A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  He was charged with making a seditious speech at Ballinalee, Co. Longford, on 25 July. He could as easily have been charged with half a dozen other speeches. He was tried on 3 September and the sentence was handed down on the 11th: two years’ hard labour, remitted to twelve months from the date of the trial—a sentence out of all proportion to the alleged comments Ashe made. The RIC witnesses could produce no notes of what he had actually said at the meeting.

  Ashe was on a collision course with the authorities from the first day of his sentence, as he refused to sew mailbags and insisted on talking to his fellow-prisoners in the exercise yard, something forbidden to men serving a criminal sentence. As a punishment his mattress was removed from his cell and he was denied any secular reading matter.

  The new coercion policy would rebound not alone on the British government but also on the Irish Party as public interest in the battle grew. Part of the evidence against Ashe had been an alleged attack in his Ballinalee speech on T. P. O’Connor, a senior nationalist MP, who had gone on a fund-raising tour of America only to return, according to Ashe, ‘with his tail between his legs.’

  In his widely published defence speech Ashe described the statements by RIC witnesses as ‘the most choice item of the evidence.’

  I have made many statements in public but had not been arrested until I criticised Mr. O’Connor. I would not mind going to prison for a decent charge, but it would be unfair to be sent to prison in order that Mr. T. P. O’Connor might collect forty thousand dollars in America.

  Nor were Ashe’s supporters outside slow to mention the fact that the chairman of the Prison Board overseeing the coercion strategy, Max Green, was a son-in-law of John Redmond.3

  The confrontation escalated rapidly as other rebel prisoners joined the protest and adopted similar tactics to those used in Lewes Prison to secure concessions. In retaliation the cells were raided and stripped of bedding and the men had their personal belongings removed. Boots were taken to prevent the prisoners kicking cells doors or otherwise damaging prison property. The prisoners then brought forward a threatened hunger strike from 1 October to 20 September.

  From the beginning the Prison Board made it clear that it would take a hard line and would resort to forced feeding to break the strike, a controversial practice that had led to deaths in Britain in the past. The prison authorities also tried to suppress news of the strike, but Ashe managed to send word to the Lord Mayor, Laurence O’Neill, who visited him and other prisoners in Mountjoy. Prisoners who had been in Lewes with Ashe considered the regime there to be humane compared with that adopted by the Prison Board in Mountjoy.

  During the forced-feeding sessions each man was strapped by his arms and legs in a high chair. A tube was forced down the gullet through either the mouth or the nose so that food could be pumped directly into the stomach. As there were only four pumps in the prison, it was not possible to feed all forty prisoners each day. Nor was the equipment sterilised. Dr William Lowe, who administered the forced feeding, had no previous experience in the procedure.4

  On Sunday 23 September there was a mass protest in Smithfield, followed by a march to the prison. It was to be the first of many such protests over the coming years. Ashe was visited again by the Lord Mayor and Sir John Irvine, chairman of the Visiting Justices Committee. The bedding and clothing had been restored to the cell, but Ashe remained adamant that the men would continue their protest until they achieved prisoner-of-war status. ‘Even though I do die, I die in a good cause,’ he told his distinguished visitors. A deeply religious man, Ashe appeared to have a premonition of his death.

  On Tuesday 25 September, Ashe was forcibly fed by Dr Lowe shortly after 11 a.m. Lowe claimed later that Ashe did not resist having the tube inserted down his throat, but other prisoners recalled Lowe as a particularly rough practitioner, and the subsequent examination of Ashe’s body uncovered extensive bruising and scratch marks around his mouth, chin and throat. Whatever happened, it resulted in fatal damage to his lungs. He was taken to the prison hospital ward after the forced feeding session and transferred to the Mater Hospital at about 5 p.m. In a scene reminiscent of the executions a year earlier, two Capuchin friars, Father Albert and Father Augustine, called to give him the last rites. He told the priests: ‘I was splendid this morning until forcibly fed.’ As they were leaving he added: ‘We made a great fight.’ Father Augustine gave the traditional blessing in Irish: ‘God is good, and he has a good mother.’ Ashe replied in Irish, ‘Yes, indeed, father.’ Those were his last recorded words. Water slowly filled his damaged lungs, and he died of oedema at about 10:30 p.m. while Dr Kathleen Lynn was taking his pulse.

  A large crowd had already gathered outside the hospital. Among the mourners was his old friend and fellow-piper Seán O’Casey. The next few days saw an outpouring of grief such as Ireland had not witnessed for many years. It was as if the feelings of fear, confused anger and uncertainty that had haunted Dublin and the country at large since the events of Easter Week and the subsequent executions had been resolved in an overwhelming outburst of sorrow for the loss of the dead man.

  O’Casey wrote a lament for Ashe, but Ashe had written his own epitaph.

  Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord!

  The hour of her trial draws near,

  And the pangs and the pains of the sacrifice

  May be borne by comrades dear.

  But Lord take me from the offering throng,

  There are many far less prepared

  Though anxious and all as they are to die

  That Ireland may be spared.5

  The song would be published in every nationalist newspaper and news-sheet in the country.

  Long before then both the British administration and the Irish Party had to undergo their own political purgatory. As Ashe’s biographer Seán Ó Lúing put it, ‘Thomas Ashe’s death changed the mood and mind of Ireland almost overnight.’ Until then the Irish Party leadership had clung to some hope that Sinn Féin’s political progress could be halted. The next morning the party’s mouthpiece, the Freeman’s Journal, voiced their despair.

  There must be a hidden malignant and malevolent influence somewhere in the government of Ireland, whether in the War Cabinet or the Castle, determined that Ireland shall not have peace in freedom and that there shall be no reconciliation between the British and Irish peoples.

  The Irish Independent put the dilemma faced by the Irish Party with brutal bluntness. The death of Ashe had driven the country ‘to the verge of desperation’ and had

  embittered thousands of Irish nationalists who had no real sympathy with the policy of Sinn Fein. The Irish Party … is now fighting for its life and … hates the Sinn Feiners more than it does the Unionists, and longs for their complete extermination. Yet it is holding out the left hand as if to succour them, whilst with the right it would deal them the death blow should the chance be theirs.

  Much of the provincial press was already turning against the old guard. The Waterford News, in Redmond’s own stronghold, denounced the ‘cataracts of crocodile tears’ for Ashe, while the Kilkenny People, which had witnessed Cosgrave’s victory, drew attention to the role of Max Green in the whole affair.

  The only newspaper in the south to play down Ashe’s death was the Irish Times, which gave more prominence to the annual meeting of the Ferns Diocesan Synod of the Church of Ireland. Predictably, the synod in its debate ruled out any notion of a ‘Republic’ for Ireland, but the president, Dr Gregg, pointed out with more prescience than he probably realised that an Order in Council of 1801, made after the Act of Union was passed, provided for ‘dominion’ government under the crown. ‘The dissolution of the Legislative Union did not mean either quitting the Empire or losing their King,’ he told his fellow southern unionists.6 He had unknowingly described the constitutional arrangement that would be made at the end the War of Independence in 1921.

  Meanwhile in Dublin the British military guard on the Mater Hospital withdrew and Ashe’s old comrades t
ook charge. A guard of honour composed of men from Fingal stood over the body, which was cleaned by nurses and dressed in Volunteer uniform. Sister Juliana recalled: ‘He was such a handsome young man, with lovely hair. He looked beautiful.’7 The body was then taken to the Pro-Cathedral for requiem mass.

  An application was made to the Estates Committee of Dublin Corporation by the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee (an IRB front chaired by Seán McGarry) for Ashe to lie in state in City Hall. This elegant Georgian building by Thomas Cooley represented the last great display of civic pride by Dublin’s mercantile elite, serving as the Royal Exchange before becoming the meeting place and head offices of the corporation. It was also within shouting distance of Dublin Castle and had been under permanent military guard since being recaptured from the rebels during the rising the previous year.

  When the Estates Committee granted permission for Ashe’s body to be brought there under a Volunteer escort, the Under-Secretary for Ireland, Sir William Byrne, wrote immediately to the Lord Mayor warning of the likely consequences. He suggested, not unreasonably, that Ashe could as easily lie in state at the Pro-Cathedral. But O’Neill was not to be moved and was strongly supported by two of the most conservative nationalist members of the Estates Committee, the undertaker and slum landlord Patrick Corrigan, who had disposed of Alderman Kelly’s explosives store after the rising, and the builder who had locked his men out in 1913 and had been knighted for his wartime services, Sir Patrick Shortall. All three met Byrne and senior officials in the Castle, even as Volunteers were assembling across the Liffey to bring Ashe’s remains to City Hall.

  O’Neill proposed that the administration could easily avert a crisis by withdrawing the military guard temporarily from City Hall. According to the Lord Mayor, Byrne remained implacable and informed the deputation that he had a regiment of soldiers ‘armed to the teeth’ in the Castle Yard. Fortunately, Lieutenant-General Mahon was also present, and he took it on himself to withdraw the guard.8

  Even as the troops withdrew, the giant funeral procession wound its way through the crowded streets. Tens of thousands would come to pay their respects to the martyr between then and the funeral on Sunday 30 September.

  Incredibly, the administration continued its forced feeding of the remaining prisoners in Mountjoy for several days, further fuelling public anger, before conceding the hunger-strikers’ demands.

  The danger of a confrontation arose again when the Chief Secretary heard that there was a Volunteer guard of honour in City Hall. He banned the possession or carrying of arms in the building. Fortunately, Duke was not in Ireland, and Mahon simply ignored the Chief Secretary’s instruction.9 Troops were virtually confined to barracks until after Ashe was buried.

  The funeral was generally admitted to be ‘larger and even more impressive than the funeral of Parnell.’ References to the death of Parnell were to be common in the coming days and weeks, as if nothing of comparable significance to the nation’s psyche had occurred between those two events. Because of the wartime ban on excursion trains, some Volunteer detachments took extraordinary measures to reach Dublin. Two hundred men from Ashe’s native Kerry travelled for days to reach Dublin in time for the funeral, and another contingent was said to have marched all the way from Athlone. In all, nine thousand Volunteers took part, along with the Irish Citizen Army and virtually every Catholic fraternity and every trade and business association in Dublin. The largest contingent was made up of 18,000 trade unionists, of whom 8,000 were members of the ITGWU, marching behind their general president, Tom Foran. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Walsh, attended, despite his increasingly poor health. ‘I feel it a duty,’ he wrote to the Lord Mayor, ‘to take part in the public protest that will find expression in the funeral.’ The Irish Independent commented next day:

  This was the real significance of yesterday’s unprecedented demonstration. The people from the Archbishop down to the humblest citizen, while paying tribute to the memory of the dead also desire to register a protest against a regime and a practice which they regard as needlessly vindictive and harsh.

  At the graveside Michael Collins gave perhaps the shortest funeral oration ever made in Ireland. Stepping forward after the firing party had fired three volleys and a Fianna bugler had sounded the Last Post, Collins said a few words in Irish that were never recorded and then in English: ‘Nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.’10

  With that, the official ceremony ended; but thousands flocked to the grave over the next few weeks, not alone to pay their respects but some also to secure souvenirs. Margaret Connery of the Irish Women’s Franchise League protested that the grave ‘had the appearance of being trampled by a herd of cattle’ and ‘Irish “Huns” were busy cutting up wreaths, cards and even a temporary cross erected by Corporation employees.’11

  Meanwhile meetings of local councils and boards of guardians throughout Ireland passed votes of sympathy on Ashe’s death. The quarterly meeting of Dublin Corporation took place on the day after the funeral, and all regular business was put aside to consider a motion from the Lord Mayor. Inevitably, O’Neill referred to his own meetings with Ashe and the dead man’s famous words, ‘If I do die, I die in a good cause’; but, conscious of the explosive atmosphere in the city, he made no reference to the meeting with Sir William Byrne and Lieutenant-General Mahon.

  An independent nationalist, O’Neill was ideally placed to be Chief Magistrate of Dublin at a time when the UIL still dominated the corporation but had lost its popular mandate. He did not allow any discussion of the dead man’s politics ‘or whether Thomas Ashe was right in his methods,’ but he was scathing in his criticism of the government. So were other speakers, including the former Lord Mayor and UIL stalwart Lorcan Sherlock, who drew loud applause when he declared the government of the country to be turning patriots into criminals. No government had done more to generate ‘the strongest and bitterest feeling of national resentment and national hatred against oppression and hypocrisy … since the days of Mr. Parnell.’ The council voted unanimously for the motion of sympathy by a standing ovation.

  Unionist councillors appear to have absented themselves from the vote, and there were misgivings over a similar motion in the old unionist heartland of Blackrock. Unionist councillors agreed to support it only if it was restricted to offering sympathy to the dead man’s family and deploring the circumstances in which his death occurred. While voting for the motion, Lady Dockrell commented wryly that five women suffragists had died of forced feeding in British prisons and not a word had been said about it in Ireland.

  Nor did Ashe’s death attract much notice in Britain. Londoners and residents of east-coast towns in particular were far too preoccupied with the long moonlit nights that facilitated Zeppelin raids from across the North Sea.

  There was one last ordeal for the Irish Party and the British administration concerning the death of Thomas Ashe and, appropriately, it was provided by Tim Healy, who represented the Ashe family at the inquest. Healy condemned the authorities in searing tones for using confrontational tactics that breached their own penal regulations in order to punish the prisoners. He too referred to Max Green and the Prison Board, claiming that if it had not been for the intervention of the Lord Mayor of Dublin and the outrage of its citizens they could well be investigating forty deaths in Mountjoy Prison rather than one.

  Even at this late stage the government’s legal team had no instructions to offer any words of regret to the Ashe family, or a credible explanation to the public of how the death had occurred.

  Immediately Thomas Ashe Cumainn of Sinn Féin sprouted up throughout Ireland. One of the first was in the Rotunda ward in Dublin’s north inner city. It was ironic, given Ashe’s radical social views, that he would now be transformed into a quasi-religious figure, like Pearse. On the other hand, his piety reconciled many naturally conservative Catholics to the cause of advanced nationalis
m and drew significant numbers of clergy into the ranks of Sinn Féin. At Mount Bolus, Co. Offaly, the Rev. J. Kane said he did not blame older men for clinging to the Irish Party, but ‘when they knew Sinn Féin they would come in.’ He attacked the Irish Party for its powerlessness to address basic grievances, such as the crippling of the cattle trade to meet the demands of Britain’s war economy.

  In Belfast, Laurence Ginnell, a nationalist MP who had deserted the Irish Party for Sinn Féin, assured a meeting held to found a new Thomas Ashe Cumann that the organisation was not advocating ‘red ruin and revolution’ but had policies ‘similar to those of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce in promoting Irish industry.’ Several local priests attended the meeting; and when the Gaelic League decided to launch a fund for a memorial hall to commemorate Ashe there was a massive response from the clergy, both as individuals and in forwarding collections from special masses held for the repose of the dead man’s soul. Subscription lists for the Ashe fund frequently carried expressions of gratitude from Gaelic League and Sinn Féin branches to parish priests for allowing them to hold church gate collections. Within a few weeks the league had enough money to acquire 14 Rutland Square for the promotion of Irish, Irish music and the reconfigured ideals of the late Thomas Ashe.12

  There could have been no better backdrop to the Sinn Féin convention that gathered in Dublin on 25 and 26 October than the Ashe funeral. Even more delegates attended than were at Count Plunkett’s conference in April: 1,700, compared with 1,200.13 But the most significant difference was that they all represented Sinn Féin branches—1,009, to be precise, from virtually every parish outside Ulster and quite a number within the province. The disparate organisations of the spring had been subsumed into one political party committed to ‘securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic.’14