Unlikely Rebels (12 page)

The Plunkett daughters did not receive the same educational care as their brothers, an approach typical of the day. Allowed to sit in on their brothers' lessons with tutors, a few terms at the Sacred Heart schools in Leeson Street and at Mount Anville comprised their formal education. But they also had access to their father's huge store of books, which was their Stonyhurst, and they emerged well educated.

Irish winters had such a poor effect on Joseph's condition that his mother took him to Paris, where he studied under the Marists at Passy. He also wintered in Italy, Sicily and Malta and spent some time with his sister in Algiers where, apart from learning Arabic, he indulged in both dancing and skating. In fact, while there in 1911, his skating was considered so skilful that he was offered a job as instructor at the largest skating rink in Cairo and was youthfully tempted by the magnificent white uniform that went with the job. Sartorially speaking he was never a dandy but, nevertheless, had suits ‘of good cloth, worn carelessly'.
[18]

After the War of Independence, when the Free State was established, portraits of the executed leaders of 1916 were displayed on school walls. What the students saw of Joseph Plunkett – always called Joseph Mary Plunkett – was a schoolboyish face in pince-nez amongst the group of Proclamation signatories. There was no way of knowing then that most pictures of his adult life had been deliberately destroyed when he set out with a false passport to join Sir Roger Casement in Germany and that this old photograph seemed to have been superimposed, not very flatteringly, on the official portrait of the other signatories.

Nellie Gifford, who obviously regarded him as her favourite brother-in-law, said:

Data is a cold affair, for the Professors. History will be cold on the warm, human motive that impelled them [the Irish rebels] towards their target, or the odd kinks, loves and capabilities – all in short that make the man live on. Ignoring these endearing little items leaves the subject on the dissecting table for all time … Joe was a very devout Catholic and a minor mystic and a minor poet. He himself would be the last to say otherwise … He inherited a weakened physique that housed a courageous and generous personality. Whenever there was a bit of fun, as at the amateur theatricals held in a hall owned by his mother, he was keenly attracted. Above all he was always interested. Any topic carrying your own particular slant gained his eager attention, his quiet attention, as if he must lean a little out of the chatting circle, retiring (from it) and relishing (your slant) to the full. He was bigger than his memory will probably be.
[19]

Dr Theo McWeeney said of him, ‘he had rather untidy, silky hair … his bright darting eyes lit up his face. His hands were long and delicate, graceful hands. He was a man who spoke quickly, gaily, full of enthusiasms … He had an interior life of a great intensity.'
[20]

Joseph Plunkett's sense of humour was puckish. In Algiers, on losing a broken piece of Celtic jewellery in the sand, he remarked, ‘That will give food for thought if an archaeologist finds it some day.' When very young, his party piece was to sit on a chair, quite still, arms rigidly at his side, and let his dextrous feet do a spirited jig or reel to the Irish music.

Joseph Plunkett had fallen in love before meeting Grace Gifford. The girl was Columba O'Carroll, daughter of a doctor in the Fitzwilliam area. Her family disapproved because of her young suitor's ill-health, but the romance inspired a very beautiful poem in
The Circle and the Sword
, the collection of his work selected and seen through publication by Thomas MacDonagh while Joseph was in Algiers in 1911. His poem about his first, youthful love was written to Columba (his ‘dove'):

White dove of the wild dark eyes
Faint silver flutes are calling
From the night where the star mists rise
And fireflies falling
Tremble in starry wise,
Is it you they are calling
?
[21]

The two young men, Thomas the senior by nine years, met when the Countess sought a tutor to teach Joseph Irish. They took to each other instantly, sharing a love of literature and an abiding sense of nationalism; the people of the Donegal Gaeltacht, where they studied Irish, recalled them proudly and affectionately. Thomas and Joseph also shared an irreverent nickname for Pearse. They felt his inspirational dream for Ireland was not well served by his occasional impracticality and referred to him affectionately as ‘Pop' – ‘Poor Old Pearse'. Despite that, he inspired them. His dream for Ireland was theirs too.

Joseph lived for two and a half years with his sister Geraldine in one of the Plunkett houses on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook. Since he was not well after his return from Algiers, it was felt that this arrangement was desirable for his full recovery. She was very fond of him, her eldest brother, and also very much aware of his wide-ranging interests, which included motorbikes, art, the wireless, wine, playing the violin, poetry and the study of mysticism. He had even found time, in 1906/07, to design the Irish postage stamp which depicted a neat, Celtic cross. It was sometimes found postmarked on envelopes beside Edward VII stamps, cocking a snook at the monarch, as it were, because it was, at that time, unofficial. It appeared again in blue and black or green and black around Easter Week 1916. Later it became an official stamp of a free Ireland.

Among Plunkett's favourite mystics was the irrepressible woman-before-her-time St Teresa of Ávila. They had much in common, Joseph Plunkett and Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, a young Irish rebel and the first woman doctor of the Catholic Church: both from wealthy backgrounds, both suffering ill health, which they determinedly ignored, both much travelled, both as much at home with the practical side of life as with its spiritual dimension, both humorous and warmly human, both determined to change that which they saw as wrong.

The ‘Columba verse' indicates how the young poet set about expressing his love for his lady. But it is his poem where he tries to express his love for Christ that is best remembered. He is the supreme pantheist: everything in nature reminds him of his Redeemer: flowers, stars, skies, birds, rocks and trees:

I see his blood upon the rose
and in the stars the glory of his eyes.
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
his tears fall from the skies.

If it is true that we are known by our friends, then the goodly company who constituted Joseph's mind-companions, including not only Teresa of Ávila but also St Thomas More, St Francis and St John of the Cross, stamp him with a certain greatness which would have benefited his country eventually had he lived. It is sometimes said that he was already dying before his execution, but he had recovered repeatedly from such attacks. Another visit to a warmer climate might once more have restored his health, and, besides, by 1916 penicillin was little more than a decade around the corner.

For all that, this frail revolutionary did a lot of living in a short space of time: missions to Germany and America, and an insurrection, of which he was Director of Military Operations. Time may have been running out for Joseph Plunkett, but he grasped the passing hours and defied his mortality. No leader, however physically robust, could have managed more in the short time left to him.

Notes

The céilís, concerts, drama, Gaelic sport and Irish classes and romances were largely convivial, social aspects of the Irish Ireland dream, yet, distinct from that, with the borders inevitably blurring at times, were the starker features of what was evolving around the country. ‘John' Gifford wrote of the men and women involved: ‘Some were in Sinn Féin; others in the Irish Republican Brotherhood; others in the Inghínidhe na hÉireann. Still more were in the ranks of the Gaelic League or the GAA. Within a few years these scattered groups had coalesced, and an Irish revolutionary force was in being.'
[1]

These were obvious milestones on the road to rebellion. After 1913, it became obvious that the influence of the republican press, the bitterness engendered by the lock-out strike and the consequent formation of the Citizen Army were slanting events closer to armed confrontation. At the same time, the unionists in the northern counties, reacting to the ‘threat' of John Redmond's dream of Home Rule for Ireland, decided to arm. Apart from private purchases from Germany of arms and ammunition by wealthy unionists, £100,000 – a huge sum in those days – was subscribed to buy the arms that were smuggled into Larne, County Antrim, in April 1914. The importers deliberately cut off public communications on the day of the arms arrival, and, in a convoy of motor cars, 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition were distributed across Ulster. No police stopped the convoy, though what they did was illegal. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the Conservative Party, the unionist Ulster landlords – none of them wanted Home Rule either, and this illegal army had their tacit support. Even more significantly, the British army officers in the Curragh, County Kildare, mutinied and refused to march against the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). They resigned their commissions rather than oppose those they perceived to be friends.

They were to have no such misgivings when the nationalists in the south proceeded to arm. In fact, the UVF did the south of Ireland militants a favour: they pointed the way. Three months later, in July 1914, a nationalist Protestant, Erskine Childers, lent his yacht,
The Asgard
, to enable the importation into Howth Harbour, County Dublin, of a much humbler cargo than that at Larne. The subscribers of the purchase price of £1,500, in comparison with the north of Ireland's £100,000, were fellow Anglo-Irish Protestants: Sir Roger Casement, the Honourable Mary Spring Rice (a daughter of Lord Monteagle and sister of a British ambassador), Alice Stopford Green (later a senator in Seanad Éireann) and a Captain Berkeley. In all 1,500 rifles were bought, of which 900 came on
The Asgard.
That figure made the purchase price approximately £1 per rifle, so it is obvious they were not the best rifles in the world. One might even wonder if they were not relics of the Napoleonic wars. No matter how it is viewed, numerically or qualitatively, this was David confronting Goliath. Apart from the £100,000 UVF importation, the republicans also faced the weaponry of the three official armed agencies supporting unionists, north and south. On one small island there were now nine ‘armies':

1. the British army of occupation (armed)
2. the Royal Irish Constabulary (armed)
3. the Dublin Metropolitan Police (armed)
4. the Ulster Volunteer Force (armed)

On the republican side, minimally or not at all armed:

5. the Irish Republican Brotherhood (
IRB)
6. Na Fianna (a sort of boy-scout nationalist movement set up in Dublin in 1909 by Bulmer Hobson and Countess Markievicz among others)
7. the Irish Citizen Army (ICA)
8. the Hibernian Rifles (a small, exclusively Catholic militia based in Dublin)
9. the Irish Volunteer Force (which included the IRB)

Goliath had far superior numbers and equipment. David had 700 years of resentment, a dream of freedom and, of course, 1,500 weapons worth approximately £1 each. It is interesting to contrast the smooth, unopposed importation passage of the huge UVF purchase at Larne with that at Howth, where the gunrunners were almost entirely without transport. The Fianna had brought along a small horse and cart and a trek cart – a very narrow, short, covered cart, manually powered. In a photograph of them running along with their quaint wagonette, it looks like a mobile fruit stall from the Moore Street market. There were also some bicycles, whose crossbars neatly accommodated a rifle, and the rest were just hidden under jackets. While all this compares pathetically with the Larne fleet of cars, headlights ablaze to illuminate the scene, nevertheless the Fianna's arrangements were adequate for the delivery, and the strange little wagon proved very useful, taking a major stash of the rifles. Darrell Figgis and Conor O'Brien had been involved in the purchase of the guns at Antwerp. Childers' wife, Molly, in the yacht, was to wear a crimson garment as a signal to the waiting party, which included Mary Spring Rice, Gordon Shephard (an English friend of Childers) and two fishermen from Tory Island.

Also at Howth that day was Cathal Brugha with a group of his IRB men to guard the shipment. Another group of approximately 800 Irish Volunteers had allegedly made a routine march from Fairview to arrive ‘coincidentally' at Howth. On the way back to the city with their haul they were stopped in the Raheny-Clontarf area by W. A. Harrel, Assistant Commissioner of the DMP, backed up by a large contingent of Scottish Borderers. He demanded surrender of the arms, but Bulmer Hobson, who was in charge of the delivery, refused. Hobson left Thomas MacDonagh and Darrell Figgis to argue with the Assistant Commissioner while he slipped away to move his men quietly and quickly through fields and round the backs of houses, each carrying rifles. A word of pity may be allowed W. A. Harrel: the man was only doing his duty and he was confronted by two of the ablest talkers in the movement. MacDonagh, the persuasive university lecturer, a wordsmith by profession, and Figgis, a worthy debater in any company, used their ‘blarney' to give time to the fleeing convoy. In the event, only nineteen rifles were lost. It was an occasion for glee, but unfortunately the day was to end on a tragic note. Dubliners, having heard of the successful manoeuvre, jeered the Scottish Borderers as they marched back to barracks along the Liffey quays. Hasty tempers combined with tired, irate, trigger-happy soldiers, left three people dead: the first casualties, it could be said, of the War of Independence, unarmed and shot without trial.

Superintendent Brangan, in charge of a contingent of the DMP who had been ordered to Howth, was brought before a tribunal which accused him, because he was Irish, of turning a blind eye to the dispersal of the guns. He was summarily dismissed and deprived of his pension rights. On appeal, his conviction was quashed and his job and pension restored.
[2]

Some Howth residents were given weapons to store. They were instructed to keep the weapons oiled and serviceable. One such ‘minder' was Molly Brohoon, who eventually went on the run.
[3]

Another very different episode took place the following year, edging Ireland towards use of those imported arms. Words can undoubtedly be weapons, and never were they more so than when Pádraig Pearse stood before those assembled in Glasnevin Cemetery, in 1915, at the interment of the old Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, whose remains had been brought from America. It was, at least partly, an orchestrated exercise in emotional political blackmail, and the conductor was Thomas MacDonagh. The occasion had all the ingredients for drama: one of the revered, though defeated, ‘Bold Fenian Men', O'Donovan Rossa, had been brought home for burial in his native land. There was dignity and a reverence for the old warrior in the thousands who lined the route and in the marching feet representing every Irish Ireland ideology and every organisation, however insignificant, involved in the movement.

If the funeral itself was impressive, Pearse's oration at the grave was electrifying. Even the cadence of his words was intrinsically dramatic, and the concluding triad rang out unforgettably in the hushed air, challenging the might of England with its simple thirteen words:

The fools, the fools, the fools: they have left us our Fenian dead.

Pearse, the poet and dreamer, who was certainly no Sarsfield mili-tarily speaking, mesmerised his listeners with his monosyllabic challenge. It was a defining day in Irish history.
[4]

Reaction around the city was divided, as in the Gifford household: the daughters deeply moved and involved, their mother indignant at such fuss about a
Fenian
and their father feeling, perhaps, a little uneasy about the future.

Notes