Unlikely Rebels (23 page)

Sibling rivalry is not an uncommon human characteristic, and, in describing the fortunes of the Progressive League, we find great dissimilarity between the descriptions of involvement and responsibility in the League's affairs given by ‘John' in
The Years Flew By
and by Nellie in her Washington notes. ‘John's' summing up is given to absolutes and contains no reference to the part Nellie or her husband played:

A new organisation came into existence called the Progressive League. We set up a shop, the front part of which was devoted to Irish books, pamphlets, periodicals, postcards, badges and the usual propaganda material. This must have been 1918 because we had in the window a map which we used in the way that war maps were used at that time, by sticking pins with little flags to indicate the constituencies in which Sinn Féin were victorious in the election … I was in charge of the premises and was chief saleswoman. The back part was used for committee meetings and lectures. We had many visitors and recruited new people into the movement.
[5]

The ubiquitous ‘we' of this extract supposedly covers Joseph Donnelly and his wife, who were not only involved in the setting up of the League but whose shop it was and who are not even mentioned in the extract.

Nellie's record is fuller and, on balance, seems more accurate. Though it is a minor point, the Progressive League seems to have been started in 1916. Nevertheless, Nellie, too, excludes from her record the fact that ‘John' must have played an appreciable role in the League, given her longer stay in America and her journalistic and other contacts. Joseph Donnelly's premises were first used for the meetings; only when the membership swelled did they consider seeking bigger venues. They were not only attracting blue-collar workers (who, as Nellie recorded, gave generously from their limited means) but also the more well-heeled members of the Irish-American community, among them a society doctor, some of whose patients were among New York's wealthiest.

The meetings soon became an intrusion on the printing works, and Nellie had the job of finding a new venue, helped, she readily admitted, by a Mrs Hickey, a seasoned New Yorker. The premises they finally chose had a counter which served as a reception desk. Fired with 1916 anniversary zeal, Nellie lit small candles in the window before the patriots' portraits but the lights were quickly extinguished by order of a representative of the New York Police Department who told Nellie she was breaking the law by having naked lights in the window. She said he admonished her with a twinkle in his eye. Also, it was Nellie who the League sent to book the theatre for the monster meeting – very successfully, as has been seen.
[6]

‘John' could surely have spared Nellie a word of recognition in her summing up of the League in
The Years Flew By.
Perhaps this was due to the old nursery groupings, with Gabriel, Nellie and Ada being the ‘middle three', as Nellie sometimes called them, excluding the ‘babies', the youngest of whom was ‘John'? The chronological groupings may have been accentuated by the fact that Nellie and Ada, of the six sisters, remained Protestant, like their brothers, while ‘John', Grace, Muriel and Kate became Catholics. The split is there, even in the later correspondence of their middle age. However, leaving aside this different approach in recording the affairs of the Progressive League, it still remains obvious that all Isabella's ‘Yankee' daughters were fighting Ireland's cause, in one way or another, while their fellow republicans at home were mending gaps and erecting new patriotic fences for the struggle yet to come.

While Nellie, Ada and ‘John' Gifford had found their American work for Ireland greatly impeded since the USA had become Britain's ally in the Great War, at home Grace was increasingly finding herself a platform heroine against conscription. In fact, such proposed conscription, as Britain became desperate to fill the depleted trenches, became a boom time for Sinn Féin. Better to take your chance in an Irish ditch fighting for Ireland than in a French trench, gassed to death for England. Both Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George later admitted that economics rather than German expansion per se was the motivation for their part in this war. In Ireland, their reasons did not matter: the executions of Easter Week and incidents such as the hunger-strike deaths of Tom Ashe and Terence MacSwiney had killed any residual desire to fight on England's side, in any war, for any reason, among an increasing number of the population.

Notes

From the time of the Volunteer split of 1913, two sides, political and militant, ploughed individual furrows towards freeing Ireland. Paradoxically, it was the non-violent side, represented by Redmond's National Volunteers, who were responsible for the greater bloodshed – a substantial part of the 50,000 Irish who fought England's war in the deadly trenches for ‘the freedom of a small nation' – not Ireland, but, allegedly, Belgium.

During the years immediately following the Rising, while an uneasy sort of peace prevailed, Dublin Castle kept close watch and detailed documentation on even the merely cultural aspects of the Gaelic revival.
[1]
The tumultuous welcome that greeted the returned prisoners who had been imprisoned after the Rising, underlined for Britain the damage the executions and internments had done to its power.

After Easter 1916, republicans continued to take part in the democratic elections. Time and again, Sinn Féin nominees, even those in British prisons, defeated Redmondite candidates at by-elections. Furious reaction from the authorities included police raids, confiscation of arms and criminalisation of seditious matter. Moreover, no blind eye was turned any more to manoeuvres or marches about the streets of Dublin.

Following the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis on 25 October 1917 where Éamon de Valera was elected president of the party, on 27 October delegates also met in Dublin to formally reorganise the Irish Volunteers, electing de Valera as President, Cathal Brugha as Chief of Staff and Michael Collins as Director of Organisation. The first two offices sounded more imposing, but, in the coming war, it was Collins who effectively ran the Volunteers.

A ‘German Plot' was allegedly ‘discovered' by Dublin Castle in May 1918, which accused some of the republican leaders of holding secret talks with the Germans: de Valera, Count Plunkett, Griffith and, in fact, the entire leadership of Sinn Féin, were jailed as a result. Collins was busy all over the country, using his Frongoch contacts to weave together a loyal, clever web of espionage agents. He could play the British at their own game with his men in state and semi-state posts – his biggest coup was placing some of them as detectives into the DMP. Collins' planned guerrilla tactics – not open warfare – would be swift, sly and utterly necessary, given the IRA's (as the Volunteers had become known) dearth of arms. He was born for the job, but this powerful, charismatic man – like all others – had his flaws: he seemed to disparage Plunkett when he faulted the strategy of Easter Week conceived by his commander (and civilian employer), despite Connolly's approval of its garrisoned, ring-around-the-city plan, the plan that has since been defended, never more admirably than by the professional soldier Colonel P. J. Hally.
[2]

It was not as if guerrilla warfare, however brilliant a tool in Collins' hands, was something new in Ireland. Over the centuries, young rebels such as Rory O'More, Art MacMurrough Kavanagh, Fiaich McHugh O'Byrne and even Collins' contemporary, Liam Mellows, had seen its appropriateness. Plunkett certainly had been as well aware of this as Collins, but it took the dramatic GPO stand and the subsequent executions to rouse the spirit of nationalism. There would have been no Frongoch without Easter Week, and there would have been no safe houses without Frongoch and the executions.

The end of the First World War in November 1918 precipitated a general election, and both Kate and Grace worked hard for the Sinn Féin candidates. Then the fateful decision was made: that elected Sinn Féin candidates would not take their seats at Westminster. They swept the electoral board, winning more than twice the seats of the combined other parties, and the first meeting of Dáil Éireann was held in the Round Room of the Mansion House on 21 January 1919. They elected de Valera as president of the First Dáil, ratified the Republic declared at the GPO, voted in a constitution and declared a Bill of Rights. Some of the elected members were in His Majesty's custody, some on the run. For example, Éamon de Valera was still incarcerated in Lincoln Jail in England. Collins decided to set up an escape in February 1919. A key was duplicated, put in a cake and sent in to the prisoner. De Valera escaped and presided at the second session of the First Dáil in Dublin. The British found the whole idea of an Irish parliament absurdly pretentious and were comfortable in the belief that the IRA was dormant and that this ridiculous Dáil Éireann would not last.

Yet the scene outside the Mansion House on that historic day should have given them food for thought. Dawson Street was chaotic, with crowds milling about the Dáil's first meeting place, almost opposite the IRA's headquarters, which had housed Nellie's ‘Burra' office. There were two policing bodies keeping order: the
de jure force
, the DMP, was using all its efforts to keep the trams going, and a de facto policing body, the Irish Volunteers, was trying to keep the crowds orderly.
[3]

From then until the end of the War of Independence there was a duplication of offices of state, one appointed by Westminster and one by Dáil Éireann, which from then on met secretly, either in the Mansion House (with escape routes carefully planned) or in a private house in Mountjoy Square.

The Giffords had many friends and acquaintances in the First Dáil: Grace's father-in-law, Count Plunkett, became Minister for Foreign Affairs; Arthur Griffith, who had ferried them around Dublin Bay and sponsored ‘John' in her early republican writings, was Minister for Home Affairs; Countess Markievicz, their friend and Nellie's commandant at the Royal College of Surgeons, was Secretary for Labour; Michael Collins, who had brought the protective gun from Joseph Plunkett to Grace, was Secretary for Finance; Larry Ginnell, the cattle-rustling MP so admired by Nellie and ‘John', was Minister for Propaganda and was also, appropriately, on a committee to consider land policy; Thomas MacDonagh's brother Joe was on a select committee to determine financing the Dáil.

During the August 1920 (private) session of the First Dáil, the oath of allegiance was administered to two other friends of the Giffords from America: Dr Patrick McCartan and Liam Mellows. The Giffords had not only got them out of jail but had also helped to facilitate their passage from America. Dr McCartan was appointed Envoy to the USA.

The financing of Dáil Éireann started with the initial loan of £2,000 made by Anna, sister of The O'Rahilly, in January 1919. In April of that year, Collins was given carte blanche ‘[w]ith further reference to Dáil to receive all monies which he can obtain from the proceeds of Anti-Conscription refunds, the issue of Republican Bonds, and all other sources for the purposes of Dáil, and to apply these monies to such specific subjects as the Ministry (when not reduced below five in number) shall unanimously approve'.

The funding from then on was a conglomerate affair, amalgamating the great generosity both from the Irish abroad, especially in America, and from those at home, even on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Some of the better-off Irish citizens (such as the O'Dalys of Limerick) paid income tax directly to Dáil Éireann. The money flowed in, despite British suppression of newspapers carrying advertisements for the first Dáil national loan. Total trust was involved, as instanced by the occasion when Daithí Ó Donnachadha, Secretary to the Trustees of Dáil Éireann, ran from a raid by British forces in Limerick, carrying in his suitcase the considerable Dáil loan money that had just been checked by George Clancy, newly elected mayor of the city. Ó Donnachadha deliberately took a first-class carriage to Dublin the next morning and read his newspaper with apparent calm during a search which did not include first-class passengers. He stoically smoked a cigar while the headlines before his startled eyes told him that Mayor Clancy and others had been murdered by Auxiliaries during the raid from which he had barely escaped, complete with the precious suitcase resting snugly on the rack above, which might well have been the object of the raid. The amateur handling of this money obviously relied on people of honour. Kate Gifford-Wilson was such a person and was appointed a registrar of the Dáil loan. (
Her husband, Walter Wilson, had fallen victim to the Spanish flu epidemic.)

The Sinn Féin courts illustrate one of the most successful and intriguing duplications of offices of state from the time. The English system of justice, administered with bias and selectivity over the centuries, with rigged juries and hanging judges such as Peter the Packer, held all the paraphernalia of law.
[4]
Theirs was the magnificent Four Courts overlooking the Liffey, as well as various, dignified-looking halls of justice about the country; they had also their retinue of bewigged and begowned barristers and judges. Sinn Féin had none of these and held its courts in schoolhouses and kitchens in townlands and villages. What that party did have, however, was the allegiance of the people, who recognised these makeshift courts and shunned the others which were, from then on, used generally only by those known as ‘West Britons'. So, around a kitchen table, with an oil lamp for light, land disputes were settled in a country where land was much more than just wealth and where many a lifelong vendetta had ensued over as trivial a matter as the right to cross a ditch. The litigants almost always accepted the courts' decisions, even if they favoured the landlords. The soul of the nation was lodged firmly in the parliament that called itself Dáil Éireann.

The directive issued by Dublin Castle to all Irish newspapers, that the proceedings of Dáil Éireann were not to be reported, was ignored. The various streams of labour, politics, militancy and culture were in confluence, making for the harbour of freedom. Anything Britain could do at that stage was to prove merely a stopgap to this great, historic flood.

The IRA had been dormant since the Rising, it was true, with just three of its supporters killed and several RIC wounded in minor skirmishes about the country. However, on the day the First Dáil sat, the sound of rifle and revolver shots broke the still air at a quarry in Soloheadbeg, not far from Tipperary town. These were the first (unauthorised) volleys fired in the often brutal, though ultimately successful, War of Independence. The shots came from the rifle of Seán Treacy and the revolvers of Dan Breen and Seamus Robinson, all members of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade of the IRA. They had hoped to capture what proved to be 160 pounds of gelignite destined for the quarry. The IRA men knew that, apart from two civilian ‘loaders', there were only two armed RIC men to guard the consignment en route from Tipperary town. The plan was to ambush the small party near the quarry. In his autobiography,
My Fight for Irish Freedom
, Dan Breen stated that the plan was to ambush
only
, with no intent to kill, but that the RIC men reached for their weapons, and, in reaction to this unexpected resistance, fatal shots were fired and the two servants of the Crown lay dead on the roadway.
[5]
However, Breen later left a personal statement in the Bureau of Military History to the effect that Treacy and he had deliberately set out to kill the police escort, members of the most important force of their enemies.
[6]
Their deaths would start the war for freedom. One reaction to this statement has been the suggestion that Breen might have regarded it as an honour to have kick-started the war which ultimately brought and end to British rule in Ireland. Whatever the reasons, the shooting of the RIC men was a very quick, physical reaction, and a blueprint for many of the incidents of the ensuing war.

Owing to comments from Breen about the shooting a price of £10,000 was put on his head. It was never collected, but Tipperary town was earmarked for special attention: fairs and markets were forbidden, the roads and lanes of Tipperary were alive with manned lorries and the hated vehicles nicknamed black marias, and even an aeroplane was used to try to spot the three marked men.

But this episode was like a rallying cry to the IRA all over Ireland. By the end of December 1919, eighteen RIC men had been killed and the more remote RIC barracks were being closed. Retirement from the force was rife and recruitment negligible. British reaction, allegedly ‘unofficial', was crude and violent. When a jury refused to find the death of an ambushed soldier ‘murder', 200 British soldiers inflicted damage on the jury members
'
houses to the extent of £3,000. No one was brought to account. The IRA continued raids for arms; the British raided for insurgents.

Atrocities multiplied. Tomás MacCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork and Officer Commanding Cork No. 1 Brigade of the IRA, was shot in front of his family; the unionists in the north of Ireland conducted pogroms against the nationalists, who were unprotected by either the British army or the police. Volunteers for the depleted RIC had to be found in England and came to Ireland with no training and a makeshift uniform, the mixed colouring of which gave them the feared name of the Black and Tans. In July 1920, an elite corps under General Crozier arrived, armed with bayonets and revolvers. On 14 October, Seán Treacy (of the Soloheadbeg raid) was shot in Dublin's Abbey Street; eleven days later, Terence MacSwiney, who had succeeded Tomás MacCurtain as Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger strike following a seventy-three-day fast; on 1 November, Kevin Barry, an eighteen-year-old medical student, was hanged in Mountjoy Jail followed by the hanging of eight more IRA men. There was dismayed world reaction to the deaths of MacSwiney and Barry. British prestige abroad was low, yet Lloyd George was foolish enough to boast, on 9 November, ‘we have murder by the throat'.

Twelve days later, Collins organised the assassination of fourteen British agents who had been sent over to wipe out Collins' own men. The response was predictable: three men, Dick McKee, Peadar Clancy and Conor Clune, were shot ‘while attempting to escape' according to the official report. One of the men, Clune, was entirely innocent. Their bodies showed bruises and marks consistent with bayoneting. They were formally buried, with Collins acting as a pall-bearer. A still more dramatic reaction came from the Castle, however; the Black and Tans went to Croke Park where a Gaelic football match was being played. They mounted a machine gun and indiscriminately shot into the crowd. Twelve people died and sixty were injured. The retaliation earned the name of ‘Bloody Sunday'.