A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913–1923

By Diarmaid Ferriter

The renowned Irish historian delivers “an excellent scholarly reevaluation” of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the turbulent decade that followed (Library Journal).

On Easter Monday of 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood launched an armed uprising against British rule that would continue for six days. But Easter Rising was only the beginning of an ongoing revolutionary struggle. In A Nation and Not a Rabble, Diarmaid Ferriter presents a fresh look at Ireland from 1913-1923, drawing from newly available historical sources as well as the testimonies of the people who lived and fought through this extraordinary period.

Ferriter highlights the gulf between rhetoric and reality in politics and violence, the role of women, the battle for material survival, the impact of key Irish unionist and republican leaders, as well as conflicts over health, land, religion, law and order, and welfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781468315417

Book preview

For Ireland, the years 1913–1923 were some of the most tumultuous the nation had ever experienced. Packed with violence, political drama, and social and cultural upheaval, the decade saw the emergence in Ireland of the Ulster Volunteer Force to resist Irish home rule, and in response, the Irish Volunteers, who would later evolve into the IRA. The onset of World War I, along with the rise of Sinn Fein, intense Ulster unionism, and conflict with Britain culminated in the Irish War of Independence, ending with a compromise treaty with Britain and then the enmities and drama of the Irish Civil War.

In A Nation and Not a Rabble, renowned Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter explores these revolutions, drawing on an abundance of newly released archival material, witness statements, and testimony from the ordinary Irish people who lived and fought through this extraordinary period in their nation’s history. The book highlights the gulf between reality and rhetoric surrounding the politics and violence of these revolutions, and challenges us to take a new look at how the decade is framed in history. Ferriter addresses the role of women in the period, the battle for material survival, the impact of key Irish unionist and republican leaders, as well as conflicts over health, land, religion, law and order, and welfare.

ALSO BY DIARMAID FERRITER

The Transformation of Ireland

Judging Dev: A reassessment of the life and legacy of Éamon de Valera

Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland

Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s

Copyright

This edition first in published hardcover in the United States in 2015 by

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Copyright © Diarmaid Ferriter, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-4683-1541-7

For Carmel Furlong

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Taking

the long view, work on this book began nearly twenty years ago when, with Paul Rouse and Catríona Crowe, I was involved in the research of a National Archives of Ireland (NAI) exhibition to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. That research introduced me to the Dáil Éireann files and other collections in the NAI and the documents led to much reflection then and in subsequent years on the nature and experience of the Irish revolution and its various layers. More research in the NAI as well as trawls through the extensive collections in the University College Dublin (UCD) archives, along with the UK National Archives in Kew, London, and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast, brought me to a deeper awareness of this period, an appreciation of its complexity and the reasons so many become absorbed in it. I am grateful to the staff of all these archives and the staff of the UCD library, which also houses valuable primary source material for the revolutionary decade this book assesses. My colleagues in the School of History and Archives at UCD deserve my deep gratitude for support and collegiality, especially Kate Breslin, as do friends for offering warmth and great company, including the Briggs family, Aisling Caden, Stephen Cullinane, Mark Duncan, Adrienne Egan, Liza Finnegan, Ronan and Karen Furlong, Ambo Kearney, Seán Kearns, James Kelly, Philip King, Cormac Kinsella, Pat Leahy, Anne, Tom, Catherine, Lucy, Rose and Kevin Maher, Peter Mooney, Deirdre Mulligan, Paul Murphy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Nuala O’Connor, Greg Prendergast, Antoinette Prout, Yetti Redmond, Paul Rouse, Martin Walsh and David Whelan. Profile Books, yet again, have been generous and patient and provided unstinting support; thank you to the late Peter Carson as well as Andrew Franklin and Penny Daniel. I am particularly grateful to Trevor Horwood for his skilful copy-editing, and to Deirdre McMahon and Catríona Crowe for comments on earlier drafts of this book and for the conversations Catríona and I have had about this period and much else over many years of treasured friendship. As always, my greatest debts are to those closer to home; to my cherished parents, Nollaig and Vera, sublime siblings Cian, Tríona and Muireann, and those we are lucky enough to have as long-standing, close and loyal friends, including the wonderful Carmel Furlong to whom this book is dedicated. I am also beyond fortunate to be surrounded by three beguiling, inspiring, intensely loveable and infuriating daughters, Enya, Ríona and Saorla, and the adorable, formidable, insightful, sceptical, funny and generous Sheila Maher, whose support and love have helped this book, like the others, move from abstract to real.

INTRODUCTION

In

January 1922, George Gavan Duffy, a barrister and Sinn Féin TD who had served as an envoy for the Irish republican movement in Paris during the War of Independence, was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs in the southern Irish provisional government, formed after the Anglo-Irish Treaty had been ratified to bring an end to that war. The Treaty offered, not the Irish Republic Sinn Féin had sought, but an Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth, with continued subordination to the British Crown represented by an oath of allegiance to that crown. In April of that year, Gavan Duffy articulated a fear that the looming civil war had the potential to do lasting damage to Ireland’s reputation abroad and the fledging Free State’s dignity. He concluded there was urgency that those on both sides of the Treaty debate should ensure Ireland was seen ‘as a nation and not a rabble’.¹

That particular word – ‘rabble’ – and other versions of it, frequently surfaced in assessments of the breakdown of the established order and the mayhem often apparent in the period of the Irish revolution from 1913 to 1923 that ultimately led to the creation of the state of Northern Ireland in 1920 and the Irish Free State in 1922, subsequently the Irish Republic. A horrified unionist, writing to her friend at the end of 1918, remarked: ‘This is a very unpleasant country to live in now. We are going through so many changes. The democracy in Ireland are a very bad lot, they are so low and uneducated, only a rabble led by the priests.’² Likewise, the diaries of Elsie Henry, who worked with the Red Cross charity in Dublin and had friends and brothers fighting in the First World War, include a letter written by a contemporary in April 1918 about growing tension over possible conscription of Irish men into the British army. It included the observation ‘the peasants and labourers of Ireland are inflammable material, who are now led by skilful leaders, backed up by the late insurrection, by song, ballads and what passes for history and by a literature; and they are out or will be out soon – if conscription is imposed’.³

The playwright and Abbey Theatre director Lady Augusta Gregory, when corresponding from her home in Galway with poet W. B. Yeats in the immediate aftermath of the 1916 Rising, commented: ‘It is terrible to think of the executions and killings that are sure to come … yet it must be so – we had been at the mercy of a rabble for a long time, both here and in Dublin, with no apparent policy.’ And yet, as the executions of the Rising’s leaders were carried out, she changed her tone. Her mind was now ‘filled with sorrow at the Dublin tragedy’; the execution of John MacBride, a long-standing republican activist and Boer War veteran, who was not involved in the planning of the Rising but who joined the fighting at its commencement, was ‘the best event that could come to him, giving him dignity’. The leaders, she concluded, were ‘enthusiastic … and I keep wondering whether we could not have brought them into the intellectual movement’.⁴

This concern with and admiration for dignity was partly what propelled Lady Gregory and other cultural nationalists to do what they did for Ireland, but it also left them feeling uncertain and ambiguous in their responses to the Irish revolution. Gregory had different views of what was happening at different stages. So did many. The idea of the ‘rabble’ and the fear of it also reflected class divisions and the threat of class conflict, so obviously manifest in the Dublin Lockout of 1913, when employers refused to recognise the right of unskilled labourers to be members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU): ‘This is why the ITGWU was seen as such a threat. It organised outside of the craft unions, and brought together as a powerful industrial force the workers who were dismissed as rabble.’⁵ With a home rule Ireland on the horizon, the 1913 Lockout was also a power struggle in relation to who would control a self-governing Ireland.

The militancy of the marginalised was feared, and the adoption of their cause by some of Ireland’s elite was abhorred by others of the same ilk. Elsie Mahaffy, daughter of the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, for example, wrote about the involvement of Constance Markievicz in Irish republicanism in 1916, to the effect that she was ‘the one woman amongst them of high birth and therefore the most depraved … she took to politics and left our class’.⁶ But Markievicz, a member of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, despite her reputation for radicalism, hardly exhibited much solidarity with those less well off who were with her in Aylesbury prison after the 1916 Rising, and later complained to her sister that she had been imprisoned with ‘the dregs of the population’.⁷ (Yeats was later to complain that Markievicz, who died at the age of fifty-nine, had sacrificed her beauty and burned herself out campaigning on behalf of those who were ‘ignorant’ – another rebuke of the ‘rabble’.)⁸

Some of the correspondence highlighted above underlines the danger of generalising about the Irish revolutionary period and the inadequacy of its traditional narratives, reflected in the recent observation of Roy Foster that ‘we search now, instead, to find clarification through terms of paradox and nuance; we have become interested in what does not change during revolutions as much as what does’.⁹ This is partly due to the abundance of new source material that throws up such a variety of perspectives, admissions and ambiguities. These sources, discussed in Part I of this book, challenge the following notion, articulated by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín in his introduction to a collection of Irish fiction:

Those central moments in French history are communal and urban, but the critical moments in Irish history seem more like a nineteenth-century novel in which the individual, tragic hero is burdened by the society he lives in. We have no communards, no rabble in the streets. Instead, we have personal sacrifice as a metaphor for general sacrifice.¹⁰

Likewise, it has long been contended that while the revolution transformed Anglo-Irish relations, ‘it did not change the relationship between one class of Irishmen and another. Its impact was nationalist and political, not social and economic.’¹¹ That assertion about a primarily political revolution, however, is also problematic; more probing of sources that highlight the ‘history from below’ of the period suggest that social and economic forces did have an impact; while radical impulses may have been resisted, they had an ongoing presence, and the fear of the ‘rabble’ and its potential to destabilise the ‘political’ revolution was often apparent. Concerns and disputes over land – a central theme throughout the revolutionary period and discussed in Part II of this book – the cost of living, unemployment and victimisation abounded. There were also difficulties in reconciling the priorities of the Sinn Féin and labour movements, and local feuds simmered both during the revolution and in its aftermath. As a result of the revolution, some clearly fared better than others, which underlines the fact that the revolution did ‘change the relationship between one class of Irishmen and another’, not through the creation of a new socialist regime, but through the existence a hierarchy of benefit. As the writer Francis Stuart, interned during the civil war, saw it, ‘we fought to stop Ireland falling into the hands of publicans and shopkeepers and she had fallen into their hands’.¹²

During the revolution and after it, there were many groups that could be and were identified as ‘rabble’, including those who took up arms and were wary of centralised control, in both Ulster and southern Ireland; those suspicious of constitutional politics and its practitioners, women demanding the vote, and those who laboured in the city and rural areas and agitated for greater status and wages. Other relevant groups included those who volunteered for service in the British army during the war, the ‘separation allowance women’ they left behind, and those who rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty and took up arms against it. All, in their own ways, created difficulties for those seeking to control and direct the revolution, and their experiences involved a multitude of personal motivations and expectations.

If it is true that events of this period in Ireland, especially the 1916 Rising, amounted to ‘Ireland’s 1789’,¹³ how relevant are international studies of the ‘rabble’ or ‘crowd’ to the Irish situation? George Rudé’s work on this theme from the 1960s in relation to popular disturbances in England and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was influential and pioneering. Using Marx’s description, he was interested in the ideas that ‘grip the masses’ and the role they play in the peaks and troughs of a popular movement. Rudé was praised for ‘putting mind back into history’, as he looked at leaders but especially followers, at whether their motivations could be seen as involving ‘backward’ or ‘forward looking’ concepts, and whether the crowds could develop a distinctive sociopolitical movement of their own.¹⁴ Rudé focused on the needs of the groups and classes that absorbed ideas, the social context in which these ideas germinated and ‘the uses to which they put them’.¹⁵ His framework of inquiry was further developed and challenged in subsequent decades by the study of different types of crowds; those who assembled for religious reasons, or on state occasions or for funerals; not necessarily ‘the masses’, but different groups of various sizes that assembled, influenced each other’s behaviour and who could be marshalled by elite factions.¹⁶

There were a number of traditions in Ireland well before the early twentieth century that were relevant to ‘crowd’ themes; the proliferation of crowd activity during the era of Daniel O’Connell, leader of the successful movement for Catholic emancipation in the 1820s and the unsuccessful subsequent movement for repeal of the Act of Union in the 1840s, agrarian unrest, the Land War of the 1870s and 1880s and the attendant mass meetings organised by the Land League, Fenian uprisings, commemorations, funerals and election rallies. Ulster also had its own traditions of agrarian and urban mobilisation to draw on, including campaigns against home rule in the late nineteenth century. Developments in communications, the use of partisan newspapers, increased literacy, the priorities of a younger generation and greater public prominence for women all played their part in mobilising groups.

The important point is that increasingly in nineteenth-century Ireland, various groups ‘saw crowd strength as a sign of the seriousness of their intent’, and there is no doubt that this impulse gathered momentum in the 1913–23 period; mass rallies, funerals, election meetings, military drilling and protests were paramount. Crucially, these assemblies heightened the sense of ‘the other’ or being on the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ side, and increasing invective was employed in relation to how those deemed to be on the ‘wrong’ side could be described. During the Irish revolutionary period militia forces were established, most notably the Ulster Volunteers and Irish Volunteers (subsequently the IRA) in 1913; for their members and those they declared to be defending they were noble and courageous, to their opponents they were an ignorant rabble being duped or used by corrupt leaders.

A growing scepticism about constitutional politics was also relevant here; as was recalled by IRA member Christopher (‘Todd’) Andrews, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) that took its seats in the Westminster Parliament, and fought for home rule rather than an Irish Republic, became discredited to the point that ‘the word politician was never applied to a member of the [republican] Movement. It was a word of ill-repute.’¹⁷ In retaliation, some of those IPP politicians, particularly as a new Sinn Féin political mass movement began to threaten the IPP’s very survival, turned on the ‘rabble’ with a panicked snobbery. This was particularly apparent in one of the last letters written by IPP leader John Redmond, who in criticising his own party for not uniting around him in early 1918 suggested the result of such disloyalty in Ireland would be ‘universal anarchy, and, I am greatly afraid, the spread of violence and crime of all sorts, when every blackguard who wants to commit an outrage will simply call himself a Sinn Féiner and thereby get the sympathy of the unthinking crowd’.¹⁸

The mistake here was in asserting that those embracing the new politics and resistance were dupes; they were in fact far from ‘unthinking’; they were young and determined to reject Redmond’s generation, and with confidence and purpose, ‘knew that they were different from their parents’.¹⁹ But their revolution was, in turn, while propelled by much idealism and courage, also multi-layered, complicated, messy, brutal and sometimes compromised as a result of competing impulses at national but also local level, as smaller ‘crowds’ or independent-minded ‘rabbles’ pursued their own agendas. The revolution could serve as a useful cloak for the settling of scores that had little to do with ideas of nationalism or ‘the nation’.

The fear political leaders had was that they would not be able to control these movements; that the ‘rabble’ might go its own way. There were strong tensions in relation to centralisation and local initiative in both the unionist and republican movements that were at odds with the images these groups wanted to portray of themselves, and attempted to portray in earlier partisan accounts of the revolution, as united and monolithic. Tensions between different social classes always bubbled beneath the surface and sometimes boiled over. For those who wanted to defend the union with Great Britain and those who wanted to break it, mobilisation was deemed imperative to pressurise British governments, but such activity could not completely mask internal fractiousness: ‘although such mobilisations were portrayed by the media as highly disciplined non-violent affairs, there was always an underlying element of threat, namely, that the leadership could not hold the masses in line indefinitely’.²⁰ This was even more complicated during the War of Independence from 1919–21, when republicans fought a guerrilla campaign, and before that, many UVF members had found themselves in a different theatre of war altogether as soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, as did thousands of recruits from southern Ireland. The difficulties of control also became acutely apparent during the civil war in the south from 1922–3, but also in the new state in Northern Ireland from 1920.

The labour movement was also relevant here, as part of a broader development in the UK of conflict between the ‘socialist’ and the ‘national’ interest, creating obvious class divisions that British liberals struggled with. Labour unrest, combined with tension over home rule, armed resistance in 1916, suffragism, as well as the rising cost of living, complicated British rule in Ireland.²¹ In responding, British governments struggled with their Irish policy, initially granting concessions through, for example, land reform and the expansion of access to education and local government, and increased welfare provision for the ‘rabble’, but preoccupied with so much else, they also turned a blind eye to growing militancy and gunrunning. Their perspective was also undermined by lazy racial stereotyping about a ‘peculiar kind of [Irish] patriotic impulse’, and by applying different standards to the threat of Ulster violence and the threat of southern Irish republican force.²²

And what of ideas of ‘the nation’ during the revolution, the term that, along with the ‘rabble’, so preoccupied George Gavan Duffy? Ten years previously, Tom Kettle, who had been elected an MP for the IPP in 1906 but at the end of 1910 left Parliament to pursue his writing, in The Open Secret of Ireland (1912), declared: ‘the open secret of Ireland is that Ireland is a nation’. This had earlier been given credence by Alice Stopford Green in Irish Nationality (1911) and The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing (1908), books that insisted on the unbroken continuity of a national tradition in Irish history. Green was the wealthy daughter of a Protestant archdeacon and married the social historian John Richard Green; financial security allowed her to develop her own interest in history, and in the 1890s she was converted to Irish home rule through a growing distaste for British imperialism:

She contended that pre-Norman Ireland [before the twelfth-century invasion] was not a home to barbarians but to an admirable civilisation, which, she insisted, was marked by an attachment to spiritual rather than material values. This argument was clearly motivated by, and had implications for, contemporary politics. She sought to prove that, before interference from England, the Irish had successfully governed themselves and should be allowed to do so again.²³

But that did not mean that Green was comfortable with the violence of the Irish revolution; it troubled her greatly.

Tom Kettle, killed in action with the British army at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, exemplified some of the dilemmas for those who resisted narrow definitions of nationalism. While he had maintained the moral right of Ireland to rebel ‘if it were possible’, he did not think it wise to build ‘an impossible future on an imaginary past’, an approach that, historically, had led English parties to wipe Ireland ‘off the slate of popular politics’. A liberal Catholic, he also admired European civilisation, and regarded it as a greater cause than Ireland’s.²⁴ Such perspectives came under increased pressure in Ireland during the First World War, but what linked many of the militant or military-minded who went in different directions were similar ideas: ‘militarism, honour, patriotism, self-sacrifice, manhood, adventure … spiritual yearnings defying the grey calculations of a secure and cautious life’.²⁵

Also in 1912, librarian and Jesuit Stephen Brown, in the Jesuit-published journal Studies, maintained that the word ‘nation’ was too glibly used and that its uses were ‘untroubled by any consciousness that the idea which this word claims to express presents special difficulties of definition’.²⁶ It could be defined, he suggested, according to race, language, customs, religion, history, a national government or just common interests, or to those living in a common territory in organised social relations ‘held together in a peculiar kind of spiritual oneness’. This definition was certainly relevant to those who proclaimed a republic at the outset of the Easter Rising in 1916; after all, Patrick Pearse, chosen as president of that republic by the rebels, wrote an article two months before the Rising entitled ‘The Spiritual Nation’. But Brown suggested ‘there can be no precise or final formula’.²⁷

This absence of an accepted definition was in itself significant in the decade of revolution; notions of the nation became divisive in what was a plural as opposed to a unitary society, as represented by the experiences and allegiances of the majority in Ulster who claimed to be part of another nation, in contrast to southern Ireland. Conflicting definitions led to aggressive exclusion, or as the historian Nicholas Mansergh put it: ‘The greater the success in translating the inner feelings of a community into language, almost inevitably to be communicated in part in emotional imagery, the more likely it is for those who are not members of that community to have a feeling of alienation.’²⁸ These feelings of alienation, when combined with other tensions, developed a momentum of their own which could also exacerbate the sense of a ‘rabble’ that needed to be contained or resisted.

For some, nationalism was about will and spirit and antiquity, an appeal to the dead generations; for others it was something that needed to be called into being and could include social aims, an obvious priority for the leading Labour intellectual of this era, James Connolly, for whom ‘the Irish question’ was ‘a social question’.²⁹ Small radical groups and wordy polemical journalists who fuelled ‘the little newspapers and magazines of the nationalist fringe’³⁰ went to great lengths to excoriate what they regarded as the failures of the contemporary order, but what they wanted to see it replaced with depended on perspectives that could be informed by many things, including age, class, gender and political inheritance.

It was also the case that separatist language and sentiment would only gain a broader acceptance when linked to grievances such as urban poverty, rising food prices and taxes, cessation of land distribution and emigration.³¹ As a result, the balance to be struck between political separatism and social advance was delicate and rarely satisfactorily achieved. These material questions also pervaded the process after the revolution of compensation and the quest for military service pensions and recognition, discussed in Part III of this book.

Those looking for evidence of broad, sophisticated ideological debate during the decade may be disappointed, but perhaps in that search, they are misguided in projecting later preoccupations on to a generation that were not republican theorists and saw no reason to be. Those who propelled the republican revolution were more focused on the idea of separation from Britain ‘rather than implementing any concrete political programme’. Ideology does not feature strongly in most accounts of the revolution and, in the words of Charles Townshend, ‘the new nationalist leaders did not see it as necessary to analyse the self that was to exercise self-determination’, or as Mansergh had asserted at a much earlier stage, the republican leaders ‘do not appear to have debated what may have appeared to be potentially dividing abstractions’.³² Political scientist Tom Garvin’s estimation was that ‘Irish republicanism was not a political theory but a secular religion’.³³ So too was Irish unionism, but for British politicians dealing with both perspectives, any theories of nationalism were unwelcome intrusions, ‘because at almost every point behind the argument lay the deeper question: were there in Ireland two nations? Or two communities? Or only contrived divisions?’³⁴ When asked by the founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, why the British government had abandoned the idea of ‘Irish oneness’ or treating the island as an entity, British prime minister David Lloyd George replied: ‘we could not coerce Ulster’.

But alongside pragmatism, such assertions also hid double-dealing, false promises and inconsistency in relation to what Britain would decide merited coercion. The Irish revolution threw up obvious dilemmas: what rights do majorities and minorities have and how can they be asserted or vindicated? Such questions were never resolved to the satisfaction of most during the revolutionary period and remained unresolved long after it. They were also relevant to how the revolution was remembered and commemorated, who should control that process and who the ‘true’ inheritors of its legacy were, as also discussed in Part III of this book.

There is little doubt that in its aftermath, a social analysis of the revolution struggled to find space on the crowded canvas of political and military writing on the period. This has been somewhat countered in recent times and has included an increased focus on regional and micro studies, as well as a probing of the social composition of those involved.³⁵ The Canadian historian Peter Hart has made the point that, because of the range of source material available, Ireland is a great laboratory for the study of revolution:

Ireland’s is quite possibly the best documented revolution in modern history. For a secret army, the guerrillas left an extraordinary paper trail through their own and their opponents’ records as well as in the daily and weekly press. This continued long after the war was over, as gunmen claimed pensions, wrote memoirs and commemorated themselves and their comrades.³⁶

Hart also suggested in 2002 that, as a result of such archival riches, the revolution ‘needs to be re-conceptualised and to have all the myriad assumptions underlying its standard narratives interrogated’, to include examinations of ‘gender, class, community, elites and masses, religion and ethnicity, the nature of violence and power’.³⁷ There is now also much more focus on the key role women played in cultural, political and military awakenings and finding new outlets, and what they suffered on account of their gender; no longer is their documented involvement just a case of ‘fleeting glances of these shadowy female characters’.³⁸

Rectifying the imbalances that affected more traditional accounts of the revolution is not just about new sources (discussed in Part I); giving the social history of this period a new prominence is also about using long-opened but neglected collections, or indeed, looking at ‘political’ sources in a different way. As the renowned historian of twentieth-century Ireland Joe Lee suggested, ‘it is often overlooked how much social history can be found in the accounts of political events’.³⁹ The National Archives of Ireland collections for this period, for example, include the Dáil Éireann records, used extensively in Part II of this book, which give a detailed overview of the administration of various underground republican government departments and the problems they confronted. The records of the Ministry of Local Government and accounts of the proceedings of local authorities transmitted to central government also give an insight into a multitude of regional social and economic problems. The same is true of the records of the Dáil Éireann Land Settlement Commission, which document the attempts to arbitrate on the claims of individuals to land from which they had been evicted.

The collections of the British National Archives in London also contain numerous reports of what was going on in Ireland at local and national level and the collections in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) illustrate aspects of the internal dynamics of the Ulster movement and political, religious and military strife. Other documents compiled in the 1920s offer a perspective on the social legacy of the revolutionary period, including the papers of the Committee on Claims of British Ex-servicemen, established in 1927 to look into the plight of Irishmen who had fought with the British army in the First World War. As one witness insisted, in outlining their social and economic grievances, ‘it is about time the promises made to them in 1914 were carried out. The men are not getting younger and they are not getting stronger.’⁴⁰ Many in the revolution’s aftermath found themselves living as mental ‘internees’ (a word used by nationalist and writer Alice Milligan), disappointed by the new states created as a result of the revolutions and feeling at home ‘nowhere’.⁴¹ What transpired after the revolution also bred new dismissals of the ‘rabble’, involving cynicism and snobbery on the part of some about democracy itself. Mabel FitzGerald, for example, a 1916 Rising participant, and wife of Desmond, War of Independence veteran and pro-Treaty minister in the 1920s, wrote in a personal letter in 1944: ‘I find the masses are always wrong, they seem to stand for the worst in man … adult suffrage seems to have led only to the supremacy of people without standards and values and of the half-baked educationally … they already dominate everything here [in Ireland].’⁴²

For all those who were celebrated, honoured and feted, or who forged rewarding political careers in the aftermath, many more were left wounded and impoverished despite their military, political or intellectual contribution to the decade, and even for victims there was an obvious hierarchy. The most recent opening of new archives, especially the Bureau of Military History statements collected from veterans of the revolution in the 1940s and 1950s and locked up until 2003, and the Military Service Pensions Collection, documenting the applications of those who applied for recognition of their military service during the revolution, the first batch of which was released in 2014, discussed in Parts I and III of this book, has been part of another broadening of the parameters of historical inquiry into the revolutionary period. Collectively, these various records reveal a fascinating web of different Irish experiences, including understandable feelings of despair and resentment and the search for stability in the midst of mayhem, but also humanity and humour as people reacted to issues of law and order, economics, land, class struggle, violence and the dominant political questions.

There is now more interest in the experiences of those who would not have been mentioned or considered to the same extent in earlier decades. Alongside a continuity of interest in high politics, Anglo-Irish relations and the ‘leading personalities’ of the era, new questions have emerged in relation to the revolution, prompted by this new archival material: how did the revolution affect the people of this era, combatants and non-combatants, male and female? What information do we have of ‘people getting on with their lives through periods of national trauma’?

This was a description used in relation to a project launched by Trinity College Dublin in 2013 to encourage those who might have family archival material relating to the period. One example given was that of two lovers corresponding in 1915; when their son was asked in 2013 what ‘side’ they were on in 1916 during the Easter Rising, his response was ‘They were not on any side … they were on the getting on with life side.’⁴³ What did ‘getting on with life’ involve for those who lived through the revolutionary period? How did contemporaries make sense of it and its aftermath and legacy? This book, in examining aspects of the Irish interior of the revolution, seeks to underline the significance of those questions, highlight some of the archival material available in attempting to answer them, and to look generally at the evolution in the understanding and perception of the revolution since the 1920s; to consider how we came to know what we know about the period, who told us and why; its impact, legacy and how it has been remembered.

The first part looks at how the revolution was framed by those writing about the subject, including veterans and later professional historians; what agendas they followed, the sources they used, the controversies they engendered and how the growing importance of archival material expanded the range and scope of historical inquiry. The second part offers an analytic narrative of the revolution, largely driven by recent sources, which, while acknowledging the significance and contribution of well-known political and military leaders and the Anglo-Irish high politics that bordered the revolution, also provides a detailed focus on the social forces and human impulses that predominated, the tension between central control and local dynamics, between notions of ‘the nation’ and the concerns of ‘the rabble’, and the gulf between rhetoric and reality. The third part assesses the detritus of the revolution, the legacy for some of those directly affected, their quest for recognition of their service, how commemoration of the period presented challenges for both state and society from the 1920s onwards, and where we are now in relation to understanding and remembering the revolution during its centenary.

PART I

IN SEARCH OF THE RABBLE

– ONE –

OPENING THE WITNESS ACCOUNTS

On

the evening of 11 March 2003, state cars began to arrive at the Cathal Brugha military barracks in Dublin, home of the Irish Military Archives. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern and the Minister for Defence, Michael Smith were in attendance, as was the former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave. His father, William T. Cosgrave, was one of the Sinn Féin ministers during the Irish War of Independence and went on to become president of the Executive Council (prime minister) of the new Free State in 1922. Gathered there also was a group of Irish historians, some of whom had been waiting for this occasion for many years. An archive was about to be opened, after a half-century under lock and key, that would shed light on a period still much disputed in Irish history, the revolutionary period of 1913–23.

The historians who were present that day represented two different generations; those who had come to prominence from the late 1960s to the 1980s during the most intense periods of the Troubles of Northern Ireland that began in 1969, and a younger generation who began studying history at university in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had established themselves as professional historians during the peace process that brought the Troubles to an end in the late 1990s. The politicians who attended included those politically active in the 1960s and 1970s as the offspring of the revolutionary generation, and their successors who governed in the 1980s and beyond, while the ghosts of those who fought in the War of Independence and the civil war loomed large; the barracks itself is named after Sinn Féin’s Minister for Defence during the War of Independence.

The archive unveiled and formally launched that day was that of the Bureau of Military History (BMH), which included over 1,700 statements taken from 1916 Rising and War of Independence veterans in the 1940s and 1950s, whose witness accounts of their role in the conflict were impounded in the late 1950s, with no agreement as to when they might be opened, but with a consensus that it would not be for at least another generation. That was hardly surprising; many of the events, individuals and legacies of the revolutionary era were still raw and divisive in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, and there was concern about allegations and accusations that might be contained in the statements with no right of redress. Those involved in collecting the statements, however, had been adamant about their neutrality, and had held firm to their independence; when the old IRA organisation in Limerick city insisted that all potential statements for the BMH had to be submitted to it before being given to J. J. Daly, the Bureau’s investigator for Limerick, for example, Daly refused to accept this and the delays caused by his refusal ‘were surely worthwhile’.¹

While there was much agreement in 2003 as to the potential value of the BMH statements for professional historians and those interested in history generally, a committee of historians and experts that had been asked to advise the government on the BMH process in the 1940s was not united in its attitude to the value of the collection, when it might be released and the probable verdict of posterity. Richard Hayes, chairman of the Bureau’s advisory committee, and director of the National Library of Ireland, wrote to fellow committee member Robert Dudley Edwards, Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD, in February 1958, in relation to disagreement as to when the material should be opened to researchers: ‘I think we can do nothing and I have no time to bang my head against a blank wall. Incidentally, the material collected seems to me to be of so little value that I do not mourn the loss.’²

Florence O’Donoghue, another committee member and a War of Independence veteran and keen historian, was adamant that there was no justification for impounding original documents ‘which would be available if they had not been given to the Bureau. I put in a number of original documents, some my own, some I had got from friends. I would never have done so if I knew they were going to be inaccessible for a very long period.’ In the 1940s and 1950s part of the government’s mission in relation to the BMH, it appeared, was ‘to keep the documents out of the historians’ hands’; they were there to advise, not supervise.³ Dudley Edwards scribbled a note after a meeting with another of the members of the advisory committee, Sheila Kennedy, a lecturer in history in Galway, to the effect that ‘she is fed up with the Bureau, feels it is a dreadful waste of money which could be put to much better historical uses’ and that the work ‘could well have been done in a university’. This reflected resentment that the work was being carried out by people who were not professional historians, but public servants employed by the Department of Defence.⁴ Furthermore, Hayes had severe doubts about the statements being made available to the general public: ‘If every Seán and Seamus from Ballythis and Ballythat who took major or minor or no part at all in the national movement from 1916 to 1921 has free access to the material it may result in local civil warfare in every second town and village in the country.’⁵

Five decades later, this assertion by Hayes might be seen as delightful exaggeration underpinned by a good deal of snobbery. It was an interesting stance, not just in relation to the sensitivities and divisions of the era, but also on the question of to whom the story of the revolution belonged and who should be in a position to research and document it. One of the most notable developments in recent years in Ireland in relation to the history of this period and access to its documentation has been its democratisation, including the opening up of archival material, a lot of it online, to much bigger audiences than was previously the case. It is no longer the preserve of state or an academic elite; much of it is now open to anyone with an Internet connection.

What have such developments meant in relation to an understanding of the revolutionary period? In some respects it was about building on the information contained in valuable collections of source material that had been available for decades. Before the opening of the BMH, historians had access to accounts of life in IRA flying columns and the day-to-day activities and operations of the republican movement during the period 1913–21. The huge archive of Richard Mulcahy, for example, who was chief of staff of the IRA during the War of Independence and whose papers were deposited in the UCD archives in the 1970s, shed much light on the internal dynamics and difficulties of the republican movement. After retiring from politics in 1961 Mulcahy spent much of that decade collating his papers and complementing them with voice recordings of contemporaries, and ‘his pioneering decision, under the terms of the Mulcahy Trust established in December 1970, to make permanent arrangements for depositing his papers in the archives department of UCD, made him an exemplar for other leading politicians from both sides of the treaty divide’.⁶

Likewise, Ernie O’Malley, a leading figure in the IRA who had the distinction of writing the best literary accounts of the revolution, had earlier amassed more than 450 handwritten interviews of veterans of the War of Independence and civil war. A native of Castlebar in County Mayo born into comfortable middle-class circumstances, O’Malley was active as an IRA organiser and was appointed commander of the IRA’s 2nd Southern Division in 1921. He opposed the Treaty and played a leading role in the anti-Treaty IRA campaign. He conducted the interviews himself; for six years he ‘criss-crossed Ireland in his old Ford, driving up boreens and searching out old companions in order to record, and in a sense relive, the glory days of the revolution’. What had begun in the late 1930s ‘as an effort to supplement his own knowledge had developed by 1948 into a full-blown enterprise to record the voices, mostly republican, of the survivors of the 1916–23 struggle for independence’, with his material eventually deposited in UCD.⁷ O’Malley was therefore conducting his own oral history in tandem with the state’s BMH project, but the BMH project was larger and broader in relation to the number and mix of witnesses and the statements were recorded in typescript, unlike O’Malley’s, whose handwritten accounts of interviews created significant obstacles for historians because his writing was so difficult to decipher.

After the opening of the BMH in 2003, those seeking to reconstruct events in a particular part of the country now had new opportunities to consult a concentrated body of statements from that region and weigh them alongside information already in the public domain. The mass of statements also enabled historians to reconsider an issue that had not been in any sense settled – the degree to which IRA activities were subject to centralised control. The statements also invited reassessment of such themes as the organisation of the Easter Rising of 1916, the role of women in the conflict, the impact of the First World War and the conscription crisis of 1918, as well as the influence of cultural organisations in the opening years of the century. Many of the contributors placed their statements in the wider context of the social, economic and cultural upheavals of these years.

The BMH statements suggest the resourcefulness and commitment of this generation were exceptional. Theirs was overwhelmingly a revolution of the young; they were physically fit (they thought nothing of cycling from county to county) and, in the main, politically disciplined. Those looking for evidence of intense ideological debate may be disappointed, but the Bureau files contain much material of interest to the social historian. For Elizabeth Bloxham, flirting and youthful exuberance were part of her membership in Cumann na mBan (CnB) the female auxiliary of the IRA established in 1914, but her statement, like many others, also underlined the seriousness of their mission: ‘I have sometimes wondered if an invisible onlooker could have realised underneath our gaiety we were all in such deadly earnest.’ Bridget O’Mullane, organising branches of CnB, recalled that

the life was strenuous, as I generally worked in three meetings a day to cover the various activities of each branch. My meals were, of course, very irregular, and the result of this sort of life, which I led for three years … was that my weight was reduced to 6 stone. I got many severe wettings and consequent colds, which I was unable to attend to. The reaction to this came during the truce [July 1921] when I broke down and had to get medical attention.⁸

Just over ten years after the opening of the BMH archive, a more significant, indeed monumental, archive was in the process of being gradually released to the public; the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC), a voluminous collection of nearly 300,000 files relating to the processes involved in the award of pensions for military service during the 1916 Rising, War of Independence and civil war period and for compensating those who suffered loss and injury. Launched by the Taoiseach Enda Kenny in January 2014 as part of a phased programme of the online release of the documents, this archive opens many other doors to an understanding of the role of the ordinary Volunteer from 1916–23 as pension applicants, under a string of legislation from the 1920s to the 1950s, had to provide detailed accounts of their activities to make a case as to why they were deserving of a pension. Their accounts needed to be verified by referees and the administrative process involved the creation of an enormous body of supporting documentation.⁹

What was apparent during the administrative process from the 1920s onwards was that the bar would be set very high in relation to qualifying for a pension; in the words of William T. Cosgrave in 1924, the definition of active service made it clear the government ‘does not intend there should be any soft pensions’.¹⁰ This was, and remained, the case. The archive is, as a result, also a chronicle of great disappointment; the vast majority of those who applied for these pensions were not awarded them. A government memorandum from May 1957 revealed that 82,000 people applied for pensions under the main Pensions Acts of 1924 and 1934; of these, 15,700 were successful and 66,300 were rejected.¹¹ The archive contains an extraordinary level of testimony and detail about individual and collective republican military endeavour, but it is also an archive that reveals much about frustrated expectations, concern about status and reputation and difficulties of verification; it does much to illuminate aspects of the afterlife of the revolution.

While the list of those awarded military service pensions at the highest grade under the 1924 and 1934 Acts reads like a roll call of some of the best known gunmen and later politicians of that era, the bulk of the MSPC archive is filled with the accounts of those who were not household names, and includes many voices of desperation and urgent pleas for pensions due to the abject circumstances of a host of War of Independence and civil war veterans.¹²

Close association with the Irish revolution and its architects was no guarantee of a comfortable life. In July 1941, Nora Connolly O’Brien, a daughter of the labour leader James Connolly, executed after the 1916 Rising, and who herself had been an active member of CnB, wrote to a confidant that she had not

heard a word yet from the Pensions Board, so don’t know what is going to happen in my case … I am at my wits end. We are absolutely on the racks. This week will see the end of us unless I have something definite to count upon. Seámus [her husband] has had no luck in finding any kind of a job. I was hoping that the pension business could be hurried up and what I could get might tide us over this bad spell. There seems no prospect of anything here so we have written to England applying for jobs. I’m absolutely blue, despondent, down and out, hopeless and at the end of my tether …¹³

In contrast, Tom Barry, one of the best known and most admired of the flying column leaders during the War of Independence, as a result of the Kilmichael ambush of 28 November 1920, when he led an attack on a patrol of Auxiliaries, seventeen of whom were killed, was primarily concerned about status and reputation rather than material survival in relation to his pension. In January 1940 he received his military service pension award of Rank B rather than Rank A, which ‘I reject … on the grounds of both length of service and of rank’. He was livid that the Board had disallowed him full-time active service on certain key dates: ‘It is sufficient to state that my award was humiliating to a degree … I do ask the Board now to understand that I am feeling ashamed and ridiculous at the award and that I am entitled at least to have this humiliation removed from me.’ He insisted on his appeal being heard in person and maintained that he had many former IRA officers who were prepared to verbally testify on his behalf. He successfully appealed his decision and was awarded Rank A.¹⁴ The multitude of narratives in the MSPC archive contain a variety of sentiments and tones; pride, arrogance, anger, self-belief, righteousness and, more often than not, dignity (see Part III). These were also sentiments that strongly influenced written accounts of the revolution in its aftermath.

– TWO –

WHO OWNED THE REVOLUTION?

The

question of ownership of the revolution and its legacy was apparent from a very early stage, as was fear about the consequences of some of the radical sentiments it had engendered. Consequently, it was frequently deemed necessary to rein in lawlessness and affirm the need for malcontents to know their place and their status. A struggle to reconcile rhetoric and reality was also relevant to the contested legacy of the period and how it was written about. Adaptation was not easy for many, perhaps because, as was recalled by Ernie O’Malley, ‘we had built a world of our own, an emotional life but with no philosophy or economic framework’.¹ For many, the easiest way to deal with the legacy was to remain silent. When he spoke to the BMH in 1951, George Gavan Duffy, by that stage President of the High Court, began starkly:

I hark back to the aftermath of the Treaty with reluctance and distaste, for the memory is painful and a country so bitterly divided, nearly half and half, on so vital an issue presents a sorry spectacle. The next generation took the measure of the shortcomings of the two parties for and against the Treaty; and perhaps the most disturbing feature in Irish life during the past 30 years has been the detachment of the bulk of the younger people from public affairs; I attribute that stolid indifference largely to disgust at the rancour permeating our public life for many years after the Treaty. The resort of the bellicose Republicans to civil war was inexcusable, but the personal acrimony that infected several of the leaders on both sides was of more lasting effect.²

When, in 2014, the seventy-two-year-old president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, made the first state visit to Britain of an Irish head of state, he referred to his own father’s involvement in the War of Independence and the internal divisions it created, but also quoted the constitutional nationalist Stephen Gwynn, who referred to the damage it did to Anglo-Irish relations, causing British and Irish to ‘look at each other with doubtful eyes’. Higgins’s own father, John, was imprisoned in Kildare during the civil war, lost his job, and the financial strain fractured the family; according to the president’s brother, their father ‘never spoke very much about it all actually. They just didn’t.’³

When he was interviewed in 2012 about commemorating the events of this period, artist Robert Ballagh offered a personal anecdote that was by no means unique:

Politics were never discussed in my home, and much later on I discovered one of the possible reasons why. On my mother’s side, during the Civil War, my grandmother and my grandfather were on opposite sides and ended up, I think, not talking for about a decade. So I can appreciate why my mother felt that politics was not a proper subject.⁴

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, for some of the participants it was difficult to let go; others slotted comfortably into the new order and began to fashion self-serving narratives of the period. By 1924, when Kevin O’Higgins, the new Free State’s Minister for Home Affairs, later Justice, who was assassinated by republicans in 1927, addressed the Irish Society of Oxford University, he suggested that ‘to form a just appreciation of developments in Ireland in 1922 it is necessary to remember that the country had come through a revolution and to remember what a weird composite of idealism, neurosis, megalomania and criminality is apt to be thrown to the surface in even the best regulated revolution’.⁵ Most of these words, of course, did not, as far as he was concerned, apply to the ‘eight young men in city hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of another not yet built and with wild men screaming through the keyholes’, his description of the beginning of the civil war from the perspective of the pro-Treaty provisional government.⁶

The reference to the screaming wild men was another version of the ‘nation and rabble’ thesis; pro-Treaty state builders had their eyes fixed on the prize of a successfully built nation state, and a rabble was out to undermine them viciously: ‘an ebullition of the savage primitive passion to wreck and loot and level when an opportunity seemed to offer of doing so with impunity’. Simply translated, there was no idealism on the republican side; the eloquence of Éamon de Valera, political leader of the anti-Treaty republicans, was ‘frenzied’, but Michael Collins, the former director of intelligence for the IRA and then pro-Treaty leader killed during the civil war, was someone who was ‘sprung from the loins of the people, his love for the people was too big, too real, to allow his nationalism to become a thing of dry formulae or doctrinaire theories’.⁷

The year the civil war ended, writer George Russell (AE), who had been identified publicly with revolutionary nationalism by Hamar Greenwood, chief secretary for Ireland, in a speech to the House of Commons in 1920, but who became more detached from the republicans’ dreams and preferred to focus on the practical social and economic possibilities of independence, wrote an article lamenting that the champions of physical force had squandered the spirit created by poets and scholars. Free State Ireland, he maintained, had ‘hardly deflected a hair’s breadth from the old cultural lines’.⁸

But had the revolution ever really been about creating and nurturing a free spirit? And how else did those who wrote about the revolution frame these issues? According to renowned author and former IRA Volunteer Seán O’Faoláin, the civil war ‘woke us up from the mesmerism of the romantic dream. It set us asking questions … about the pre-sanctified dogmas of our history. We were blessed by a series of writers who … had the courage to face experience and record it.’ This was certainly what playwright Seán O’Casey did in his three Dublin plays in the 1920s: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). O’Casey, secretary of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) in 1914, the workers’ militia formed as a result of the 1913 Lockout and whose members played a prominent role in the 1916 Rising, was sceptical about the Rising, and caustic about the marginalisation of the labour movement. He complained that James Connolly, who led the ICA to battle, on his way to being a republican martyr, ‘saw red no longer, but stared into the sky for a green dawn’.⁹

O’Casey, as well as settling scores and trouncing his enemies in