The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  ‘SENTIMENTALLY SEDITIOUS SHOPGIRLS’

  Of all Irish separatist organizations, Cumann na mBan (always, unlike the Volunteers, known by the Irish version of its title)135 was perhaps the least disrupted by 1916. It had mobilized for the rising alongside the Volunteers and played – where allowed – what may be called a semi-combat role, under fire with the fighters. One or two women had indeed fired rather than merely carried or loaded rifles, though they were in the Citizen Army, not Cumann na mBan. High-profile women of both organizations like Constance Markievicz and Kathleen Lynn had been visible among the rebel leadership. Some eighty women were arrested, and though nearly all were released, they caused real embarrassment to the authorities. The leadership of 1916 veterans like Helena Molony and remarkable widows like Aine Ceannt, Kathleen Clarke and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (not to mention sisters like Sheila Humphreys) might have been expected to propel Cumann na mBan into the vanguard of militant separatism after 1916.

  An impetus to gender equality was manifested in the League of Women Delegates, formed in 1917 to protest against the under-representation of women on Count Plunkett’s Council of Nine. (The only woman on it was Countess Plunkett.) But though (after a series of rebuffs) they achieved the co-option of four ‘ladies’ on to the Sinn Féin Executive, the Sinn Féin Convention in October 1917 mustered a bare dozen women among over a thousand delegates.136 Radical groupings such as the Women Delegates, Cumann na dTeachtaire, the Irish Women Workers’ Union and the Irish Women’s Franchise League indicated a coherent Irish feminist impulse, but it was only haltingly transmitted into Cumann na mBan as a whole. In fact much of Cumann na dTeachtaire’s time was spent on non-political issues such as the prevention of venereal disease and the provision of public lavatories for women, and the group disappeared without trace early in 1919.137

  But Cumann na mBan became more feminist after 1916, or at least ‘its feminist members found it easier to present the organisation in a more progressive light.’138 It also became more explicitly republican. By 1918 its constitution invoked the proclamation of the 1916 Republic as the basis for ‘seeing that women take up their proper position in the life of the nation’. Members were urged to play a full part in local public life and ‘assert their right as citizens to take part’ in the nomination of parliamentary and local government elections. To make them more effective, branches were to set up lectures, debates and classes on civic education.

  This progressive line was clear in the organization’s highest-profile propaganda action, the delivery of a message to President Wilson in January 1918 (even though its bearer, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, was not actually a member of the organization). The message invoked ‘the generosity of the American administration on all things affecting women’s lives and welfare’, and appealed to it to ‘recognise the political independence of Ireland in the form of an Irish Republic’ – contending that ‘from its inauguration’ [in 1916] the Republic ‘was prepared to give women their full place in the Councils of their Nation’.139 By 1919 Cumann na mBan’s constitution claimed that ‘by taking their place in the firing line, and in every other way helping in the establishment of the Irish Republic’, they had ‘gained for the women of Ireland the rights that belonged to them under the old Gaelic civilisation, where sex was no bar to citizenship’. Since those rights had been ‘stolen from them under English rule’, it followed that an independent republic would restore them.

  Women activists were assessed in sharply different ways, ranging from the Times correspondent’s dismissive ‘shop girls led away to sedition by sentimentalism’140 to the idiosyncratic writer Shaw Desmond’s weird invocation of ‘Ireland’s fierce virgins’. ‘Hollow-cheeked women of parted lips whose souls under the drive of their passion seemed to be peering out from the staring eyes. Women as impossible to stop as running water or lambent flame … ecstatic – but ruthless’. ‘They were not “womanly” women, these Amazons of Sinn Féin, although they were “feminine” women – to the last hair on their fine, compact heads, and to the last nail on their slender, almost cruel hands … ruthless, wonderful women.’ ‘These young girls, many of them of a curious physical beauty, had deliberately transformed all the love of life and potency of love which they had to the full, into another channel – the channel of country … the religion of Nationalism.’ ‘All the ordinary attributes of woman had been either coerced or cajoled into a sort of suppressed fierceness.’141

  Cumann na mBan was in the front line of the anti-recruitment campaign and the police boycott. In the 1918 conscription crisis it effectively took over the Woman’s Day (Lá na mBan) on 9 June from its original organizers, an independent committee led by Alice Stopford Green and Agnes O’Farrelly. One of Cumann na mBan’s founders, Nancy Wyse Power, rather unkindly dismissed this committee as ‘odds and ends’, and the organization’s Executive feared that unless it took control ‘the demonstration might … prove inadequate.’142 The Day itself saw Cumann na mBan leading processions in towns all across the country (albeit outnumbered in Dublin itself by the 2,400-strong Irish Women Workers’ Union), and it organized the signing of the anti-conscription pledge over the next few weeks. Its profile was high at this point, and it even gained the kudos of being proclaimed a ‘dangerous association’ in some areas. During the crisis it expanded even more dramatically than Sinn Féin itself – according to its 1918 Convention report it grew from 100 branches in 1917 to ‘considerably over 600’ a year later. (At that Convention, though, there were nothing like 600 delegates – maybe only a quarter of that number; and the RIC counted only 112 branches, with an estimated total membership of 3,691 in September, although those figures were certainly too low.)143

  As with Sinn Féin, that figure fell sharply in 1919 before rising once more through 1920–21. Total membership was never certain – no systematic roll was ever drawn up. Branch membership was more fluid even than for Volunteer companies, ranging from half a dozen to thirty or so. At a conservative average of ten, there were at least 6,000 active Cumann na mBan women in 1920. But in the end the organization failed to maintain the momentum of its growth, or its position as the near-equal of the (sometimes assertively) male Irish Volunteers.144 A sign of problems to come was that in 1918 ‘the spread of Sinn Féin Clubs and the series of by-elections in which members of Cumann na mBan take a prominent part’ created ‘an impression that our Branches were Women’s Sinn Féin Clubs’.145 This was an impression (shared, incidentally, by the Inspector General of the RIC) that the organization wanted to prove false.

  Cumann na mBan emphatically saw itself as a military organization – its badge was formed by its initials, C na mB, resting on the barrel of a rifle. But it equally definitely specified that its military role was auxiliary. Brighid O’Mullane, the organizer for a vast area starting from Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, who found that girls’ parents were one of the biggest obstacles to recruitment, thought that they were reluctant ‘to accept the idea of a body of gun-women’. Yet, for her, the members of Cumann na mBan were ‘the pioneers in establishing what was undoubtedly a women’s auxiliary of an army’ – not quite so shocking perhaps.146 Whereas women had mainly been held back from the front line by male attitudes in 1916, after that they seem to have deliberately opted out. ‘There has always been work in connection with an army that is best done by women,’ argued Leabhar na mBan, ‘such as First Aid and the running of temporary hospitals. But modern warfare has shown the advantage of releasing as many men as possible for the actual firing line by getting women to look after such departments as cooking, catering, stretcher-bearing, and signalling: and in many cases dispatch carrying can be more safely done by women.’147

  Though the last of these suggestions would prove prophetic, at this point – and right into 1920 – Cumann na mBan was thinking in terms of conventional warfare. Still, it never tried to secure weapons for itself – even on the small scale achieved by the Volunteers before 1920. Rifle practice was dropped from the list of ‘suggested military activity�
� in the Cumann na mBan constitution as early as 1917, and though ‘cleaning and unloading of rifles’ was added in 1919, it would be replaced by ‘home nursing’ the following year. This made sense, up to a point: as Cumann na mBan did not intend to take part in armed combat, ‘there was little point in training their members in skills that would be of no use to them.’148 But it widened the symbolic distance between the men’s and women’s movements and, in a context where deadly weapons were increasingly prized, cannot have bolstered the latter’s prestige.

  The nature of the relationship – and of Cumann na mBan’s social profile – can be sensed in an instruction issued by the Cork Volunteer commander Tomás Mac Curtain some time in 1918, probably during the conscription crisis. ‘Write both Cumann na mBan sections at once for three ladies from each side (that is five in all) [sic] to cater for the men in this building [the Volunteer hall]. They will want to start in time to put the place in order, secure tables, etc. Only the six [sic] girls selected will be allowed in the building. They may hire a woman or two to do the rough work but that will be a matter for themselves.’149 The two organizations were undoubtedly very close. Brighid O’Mullane set up Cumann na mBan branches in her area by getting ‘the names of reliable girls’ from local Volunteer commanders.150 (Often they were the commander’s sisters or cousins.) But there was never any doubt which was the leader. In 1920 a Cumann na mBan organizer in Leitrim was frankly asked by one Volunteer commander, ‘do you expect me to trust these girls with the secrets of the IRA?’151

  Though its structure survived 1916 unscathed, it was at the same time both more centralized and less solidly articulated than that of the Volunteers. The Dublin Executive overshadowed the local branches. In 1918 the first attempt was made to fit Cumann na mBan branches with IV companies, but the adoption of military ranks was resisted for some time (mothers did not like their girls to join the ‘Irish WAAC’, it seems), and branches were run by presidents and secretaries, not by captains. In February 1919 the 1st Cork Brigade of the Volunteers wrote to the Cumann na mBan District Council asking it to consider ‘attaching a Branch of Cumann na mBan to each Company of Volunteers’, ideally covering the same district.152 But not until 1920 would a fully military structure be adopted, and then only in the most active areas. (Ten-woman branches, or sometimes squads of five, were assigned to each Volunteer company. They were commanded by captains, but still had secretaries and treasurers rather than adjutants or quartermasters. The organizational parallel went up to battalion level – the Cumann na mBan District Council – but no further; there was no Cumann na mBan tier equivalent to IRA brigade councils.)

  Cumann na mBan fell far short of matching the Volunteers on a unit-by-unit basis. While the IV Carlow Brigade had six battalions, totalling forty-six companies, for instance, Carlow Cumann na mBan had a single district council with twenty branches; south Leitrim had twenty-six Volunteer companies and sixteen Cumann na mBan branches. Overall, even after post-Truce expansion, Cumann na mBan mustered only eighty-five district councils (of variable strength), alongside the Volunteer total of nearly 300 battalions. So the organization’s instructions to its branch leaders remained somewhat theoretical: ‘the captain must keep in close touch with the Volunteer battalion or company officer, get his help in organising signalling and other classes, see that he knows how to get in touch quickly with mobilisers, and put herself under his orders in all military operations.’153 But organizational structure would not be the key link between the women’s and men’s forces. It is clear that women worked with the Volunteers primarily on the basis of personal contacts. Trust was vital, and the women trusted by Volunteers were their friends and relatives.

  There were signs that some in the organization were pushing for greater equality. At the 1918 Convention there were demands for definition of the relationship between Cumann na mBan and Volunteer officers, though the motive for this seems to have been to fend off Volunteer interference in Cumann na mBan activities. It has been suggested that ‘the younger women’ who joined as the conflict intensified ‘proved determined advocates of total militarization’, that is to say turning Cumann na mBan into a fighting force. But it is not clear how many did so. The call eventually issued at the 1921 Convention to run the organization on strictly military lines would be defeated.154 None of this is to suggest, of course, that the women’s view of their contribution to the struggle – as being the equal of the men’s – was not fundamentally correct. Had the kind of formal military combat still prioritized by the Cumann na mBan leadership actually taken place, things might have been different, but it was rendered more or less irrelevant in guerrilla war. In the sort of war that emerged, women often played a vital role, even if not the one originally envisaged.

  ‘A CERTAIN IDEAL OF FREEDOM’

  By the late autumn of 1918, in the view of the Inspector General of the RIC, ‘practically the entire Nationalist youth of both sexes’ had ‘become obsessed with the idea of an Irish Republic’.155 But just what they understood by this idea was less clear: British military intelligence suggested that it was ‘a kind of pious opinion which must be expressed at every meeting, but which nobody from de Valera down ever hopes to see realised’. It seems beyond doubt that, as it had long been, ‘the republic’ was ‘a slogan or a battle cry, rather than … a concrete objective’.156 But if there was, as has been perceptively suggested, a key shift from the ‘men of words’ who had led the 1916 rebellion to the ‘men of action’157 who organized the revolutionary movement at the end of the war, the implication might be that the ‘republic’ they built was concrete rather than abstract, practical rather than symbolic.

  Ideology does not figure prominently in most accounts of the radicalization and mobilization of the national movement. Ernie O’Malley held ‘a certain ideal of freedom’, but this was quite abstract, and in an odd sense negative. (The opposite of the ‘slavery’ that so many nationalist ballads equated (identified) with ‘English’ rule.) As he admitted later, he had ‘not one idea in my head as to policy. I know nothing of the application of freedom as I know nothing of the application of tyranny.’158 This left an extensive empty space for differing conceptions of the republic. The extraordinary public consumption of rebel memorabilia after 1916 has led some to see this new iconography as probably more influential than revolutionary ideas. If so, these symbols seem to have had varying substance. Irish republicanism certainly lacked the consistency of French or American political ideas; it has been said to hang together ‘in a logically anomalous but psychologically satisfying way’ – another manifestation perhaps of ‘elective affinity’. The American conception of the ‘masterless’ citizen, it has been suggested, never took root in Ireland.159

  When Sinn Féin adopted republicanism in 1917, it looked like a radical commitment, but for many Sinn Feiners it may have been less a revolutionary line than ‘a pragmatic device for winning international support’. America, France and other republics were viewed as potential allies, as was the newly republican Russia. De Valera certainly contended that it was only ‘as an Irish Republic that we have a chance of getting international recognition’.160 The somewhat awkward compromise adopted by Sinn Féin in 1917, that after achieving republican status the people could choose another form of government by referendum, showed how far the party still was from the doctrinaire commitment of the IRB – certainly while Griffith remained prominent in it. The formula was drafted by de Valera and Brugha, according to the labour leader William O’Brien (who knew Brugha well). When O’Brien asked Brugha if this meant that Griffith had ‘accepted the Republic’, Brugha replied, ‘He had to or walk the plank.’161

  Irish historical experience does seem to have engineered a kind of exceptionalism in the ideological sphere. The polarization of the middle class in nineteenth-century Europe – notably in France, ‘where village teacher and parish priest faced each other across a deep ideological divide’ – was absent in Ireland.162 Nationality trumped all political ideas, whether of left or right. I
rish nationality was embraced almost as a religious conviction, its truth self-evident. National sentiment was pervasive – a viscerally absorbed story of oppression and expropriation, based on an assumption of the ‘righteousness and exclusivity’ of a historically distinct people.163 Children were socialized into this worldview through family and school. Though the Volunteers and Sinn Féin often built history teaching into their programme after 1916 – the Belfast Volunteer leader Roger McCorley said that in the early days there was a ‘political commissioner’ attached to every company, whose job was to give a talk on Irish history after every parade – most members thought this superfluous.164 They knew it already. As an American diplomat remarked (and as so many of the participants’ memoirs make plain), ‘hardly an intelligent Irishman is to be found, in any walk of modern Irish life, who is not steeped in the history of his country.’165