A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  De Valera had given an early display of his famous obstinacy that morning by insisting that the Mansion House Conference endorse his version of the anti-conscription policy before going out to Maynooth. Years later he would tell William O’Brien that he had already cleared the wording confidentially with Archbishop Walsh and that his refusal to accept amendments was for fear that any change might unravel the agreed strategy. Walsh had also arranged for the Lord Mayor to phone him from the Mansion House when the delegation would be ready to travel to Maynooth to seek the hierarchy’s blessing. Even the speaking order of the delegation was decided in advance, with de Valera giving the opening position on behalf of the Irish Volunteers, that they would not limit themselves to passive resistance, and William O’Brien speaking last, pledging the support of workers to the cause.

  The bishops gave the campaign their blessing. Their statement against conscription contained the key phrase engineered by Walsh that it was being imposed in ‘an oppressive and inhuman law, which the Irish people have a right to resist by all means that are consonant with the law of God.’ They also decreed that a Mass of intercession would be offered up in every church the following Sunday, at which details would be announced of rallies where people could sign the pledge against conscription. Indeed many Mass-goers found that they were able to sign the pledge at tables outside the church gate on the next Sunday.

  As O’Brien said afterwards, ‘we were getting all we asked for and more.’29 It was a far cry from his speech in the Mansion House a month earlier, acclaiming the Russian revolution for attaining ‘the most complete political and economic freedom that the world has yet seen,’ but it was also of much more practical value; and O’Brien, unlike his mentor James Connolly, usually came down on the pragmatic side of any political question.

  The delegation then hurried back to the Mansion House, where the crowds were still thronging ‘every foot of the thoroughfare’ and singing rebel songs to while away the time. The delegates were delayed by the breakdown of the car in which O’Brien and John Dillon were travelling, so that proceedings did not end until 9:45 p.m. While there were cheers for all the departing leaders, de Valera was carried shoulder high down Dawson Street, and it was only with some difficulty that he freed himself to catch the Dalkey tram home to Booterstown.30

  It was one thing for the Mansion House Conference and the Catholic hierarchy to make ambitious declarations asserting the rights of the Irish people, but only the trade union movement could give them effect. William O’Brien came into his own when the conference reconvened next day and endorsed a proposal for a national strike on 23 April. A special All-Ireland Trades Conference was held in the Mansion House on Saturday 20 April to plan the action. Uniquely, it took place with the support of the nationalist press. Even William Martin Murphy’s Independent group of newspapers threw its weight behind the strike and warned workers of the dangers of not showing solidarity with each other!

  It was left to the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr J. H. Bernard, and a Labour Party member of the British government, George Barnes, to champion conscription. In a sermon preached in St Michan’s church on Sunday 21 April, Dr Bernard not only advised people to respect the new conscription laws but urged young men not to wait to be conscripted.

  Offer your services as voluntary recruits without delay. Do not hesitate because others hold back. Your duty remains the same, whether others are cowards, or shirkers, or traitors, or not.

  An interview given by Barnes to the Press Association the same weekend, urging Irish workers to support the war effort, was a deliberate attempt to appeal to them over the heads of the local trade union leadership. Although Barnes was serving as Minister for Pensions in the Lloyd George government, he had been one of the strongest supporters of the men locked out in 1913, speaking at public meetings in Dublin, including the funeral of one of the men killed. He had been shocked by the ‘traces of battered humanity’ he had seen as the funeral procession passed through the city and had attempted to move an amendment to the King’s Speech in early 1914 to address the workers’ grievances. But he completely misjudged the mood of the city in 1918.

  He tried to reassure workers that home rule was coming and that it would be ‘a tragic thing if that settlement were lost again through hasty and needless conflict.’ As far as Irish workers were concerned, ‘there is no need for them to fight conscription. Home Rule is right ahead.’ The ‘settlement of the Irish question has become a necessity of the war, and … organised labour in this country [Britain] is pledged to see this thing through.’ The only danger was that Ireland was ‘full of combustible material,’ and ‘a spark from either side may kindle … disaster.’ He considered the ‘disaster of separation’ to be even worse than ‘the disaster of revolution.’31

  The strike itself was effective everywhere outside Belfast and its environs. Far from Barnes influencing Irish workers, even those in British unions, such as the National Union of Railwaymen and his own Amalgamated Society of Engineers, played a crucial role in ensuring its effectiveness. More than 100,000 workers were reported to have signed the anti-conscription pledge at trade union offices and at meetings around the country.

  In a demonstration of the strong bonds now developing between the Catholic Church, the new national movement and Dublin workers, thousands of strikers attended Mass in Dublin’s working-class parishes. Churches in Gardiner Street, Dominick Street and North William Street, as well as the Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street, were reported to be particularly well attended. Elsewhere ‘there were many little discomforts connected with the day, which the public bore with cheerfulness,’ the Irish Independent said. ‘There was, for instance, no bread delivery, grocery or victualling establishments [butchers] and restaurants were closed.’ The absence of trams ‘cut thousands off from the seaside’ and prevented day trippers from enjoying the fine weather. During the day the Parnell Monument was bedecked with a Tricolour and a ‘No conscription’ sign.

  The only places of any consequence where business was conducted in the city that day were Dublin Castle and the Stock Exchange. Even licensed premises were closed, together with theatres, cinemas and music halls.

  Some of the main hotels in the city tried to defy the strike, but by early afternoon ‘practically all of the male staff,’ including waiters, had left work, and guests had to collect their own meals from the kitchens. The Irish Independent awarded the accolade for the greatest self-sacrifice to the hackney car owners, ‘in view of the rich harvest presented by Punchestown Races.’32 O’Brien and his comrades had reason to be proud and no reason to expect that Labour had reached its apogee in leading the national struggle.

  On the night of the Mansion House Conference, after de Valera had headed home on the Dalkey tram, several hundred young men of military age finished off the proceedings by marching in formation to the Shelbourne Hotel in St Stephen’s Green, where Field-Marshal French was staying. They stood chanting ‘No conscription!’ for about ten minutes, then dispersed peacefully. French, who had commanded the British Expeditionary Force in France during the opening phases of the war, had arrived on a fact-finding mission. A fortnight later he would be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to replace Lord Wimborne.

  Wimborne had survived the fall-out from the Easter Rising because he had urged a pre-emptive arrest of the rebel leaders, a proposal rejected by the then Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, as too provocative. Now he was dismissed for being too weak, refusing to support the introduction of conscription.

  Henry Duke, who was thought to have ‘gone native,’ was replaced as Chief Secretary by another lawyer, Edward Shortt, to implement the new strategy. French represented the symbol rather than the substance of the new policy. He was regarded as old and tired after being relieved of his command in France in 1915. The real architect of the new policy was the former Unionist leader and member for South County Dublin, Walter Long, who was now Secretary for the Colonies in the War Cabinet.

  That policy wa
s put into operation immediately. On the night of 17 and 18 May more than seventy Sinn Féin leaders, including de Valera, Griffith, Markievicz and Cosgrave, were arrested on suspicion of being involved in a plot with Germany. Many senior figures in the organisation had been warned in advance of the arrests but had decided that this latest move would backfire on the authorities and consolidate popular support before the forthcoming parliamentary by-election in Co. Cavan, where Arthur Griffith was the Sinn Féin candidate. They were certainly correct in that assessment. Some fifteen thousand people attended a rally in Cootehill the following Sunday to denounce the arrests; and Griffith defeated the nationalist candidate comfortably by a margin of 1,200 votes.

  The tip-offs about the arrests came from within the Dublin Metropolitan Police, where demoralisation was turning to disaffection. The treatment of the ringleaders of the police strike in 1916, the increasing support for radical nationalism and the continuing grip of Protestants on most promotions were sources of grievance, and many members of the DMP, like the RIC, had signed the anti-conscription pledge.

  At least three members of G Division had gone a step further and, independently of each other, had approached the Irish Volunteers to offer information. Ironically, one of them, Ned Broy, a police typist in his mid-twenties, was given the task of typing the list of senior rebel suspects for the swoop. He passed a copy of the list to a cousin who worked as a clerk for the GSWR in Kingsbridge, who passed it to Harry O’Hanrahan (a brother of Michael O’Hanrahan, one of the executed 1916 men). Another G Division detective, Joe Kavanagh, who had been in touch with Michael Collins for some months, passed word to him through an established contact, Thomas Gay, an IRB member who worked in Capel Street Library.

  It was probably no accident that these detectives, and others who switched their allegiance within the DMP, tended to be in the lower ranks. It was an indication of the sea change in the feelings among many public servants about what the future might hold.

  It was ironic that the decision to carry out the arrests led to the most militant and committed separatists taking control of the radical nationalist movement—most notably Collins, who heeded his own advice and avoided the police raids that night. He would go on to reorganise the intelligence department of the Irish Volunteers’ GHQ in Dublin, replacing the miscast Dublin solicitor Éamonn Duggan as Director of Intelligence. Duggan was more useful to the movement representing members in the courts.33

  The thinking behind the sweep by Dublin Castle was based on a belief that ‘the brain power of these organisations which are the chief disturbing element in Ireland is mostly centred in the City of Dublin.’ The same ‘Report as to the State of Ireland’ prepared later in the year for the Cabinet by Lord French stated that the clamp-down was vindicated by a reduction in the number of indictable offences, from 269 in May to 174 in June. The report conceded that there had been less progress in the provinces than in Dublin, and it lamented that ‘moral courage is not one of the great attributes of the Irish people.’34

  The report also contained details of the surveillance of extremists by the DMP in May and June 1918 to support French’s analysis. There were certainly plenty of Dublin activists who travelled to Co. Cavan to campaign for Griffith in the first two weeks of May. They included Dr R. Boyd Barrett, Kathleen Clarke, George Gavan Duffy, Eoin MacNeill, Darrell Figgis, Joe McGuinness and Éamon de Valera, as well as Griffith himself. While the Inspector-General of the RIC, Sir Joseph Byrne, reported that the subsequent arrests made speakers more cautious at meetings, cries of ‘Up the Kaiser’ and ‘Up Germany’ were frequent, and defections from Sinn Féin were unlikely while ‘the dread of conscription’ bound young men of military age and their families to Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers.

  Nor was surveillance restricted to members of the separatist movement. The RIC monthly report for June stated that Labour was

  organising all over the country under the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, and is likely to become a powerful and troublesome force. The Union professes to be non-political but its recognised journal Irish Opinion or The Voice of Labour is edited by an advanced Sinn Feiner and the tone of the paper is Sinn Fein. The principal organisers of the Union are Sinn Feiners and so also are the members.35

  It is not surprising, therefore, that the RIC took a close interest in the movements of William O’Brien. Although he was still technically a member of the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers and would not be appointed treasurer, or de facto general secretary, of the ITGWU until February 1919, it was clear that he was already carrying out extensive organising work for the union. The police report for June 1918 showed O’Brien travelling to Carlow, Longford, Limerick and Navan to establish branches of the ITGWU or to deal with industrial disputes.

  Meanwhile there was close surveillance of separatist and Labour activities in Dublin itself by the DMP. These included sports fixtures at Croke Park and an aeraíocht held there on 12 May to commemorate members of Fianna Éireann who fell in Easter Week, as well as social events such as the May Day concert at Liberty Hall. The latter attracted about six hundred people, mainly ITGWU members, including ‘known suspects.’ A much larger and, as far as the police were concerned, more respectable crowd attended a Whist Drive and Labour Concert organised by the trades council in the Mansion House on the following Friday night.

  The sheer size of the crowds at hurling and other sports fixtures, usually 3,000 to 8,000, must have made surveillance difficult, and police note-takers infiltrating meetings and concerts were no longer readily tolerated, so that the intelligence notes yielded little more than lists of names. Nevertheless the police authorities sought to explain the apparent futility of persistence by explaining to their superiors that ‘these entertainments, which generally border on sedition, afford opportunity to the disaffected of meeting together in furtherance of their organisation.’

  And occasionally this work did yield results, such as a number of arrests for illegal drilling in open ground at Dean’s Grange and at the Conservative Workingmen’s Club in York Street in June, as well as the seizure of forty thousand rounds of rifle ammunition concealed in sacks of oats in the city and of explosives on a ship from Ardrossan in Scotland.36 But despite the claims of Lord French, the arrests did not stop protests and public meetings in the city. On 19 May, the day after the mass arrests of Sinn Féin leaders, five hundred people attended an anti-conscription rally in the school yard attached to Meath Street church in the Liberties, where members of the local clergy spoke in place of the advertised speakers. The meeting agreed to organise house-to-house collections for the anti-conscription fund, which the police believed now totalled £250,000.

  Public defiance also took more blatant forms. On 2 June thousands of people attended the funeral of John Cullen, a 1916 veteran who had never recovered his health after being released from prison. Cullen’s remains, his coffin draped in a Tricolour, were brought from his home in Prussia Street on a tour of the north city before reaching Glasnevin cemetery. Fifty Volunteer companies marched behind the hearse as well as four hundred members of Fianna Éireann and three hundred members of Cumann na mBan, along with a large crowd of ordinary citizens. A revolver volley was fired over the grave and the Last Post sounded. The DMP managed to prevent a group of Fianna members forming up afterwards, but the Cumann na mBan contingent proved too much for them and were allowed to march off in formation. On 23 June shots were fired and the Last Post sounded at the funeral of another Volunteer, John Byrne from City Quay. The crowd was much smaller, but again the funeral procession was made a demonstration of strength.

  By now the police were admitting that the ‘German plot’ arrests had

  stirred up a bitter feeling against England which shows no sign of abatement. The young men are unwilling to take part in the War on any terms and therefore the Police see no prospect of a general and satisfactory response to the Lord Lieutenant’s appeal for 50,000 voluntary recruits, unless it is supported by the Bishops and the Nat
ionalist Party.

  Nevertheless, the rate of recruitment more than doubled in the four weeks ending 15 June 1918, to 538, compared with 1,079 in the four months ending 15 May.37

  Southern unionists had a more realistic assessment of the state of the country than Dublin Castle. Hopes that some accommodation might be reached under the home-rule dispensation had died with the convention in April and the irresistible rise of Sinn Féin. This was reflected in the election of hard-liners to the Unionist Council in the first week of June 1918. The Irish Times commented:

  Three months ago a large number of moderate Nationalists were anxious for a reasonable settlement; that party no longer asserts itself in public affairs. The basis of the Irish Convention was national recognition of the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament. Within the last few weeks the most powerful force in Ireland—the Roman Catholic Hierarchy—has defied that authority on an essential point of principle, and has rallied the whole of Nationalist Ireland to its support. These hammer blows, following one another in rapid succession, have killed every hope that moderate Irishmen founded on the work of the Irish Convention.

  The Times blamed the new leader of constitutional nationalism, John Dillon, for the dilemma of southern unionists. It said the Mansion House conference convened by the Lord Mayor had helped Dillon in his ‘undertaker’s task of driving the last nail in the coffin of Home Rule by rejecting the Empire’s final appeal to Ireland for voluntary service in the war.’38 While the editorial seriously misrepresented Dillon’s role in the process, and there was a large element of ‘it’s everybody else’s fault’ in the diagnosis, it did reflect the growing belief among southern liberal unionists that the time for compromise was over.