but sobbed themselves. He pulled himself together and put his arms around them.
McDermott said to Elizabeth, ‘Get a white flag, please.’
He borrowed a white handkerchief and put it on a stick. Michael O’Reilly opened the door and thrust it outside. A volley caused him to withdraw it. Moments later, he tried again. This time, silence.
Realizing what Elizabeth was being asked to do, Julia started to sob, ‘You’ll be shot, shot.’ Too many had been gunned down already waving white flags.
Pearse rehearsed with Elizabeth his message to the military.
In a last hug, the two young women prayed together, then, taking a deep breath, Elizabeth went through the door Pearse held open for her. The pavement of Moore Street echoed with her brisk, bold step. She held the white flag aloft. It was 12.45 p.m.
In the back room, Connolly stared coldly straight ahead. There were alien tears in McDermott’s eyes. Winifred Carney was weeping and could not stop.
The silence held.
Julia let out a little screech, ‘She’ll be all right.’
Elizabeth was now almost up to the barricade. Without turning her head, she saw at the corner of
Sackville Lane The O’Rahilly’s hat and his revolver on the ground.
‘That’s hopeful,’ she thought.
At the barricade, she called out, ‘The Commandant-General of the Irish Republican Army wishes to treat with the Commander of the British Forces in Ireland.’
A Colonel named Hodgson said, ‘How many girls are down there?’
She did not answer.
‘Take my advice, go back and bring the others out at once.’ Then he changed his mind. ‘You’d better wait, I’ll have to report this.’
He deputed an NCO to accompany her to the Parnell Monument. There, Colonel Portal, the area commander, emerged from a house and Elizabeth repeated her message.
‘The Irish Republican Army?’ Portal echoed scornfully. ‘Sinn Feiners, you mean.’
‘They call themselves the Irish Republican Army, sir, and I think it’s a very good name.’
He sniffed. ‘Can Pearse be moved on a stretcher?’
‘Commandant Pearse does not need a stretcher.’
Portal had read a military communique which said Pearse had a fractured thigh and Connolly was dead.
He turned angrily to a junior officer. ‘Take that red cross off her, she’s a spy.’
The officer cut the crosses off Elizabeth’s sleeve and apron. He led her to a branch of the National Bank and searched her. She had on her scissors, sweets, bread, cake. She did not seem a great threat to the Empire.
She was taken to Clarke’s shop, 75A Great Britain Street, and held there for an hour while someone telephoned the Castle and the Castle contacted General Lowe at Trinity.
Joe Plunkett, stretched out in Hanlons’, wrote a letter. He headed it: ’6th Day of the Irish Republic.’
My darling Grace,
This is just a little note to say I love you and to tell you that I did everything I could to arrange for us to meet and get married but that it was impossible.
Except for that I have no regrets.
Give my love to my people and friends.
Darling, darling child, I wish we were together. Love me always as I love you. For the rest all you do will please me.
Rebels Page 45
