Authors: Gabriel Doherty
This strain of invective was, therefore, sustained by the party right up to the eve of the Rising. When that uprising materialised out of the blue, it was immediately labelled as both ‘Sinn Féin’ and ‘pro-German’, using language honed over the previous eighteen months. That the rebels were Sinn Féiners was, for party speakers, axiomatic. That they were pro-German was corroborated by the reference to ‘gallant allies in Europe’ in the Proclamation of the Republic and by events on the Kerry coast – the arrest of Casement and the sinking of the
Aud.
The rebels struck at the heart of the party’s ‘pro-England’ wartime political strategy. As John Dillon put it in his famous parliamentary speech of 11 May:
I say that these men, misguided as they were, have been our bitterest enemies. They have held us up to public odium as traitors to our country because we have supported you at this moment and have stood by you in this great war.
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III
There was, however, another party attitude towards the Sinn Féiners, which was apparent in the months before the Rising. For all that they were political opponents, individual Sinn Féiners did receive sympathy and support from many constitutional nationalists if their actions led to their being prosecuted by the authorities. As an example of this, in the second half of 1915 a succession of resolutions was put up at council meetings, protesting against the arrest and deportation to Britain of Irish Volunteer organisers. Though many of these resolutions were blocked or amended by Irish party stalwarts as Sinn Féin-inspired, they often produced heated debate and expressions of sympathy from individuals who were still clearly constitutional nationalists. In a few cases, including Sligo corporation, the Long-ford guardians and the Roscommon town commission, the resolutions passed. The pro-party newspaper the
Western Nationalist
(set up in Boyle as recently as 1908 to counter Jasper Tully’s vitriolic, anti-party
Roscommon Herald
)
criticised what it saw as injustice. Under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), military officers could order people out of the country if they were thought to be hindering recruiting. It was unjust that any man could be deported simply because he preached politics with which the military disagreed.
24
More widespread, within the five counties studied here, was sympathy for local men who suffered at the hands of the authorities. In Westmeath, at the beginning of September 1915, a young man named Edward Moraghan was at Mullingar railway station when he got into a row with a group of soldiers. He called them cowards to enlist, said that England should fight her own battles and was promptly arrested. He was subsequently sentenced by magistrates to three months’ hard labour. The sentence triggered considerable criticism. In particular, the treatment of a young man seen as hot-tempered but respectable (with two brothers away in the army and the only remaining support for his farmer father) was contrasted with the impunity with which English strikers and ‘conscriptionist’ critics of the war were allowed to operate. Patrick McKenna, the UIL national director for south Westmeath and a protégé of John Hayden, briefly resigned in protest from Westmeath County Council until the lord lieutenant remitted Moraghan’s sentence.
25
More seriously, two local Volunteer leaders were arrested in Co. Sligo in November. In Tobercurry, Patrick Dyar was charged with speaking against recruiting and possessing anti-recruiting documents. Dyar, a book-keeper,
had persuaded thirty two local men to sign a document pledging that they would resist conscription even at the cost of their lives. He received one month in prison. On his release in December he was greeted with the traditional torch-light procession and band parade. As the
Western Nationalist
put it, ‘poor hot-headed Irishmen are safer prey’ than English labour leaders.
26
Rather more dramatic was the case of Alex McCabe, one of Dyar’s few fellow Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) men in Co. Sligo. McCabe was charged with possessing explosives on railway premises. When arrested, he was in possession of forty two gelignite cartridges, twenty detonators, five coils of fuse wire, an automatic pistol and a list of arms purchases.
27
This was, as the local press reported it, a ‘sensation’, and McCabe was taken to Dublin, under heavy escort, where he was eventually tried in February 1916. McCabe’s case epitomised the confusion of local opinion about Sinn Féiners. As an anti-war activist and Volunteer, he had been an irksome rival to the Irish party – in July 1915 he had been suspended from his teaching post by the local parish priest, Rev. O’Grady of Keash, because of his ‘objectionable political activity’.
28
When he became a prisoner, however, he became a nationalist victim in British hands. A ‘McCabe Indemnity Fund’ was set up and the
Sligo Champion
printed a brief appeal for contributions.
29
The Sligo
MP John O’Dowd asked parliamentary questions about his constituent’s conditions of imprisonment and terms of trial; J.P. Farrell even visited him in prison, on the pretext that he was the nephew of one of his own Longford constituents.
30
Such gestures of support, however, were as nothing to that of the Dublin jury, which accepted McCabe’s defence that the explosives were for fishing, ignored the judge’s direction and after twenty minutes’ deliberation acquitted him.
31
The main cause célèbre just before the Rising was not local, however, but was in nearby King’s County (Offaly), in Tullamore. On 20 March 1916, Sinn Féiners in the town were trapped in their Volunteer Hall by a hostile crowd. Stones were thrown and shots were then fired from the hall. The crowd dispersed, but the police tried to enter the hall to disarm the Sinn Féiners. One police sergeant was shot and seriously wounded and thirteen men were subsequently charged with attempted murder.
32
Ten of these were still untried and under arrest at the time of the Rising. The anti-party
Midland Reporter
, controlled by the inveterate conspiracy-theorist Tully brothers, demanded to know who had supplied Union Jacks to the mob and had started them on their mission to attack the Volunteer Hall. However, it was the pro-war, pro-party
Westmeath Independent
that most strongly defended the Sinn Féiners.
33
The scuffle should never have taken
place: both the police and Sinn Féiners had acted foolishly. Patience and not coercion was needed to win over young men and if England had not been able to win over all the elements of Irish life, was it to be wondered at? The lever moving Sinn Féin was not pro-Germanism but love of country, ‘for, above all the wrangling in connection with the Sinn Féin movement, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is the product of patriotic inspiration’.
34
The cases of Moraghan, Dyar, McCabe and the Tullamore men all triggered sympathy for individuals, if not for the Sinn Féin movement as a whole, but only once they had become prisoners of the police and ‘Dublin Castle’. Many of the constitutional nationalists who followed these cases had themselves clashed repeatedly with the authorities over the years; a significant number had been imprisoned and some were still highly-regarded former Fenians. Moreover, such arrests occurred during a period in which repeated calls for active Irish participation in the war did not generate popular enthusiasm. The local refrain in late 1915 and early 1916 was that the war was not one of ‘sentiment’. The majority of Irishmen were indifferent. As the
Longford Leader
put it at the beginning of 1916, it was ‘never a peoples’ war’ and ‘we see no prospect for an immediate end to our cruel period of suspense’.
35
The war itself was perceived to be going badly. Nothing occurred to change the general view that it would be long and its cost enormous. Recruiting in provincial Ireland, outside of its larger towns, remained slow. Politically, the perception was reinforced that nationalists were ‘mere puppets in a continuously losing game’:
36
the operation of home rule was stalled indefinitely; taxes were raised; public services cut; and bitter, unionist enemies admitted into the coalition government formed in May 1915. Throughout 1915 the fear of military conscription was pervasive, as was the belief that its imposition would end nationalist Ireland’s support for the war.
In this period before the Easter Rising, the sense of victimhood and anglophobia that had long permeated nationalist political language was given full expression, not just in the ‘mosquito press’ of the anti-war opposition, but throughout the party-supporting press. This took the form of incessant complaints and denunciations of Tories, ‘conscriptionists’, the congested districts board, Dublin Castle, orangemen, the war office and the Ulster division. Consistently, such complaints were suffused with the belief that nationalist Ireland was treated unfairly relative to Ulster and to ‘England’. Such a state of anglophobic hostility was at variance with the hopes and outlook of John Redmond.
37
His party might still pledge its
loyalty to the ‘leader of the Irish race’, but the tone of much of the comment from its leading figures, both national and local, was distinctly sour. At the beginning of 1916, for example, the
Western Nationalist
wrote of John Dillon that ‘there was a touch of the old, rebel spirit’ in a parliamentary speech that Dillon made against conscription. Dillon declaimed that if England had treated Ireland decently in the past she would now have far more Irishmen fighting her battles. Incompetent officers had sacrificed Irish regiments at Gallipoli. ‘I tell you that before this [Military Service] bill is passed we will demand their blood at the hands of the government.’
38
At the local level, the mood was captured in a letter to the press at the end of 1915 from Patrick McKenna, the UIL national director who had so angrily protested about Moraghan’s gaol term (and who would, in 1917, be the party’s unsuccessful candidate in the South Longford by-election). McKenna was incensed because an official order had been made to control the sale of shotgun cartridges. The whole attitude behind this order was one of ‘we cannot trust the Irish’. While, he wrote, 250,000 Irishmen could fight for the empire, in Ireland they could not be trusted to shoot snipe. Ireland was just as entitled to be an armed nation as any of the small nations fighting in the war. McKenna thanked God for being ‘what they call an agitator … Whatever we gained was by agitation while we uniformly lost by moderation.’ Referring to the arrested and deported Volunteers, he stated that there was no fair play for Ireland under DORA – an Irish anti-war dissident would get three to six months in jail while his Scottish equivalent got only five days. McKenna concluded, re-affirming his own political loyalties: ‘I may mention that I am not in any sense a pro-German or a Sinn Féiner.’
39
IV
Over the winter of 1915–16, political hostility to Sinn Féiners, therefore, co-existed with disillusionment with the war, outbursts of antipathy to England and sympathy for fellow nationalists in trouble. As a result, the subsequent response of the Irish party to the Easter Rising was anything but homogeneous. This is not to say that the rebellion was approved of: as already seen, it was condemned across the local nationalist press. Nevertheless, party comment on the Rising, even before the succession of executions and mass provincial arrests, made it clear that there were different levels of culpability among the rebels. It also sought to assign blame away
from them and emphasised Ireland’s victimhood. Calls for mercy and attacks on Ulster (particularly on Sir Edward Carson and the UVF) were both commonplace.
Such an emphasis was prominent in the
Westmeath Independent
as early as 29 April, before any of the executions and when the Dublin nationalist press was still unobtainable. This paper’s condemnation of the Rising has already been noted, as has its immediate analysis of the threat posed to home rule. Its owner, Thomas Chapman, was a Protestant home ruler and Westmeath County Councillor who had two sons serving in the army. Its editor, Michael MacDermott-Hayes, was secretary of the south Westmeath UIL. Its leading article made it clear that the Rising was the action of ‘a section of irresponsibles’, but then went on to state that the Rising would almost certainly not have happened if home rule had been in operation (if it had happened, it would have been suppressed by Ireland alone, just as de Wet’s 1915 rebellion in South Africa was suppressed without any need for imperial forces). The key people to blame for the uprising were Sir Edward Carson, for legitimising and justifying physical force, and James Larkin, the wild Dublin socialist. The paper contrasted the ‘mistaken ideas of patriotism’ of the Irish Volunteers with the ‘pure scoundrelism’ of the socialist Citizen Army – only the latter were looting in Dublin. ‘A lot of regret must be for the young men who have been unfortunately led into this business.’
40
A week later, the paper developed these themes. It still lamented what it called ‘an outbreak of Larkinism’ and an epidemic of madness in Dublin (it was not an Irish rebellion), but it now linked the rebels with the tradition of Irish ‘valour’. ‘These young men are Irishmen. They are the class from whom has been drawn the Irish soldier, who has made the world ring with his valour.’ It also made an explicit plea for mercy and for there to be no more executions. ‘Notwithstanding their crime, and it cannot be minimized, it is the duty of Ireland to plead for mercy for the misguided fellows dragged into this movement.’ The crime of all the rebels was no worse than that of de Wet in South Africa. ‘Mercy for the men; punishment, if it must be, for the leaders – but not the punishment of death!’
41