A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  The Irish Independent commented that the leadership of the Irish Party was now paying the price for fawning ‘like nerveless creatures’ on successive English governments rather than acting like men and securing home rule in 1912. The Irish Times took the opposite tack and bewailed the fact that Redmond had been ‘overborne’ by John Dillon and other opponents of the war. It believed that had others emulated Redmond’s enthusiasm the unity of nationalist and unionist would have been secured, although on what basis and to what purpose was unclear. The paper was on sounder ground when it predicted that partition would only deepen existing divisions.22

  The next day, on the other side of Europe, the Russian Revolution began when Cossacks refused to disperse mass demonstrations in Petrograd, called on International Women’s Day to demand bread. Its reverberations would soon be felt in Ireland through the renewed pressure for conscription as the Russian military effort flagged. The revolution was hailed in Irish labour circles and especially in the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, where tensions between some of the members and James Connolly over the use of Liberty Hall by the Citizen Army before the Easter Rising were long forgotten.

  The triumph of the Bolshevik rising in November would strike a particular resonance with some of Connolly’s former comrades. As William O’Brien told the Irish Labour Party and Trades Union Congress in 1918, when Connolly

  laid down his life for the Irish working class he laid it down for the working class in all countries, for he believed that an example of action ought to be given to the workers to spur them to resistance to the powers of imperialism and capitalism which have plunged Europe into the war of empire and conquest … We know the influence it exercised among those great men and women who have given us the great Russian Revolution.23

  Meanwhile the ITGWU was in the middle of a Lazarus-like resurrection. It had struggled as an organisation in the aftermath of the lock-out. Larkin had departed to the United States on a fund-raising trip that was also meant to provide him with an opportunity to recuperate from the strain of struggle and defeat, while his successor, Connolly, became increasingly preoccupied with the Citizen Army and plans for the rising. Membership fell from 30,000 at its peak in 1913 to 15,000 in 1914, 10,000 in 1915 and probably less than 5,000 on the eve of the rising.24 To add to its woes, Liberty Hall had been bombarded, its records seized and many leading members shot or imprisoned. The union had to accept an offer of temporary accommodation at the Trades Council Hall in Capel Street. Miraculously, membership reached 14,000 by the end of the year and 25,000 by the end of 1917. Thomas Foran, the president, doubled as general secretary on his release from prison, and he was joined by his fellow-internee William O’Brien, an organiser of genius. Although O’Brien would not be formally appointed general treasurer of the ITGWU until February 1919, he devoted most of his time after his release from internment to the union.

  Two other key figures in the revival of the union were Joseph McGrath, who took over management of the ITGWU’s National Health Insurance Approved Society, and J. J. (Séamus) Hughes, who served as financial and corresponding secretary. Liberty Hall was renovated through a building fund to which members contributed the first week’s pay of any increase achieved by the union. ‘In this way [the] Liberty Hall frontage has actually been rebuilt by the employers of Dublin!’ the union boasted.

  Another critical factor in the union’s success was its close association with Connolly and Easter Week. It was becoming patriotic as well as economically beneficial to join the union. Many small ‘land and labour’ unions in rural Ireland joined the ITGWU en masse, and in Dublin new groups of workers, such as cinema projectionists, did so. Of course the authorities and employers were far from happy at the unexpected resurgence of the union. After the rising John Dillon Nugent, the Dublin MP who was also secretary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, had approached Dublin Castle with a view to ‘buying’ the union. It is probable that he meant making a bid for the insurance section, as he was head of the Hibernian Insurance Fund, the largest Irish insurance company.

  Fortunately for the union, the recruitment of McGrath ensured the continuing financial viability of the union. McGrath had worked for the accountancy firm Craig Gardner before taking part in the rising, was a close associate of Michael Collins and a senior figure in the IRB. Séamus Hughes, also a participant in the rising, was a prominent figure on the cultural scene. A former seminarian and a contributor to the Irish Worker in its heyday under Larkin, he saw no problem in people believing in ‘economic socialism without attaching themselves to atheistic doctrines.’25

  It was against this surge in the new patriotism that the legacy of the Irish Party had to contend. As it had never opposed political violence on principle and had frequently invoked the memory of the ‘hillside men’, the party could only criticise the British government for betraying constitutional nationalism and the rebels for subverting it. The futility of its position was demonstrated by a return to Parliament, having made its protest over partition. The alternative was to adopt the abstentionist position of Sinn Féin that it had consistently attacked.

  Any hopes that the post-rising mood in Dublin was a passing fancy were dispelled on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, regarded as the first anniversary of the rising. A proclamation was issued by Lieutenant-General Sir Bryan Mahon, who had commanded the 10th (Irish) Division at Gallipoli and was now general officer commanding the forces in Ireland, banning public meetings and assemblies in Dublin during Easter Week, except for the annual Lord Mayor’s procession to the Pro-Cathedral on Easter Sunday. The procession passed off peacefully, but on Easter Monday a large Tricolour was flying at half mast from a temporary flagstaff on the parapet of the GPO. The parapet is 90 feet above ground level, so that the flag was visible over a wide area and drew crowds into Sackville Street. ‘Thousands of holiday makers … raised their hats in passing it, and waved handkerchiefs.’ When the flagstaff toppled over at about 10 a.m. a young man promptly walked along the parapet to fix it back in position. ‘That was the signal for an outburst of cheering and various other demonstrations of approval on a wide scale,’ the Irish Times reported.

  One such demonstration was by a group of young men who occupied Nelson’s Pillar and flew another ‘Sinn Fein flag’ from the top for about a quarter of an hour. They were allowed to leave the Pillar unmolested, but a policeman then climbed onto the parapet of the GPO to remove the flagstaff. It was secured so firmly that it took an hour to cut it down. As soon as it hit the ground three boys tore the flag off the staff and ran down Prince’s Street into the ruins with their prize. Again there were loud cheers, and a large section of the crowd made its way down Lower Abbey Street to Liberty Hall, where there were further cheers and flag-waving.

  Many in the crowds that gathered at Liberty Hall and continued to occupy Sackville Street wore black armbands surmounted by ribbons with ‘Sinn Fein colours.’ Flags appeared on other buildings, and during the afternoon gangs of youths used the debris on derelict sites to stone the police. The fighting grew particularly fierce outside the Abbey Theatre, where a DMP superintendent and inspector were among the casualties. Eventually the police retreated to Sackville Street, while an unarmed military detachment passing along Eden Quay had to flee across Butt Bridge.

  Some rioters turned their attention to the Methodist church in Lower Abbey Street, while others made for the richer pickings in the shops erected in temporary buildings nearby. The worst of the rioting was at the junction of Talbot Street and North Earl Street, and several trams were damaged as well as shops. Peace was eventually restored when a sharp hailstorm just after dark scattered the crowds.

  Only two arrests were made on a day when a mixture of rebel sympathisers and what the Times termed ‘young toughs’ effectually took over the north city. Republicans had retrieved their honour by defying the authorities; but the only people able to re-enact fully their role in the rising were the looters from the slums.26

  Meanwhile, in the stately atmosph
ere of City Hall across the river, the Irish Drapers’ Assistants’ Association, Ireland’s largest, oldest and richest white-collar union, was holding its annual general meeting. At the top of the agenda was the lack of compensation from the government for members who had been laid off as a result of the destruction of department stores during the rising. Although the Drapers were the wealthiest union in Dublin, their resources had been severely tried. During the winter £3,000 had been paid out to offset hardship and another £3,000 by the insurance section. Despite the disturbed state of the country and the lack of sympathy from government and employers alike, the association’s president, W. J. McNabb, appealed to members not to allow politics to affect their work.

  Membership had reached a record figure, largely because of expansion in Belfast and the North; it had also held up in Dublin, although £500 had had to be paid out in unemployment benefit. Despite McNabb’s plea, politics did intrude with a debate on a motion dealing with conscription. Southern delegates insisted that the issue was an ‘economic matter,’ while northern members insisted it was ‘political.’ There does not appear to have been a vote. Delegates adjourned to dinner at the Dolphin Hotel, where the general secretary, Michael O’Lehane, a long-standing member of Sinn Féin, assured them that with the growth of education labour could, without bloodshed, achieve all its objectives.27

  The militant mood on Dublin’s streets was about to be further inflamed by news that another six hundred jobs were to go in the city’s breweries and distilleries. Distress was now so widespread and so obviously feeding into civic disorder that the Local Government Board finally sanctioned £1,250 for setting up communal kitchens in the poorer areas of the city.

  Any kudos from the measure was cancelled out by the angry public reaction to a letter from Lieutenant-General Mahon, published in the Irish Times, urging the men who lost their jobs ‘owing to the limitations placed on brewing and distilling industries and allied concerns’ to join the British army. He described the attractions of increased separation and dependants’ allowances and stated that skilled workers would be welcome in technical services such as the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Engineers.

  The Times welcomed the general’s ‘attractive’ offer to recruits and contrasted their prospects with those of men who went to England under the National Service scheme to work ‘among strangers in a strange land.’ Army recruits, even if they ended up in a strange land, would be among their own ‘gallant Irish regiments.’ The general boasted, quite truthfully, that ‘there are more Dublin men in the trenches today than in all the Dublin breweries and distilleries.’28 It was not an argument to boost recruitment: most Dubliners now preferred to see fewer fellow-citizens in the trenches.

  If the events of Easter Monday 1917 demonstrated the mood on the streets, the first serious attempt to channel that anger organisationally came with a conference convened by Count Plunkett in the Mansion House on 19 April. Well over a thousand representatives of various organisations attended. They included delegates from local authorities, boards of Poor Law guardians and other bodies that were traditionally dominated by Irish Party stalwarts, as well as thirty divisions of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. They were leavened by representatives of radical nationalist bodies, such as Sinn Féin, the Irish National League, Cumann na mBan, and nineteen trades councils. The prevalence of Tricolours, including one carried by a fourteen-year-old boy who had allegedly been interned, indicated the prevailing mood.

  There was a minute’s silence for those who had died in the rising and a call for those still in custody to be treated as prisoners of war. But the most significant action was the adoption of a declaration asserting ‘Ireland’s right to freedom from all foreign control.’ The conference further demanded representation at the post-war Peace Conference convening in Paris so that it could release ‘the small nations from the control of the Greater powers.’ The delegates affirmed their commitment ‘to use every means in their power to obtain complete liberty.’ The Dublin Trades Council delegation, led by Thomas Farren and William O’Brien, ‘wished God-speed to the great work begun that day for Ireland.’ O’Brien declared that ‘Irish labour was absolutely united against partition—even those [workers] opposed to Irish self-government in the North.’

  Plunkett stressed that the National Alliance he was launching was not another party ‘to machine public opinion’ but was for building an organisation in every parish ‘prepared to deal with any emergency such as the introduction of a fraudulent Home Rule business.’ However, Arthur Griffith made it clear that Sinn Féin would continue to pursue its own policies, and it was agreed that all interested bodies, including the Irish Volunteers, then reorganising, should hold talks on creating a new movement to ‘smash’ the Irish Party.29 Calls from the floor for food exports to be banned and for conscription to be resisted reflected the more immediate concerns of delegates.

  The editorial in the next day’s Irish Independent summed up the conundrum now facing many moderate nationalists. The paper admitted that Plunkett’s programme appeared increasingly attractive, although his gathering ‘would have been inconceivable three or four years previously’ and was possible now only because of the

  repeated muddling, chronic weakness and inactivity of the Nationalist leaders and Party … On the other hand we are not believers in the methods or policy of the Party whose battle cry is an Irish Republic.

  It questioned how much support the abstention policy advocated by Plunkett and Griffith really had.

  It would receive the answer three weeks later in the South Longford by-election. The Sinn Féin candidate on this occasion was not a Papal count and grieving father of an executed leader of the rising but a draper’s assistant in Dublin convicted of armed rebellion. What was worse, Joe McGuinness was a native of Co. Roscommon and had no links to the constituency in which he was standing. In fact he did not even want to stand, and most of his imprisoned comrades did not want to nominate him, including Éamon de Valera, who felt that participation in a parliamentary election was tantamount to recognising British rule in Ireland.

  His only fellow-prisoners who felt strongly that he should run were Thomas Ashe, the teacher from Lusk who had won the battle of Ashbourne, and Harry Boland, a Dublin tailor. Both were senior members of the IRB—Ashe was to be elected president on his release from prison—and they worked closely with another rising IRB man on the outside, Michael Collins, to promote McGuinness’s candidature. When the candidate still refused to run they nominated him anyway under the famous slogan ‘Put him in to get him out.’

  It was a dirty campaign, even by Irish standards. No fewer than twenty Irish Party MPs campaigned for their candidate, Patrick McKenna, while Dublin radicals, such as Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, William O’Brien and the ITGWU’s new financial officer, Joseph McGrath, invaded the constituency. The large convoys of Sinn Féin motor cars bedecked with Tricolours touring the county were denounced as evidence of ‘German gold’, while the Irish Party members were accused of cheering the executions of the 1916 leaders in the House of Commons.

  Past internecine strife within the Irish Party came back to haunt it when one of McKenna’s supporters, J. P. Farrell, editor of the Longford Leader, was reminded that he had described the candidate ‘as a dyspeptic visaged humbug … from the Irish Pig Buyers’ Association.’ There was also a destructive dimension to the Irish Party’s campaign. On the weekend before polling the mothers of two of the executed 1916 leaders, Mary Josephine Plunkett and Margaret Pearse, together with the widow of a third, Kathleen Clarke, were stoned in Longford by a number of ‘drunken and abandoned females … from suitable cover behind the Bludgeon men’ of the Irish Party. The Irish Independent intimated that the women had been plied with free drink before the incident. On his return to Dublin, John Dillon Nugent was alleged by the same newspaper to have sacked a number of employees for travelling to Co. Longford in their own time to canvass for McGuinness.30 This brought the Irish Party more bad publicity; but far worse was t
o come.

  On the eve of the election more than twenty senior churchmen, including three Protestant bishops, signed a manifesto opposing partition; one of them, Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, issued a letter denouncing the Irish Party for political cowardice.31 Dr Walsh’s letter was in effect an endorsement of McGuinness, who won the hard-fought contest by 1,493 votes to 1,461.

  If the Irish Party could be defeated in its heartland it could be defeated anywhere in Ireland. The Walsh letter symbolised the alienation of many traditional supporters of home rule from the Irish Party and their despair at its inability to prosecute the nationalist cause effectively. But the archbishop had gone even further: he had made support for McGuinness and the other Easter rebels politically respectable.

  Now that a rebel prisoner was a member of Parliament, the emphasis of advanced nationalists shifted quickly to securing the release of the 120 remaining prisoners in Britain, all of whom had been sentenced to varying terms. On the evening of Sunday 10 June a demonstration was held in Beresford Place in support of the prisoners in Lewes Jail in the Isle of Wight who had begun a hunger strike for prisoner-of-war status. It had been banned by Lieutenant-General Mahon, but that did not prevent three thousand people turning out to greet the hackney car carrying the speakers, Count Plunkett and Cathal Brugha.

  As it drew up in front of Liberty Hall at 7:30 p.m. Inspector John Mills of the DMP arrested the two men. A large force of police was needed to clear a route to Store Street station nearby, and stones were thrown freely. As they neared the station Mills was felled by a blow to the head from a hurley. His assailant was pursued by two constables down Abbey Street, but one was obstructed by the crowd and the other was himself attacked when he attempted an arrest. Inspector Mills was taken to Jervis Street Hospital, where he died shortly afterwards, leaving a widow and three children aged between thirteen and nineteen. A carriage-driver at an undertaker’s was subsequently arrested, but it proved impossible to find any witnesses to give evidence. The DMP would find this to be a recurring pattern over the next few years. Four policemen were injured that night in riots along South Great George’s Street and Aungier Street as word spread of the arrests of Plunkett and Brugha. Again looters were busy.