Director: Des Bell

Historical Consultant: Fearghal McGarry

Starring: Dara Devaney, Mia Gallagher, Barry Barnes, Frankie McCafferty,

Reviewer: John Dorney

Frank Ryan lies in bed in his cramped bedsit in Berlin in 1944, listening to the Allied bombs pounding the city outside. In the morning, numbly wandering through the destruction all around him, he reminisces about the circumstances that brought him, IRA leader and anti-fascist fighter in the Spanish Civil War, here to the capital of Nazi Germany – not quite as a collaborator but not as a prisoner either.

So opens the film, described as a ‘docudrama’, The Enigma of Frank Ryan. Frank Ryan is a fascinating character for all kinds of reasons – representative of the post-civil war IRA and its attempts to make sense of the fallout of the revolutionary years – left-republican who tried with the Republican Congress, to fuse the Irish Free State’s social failings with its incomplete independence into targets for republicans to overcome – high ranking officer in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

However this film concentrates mainly on his final years, when, liberated from certain death at the hands of his Spanish Francoist captors in Burgos prison, he, along with IRA leader Sean Russell, ended up in an uneasy alliance with Nazi Germany. Underlying this is  a central question, how could an avowed anti-fascist have got into bed with these the worst of all enemies?

 ’Good versus Evil’ – which side was Ryan on?

We now know of the Nazis’ genocide of European Jews and their litany of slaughter in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Timothy Snyder in his recent book ‘Bloodlands’ puts the number of people deliberately murdered by German forces outside of combat situations at about 11 million.[1] The Nazi is regime is thus, justifiably, seen as representing a unique evil, outside of all history and politics.

Association with them in any form therefore invites a kind of demonization and allows all kinds of assumptions to be made about individuals and organizations who worked with them. This film tells Ryan’s story fairly straight and at the same time, gives its main character a relatively easy ride. Ryan cooperated initially with German military intelligence so he would not be executed or imprisoned for life by the Spanish rightists.

Thereafter, he had a chance to return to Ireland in 1940 – on a submarine in which Sean Russell died of a punctured ulcer – but for some reason decided not to do so and returned to Berlin where – no more use to the Germans – he died a sad and lonely death in 1944.

There is no evidence that he was an ideological sympathizer of the Nazis – Adrian Hoare’s biography of Ryan notes that the German intelligence concluded that he was still  basically ‘a communist’ who hoped for a Soviet victory.[2]

There is no evidence either, however, that he took any steps to actively oppose the Nazis while in Germany. In the film, the Ryan character demands to know what is going on in the concentration camps, for which demand as director Des Bell acknowledges, there is no documentary evidence.    

Frank Ryan’s last years are probably best summed up as a man, who caught in a very difficult situation well beyond his control, did very little other than try to survive.

Those who come to the film looking for an explanation of how Ryan, who on account of his anti-fascism represents ‘good’, could have worked with the Nazis, who represent ‘evil’, will be disappointed. But then so are those who wish to see a clear morality tale in the furious ideological wars in Europe of the 1930s and 40s.

 An Irish Context

Where this film is weak, historically speaking, is in showing how a left-wing Irish republican like Ryan understood terms like ‘socialism’, ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’. Coming out of the debacle of the Irish Civil War, republicans saw that their nationalist revolution had been crushed by the social elite of Irish society – the middle classes, the Church, the press – a sentiment often repeated in the following decades not only by socialists but by such Fianna Fail stalwarts as Todd Andrews, for example, who compared the civil war with Hungary’s ‘White Terror’ or crushing of the communist revolution there in 1919.

Some of the remaining IRA, as a result, led by people such as Peadar O’Donnell and, after a period, Frank Ryan, thus came to adopt a class analysis – James Connolly’s, ‘the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour, the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland’. The next revolution in Ireland would be both national and social – at once severing the remaining ties with Britain and breaking the hold of the supposedly  pro-British privileged classes (‘the ranchers’ and the banks were a favourite target) over Irish economic development, to the benefit of workers and small farmers.

This kind of thinking gained some purchase in the IRA, but eventually the leftists, around Ryan, O’Donnell and others such as George Gilmore, left the organisation to form a party known as the Republican Congress. In the context of the Great Depression, the freeing of republican prisoners after Fianna Fail’s coming to power in 1933, and De Valera’s trade war with Britain, the party’s prospects might have appeared promising, but in fact it split at its first meeting and thereafter disintegrated.

If left Irish Republicans such as Frank Ryan saw Irish freedom increasingly in class and semi-communist terms, they also increasingly viewed their ‘Free State’ enemies not only as ‘traitors’ but as ‘fascists’ as well. There were good reasons for this. The more combative elements of Cumann na nGaedheal and the pro-Treaty civil war veterans under Eoin O’Duffy had formed their own street fighting organization – the Blueshirts – modeled on the style and some of the substance of continental fascism.

The Blueshirts did include some hard right-wing and anti-semitic thinkers but also farmers who didn’t want to hand over their cattle to De Valera’s government to pay land annuities and National Army veterans and their sons who were tired of getting beaten up at rallies by the IRA. Republicans like Ryan, though, saw the Blueshirts, much as far leftists did fascist movements elsewhere, as the hard edge of counter-revolution. So when their street-fighting enemies sent a column to Spain to support the right wing military coup against the left wing Republican government, Ryan and other Congress and IRA members naturally projected an Irish canvass onto a Spanish and international conflict.

This Irish context to Ryan’s worldview sadly goes almost unmentioned in the film, which is a pity as it helps to explain the Irish International Brigaders dedication to the Spanish Republican cause. Ryan’s days as a street organizer and sometimes brawler in Dublin also go a long way to explaining his own personal mystique within the Irish republican movement – a charisma which also apparently made him an effective military officer inSpain.

 Ryan and the Nazis, a partial explanation?

What is more, Ryan’s dual political identity as Irish patriot and socialist revolutionary goes some way to explaining his cooperation with the Nazis. Apart totally from their getting him out of Burgos prison, where Franco’s forces were busy executing their defeated enemies in 1940,  the Germans offered Ryan a chance to return to Ireland in the event of a British invasion – which looked possible in the months after the fall of France in 1940. Given that his goal remained an independent all-Ireland republic, cooperating with Britain’s enemies in this eventuality probably did not strike Ryan as intrinsically dishonourable.

And even more, given that Ryan understood anti-fascism in terms of socialism versus right wing reaction, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, which agreed an alliance between Germany and the USSR must have been a bitter disillusionment. It must have been difficult to tell any longer, in 1940, who was friend and who was foe.

So Frank Ryan’s tale should not be seen as a morality tale. The anti-fascism he subscribed to was not one of liberal democracy. But nor was his involvement with German intelligence any endorsement of the Nazis’ crimes.

It is, admittedly, a big task for a docudrama, which seeks to entertain as much as to inform, to grapple with all these subtleties, a drawback that the creators of this film acknowledge. Much of its reception will no doubt comprise of debate over whether or not Frank Ryan was a ‘Nazi collaborator’ and what this says, if anything, about the modern Irish republican movement.

Leaving that aside though, the film is still worth going to see. The dialogue is not always wonderful but the story is gripping, especially towards the end, the film uses archival footage cleverly and features a striking performance by lead actor Dara Devaney. If it provokes more people to find out more about Irish and international politics then it will have also been well worth making.       

What they aspire to and what they declare openly they have sworn to obtain, is not merely the repeal of the Union, but the establishment of a perfectly independent Irish Republic… they therefore declare that the only method of obtaining their ends is by frightening England and the English people. Until at last [England] shall be only too glad to let Ireland go her own way:[1] The rational and motivation of the Fenian Dynamite Campaign

Terrorism is an act of political violence seeking to coerce political elites, through the intimidation of public opinion, into yielding ground on a political grievance. A central plank of terrorist strategy, therefore, is the attacking of soft rather than hard targets – using the bomb as the language of political grievance.

This is done to instil a sense of terror through the psychological effect of the bomb, which is used to cause widespread and arbitrary destruction in urban centres. The Fenian bombing campaign in London of 1881-85 was an early example of this tactic.

Following the failure of advanced nationalism in the 1860s and especially the abject failure of the rebellion of 1867 and of the raids on Canada in 1866 and 1870, American Fenianism was riven with disillusionment; many activists perceived a period of revolutionary paralysis with no plan of campaign to counter the British presence in Ireland.[2]

This feeling of despondency was further underlined by recognition that successful Irish rebellion required congenial circumstances, which all regarded as non-existent. Coming to this conclusion, many frustrated and aggrieved Fenians decided to wait for a moment favourable to insurrection; they strategized that this would be facilitated byBritain becoming embroiled in a global conflict, diverting military attention from Ireland.

Such a strategy, however, could only justify stagnation, and apparent humiliation for Fenian ambition, with the movement ‘consigned to the melancholic bar room reminisces of the increasingly aged men of ’67.’[3] Against this strategy, militant firebrands, particularly the youth, very much disillusioned by the lack of revolutionary direction, were desirous of undertaking direct action to meet the British presence in Ireland with uncompromising resistance by whatever means expedient.[4]

This was representative both of a perception that the conditions for Irish revolution were non-existent, and that the Victorian interpretation of warfare as two recognisable armies and a defined code of conduct was impractical under Irish conditions.

The phenomenon of modern terrorism originated in the nineteenth century. In this narrative attention has been particularly given to Russian revolutionaries and their desire to secure political change through violence, directed against political elites rather than the public. Within studies of terrorism fleeting attention is paid to Fenian terrorism, and where it is, it is often deprecating and inequitable.[5]

In fact, Fenian bombers revolutionised the concept of terrorism in the nineteenth century. Terrorism in an Irish context was pioneered in the Fenian dynamite campaign between 1881-85, when Irish-American Fenianism undertook a sustained terrorist campaign incorporating a series of explosions in British urban centres. For the first time in British history, through an integrated use of explosives and timers, utilising modern technology, the Irish question was not confined to Ireland but now affected daily life in British cities through the unprecedented experience of political violence.

This dynamite campaign was planned, organised and funded by Irish-Americans, taking advantage of advances in modern science and technology, together with the increasing globalisation of Victorian society.

For the first time in history, Fenian bombers had the real ability to transcend national boundaries and, using innovative techniques such as employing explosive timers and detonators – they revolutionised the concept of terrorism, changing it from one of irregular attacks against political elites to a sustained campaign designed to establish public terror in order to coerce policy makers.

The purpose of this article is not to provide a chronological outline of the Fenian dynamite campaign, nor to examine the circumstances of any particular Fenian bombing. Instead, this article will seek to investigate the rationale and motivation behind the Fenian dynamite campaign as a proactive strategy amongst Irish-American Fenians.

A Terrorist Strategy

Veteran Fenian bomber Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa.

Many Irish-American Fenians sought a vindication of their struggle by undertaking a recognisable terrorist strategy in Britain while the heavier work of preparing for rebellion was undertaken in Ireland.  This strategy required financial support and the Fenians endorsed the idea of a revolutionary fund to prepare, equip and perfect a strategy designed to inspire terror in British cities.

With this in mind, in September 1875 it was suggested in a letter to Patrick Ford, editor of the radical New York Irish World newspaper, that Fenianism should employ a strategy supported by a national fund to mount direct political violence against Britain so as to ‘keep the faith alive’. This strategy was to be underlined by ‘terror, conflagration, and irretrievable destruction’[6] of British symbolic property, while preparation for rebellion actively continued in Ireland.

This fund was to become known as the ‘skirmishing fund’ and increasingly became a rallying point for ‘a general desire to have more life infused into the Irish national movement’[7] by Irish-American Fenianism.

Support for terrorism was not widely endorsed, amongst Irish-American Fenians however. Those who favoured ‘open and honourable warfare’ were incensed by the call for terrorism, believing it dishonourable. This opinion was underlined by the interpretation of warfare in the Victorian era and the belief that terrorism risked bringing Fenianism into international disrepute. In this regard the founder of Fenianism James Stephens recalled the suggestion as ‘the wildest, the lowest and the most wicked conception of the national movement’.[8]

The Fenian opponents of a terrorist strategy were repulsed by the concept of irregular and arbitrary terrorism in Britain and stressed the importance of waiting for British difficulty which would draw attention and resources away from Ireland, facilitating the opportunity for open rather than secretive warfare.[9]

Underlined by scientific and technological advancements, however, Irish-American supporters of terrorism will argued that favourable conditions for Irish revolution needed to be fostered by an aggressive campaign justifying the mobilising and symbolic power of violence, rather than waiting for an opportune moment of British difficulty.

A further consideration in the evolution of Fenian terrorism amongst Irish-Americans was the pervading belief in the ability of political violence to coerce British political elites to consider the Irish question. This belief was represented by the veteran Fenian John Devoy at the height of the Fenian dynamite campaign, when he lamented how no serious consideration of Irish political grievance could be won from Britain unless it was ‘wrung from her fear’.

Similarly, Patrick J. Tynan, the notoriously self-proclaimed No. 1 of the Fenian Invincible conspiracy, believed only the threat of force caused ‘more terror and panic to the British heart’, [10]  believing the Irish question ‘must be decided by force, or else there is the certainty of national death’.[11]

Precedents for the dynamite campaign

That political violence could coerce the British government to consider Irish grievance was a real possibility, and had been graphically demonstrated already.

In 1867 London Fenians had tried to mount a rescue of an imprisoned leader Colonel Ricard O’Sullivan Burke from London’s Clerkenwell Prison. Their plan had been to penetrate the prison wall with gunpowder explosive to enable Burke’s escape.[12] Using too much gunpowder, however, they had blown down some sixty yards of prison wall, killing twelve people and injuring over one hundred others. While the Clerkenwell explosion was not an act of terrorism but a bungled rescue attempt, contemporaries recalled how ‘terror took possession of society’.[13]

Against this background of rising terror, William Ewart Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, had publically remarked how the explosion had convinced him to address the Irish question, by means of his declared mission to pacify Ireland. This would effectively result in the disestablishment of the minority Anglican Church of Ireland and the introduction of Gladstone’s first Land Act.

Importantly, however, it had demonstrated how an act of political violence had forced the Government to yield ground on the Irish question, as one commentator lamented how Gladstone had ‘appealed to the most potent power in changing English public opinion – the fear of force. The dread of an Irish war, which might easily spread to England’.[14] Recognising how this public admission and the Prime Minister’s gesture of yielding ground to Irish grievance could influence the Fenian belief in the efficacy of political violence, Sir Robert Anderson, a Home Office Fenian expert recalled:

It was their crime… that brought that question within the sphere of practical politics. Even if his estimate of the business had been just, his words respecting it would have been none the less unjustifiable. For they could not fail to encourage Fenians to commit crimes of the same character.[15]

The Irish-American Context

Patrick Ford

This belief in the ability of political violence to coerce British political elites ran parallel to a pervading political grievance against the place of British rule in Ireland amongst Irish-American Fenians.

Many resented leaving Ireland, believing themselves to have been ‘frozen out of their native land’,[16] holding an enflamed grievance and desire for revenge against colonial rule.[17] This antipathy was cross-generational, its nationalism made more extreme by the weaning of their children on stories of tyranny and of a country held by force, deceit and bribery, underlined by acts of unrelenting cruelty and despotism.[18]

These ‘bitter memories harboured by Irish-Americans, of the Anglo-Irish landlordism and resentment against the British government’,[19] were intensified by contemporary difficulty in Ireland. 1878 and 1879 had seen a poor Irish harvest and failure, the worst on record since the Famine, and increasing emigration and eviction not witnessed on a scale since the 1840s.[20]

In this period Irish-America was strongly reinforced by a wave of new immigrants, many of whom had been forced off the land due to poverty, lack of employment or eviction. These immigrants to the USA carried with them new stories for Irish-America to hear, stories often sensationalised by the Irish-American press, strengthening existing Irish-American belief in British misgovernment. This further tended to consolidate an inclination to violent retribution amongst Irish-Americans.

Combined with the established horrific tales of the earlier famine, the immigrants’ stories illustrated for many the callousness of the British hegemony in Ireland. Irish-Americans were particularly interested in burgeoning land agitation in Ireland and the increasing proliferation of tenant defence leagues. They concluded that landlordism was ‘was the last link which keeps Irelandbound to England’ [21] and as the cornerstone of British rule, which should it be removed, British Rule would be severely weakened.

The Irish coercion legislation to put down land agitation between 1882-83 was therefore widely seen as provoking a legitimate armed response. Coercion was seen within the narrative of American republicanism as the imposition of tyranny justifying a resort to arms in defence of liberty. Thus, during increasing land agitation and coercion in Ireland, Irish-America concluded that something must be done in solidarity with and defence of the whole nation.[22]

A new age of warfare

A further consideration in the evolution of Irish-American Fenian terrorism was the contemporary experience of the American Civil War. In this regard it was evident that the American Civil War had redefined the nature of contemporary warfare, particularly regarding both the use of new technology and the role of civilians.

The Civil War had illustrated the increasing adoption and adaptation of new technology, together with an increasing acceptance of the concept of attrition and willingness to encompass the loss of civilian life. This was recognised by a pamphlet written by Bernard Janin Sage in the middle 1860s, The Organization of Private Warfare – Bureau of Destructive Means and Measures. Sage had cited the need for irregular warfare and the employment of bombs against civilian and symbolic targets, to be organised by ‘bands of destructionists and captors.’[23]

Using technological development the Confederates introduced landmines and clockwork explosives. It was well remembered how Gabrial J. Raines, a Confederate General at Yorktown, had sought to delay a Union advance by means of land mines, while the Confederate Secretary of War, George Wythe Randolph, had concluded that the use of explosives and skirmishing was legitimate for genuine military value.[24]

This was represented by the Confederate John Maxwell using what he termed a horological torpedo, a prototype time bomb, disguised as a Candle box and deposited at Union headquarters Virginia, causing over three hundred casualties. Such weapons designed to cause terror and demoralisation were widely used by the confederacy nearing the end of the war, and their destructive potential was understood by contemporary Americans:

The rebels have done all human ingenuity could desire to fix traps for our men. In Some places you will see an overcoat laying on the ground, but it will not do to pick it up, for to it is attached a string leading to a fuse containing powder, so when the garment is picked up it causes the powder to explode and by this means destroy our men. Torpedoes are covered with dirt in the street and should horse or man step upon one it is death.[25]

Other soldiers recalled similar experiences citing how the Confederacy had violated the understanding of modern warfare by relying on explosives designed to ‘kill five or six men every time they did anything or moved anything.’[26]

Such tactics clearly undermined the established rules of warfare and proved that technology and irregular combat had revolutionised conflict distinguishing modern warfare from previous conflict.

In this new recognisably modern warfare there was clearly an acceptance that, through the application of new technology, that antagonists were willing to encompass loss of civilian life and heavy destruction, giving rise to the suggestion of ‘violence against public targets,’[27] which sought to demoralise and dislocate the enemy. Similarly the Union had also studied the adoption and application of new technology in warfare, prepared to undertake a war of ‘protective retribution,’ whereby a similar war of exhaustion could be undertaken against ‘enemy civilians and economy.’[28]

Thus in the American Civil War both sides had utilised the benefits of technological and scientific development, believing that the side which forsook the advantages of modern technology risked defeat at the hands of ‘a less morally fastidious opponent’.[29]

The experience of Civil War further represented a gradual awareness that Generals and strategists were ‘compelled to yield first place in importance to the scientific skill.’[30] In the aftermath of the Civil War a culture of terrorism representative of the escalating proliferation of weapons and explosives used for political advancement and grievance was continuously evolving.

Domestic terror

One contemporary despaired of this terrorist culture, recognising ‘a decidedly unpleasant industry for the construction of infernal machines’ in American cities resulting from technological development.[31]  There was a steady stream of bombing incidents, facilitated by the extensive availability of cheap scientific journals to the common man, facilitating the home manufacture of explosives by individuals rather than factory production by chemists and scientists.

As early as 1873 when the New York City Financial Comptroller Andrew H. Green received a prototype parcel bomb, apparently by people aggrieved by Tammany Hall corruption,[32] as did Judge Samuel D. Morris, the former District Attorney, and opponent of official corruption at his residence in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve, 1873.[33]

In 1874 an Edward Wagner had tried to murder his mother-in-law using an improvised  parcel bomb at Philadelphia. The bomb, filled with gunpowder, contained fifty matches arranged to touch a sliding lid and detonate the explosive.[34] In April of the following year, communicants receiving confession discovered a bomb in the vestibule of St. Xavier’s church, Cincinnati. Fortunately it was discovered and thrown outside, where it detonated with ‘a terrific noise’[35]

Two months later an attempt was made upon the lives of the ladies temperance association at Illinois when a bomb was placed under a streetcar.[36] While in 1875, as part of a semi-official vendetta against Jessie and Frank James (the notorious James Brothers), their mothers home was attacked with a bomb thrown through her kitchen window, seriously injuring her and killing their young step-brother.[37]

But the clearest anticipation of the Fenians’ methods came on 28 October 1876, when a time-delayed bomb exploded in the luggage carriage of the express train from Philadelphia to Jersey City. Bearing remarkable resemblances to a future Fenian bomb at Victoria Station London, the device was arranged with a pistol tied to clockwork, which, upon reaching a set time the pistol would discharge detonating the bomb. In the following police investigation it was suspected that the bombers had sought to wreck the train, and its passengers.[38]

That the bomb was used regularly in post-Civil WarAmerica, tends to indicate that in this culture of terrorism inspired by the experience of Civil War and technological development, it had been perceived as a tool of political advancement and a means of settling grievance.

This culture of terrorism provided disillusioned Fenian activists with a contemporary argument for the use of technology to instil a fresh impetus in place of revolutionary paralysis, operating within the norms of post-Civil War America. It was therefore evident that, conditioned by this culture of terrorism and inspired by the experiences of the Civil War, the Fenians recognised terrorism as a viable strategy.

The technology of terror

London Tower explosion - effect of the explosion in the armoury (banqueting room white tower) of the tower of London (The Graphic Jan 31 1885)

The final and most important influence upon the adoption of Fenian terrorism was modern scientific and technological development, particularly the invention of dynamite, which tended to encourage a perception of revolutionary equilibrium with the great Powers:

Dynamite was being much talked of in the newspapers; and it was said that the anarchists and nihilists of the old world had at last in their hands an implement of destruction sufficient to destroy all the armies and navies in existence… it was referred to in glowing terms as the gift of science to the oppressed children of men, whereby despotism could be overcome and the sunshine of liberty would illuminate forever more.[39]

Modern scientific and technological development had therefore given the revolutionist, for the first time in history, a tremendous individual and low-cost power perceived as a weapon of the weak, offering unbridled destruction and melodrama in a collective revolutionary delusion.[40]

This perspective was graphically represented by the prominent Irish-American Fenian and Illinois Congressman John F. Finerty who declared: in this struggle, this vendetta, which England has now distinctly challenged, SCIENCE… must match itself against STRENGTH… In this our battle for vengeance and for liberty, one skilled scientist is worth an army’.[41] As a perceived weapon of the weak, modern science had provided the means of constructing explosives in backrooms, kitchens and workshops using cheap and easily-accessed materials common in everyday trade. All that was required, therefore, was a basic understanding of chemistry, facilitating what one contemporary lamented as ‘the new and mighty enginery of destruction which modern science [had] furnished’.[42]

The importance of modern scientific and technological development upon the Fenian impetus for terrorism was graphically illustrated by the establishment of a Brooklyn dynamite school. Under the instruction of O’Donovan Rossa and a supposed Russian specialist known as Professor Mezzeroff (who was, in fact, an Irishman named variously as Smith or Rodgers) students were taught the do-it-yourself manufacture of explosives.

Inspired by the perceived efficacy of modern scientific and technological development, the purpose of this dynamite school was to train men in the do-it-yourself use of explosives in America, and then to dispatch them to Britain to undertake terrorist attacks in British cities.

By the early 1880s at least four of these students were in operation in Ireland, Scotland and England, the most remarkable being Timothy Featherstone, John Francis Kearney, Henry Dalton and Thomas J. Mooney.  This new departure meant that explosives would now be built in backrooms, kitchens and workshops using the afore-mentioned cheap and easily-accessed materials, in British cities, with graduates sharing their knowledge with Fenians operating in Britain, seeking ‘the destruction of British life and property’.[43]

The Campaign

This campaign meant that from January 1881 to January 1885 the Fenians mounted a series of explosions in British urban centres, aboard public transport and – in the red letter event of their campaign – successfully detonated near-simultaneous explosions in the Tower of London, Westminster Crypt and the Chamber of the House of Commons on 24 January 1885 in an event immortalised as ‘Dynamite Saturday’.

In the course of their campaign they successfully established an air of fear and paranoia amongst the British public. By their choice of targets indicating their desire to disrupt the common experience of daily life by introducing fear into the simplest everyday experience.

In total twenty men would be arrested for their involvement in Fenian bombings. These men would suffer unbearable Victorian prison conditions, and several of those imprisoned would suffer insanity. One of them, Denis Deasy would die in custody. Thomas James Clarke, the future signatory of the Easter Proclamation and himself imprisoned for involvement in the Fenian Dynamite Campaign, recalled of their jail experience:

Had anyone told me before the prison doors closed upon me that it was possible for any human being to endure what Irish prisoners have endured in Chatham Prison, and come out of it alive and sane, I would not have believed him.… We treason-felony prisoners were known as… the ‘special men,’… kept, not in ordinary prison halls but in penal cells- kept there so that we could be more conveniently persecuted, for the authorities aimed at making life unbearable for us. The ordinary rules regulating the treatment of prisoners, which, to some extent, shield them form foul play and the caprice of petty officers, these rules as far as they did that, were in our case set aside… This was a scientific system of perpetual and persistent harassing… harassing morning, noon and night, and on through the night, harassing always and at all times, harassing with bread and water punishments, and other punishments with ‘no sleep’ torture and other tortures. This system was applied to the Irish prisoners and, to them only, and was specially designed to destroy us mentally or physically – to kill or drive insane. [44]

Conclusion

To conclude, the Fenian terrorist strategy was, essentially, rationally chosen and underlined by a perceived revolutionary paralysis following the failure of the previous decade. Terrorism thus provided a practical argument for rejuvenation necessary to instil a fresh impetus within defeated Fenianism. Underlined by developments in science and technology, Fenian terrorism did not originate from Ireland but was peculiar to a culture of terrorism inherent to post-Civil War America.

It had evidently been influenced by the pervasive Fenian belief in the ability of political violence to coerce British political elites to consider and address Irish grievances. This had been graphically represented in the aftermath of the Clerkenwell explosion when the Prime Minister had been seen to be coerced into yielding ground on the Irish problem.

Furthermore, technological development paralleled to the escalating proliferation of weapons and explosives being used for political advancement and grievance by ordinary Americans was undoubtedly a key motivation in the Irish-American impetus for terrorism.

The Dynamite Campaign had been made possible through the innovative use of technology and an obvious desire to attack symbolic targets in urban centres. Its legacy, however, remains that for the first time in British history the Irish question would not be confined to Ireland but would affect British urban centres and sensibilities, reaching and touching not just the political elite but the very people themselves.

References  

We interview Professor Eunan O’Halpin on the project, ‘The Dead of the Irish Revolution’ – which seeks to determine, for the first time, how many people were killed in the Irish revolution of 1916-1923. The Dead of the Irish Revolution by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin will be published in 2012. Questions by John Dorney.

 Click on the links below to listen to the interview.

Eunan O Halpin 1

Eunan O Halpin2

Eunan O Halpin3 

Eunan O Halpin 4

 Unlike the Northern Ireland conflict (1969-98) where casualties were scrupulously counted, named and memorialised, the victims of the much more concentrated violence of the early 1920s in Ireland – traditionally serialised as the Easter Rising (1916), The War of Independence (1919-21) and the Civil War (1922-23) – were never counted.

In the aftermath, particularly of the intra-nationalist civil war, no one wanted to remember how many died, let alone who killed them. Now for the first time, a project based in Trinity College Dublin seeks to redress this gap in our knoweldge.

We talk to Eunan O’Halpin about the project, which so far has determined figures of fatal casulaties up to December 1921, discussing;

- How many died?

-Who killed them?

- How many were civilians?

- Which parts ofthe country had the highest death tolls?

-What kind of violence – combat, riot or assassination was most common?

__________________________________________

Professor O’Halpin was also kind enough to provide us with a list of the figures to date, which will be published in an upcoming book, Terror in Ireland, edited by David Fitzpatrick.  A summary of the major points is as follows;

*2,141  deaths from political violence in 1917-21, of whom;

* Three places combined; Cork County,  Dublin city and Belfast, saw over 50% of the fatalities.

* A further 25% of the casualties are shared between four Munster counties; Limerick, Kerry, Tipperary and Clare.

*48% of deaths were civilians and 52% combatants.

*Of the combatants, 467 were IRA, 514 RIC, and 262 British military.

Additionally, 486 people were killed in the week-long Easter Rising of 1916. Professor O’Halpin tells us that the project has yet to determine reliable figures for 1922-23 but expects the total to be higher than for 1917-21, not only because of the civil war in the south from June 1922- April 1923, but because early 1922 was the most violent period of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.

Ireland’s Arctic Siege, The Big Freeze of 1947,  by Kevin C Kearns, Gill & MacMillan, 2011.

 Reviewer: Rhona McCord

We have suffered some long cold winters in Ireland in recent years but nothing on the scale of the winter of 1947, when an estimated 600 people died as a direct result of cold during one of the severest winters on record.  Indeed the figures are probably much higher if we include those who died from an outbreak of influenza and the increase in TB deaths recorded that year.

The bad winter was experienced all across Europe in the first three months of 1947.  In Ireland there were snowfalls from early January to mid March followed by flooding in many rural areas.  The knock on effects of the bad weather affected every section of the community.  In his latest work, Ireland’s Arctic Siege, American historian Kevin C. Kearns examines the events and the impact of the winter of 1947.

In 1946, British authorities warned of impending crisis in coal stocks.  The  coal industry was due to be nationalised on the 1st January 1949 under the control of the National Coal Board.  In Ireland Taidgh Murphy T.D. announced at a meeting of the Galway chamber of commerce that there would be no coal stocks available from the U.K. until June 1947 and turf production would need to be increased by at least 40% to cope with this shortage.

The Irish government had reduced the price of turf in the budget in anticipation of the coal shortage.  However a strike of hauliers in the summer of 1946 restricted the distribution of turf stocks and resulted in a smaller supply than anticipated.  The relevance of this fuel famine hit home in January 1947 when Europe suffered one of the deadliest winters on record.

The British were rocked by the coal crisis, which was compounded by heavy snowfalls and lack of transport, conditions quickly deteriorated.   German miners in the Ruhr valley suffered extreme conditions of isolation, cold and even starvation.  In Ireland both rural and urban communities have passed down the memories of the cold winter of 1947.

Murphy’s warnings of coal shortage in the summer of 1946 may have appeared alarmist at the beginning of the winter season.  Temperatures were considerably mild compared with the previous winter.  In October favourable weather permitted rapid progress in farm work, many farms reported reaping and the sowing of winter wheat to be ahead of schedule.

On November 6 the Irishman’s diary section of the Irish Times reported an overnight change of temperature of almost 20 degrees. Although this may have been an exaggeration it did reflect an unusual mild spell of weather.[1]  At this time Ireland had only a few meteorologists mainly employed in the aviation industry and there was no public forecasting system. Kearns refers to the insufficient forecasting and the many weather prophets, which the daily papers relied upon for information.

We may look back and sneer yet with our highly equipped weather stations of today the media still turn to the skills of a Donegal postman for snow forecasts.

The first indication of bad weather came from London where icy winds were reported on 6 of January.  Two days later an article appeared in the Irish Times discussing the toll of the bad weather on people in central Europe.[2]  According to the Times reporter the Irish would fair better in similar conditions because of a higher calorie diet.  This theory was about to be tested.  On the 26 January the first snowfall was recorded in Dublin and a few days later the Irish Times claimed the ‘ coldest weather for years as “freeze up” continues.’[3]

Kearns tells the story through a series of oral testimonies of those who lived through the appalling conditions.   Describing the desperate shortage of fuel and the regular burning of furniture to keep warm.  The rationing system was still in place since the ‘Emergency’ and tuberculosis was a major health issue throughout the country.  The death rate during the two-month freeze doubled with the most vulnerable becoming the main victims of cold and hunger.

According to many of the testimonies the Irish Government was unresponsive to the needs of the country, which was facing a serious national emergency.   While officials busily denied the need to declare an emergency, they failed to utilise the Army and other resources to relieve the intolerable conditions that people were suffering.  When eventually the government recognised the gravity of the situation the response left a lot to be desired.

Seán Lemass in a radio broadcast to the nation asked people to ‘avoid the selfish practice of using off hour glimmer gas, and reduce their electricity usage.’[4]  On the other hand the generosity of wealthy types such as the Talbot’s of Malahide were praised for having made trees on their land available for fire wood.

The conditions were perilous and many accidents were recorded such as an eleven-year old boy hit by a skidding truck on Baggot’s Bridge and more serious cases like the discovery of the body of James Gallagher in Co. Leitrim who got lost in a blizzard on his way to a neighbour in pursuit of some turf.  Blizzards and snowdrifts of over 12 feet were recorded.

Many people were left stranded and isolated while thousands of livestock were killed by the cold and hunger.  The winter of 1947 was indeed a great tragedy for many,  but I wonder if Mr. Kearns has exaggerated the significance somewhat in order to sell more books across the pond.  That said, it is a decent social history and clearly establishes the disparity between rich and poor in Ireland at the end of the 1940s.

The crisis created by the bad winter only served to highlight this disparity and certain indifference by some in authority.  The book is longer than it needs to be and annoyingly repetitive however it sold out rather quickly in the run up to Christmas and has already been reprinted due to demand.  It will make you appreciate your central heating and double glazed windows and perhaps we should take note that death in cold winters is unfortunately not yet a thing of the past.

John Dorney reports on the 1913 Commemoration Committee – gearing up for the centenary of the Dublin Lockout of 1913.

It will be 99 years this August since the start of the great Dublin Lockout, when members of Jim Larkin’s Transport Union walked off the trams of the Dublin United Tramway Company, on strike for recognition of their union.

It was a social confrontation almost unique in modern Irish history. William Martin Murphy, owner of the tram company and the Irish Independent newspaper not only wanted to purge his companies of ITGWU members, he formed a cartel of virtually all the employers of Dublin to do likewise. Larkin and the other unions in the city refusing to concede to a pledge to forswear union membership, brought out over 20,000 men and women on strike. Some terms in history are undervalued by overuse, and one of them is ‘class war’, but there could be no other term for the bitter ensuing struggle.

The employing and employed classes butted heads for six months until sheer hardship forced the union members resentfully back to work, taking a humiliating pledge not to belong to or associate with Larkin’s union. The workers were sustained with food and money from trade unionists in Britain while the middle classes of Dublin held collections for the ‘loyal workers’, or strike breakers.

The dispute was also famously bloody. The Dublin Metropolitan Police fought pitched battles all along the tram lines with strikers and at one point drunken policemen made a night time assault on a tenement building to exact revenge on those who had been rioting during the day. A union rally on O’Connell Street was violently broken up, in an episode remembered in the labour tradition as ‘Bloody Sunday’ – though in fact many of those baton charged were mere bystanders. Three union members were beaten to death over the first weekend of the strike.

The workers’ self-defence force, set up during the strike – the Citizen Army – went on to participate in the nationalist insurrection, the Easter Rising just three years later. Some of its members later spoke of it as a chance to pay back to the police what had been done to them in 1913.

The Lockout fits awkwardly into the mainstream narrative of Irish history. The workers were generally nationalists, but so too were many employers, including William Martin Murphy. The strikers’ greatest ally was the British Trades Union Congress without whose aid the strike could not have been sustained. The British government did deploy police and troops to ‘keep order’ but they were in fact far more conciliatory to the workers than were Irish employers.

Some aspects of the dispute seem to be a preview of features of independent Ireland. The entrenched privilege of the Irish media, defending their own class interests with calumny of their opponents seems familiar even now. The Catholic Church also flexed its muscles – forbidding the union’s plan to send children to socialist households in England for the duration of the strike, lest they be exposed to irreligious influences.

The Lockout was also a rare time when Ireland was at the centre of broader European trends. The years before the First World War saw waves of strikes across western Europe and saw the consolidation of mass union organisations in many countries.

Although in the short term it was a defeat for the ITGWU, in the longer term the 1913 struggle is seen by labour activists as a kind of founding myth – a heroic sacrifice that helped to found their movement. Larkin’s ITGWU is the ancestor of SIPTU, the largest union in Ireland today. Although, as Padraig Yeates, the director of the 1913 commemoration committee jokingly remarks, 100 years later the fight for union recongition is still ongoing. ‘It’s like when Lincoln freed the slaves in 1862 and it was the 1960s before full civil rights for black Americans was achieved’, he says.

The iconic status of the 1913 strike in labour memory can be seen on the banners, now being collected in Liberty Hall by Sam McGrath and Kevin Brannigan of the commemoration committe. The dark navy banner of the ITGWU No 19 Branch, for instance, reveals layers of working class Dublin identity. Alongside the union emblem are the symbols of the four Irish provinces and also of Dublin itself. Under an embroidered image of workers being baton-charged in 1913 are portraits of the ‘Lockout martyrs’, ‘Murdered on the Streets of Dublin’ and under that, ‘Ni saoirse gan saoirse na lucht oibre’ – ‘no freedom without freedom for the working people’.

Other banners reflect militancy from further afield. One commemorates ‘those who suffered in the Cork General Strike of 1870′. Another, bright red, with five hangman’s nooses, is a tribute to the Molly Maguires, Irish miners hanged in Pennsylvania in 1877. One of the more off-beat, a banner representing health workers, depicts an arch-angel Gabriel slaying Satan. A representative mix of the eclectic nationalist, socialist and religious influence on Irish labour politics perhaps.

A tapestry, after the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, is planned to depict the Lockout, also in the works are an oral history project to recover grassroots memory of the dispute and a community archeology project.

It is important, Padraig Yeates, argues that the union commemoration of 1913 not be overshadowed in the upcoming, so-called, ‘decade of commemorations’ which will mostly remember the events that led to Irish independence and partition. Not only was the social convulsion of the Lockout dramatic, but it exposed many of the contradiction that had to be worked out, often painfully, in independent Ireland.

You can visit the 1913 Commemoration Committee’s site here.

You can listen to Padraig Yeates speak about the Lockout here and here.

Cathal Brennan looks at the eccentric political career of Herbert Moore Pim, Quaker, Catholic, Republican, loyalist, fascist, bohemian and occult fiction writer.

Herbert Moore Pim was one of the most unusual characters to have emerged from the revolutionary period in Irish history.  Although rarely mentioned in the works dealing with the period, his political trajectory took him into contact with many of the leading figures of the cultural, nationalist and unionist circles of the time.

Pim was born in 1883 to a distinguished Quaker business and philanthropic family in Belfast.  His father, Robert, was the secretary of the Friends Provident Insurance Company[1] and Pim followed his father into the insurance business. From the age of seventeen, he began circulating manuscripts of his poetry and short stories and developed an interest in the occult.[2]  In 1903 he married Amy Vincent Mollan, the daughter of a successful Presbyterian linen merchant.

Belfast at this time was heavily segregated along religious and political lines.  The vast majority of Belfast Protestants were Unionists who opposed Home Rule for Ireland while most Catholics favoured it.  Unlike the rest ofIreland, Belfast Conservatism and Unionism was strongly working-class and Ultra-Protestant, whereas in other areas it was led by the old Anglo-Irish ascendency.  Nationalism in the city was led by Joseph Devlin, the Irish Parliamentary Party MP forWest Belfast.  Devlin was a former bar man and labour sympathiser who had rejuvenated the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the 1890s.  His organisational skills had led him to the top of the AOH and the Irish National League bringing him to national prominence in the party.

Pim’s Quaker faith would have brought him into contact with more liberal and tolerant currents within the city.

Politically he was a unionist and conservative in his beliefs but 1910 saw a remarkable conversion.  He was received into the Roman Catholic faith by another convert to Catholicism, Father Hubert of Ardoyne.[3]

 Conversion to Catholicism

Pim adopted not just the religious but also the political and cultural traditions of Irish Catholicism. Shortly after his conversion he joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the United Irish League and became one of the ‘Star lecturers’ on their platforms.  At public meetings, and in Joseph Devlin’s Irish News, he was a bitter critic of the Irish Unionists and all opponents of John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party.  He was also an active member of the Dawn of Freedom branch of the UIL in Belfast.[4]

In 1901 he wrote The Vampire of Souls and The Man with Thirty Lives followed in 1903.[5]  In 1914 he published a novel called The Pessimist, whose central character hopes to end suffering by the extinction of all life on Earth.  He published the novel under the pseudonym A. Newman (he had become a ‘new man’ following his conversion to Catholicism).  For years afterwards he would sign his writings ‘A. Newman – Author of The Pessimist.[6]  Unknown Immortals, a collection of sketches of Belfast characters and scenes was published in 1917, while Selected Poems was published the same year.  In that era, publishing poetry and verse was quite common at the time, especially among romantic nationalists.  Despite Pim’s own belief that his writings were very important works of literature this opinion doesn’t seem to have been shared by many other people.

In August 1914, with war in Europe a certainty, John Redmond addressed the Irish Volunteers in Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow.  The Volunteers had been founded the previous year to enforce Home Rule when it was eventually passed by Parliament.  In his speech, Redmond urged the Irish Volunteers to join the British Army and support the British war effort.  This led to a split in the Volunteer movement.  Surprisingly, for such a partisan of Redmond and Devlin, Pim remained with the much smaller, IRB influenced, Irish Volunteers.  Those who supported the Parliamentary Party and the British war effort became known as the National Volunteers.  At the outbreak of war Pim declared himself a separatist and lost his job.  Patrick Maume has speculated that during this period Pim may have joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood.[7]

Separatist

Pim, bearded front, with IRB leader Sean McDermott, to his left and Irish Volunteer officers in Cork.

At this time, Cathal O’Shannon, the union activist and future Labour TD, became acquainted with Pim through the Irish Volunteers in Belfast.  O’Shannon stated that as, ‘a Volunteer, anti – war, and anti – Redmond propagandist he was effective enough,’ but, ‘sometimes his super-egotistical exaggeration of facts and figures, his affectation in speech and manner, and his startlingly irresponsible proposals and schemes embarrassed more serious or more revolutionary colleagues.’[8]

Pim began writing for The Irish Volunteer and also published a series of pamphlets called Tracts for Our Times, which dealt with figures such as Robert Emmett and the Manchester Martyrs.[9]  In 1915, Pim, and leading IRB figures such as Denis McCullough and Ernest Blythe, received deportation orders under the Defence of the Realm Act.[10]  After refusing to follow the order they were arrested, tried before a Belfast magistrate, where they were defended by Charles Wyse Power, and jailed for three months in Crumlin Road Prision.[11]

In early 1916 Pim began publishing The Irishman in Belfast.  During this same period his marriage finally collapsed because of his consistent infidelities.[12]  O’Shannon described The Irishman as, ‘a characteristic Pim product,’ where, ‘nearly every number was enlivened by some controversy.’[13]  One of Pim’s contributors was Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensbury and the former companion of Oscar Wilde.  Douglas had been a houseguest in Pim’s Finaghy home in 1915 and they were to remain close for many years.[14]  Under Pim, The Irishman began to regularly publish Douglas’ poetry.

Pim joined the volunteer muster at Coalisland, Co. Tyrone before the Easter Rising.  In part due to the conflicting orders Denis McCollough ordered the volunteers to return home without fighting.  McCollough’s reputation didn’t recover from what many in the movement in Ulster considered a disgrace and he lost his leadership role in the province.  In the aftermath of the Rising, Pim was arrested and deported to Reading Jail.[15]

He was released in August of 1916 and immediately resumed the editorship of The Irishman.[16]  In September he began publishing it again as a weekly.  Because Arthur Griffith, and most of the Sinn Féin and Volunteer activists, were still interned Pim rose to the top of the separatist movement and began directing Sinn Féin affairs and speaking on behalf of the prisoners.  According to Michael Laffan he was a bad party leader who inspired little trust and needlessly provoked and bickered with potential allies such as the Irish National League.[17]

Pim's separatist newspaper.

Griffith, writing to a friend from Reading jail, stated, ‘My well-meaning but feather headed friend Herbert Pim seems to be muddling up Sinn Féin a bit.  However we must trust in God to take him in hand and show him how to unmuddle it.’[18]

By the time the prisoners were released in December Pim found himself out of any leadership position in the movement and he concentrated on the editorship of The Irishman.  The journal combined poetry and literature with Sinn Féin policy documents and articles.  It also campaigned against sexual immorality, in which Pim was enthusiastically supported by Lord Douglas.   Pim’s campaign against ‘unclean literature’ earned the approbation of Cardinal Logue.[19]  The campaign highlighted Pim’s continued hypocrisy in regard to his outward projection of himself as a devout Catholic despite his rather Bohemian lifestyle.

In April 1918, following the victories of the Irish Parliamentary Party over Sinn Féin in by – elections in South Armagh, Waterford and East Tyrone, Pim wrote to the editor of the Irish Independent to ascribe these victories to ‘ignorance and intimidation’ of a ‘deluded majority.’  He stated that, ‘If the English actually proceed about the application of conscription to Ireland… the disaster to this country will be the direct and logical result of gross national sin committed by the so – called Irish Parliamentary Party and their following of deluded national degenerates.’[20]

Conscription in Britain had come into effect in January 1916 but the measure was never extended to Ireland.  After the German ‘Spring Offensive’ in April 1918 Conservative politicians in Britain demanded that conscription should be applied to Ireland too.  The threat of conscription succeeded in uniting all strands of nationalist opinion in Ireland against the measure and saw a large increase in membership for Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers.  Although the measure was never introduced in the end it did lead to a rise in support for the separatist movement at the expense of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

In an article in the Irish Independent he urged Unionists that only Sinn Féin could prevent conscription from becoming a reality and if they wished to fight it they should leave their names and addresses with their nearest Sinn Féin branch and assured them this would not prejudice their views on the national question.[21]  How many Unionists took him up on this offer is hard to say.  In the same article he protested against any conference with the Irish Parliamentary Party blaming them as the, ‘individuals deliberately responsible for the conscription menace.’[22]

Unionist

In June 1918 Pim had another abrupt political about face.  He and his mistress, Dorothy Hungerford, resigned from Sinn Féin and advocated conscription.[23]  Without apparent explanation he became an advocate of the most right-wing and chauvinist type of unionism.  ‘After painful experience,’ he wrote, ‘the conclusion was forced upon me that the representatives of an alleged national principle in Ireland were not endowed with qualities that would prove beneficial to any country, and that the welfare of Ireland would be safe only in the hands of the Unionists.  Now, after a few weeks observation, it seems perfectly evident to me that the integrity of Unionism should be maintained without a trace of compromise in face of the grave dangers which confront us.’[24]

In an article for the Belfast Evening Telegraph, Pim wrote, ‘In my humble opinion it is as sensible to point to France and Germany on the Map, and say “There is a nation for you!” as to “lump” Ulster and the rest of Ireland together and declare, “There is a nation for you!”’[25]

In 1919 he published Unconquerable Ulster with a foreword from Edward Carson.[26]  In it he argued that Ulster Unionists were of Gaelic descent and Nationalists were the descendants of a pre – Celtic slave race.[27]

Lord Douglas invited him over to Londonto assist with his journalistic endeavours.  Pim and Douglas campaigned against an alleged German plot to corrupt the British upper classes by homosexuality.  In 1919 Douglas established a weekly paper called Plain English with Pim as assistant editor.

Anti-Semite

The paper was ultra-right wing, anti-Semitic and anti-Sinn Féin.  In Plain English he serialised a personal memoir called Adventures in the Land of Sinn Féin.[28]  In 1920 Pim joined the far right Britons Society which had been founded the previous year by Henry Hamilton Beamish.  Pim was a fierce critic of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and accused the British government of betraying Irish Loyalists.[29]  Once again, with the zeal of the convert, Pim had gone from the extremes of Irish Nationalism to the extremes of ‘Die-Hard’ Tory imperialism.

Pim and Douglas’ next journal, Plain Speech, published an article accusing Winston Churchill of manipulating war news to benefit Jewish speculators.  Unsurprisingly, Churchill took the matter to court in 1923 and Douglas was imprisoned for libel.

Pim left for France and eventually took French citizenship.  He married Germaine Eleanor Dussotour and they had one child.  In 1927 his novel French Love was published.  It was a largely fictionalised version of his own life in which he accused his first wife of unspeakable perversions, portrayed himself as a devout Catholic and claimed to have spied on Germany during the war.

During this time he continued to publish far-right and anti- Semitic pamphlets.  After several years living in Italy, where he became involved in fascism, he returned to live in England in 1937 beside his old friend Lord Douglas in Hove.  He died in Sussex in 1950 at the age of sixty seven.

Pim was certainly one of the most interesting characters the separatist movement threw up in this period.  The correspondence in the Dublin newspapers following his death showed that few of his former comrades forgave him for abandoning republicanism in 1918 and becoming an ardent loyalist.

 Memory

Aodh de Blacam, one of his contributors at The Irishman, was one of his few colleagues who had some kind words for him, and even this prompted further letters to the papers reprimanding de Blacam.[30]  Cathal O’Shannon’s obituary in The Irish Times painted a picture of an eccentric, buffoonish curiousity.[31]  Michael Laffan wrote that his brief leadership role in 1916, ‘reflected the vacuum or lack of talent available to radical nationalists.’[32]

There can be few Irish people who lived quite such an interesting life during these years.  From Unionism to the leadership of Sinn Féin and back to Unionism again.  From the far – right of the British aristocracy to flirting with European fascism.  Simultaneously writing religious tracts and pornographic literature under different pen names (according to his son) all the while proclaiming himself to be a devout Roman Catholic, while keeping several mistresses on the go.  Pim can be accused  of many things but he was certainly never dull.

References

The fatal shooting of 13 unarmed demonstrators by the British Army in Derry in 1972. By John Dorney. See also Four Bloody Sundays

 In January 1972, a march was called by Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in for Sunday January 30^th in Derry. Its purpose was to protest against internment without trial, which had been introduced in August of the previous year.

 The city was already in a state of low-intensity conflict. Since 1969, when Catholic protests against discrimination within Northern Ireland had exploded into a three day riot with the police known as the Battle of Bogside, British troops had patrolled the streets.

The Catholic working class Creggan and Bogside areas were sealed of with barricades and behind them, in so called ”Free Derry“, two rival IRAs, the Officials and Provisionals patrolled in hijacked cars, shooting at any British troops that entered the area. Ten soldiers had died in the city already. Rioting between troops and what they referred to as the “Derry young hooligans” was also a regular occurrence.

The British Army for their part had already shot dead two local youths, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beatie, in July 1971 whom they accused of being armed, an accusation vigorously denied by locals. Another four civilians were killed by the Army by the start of 1972. As the Saville Inquiry acknowledged, “The situation in Londonderry in January 1972 was serious. By this stage the nationalist community had largely turned against the soldiers.”[1]

All political demonstrations had been banned in Northern Ireland the previous August, “until order was restored” . Nevertheless  when the march, on January 30, 1972, started out  in the Creggan, as Dr Raymond McClean remembered; “the atmosphere was so relaxed and cheerful that I decided to leave all my equipment in the car in the Creggan as I thought there would be no casualties to treat.”[2]

‘A scoop-up operation’

The Royal Ulster Constabulary police force (RUC), had if anything and even worse relationship with the nationalist population of Derry at the time than the Army, being seen as the force behind the Protestant domination ofNorthern Ireland. But had their advice been followed, the march might have gone off as peacefully as Dr. McClean predicted.

The local RUC Chief superintendant, Frank Lagan wanted to allow the march enter the city centre unmolested, to take pictures of rioters and if necessary pick them up later. But since 1969, it was the military who had primary responsibility for public order in Northern Ireland. Major General Robert Ford wanted, by contrast, to oppose the march leaving Creggan and entering city centre, with the intention of arresting “young hooligans” … “a scoop up operation to arrest as many hooligans and rioters as possible”. [3]

He had deployed for the operation one of the British Army’s elite combat formations, the 1^st Parachute regiment.

Even more ominously, Ford had recently written a memo to his commander in chief, Harry Tuzo, in which he expressed the view that the minimum force required to deal with the “Derry Young Hooligans” was, “after clear warnings, to shoot selected ringleaders”.[4]

A Bloody Ten Minutes.

Although the march had been banned, it mostly passed off peacefully after Army barricades prevented the 15,000 marchers from leaving the nationalist Bogside and passing into Derry’s city centre.

A small number of youths, as was common in Derry in those disturbed times, began to throw stones at the soldiers.

The response of the British troops varied considerably. Some units, the Royal Green Jackets, “acted with restraint”, in the words of Saville Inquiry and used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon on the stone-throwers.

Some shots were also exchanged; two soldiers of Machine Gun Platoon, fired between them five shots from the derelict building on William Street– wounding two men. In retaliation a member of the Official IRA fired a rifle at soldiers, but without casualties.[5]

But it was 1 Para that was charged with “scooping up” large numbers of rioters in arrests. Their Brigadier, MacLellan, gave strict orders for them not to follow the youths down Rossville Street, where they would be mixed up with peaceful marchers. Colonel Wilford, who was directly in charge, failed to pass on this order and sent his Support Company, in armoured vehicles, chasing the rioters down into the maze of terraced streets and flat complexes.

Eamonn McCann a radical Derry leftist who had been behind much of the original protest movement in the city recalled;

“When the shooting started that day the first reaction, after fear, was bewilderment. Why were they shooting? At Free Derry Corner where most people had gathered for the meeting the crowd flung themselves to the ground as the crack-crack of the self-loading rifles came from the bottom of Rossville Street. Looking up one could see the last few stragglers coming running panic-stricken, bounding over the barricade outside the High Flats, three of them stiffening suddenly and crumpling to the ground. One ought to have realized at the time that what was happening was they were being killed.”[6]

McCann’s disbelief was understandable. While the Paras had been sent to Derry to mount an aggressive arrest operation and possibly even “shoot ringleaders”, of the rioters, no one anticipated indiscriminate firing on unarmed crowds. The British soldiers, in an unfamiliar area, surrounded by people they believed to be hostile, were panicked by fire from one of their own officers, named in the Saville report as “Lieutenant N”, who fired over the heads of the crowds to disperse them.

The soldiers, hearing the sound of shots echoing off the surrounding buildings thought they were coming under fire and began indiscriminately to shoot at the people around them. Five died on Rossville Street and the rest were killed as soldiers pursued the fleeing crowds into the neighbouring  flat complexes.[7]

McCann again; “An hour and a half later no one knew for certain how many were dead. Some said three, some five. From McCafferty’s house in Beechwood Street Bernadette Devlin phoned Altnagelvin Hospitaland asked for the names of the casualties. About 20 people crowded around her into the hallway as she prepared to write them down. The pushing and shoving stopped as she just kept on writing.

[He heard]… how Jacky Duddy had been just behind Father Daly in the car park of the High Flats, laughing to see a priest running when the bullet got him; how Pat Doherty had been lying out in the open moaning, ‘I don’t want to die on my own’, and Barney McGuigan, a big quiet man, had gone out to him waving a white handkerchief and was shot in the base of the skull; how John Young had been dragging himself, wounded in the shelter of the barricade across Rossville Street towards the door of the flats, people screaming down at him, come on lad, come on, you’re nearly there’, but he didn’t make it.”[8]

Dr Raymond McClean, who had set out on the march so optimistically, found himself searching the nearby houses for casualties, “In the first house I found Michael Kelly …and lying bside him Jim Wray [both already dead]… William McKinney… said to me, “I’m going to die doctor am I?” I lied a bit and said ‘you have been hit badly but if we can get an ambulance and get you to a hospital quickly I hope you’ll be alright”.[9]

The shooting had lasted only ten minutes. One company of soldiers from the Support Company of 1 Para Regiment – having stormed into the Bogside in armoured vehicles to arrest rioters – had fired 100 shots from their SLR rifles in and around the flat complexes ofRossville Street, Glenfada Park and AbbeyPark, killing 13 people and injuring a similar number. Most of the dead were young men (only two were  over 40) and six were aged 17.  The shooting was done by only a handful of soldiers – around ten in total.

At the time, the British troops claimed they had come under sustained attack. The Army statement the following day claimed, “The troops came under nail-bomb attack and a fusillade of 50-80 rounds from the area of Rossville Flats and Glenfada flats. Fire was returned at seen gunmen and nail-bombers. Subsequently, as troops deployed to get at the gunmen, the latter continued to fire. In all a total of well over 200 rounds was fired indiscriminately in the direction of the soldiers. Fire continued to be returned only at identified targets”.[10]

The British government’s Widgery Inquiry of 1972 largely backed up this version, but the subsequent British Saville report of 2010 found, “Despite the contrary evidence given by soldiers, we have concluded that none of them fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks by nail or petrol bombers. No-one threw or threatened to throw a nail or petrol bomb at the soldiers on Bloody Sunday.”

There was some firing from republican paramilitaries of the Official IRA on the day, but, “nothing approaching that claimed by some soldiers and nothing that would justify them opening fire”. The Provisional IRA’s leader in Derry, Martin McGuinness, was “probably carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun” but there is no conclusive evidence that he used it on the day.

Moreover, “With the exception of Gerald Donaghey, who was a member of the Provisional IRA’s youth wing, the Fianna, none of those killed or wounded by soldiers of Support Company belonged to either the Provisional or the Official IRA”. [11] 

Consequences

The standard nationalist narrative of Bloody Sunday in 1972 is that it created the Provisional IRA and largely spawned the subsequent conflict in Northern Ireland.

Certainly the event cast a long shadow. Eamonn McCann wrote, “After Bloody Sunday, the most powerful feeling in the area was the desire for revenge. Since the deaths of Cusack and Beattie and the introduction of internment there had been mass support for the IRA, but it had been tempered with a vague uneasiness about the morality of killing people… Now…people made a holiday in their hearts at the news of a dead British soldier.”

Saville wrote, with studied understatement, “What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed”

Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of young Catholic men and women were propelled into the ranks of both IRAs, but especially the Provisional IRA, which was gearing up for its armed campaign.

The British Embassy in Dublin was burnt to the ground by irate crowds. The south was awash with belligerent rhetoric, Taoiseach Jack Lynch called the paratroops’ actions “Incredibly savage and inhuman”. Patrick Hillary, the Irish foreign minister told a New Yorkaudience, “my one aim now is to get Britain out of Ireland”. [12]

Originally, the British Army had been deployed inNorthern Irelandas an aid to the civil power and was actually welcomed by nationalists as a more neutral force than the Northern Irish RUC or B-Specials. Now  they were shooting down unarmed demonstrators. There could be no better validation of the argument that  peaceful protest had run into a wall of repression and armed struggle was the only viable option.

In 1971, 171 peopled were killed in political violence in Northern Ireland. The death toll in 1972, the year after Bloody Sunday, almost tripled to 479 deaths and between 2-300 were killed every year until 1977, after which the rate of killing dropped sharply but continued to hover at or just under 100 a year until the ceasefires of 1994.[13]   

The Stormont Parliament ofNorthern Irelandwas suspended, partly in response to the Derry shootings, by the British Government on March 28, 1972 and Direct Rule from London was introduced, which lasted, until the new Northern Ireland Assembly was established, under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, in 1999.

Was Bloody Sunday really to blame for all this? A few words of caution are necessary here. The Provisional IRA was already preparing for an onslaught on what it thought of as the British occupation of Ireland. Bloody Sunday gave them more activists and sympathizers but their course of action was already set. The loyalist paramilitaries would have responded as they did, with sectarian killings of Catholics, with or without Bloody Sunday.

The British Army for its part later admitted that in its early years in Northern Ireland, it conducted a counter-insurgency campaign using the methods of colonial wars fought in places such as Aden and Malaysia. In the early 1970s, the Army was too ready to treat the Catholic or nationalist population as the enemy and killed many civilians, mostly Catholic, in these years (though not as many as either republican or loyalist paramilitaries). In a two day period in August 1972, for instance 11 Catholics, this time in Ballymurphy in Belfast were shot dead by the British Army during arrest operations.[14]

It did learn lessons and killed far fewer people from the late 1970s onwards, but its relationship with the nationalist population was permanently poisoned.

In short, Bloody Sunday, tragic event as it was, speeded up the dynamics of a conflict already underway. Without doubt it contributed to the extraordinary length of the Troubles as well. But the continuation of the killing was also a result of choices taken on all sides.

References

Click on the link to listen to the show.

http://www.archive.org/details/TheHistoryShowEpisode2February72012

Click on the links below to listen.

Brian Hanley on Troubles pt 1

Brian Hanley on Troubles pt 2

Brian Hanley on troubles pt 3

Brian discusses how southern attitudes towards the north evolved over the period from 1969 to the 1990s.

Among the points of interest are;

That there was was a widespread upsurge in nationalist feeling in the south in the early years of the Troubles but that it quickly subsided, being replaced in some quarters with a certain hostility to northern nationalists.

That the Irish government believed that British withdrawal was imminent in the mid 1970s and prepared a plan for  dealing within a sectarian civil war in the north.

That the H-Block protest period was in large part an outlet of protest for disaffected working class youth in the south.

The evolution of northern republican attitudes towards the ‘Free State’.

The bomb attacks of loyalist paramilitaries in the south, and suspicion of British forces’ collusion, particularly in the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

(There’s a certain amount of background noise from the cafe, clinking of cups and so forth, but perhaps it adds to the atmosphere.)

Dr. Brian Hanley is the author of; The IRA  A Documentary History, 1919-2005, The IRA: 1926-1936, and with Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution, The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party. He teaches History at the University of Liverpool.

Listen to our previous interviews with Brian Hanley here -

The IRA’s ideology

The IRA at War

The Rise and Fall of Fianna Fail

A two-wheeled journey through the Pale. By John Dorney.

I rode my bike from south Dublin to Carlingford in the Cooley peninsula in January 2012.

The bicycle, when it was popularized in the late 19^th century, was the equivalent then of cheap air travel today – liberating people to travel in a short time distances that before would have taken days or weeks. Patrick Kavanagh wrote about how travelling a mere 12 miles in his native Monaghan in the 1950s could transport a man into a different parish with a whole different set of customs, accent and view of the world.

The humble machine still has this use today. On a bike you really feel the landscape, smell the manure of the fields, see all the sights on the back roads. It brings you in touch with a human geography that speeding down an enclosed motorway, with nothing but the muffled roar of engines in your ears could never do.

My trip also took me through one of the most endearingly historic regions of Ireland, the Pale – centre for some 500 years of English settlement in Ireland.

The first stage of this trip takes you through the clatter of Dublin, the cars, the heavy machinery, the music – in Finglas a car caught my eye, stopped at a traffic light blaring out dance music, the young driver thrusting himself forward in the seat to the pounding of the beat – the drizzle sprays up a stream of dirty gravel slime at you.

But when you turn off the little roundabout, past Dublin airport and into the country village of St Margarets, everything changes. A quiet descends, bar the odd passing car, the fields seem peaceful, soothingly green, with the odd cow plodding about.

The villages – Oldtown, the Naul, Annagassan, Castlebellingham – have beautiful, very old, stone-built churches. The fields are neat and well kept – growing crops. The landscape seems tamed but in human way – showing all the signs of being cultivated over many hundreds of years. Were you to ride in the other direction from Dublin, into the hills of Wicklow, you would enter a barren, brown wilderness of heather and sheep.

The Pale

North County Dublin, Meath and Louth is the true Pale, where people have tilled the rich land since medieval times. This is only part of Irelandwhere the English language was universally spoken before the 1600s. The English thought their settled, cleared farmlands marked them out from the wild hills and bogs inhabited by their cattle-raising Gaelic foes. And you can still see the distinction in the landscape.

Beyond Drogheda, perhaps one imagines it, but in the back roads, the village in the hilly country has a name derived from Irish, ‘Ballymakenny’ – ‘the town of Kenny’s son’ and the next, amid the rolling fields, an Old English one, ‘Grangebellew’ – ‘Bellew’s farm’.

Irish history is, of course, full of ironies though. The Catholic Old English of the Pale became ‘Irish’ after the reformation – incorporated into a new, confessional understanding of their identity. In the village of Oldtown you can see memorials to Mary Weston and her three brothers, who died fighting for the United Irishmen atTara in 1798 and ‘Mary Adrian and comrades of the Old IRA Fingal Brigade 1919-21’. Pure Irish rebels, pure Old English names. Listen to the accents in Drogheda and Dundalk, focus out a little bit and you could almost be in Lancashire, with the dropped ‘r’s and the prolonged vowels.

The mountains rise up like steep walls north of Dundalk. It’s not an accident that this area has always been a borderland. The modern main road from Dundalk to Newry runs right through the Gap of the North, where Hugh O’Neill’s fighters once ambushed English columns trying to penetrate Gaelic Ulster. Crumbling Elizabethan tower houses still watch over the road on the hillsides. Carlingford itself, wedged in between the mountains and sea, was a fully fledged medieval frontier bastion, and no less than four, now ruinous, castles mark the four corners of the town.

Now of course, there is again a border here, albeit no longer, since the peace process, manned by armed British troops, but its meaning has changed totally from the frontier of the 1500s. Now the north is the British ruled enclave and the south, the former Pale, the heart of nationalist Ireland.

In Dundalk, outside the courthouse, a Celtic warrior, erected in 1898, commemorates the republican rebellion of 1798. In Newry, some 10 miles distant, an obelisk wreathed in poppies, commemorates ‘our glorious dead’ of the First World War. Plantation and religious difference since 1607 will tell you some of the story here, but the landscape allows you no such simplicities. A faded Celtic cross in Castlebellingham,CountyLouth, lists the local men ‘who died forIreland’ (no surprises so far) ‘in the international war of 1914-18’.    

So your head will be filled with these contradictions, you will see, and the locals can point out to you, where Cromwell breached the walls of Droghedain 1649 and slaughtered the garrison. You will ride by signs for the battlefield of the Boynein 1690. I had just written about 1647 when Eoghan Rua O’Neill’s army burned this area so thoroughly that no one expected harvests out of it for many years.

A photo from 1922 shows Millmount fort in Drogheda smashed byFree State shells in the civil war. A newspaper headline in the same museum tells of two local men murdered by the Black and Tans in 1920. You know that much more recently, the Provisional IRA operated out of Dundalk– giving the area the reputation of ‘bandit country’.  A famous anecdote from the early 1970s tells of how the Provos on the run from Belfast used to shoot up the tv screens in the Dundalk bookies when their horse lost.

But what will in fact strike you is how peaceful everything is. All you will see is villages, each with their own Church and primary school. Tractors and vans go about their business. Boats bob up and down in the waves at a charming little fishing harbour at Castlebellingham. The odd Garda van checks cars for tax an insurance. Everywhere I went, I met nothing but kindness and friendliness. Travelling at a relatively slow pace and with only your muscles to combat gravity, you can feel the realness of the landscape, its ups and downs, its good land and bad.

A visit to the Museum at Millmount in Drogheda shows you another side to the country, quite apart from  history’s blood-soaked milestones. Displayed are lovingly prepared  banners of the 19^th century artisan associations, the bakers, the millers, the railway locomotive engineers. Photos show them – suited, tied and collared – marching through the streets of 1890s Drogheda, their banners carried by barefooted kids, their wives, all dressed up in long corseted dresses and bonnets watching from the side of the road.

Another banner represents the agricultural labourers, depicting a worker threshing corn, flanked by his smiling wife and young daughter. Apparently sons were not allowed to work in the fields. Popular superstition had it that they would be kidnapped by leprechauns or other malevolent spirits if they went to work in their infancy, though the tradition may in fact have been to encourage the education of male children. 

The next day, rolling back towards Dublin, I didn’t appreciate the sharp little hills between Drogheda and the Naul nearly as much as I had on the way out. As dusk came on, the city, situated as it is a hollow of the Liffey valley, glowed orange in the distance. Skirting Dublin airport, Planes roared overhead. Drivers, impatient on the narrow road, blared their horns at me.

Home sweet home.