Here Cathal Brennan and John Dorney interview the editor of the collection David Fitzpatrick of Trinity College Dublin on the subject of political violence in Ireland.

Fitzpatrick on Terror part 1

Fitzpatrick on Terror part 2

We discuss among other things,

What is terrorism?

Are states as well as insurgents guilty of it? 

Was British state violence in Ireland counter productive?

Did the IRA concentrate on ‘soft targets’?

Was sectarianism a factor in political violence?

John Dorney takes a two wheeled journey through the Wicklow mountains’ past and present. See also a journey though the Pale.

In Medieval times, the mountains south of Dublin marked the border between two worlds. In the lowlands and the city, the settled English speaking world was defended from its enemies by the Pale, an earthwork fortification the remnants of which are still to be found in parts of south Dublin.

In the mountains all was wildness; wild heather, wild deer, wild sheep and wild people. The Gaelic clans, especially the O’Tooles and O’Bynes, preyed on the Palesmen below. Every year on “Black Monday”, the Dublin citizens would march out of the city to Ranelagh, site of a massacre in 1209 and raise a black banner with a raven emblem in the direction of the mountains to challenge the Irish to battle in a gesture of symbolic defiance of the “mountain enemy”.

Today the mountains are still the antithesis of the city below. All wilderness and nature where the city is clamour and noise. And still, in my imagination at least, a separate, more real world.

 Bicycle as time machine

The bicycle is fast enough to travel through the mountains but slow enough to see, hear and smell them. There’s a lung-bursting climb up Stocking lane (so called because British troops policing the mountains after the 1798 rebellion used to restock here) over the first crest of the Mountains. There was a time when I could dance up these hills in my French cycling kit, but now I have a paunch around my midriff and I gasp for air and have to stop for rests on the steepest slopes.

In the real uplands the roads deteriorate into piles of loose chippings and the tree cover and houses both disappear from the side of the road and when I stop to get my breath on the steepest sections, I feel the arteries in my neck throbbing and when I close my eyes and open them again I see lights dancing in front of them.

As you crest the hill at Glenasmole, the valley is sometimes covered in white cloud, with rain spitting sideways from the west almost vertically into your right eye. In Dublin slang this valley is known as the ‘Featherbeds’. The last native speaker of the Irish language in county Dublin died here in the early 19th century.

On a wet day around the Sally Gap you can see strings of white, rain-filled cloud racing up the Liffey’s valley. Sheets of wild rain pour down. Around Glencree there are still signs of civilization. Climbing past Lough Bray telephone poles line the mountain road. But all of this ends after the Sally Gap – no fences, no telephone lines, no houses. Only the hard-packed gravel road hacked out of the bog by British soldiers 200 years ago to track down Michael Dwyer and his band of United Irish guerrillas after the rebellion of 1798.

IRA leader Ernie O’Malley wrote of the area in 1922,

“We crossed the narrow military road built after the rebellion of 1798; Michael Dwyer and his men then fought in the hills near Imail [sic]. That fighting in our country had given the large armies of the British a surprise; with the road the mountainous areas would then be more easily penetrated, or so they thought. The British were always ready for the last rebellion… The country was bare and treeless, stretches of heather and soggy bogland, practically unreclaimable. A bird on the wing, plover or the startled rush of a snipe. It was strange to have such a wilderness within twelve miles of Dublin”.

Glencree in the rain

At this point you’re in a vast brown heather bowl, ringed by mountains on all sides – like a huge natural amphitheatre. The sense of isolation is only increased by the on-off bouts of rain. And the sheep, who look at you as if you’re an idiot before either grudgingly sidling out of your way or else panicking and sprinting into the ditches away from the strange two-wheeled animal.

Past the hill-tops, a couple of valleys away, you can see the softer, greener, inhabited, parts of the mountains. But here you won’t see any houses until you descend from Glenmacnass on the road into Laragh, where the road becomes tree-lined again.

The rain and mist descending on a cleft in the hills bedded with oddly determined looking trees is a sight to behold. As well as settling over the trees, the rain spits in your face and into your eyes and drips off your cycling cap in dispiriting little drops and coats your cycling jacket so thoroughly that you’re actually glad to be climbing so that you’re still warm.

There are no houses but there are the walls of farmsteads abandoned long ago that you’ll see in little green valleys among the heather. These poignant little ruins dot the highlands.

The writer John Millington Synge tramped and cycled through these mountains at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was already emptying of people. The mountain life was simply too hard for people who could leave for Dublin or Liverpool or New York. He noted a sadness about the older people as their children left the area. Today the emptiness of the landscape is almost eerie.

Synge too was caught in the mountain rain. Writing of Glencree in 1897,

“I have come out again on the mountain road the third day of the fog. At first it was misty only and then a cloud crept up the water gullies from the valley of the Liffey, and in a moment I am cut off in a white silent cloud. The little turfy ridges on each side of the road have the look of glens to me and every block of stone is the size of house…I see wet cottages on the other side of the glen that I had forgotten. Then as I walk on, I see out over the cloud tops to real mountains standing up into the sky”.

The mountains and their secrets

These mountain have their secrets. On the left hand side of the road is a sad, lonely memorial to Noel Lemass, murdered here in 1923 in the Irish Civil War, “erected by his friends”. Every year brings more recent stories of bodies found in these hills, victims of everything from domestic violence to gangland assassinations.

The military road is dotted with abandoned barracks. At Glencree, the former barracks nestles into the side of a valley. Later it was a ‘reform school’ for young offenders. Now it’s a centre for Reconciliation of Conflicts -both Irish and international. Descending into Drumgoff, you’ll see a massive ruined structure – a fortified barracks built in the 19th century to garrison Michael Dwyer’s stomping grounds. Further down the same road is a much older military base – a slowly decaying Elizabethan keep, built in the late 16th to keep an eye on, or hem in, Fiach McHugh O’Byrne – a Gaelic raider who defeated an English army here in 1580.

Some sights in the Wicklow Mountains are yet older. At Three Rock overlooking Dublin and along the road from the Sally Gap to Laragh are Dolmens and standing stones erected before there was written history.

The road from Laragh to Rathdrum is, after the real uplands, like being released from the painful grip of a much stronger being. For a start, the road is flatter, the kilometers now spin away under your wheels instead of groaning terrifyingly slowly under each pedal stroke. And it’s warm – bright and warm – the sheeting rain is replaced by a kind sun. The scenery also becomes beautifully mild. You follow a river along a bright green, cheery valley. The villages along the way seem comforting compared to the starkness you’ve left behind.

In Rathdrum there’s a big square, stone mill beside the river and a steep, steep hill separating it from the town. The village is just one street of solid stone built houses and shops huddled very close together as if for comfort. There’s a little memorial right in the centre of town for two IRA men killed by the British in 1920. Wicklow was not a hive of rebel activity in the revolutionary years, but the cycling enthusiast and amateur photographer Robert Chapman remembered of cycling through village of Aghavanagh in 1919, “As we struggled along the level and bare bog road, we were mistaken by some men working nearby for Sinn Feiners out campaigning [for election] and a tremendous cheer went up which was returned”.

Rathdrum has a market square but, as far as I know, no market. The rally and crowd scenes at the start of Neil Jordan’s 1996 film, Michael Collins were filmed here. Jordan’s reenactment of Collins’ death was filmed not far away but over a great hump of mountain, near Hollywood in west Wicklow. Perhaps because of this ‘General’ Michael Collins has his picture in all the pubs in Rathdrum and Drumgoff, in his National Army uniform with pistols slung jauntily in a holster at his waist, beside the local boys Fiach MacHugh and Michael Dwyer (patriots all!). The exploits of the latter two are also commemorated in two great lumps of stone in the Glenmalure valley.

Charles Stuart Parnell, the constitutionalist nationalist leader was of course also from these parts – there’s a Parnell memorial park for him in Rathdrum. There are lots of reason though, why people would rather remember Michael Collins (who to my knowledge never even visited these hills) than Parnell. For one thing, Collins was ‘one of us’ a lower middle class Catholic and not, like Parnell a patrician, nationally minded Anglo-Irish landlord. There remains an outlaw glamour attached to the use of violence as well. And of course, Collins has his own movie.

At one end of the town, near the railway station is the Protestant Church built in 1620 – though remodeled later. At the other end is the Catholic – which is highly ornate, complete with statues of angels slaying demons and also, in a 19th century manner very neat and well appointed – to an almost Protestant degree.

The road to Glenmalure is more lumpy than hilly. When you get to the end of the paved road, you must carry your bike across a stream and onto a little walking track. A really cute An Oige hostel stands in your path, built in 1938, facings in bright green with old-style Gaelic lettering. It’s kind of touching to think of the new state building these little structures around the country, imagining that generations of nationalist youth would wander the country and somehow discover in the landscape the ‘real’, unconquered Ireland.

I tried riding the track beyond into the u-shaped valley that is Glenmalure, but the hillsides, like a Chinese Communist rally of the Maoist period, are lined with red flags. In fact this tells you not that the workers of Wicklow have cast off the shackles of capitalism but that the Irish Army is practicing its artillery firing over the hill in the glen of Imaal. A few ‘clangs’ in the distance put me off going any further.

Modern follies

Even in Rathdrum the Celtic Tiger’s monuments can be seen. Asking for directions to the campsite in Rathdrum, a man with short hair and short sleeved shirt told me that it was at the bottom of the hill beside the office and apartment block, “well you know, it’s not open but…”.

Sure enough at the bottom of the hill there’s a newly built but quite empty complex, complete – just like the ones in central Dublin – with electronic buzzer and underground car park. What is it doing here in this mountain village? One can imagine the advertisement, “40 minutes from Dublin, scenic location” etc. Did anyone really believe this? Now it sits there gathering dust, a little like the follies 18th century landlords would build for their own amusement, but much less easy on the eye.

Perhaps 200 hundred years from now people will come upon it, as they now do the barracks at Drumgoff and wonder whatever it could have been.

Tom Clarke as a young man.

Shane Kenna tells the story of the arrest and harrowing imprisonment of Tom Clarke, one of the architects of the 1916 Rising, in 1883 for his role in Fenian bombing campaign in England.

The dynamite war

Between 1881 and 1885 Two Irish-American organisations ‘the United Irishmen of America’ under O’Donovan Rossa and Clan na Gael under Alexander Sullivan led a bombing campaign in Britain. Since 1881 the Clan followed a policy of active work, with teams of Irish-American dynamitards travelling to the United Kingdom to reconnoitre sites for dynamite attacks in British cities, in retaliation for British policy during the Land War in Ireland. While the cities of Liverpool and Glasgow were attacked by dynamitards, London suffered most.

The first Clan mission was headed by the Brooklyn resident Doctor Thomas Gallagher and consisted of James J. Murphy, John Kent, William Lynch and Thomas J. Clarke. Joined by Gallagher’s brother Bernard they set about establishing a bomb manufacturing factory in Birmingham, disguised as a paint and decoration shop under the ownership of Murphy. From Murphy’s shop in Birmingham nitro-glycerine explosive was manufactured and transported to London by means of rubber bags and fish stockings enclosed in large portmanteau’s and boxes, and it was planned to attack major symbolic political sites in London sometime in late April 1883. 

 Arrest

The Gallagher team was arrested in April 1883 following a major police surveillance operation in Birmingham, involving entering the premises at night to survey the materials. Lynch having travelled from Murphy’s explosive factory, had been followed by a Birmingham police sergeant to London and his lodgings raided where he was found to be in possession of nitro-glycerine, a number of photographs, a map of London, and an envelope bearing the name Mr. Thomas Gallagher. Fearing news of Lynch’s arrest, the Birmingham constabulary chose to search Murphy’s shop soon afterwards, where police had discovered over 170lbs of nitro-glycerine:

In a sitting room at the back of the shop… a quantity of nitric and sulphuric acid, and some books and papers connecting the occupant with the United States. In the scullery there was more of the same acids; while in the furnace, there was an earthenware vat containing a white fluid material in course of manufacture. There was a further supply of similar material in other parts of the room and premises.

Following an extensive search, an eager constable discovered a notebook signed by Tom Clarke and a letter giving his address at Nelson Square London. This gave the police a definitive lead and Scotland Yard was immediately informed of the development. With the net beginning to close around Clarke, the police moved into mobilisation under inspector John Littlechild. Littlechild waited for Clarke’s arrival at his apartment prior to raiding the accommodation, and at half past one Clarke arrived with Gallagher and as he turned the key to open his apartment door, Police swooped on the two men. On investigation Littlechild found Clarke had a large portmanteau in his room containing:

two India rubber cases, each about 2ft long… apparently full of something

Littlechild had found nitro-glycerine and Clarke was arrested. Gallagher could have reasonably argued that he knew nothing of the plot, but given the surveillance operation carried out he could not escape arrest and evidence began to mount against him. His brother Bernard and Curtin were later arrested and the Gallagher team were broken. 

Trial and detention

Chatham Prison

On Monday 11 June 1883 Thomas Clarke stood trial with his colleagues, accused of attempting to levy war upon the Queen ‘in order to compel her to change her measures and counsel, and in order to intimidate and overawe both Houses of Parliament.’ Lynch had turned and offered his assistance to the prosecution to secure a conviction of the team, and his evidence indicated a number of targets the dynamitards had intended to attack including the Palace of Westminster. There is significant evidence however to suggest that Lynch was lying, as were the prosecution who denied the stringent surveillance of the team in Birmingham. According to them :

no one knew anything of the coming or going of these men: nobody who had to protect the law of this country knew of the arrival of these men from America or aught else.

These misrepresentations of fact, which were intended to engage the fears of the public and the jury, succeeding in securing a conviction as on Thursday 14 June when the jury found Gallagher, Clarke, Murphy and John Kent guilty, sentencing to life imprisonment. Bernard Gallagher was acquitted while Lynch, for his services, was rewarded with exoneration. Clarke recalled:

we were hustled out of the dock into the prison van, surrounded by a troop of mounted police, and driven away at a furious pace through the howling mobs that thronged the streets from the Courthouse to Millbank prison. London was panic stricken at the time.

At Millbank Clarke and his fellow dynamitards were placed in temporary detention and were then convoyed to Chatham and Portland prisons respectively. Clarke now facing the darkest period of his life recalled:

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.

Immediately Clarke learned silence was rigidly enforced and the convict should reflect on what he had done. Under no circumstances was he to make contact with fellow dynamitards, and if he did punishment would be severely enforced. Clarke recalled how, to escape this monotony, dynamitard convicts determined to keep in contact with each other. Using lead in the pivots of their cell doors, they made makeshift pencils and wrote messages on regulation brown paper. In the dreary, dark and dull atmosphere of prison, this kind of communication with his fellow Irish prisoners was something he could look forward to and enjoy, despite the punishment it would bring if discovered.  

Clarke recalls the harrowing story of dynamitards being treated with contempt and anger within the walls of Chatham and Portland, finding they were treated as ‘special men.’ This title, reserved specifically for the dynamitard convict was terrifying given that it entailed strict rules and stricter punishments. These ‘special men’ found gaolers and wardens treated them as they pleased, often relinquishing ordinary rules for prison regulation, and implementing an unvarying system of persistent harassment:

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.

 Insanity

 As a result of the treatment dynamitards received in prison, many broke under the strain, drifting into psychosis and lunacy. Clarke recalled his fear of looming insanity when he noticed a constant ringing, which he feared to be in his head. Much to his delight he discovered this ringing was coming from a fresh telegraph wire outside which he had not seen. Clarke expressed joy that he was not losing his mind on that occasion, but the thought continued to haunt him for some time particularly as he noticed:

 one by one, I saw my fellow prisoners break down and go mad under terrible strain – some slowly and by degrees, others suddenly and without warning. “Who next” was the terrible question that haunted us day and night – and the ever recurring thought that it might be myself, added to the agony.

Dr. Gallagher had collapsed under the mental strain and refused to work claiming to be God. He could not hold his food and began vomiting intensely reducing himself to an extremely low state. Clarke spent sleepless nights in his cell listening to Murphy ‘fight against insanity, cursing England and English brutality form the bottom of his heart, and beseeching God to strike him dead sooner than allow him to lose his reason.’  Clarke discussed his fears with the Catholic Chaplin who while listening attentively, dismissed the matter, fearing the Prison authorities would cause trouble with his Bishop. Clarke, while disheartened, was not to be beaten and wrote to John Redmond MP detailing the treatment of his friends. He learned his letter had been suppressed by the Prison authorities. Redmond however later came to visit the dynamitards and Clarke discussed his fears, finding the MP would approach the Home Secretary to examine the men’s condition.

The Home Office agreed to the demand and doctors were sent into the hospital to examine Gallagher and Whitehead. However, they found the two were feigning insanity and looking for special treatment. This resulted in further punishment for the two dynamitards, worsening their mental situations and as these situations worsened, it was continuously noted that their declining health was a result of their efforts to feign insanity.

The convicts successfully publicised their sufferings, by means of letters and visits from Irish politicians. The resulting public outcry was deafening and despite a growing publicity campaign in the United States and Ireland regarding their degrading treatment, continued pleas and petitions for their release were ignored.

In Ireland an Amnesty Association was formed to lobby the government demanding immediate action and succeeded in persuading the Home Office to allow an American doctor, St. John Gaffney, to examine Gallagher and Murphy. Gaffney found them clinically insane. The government disagreed and a further British doctor examined the men overruling Gaffney pronouncing them reasonable. For a further three years they stayed in this condition, continuously degrading.

Release 

By 1896 Dr. Gallagher was released from Portland and emerged a physical and mental wreck. The government had finally concluded that further incarceration would result in his death. Arriving in America it was noted he was:

a raving maniac… not one of his friends would have known him. The handsome, stalwart Irishman of thirteen years ago had become almost an old man. His form still strong, is bent and emaciated. His sunken cheeks are covered with a closely clipped grey beard, and his hair has become but a narrow rim of white about his bald head. His deep set eyes gleam with the restless light of an unbalanced mind.  

 

Murphy returned to Cork, where he promptly disappeared from his family. He was finally discovered dishevelled searching for a boat to America. Both were incarcerated in insane asylums. Thomas Clarke remained imprisoned and was the last of the dynamitards to be released. He recalled that his prison life had never been so lonely and now lived in strict silence alone with his thoughts he found his imprisonment to be like ‘a sailor’s rope that had no end to it.’  As Clarke lay his cell, the one inspiration in his prison life was his love for Ireland:

The struggle for Irish freedom has gone on for centuries, and in the course of it a well trodden path has been made that leads to the scaffold and to the prison. Many of our revered dead have trod that path, and it was these memories that inspired me with sufficient courage to walk part of the way along that path with an upright head.            

Clarke in 1916

In September 1898, Thomas J. Clarke was released on license from Portland Prison. The medical officer concluded that his health had deteriorated resulting from long imprisonment. He had chronic arthritis in the left knee and had developed a heart murmur, despite the fact he was only thirty-seven years of age. He soon after moved to America marrying  the niece of fellow dynamite internee John Daly’s, Cathleen and becoming secretary to John Devoy in Clan na Gael.

In 1907 he finally returned to Ireland where he opened a tobacco shop in Parnell Street and became actively involved in rebuilding the Irish Republican Brotherhood with Seán MacDiarmada and Bulmer Hobson. He later sat on the IRB military council planning the Easter Rising of 1916 and took part in the insurrection in the General Post Office, afforded the honour of being the first signature to Easter proclamation.

Clarke was to be President of the insurgents’ Republic, but refused military honours and stood aside for Patrick Pearse to assume to the role. On 3 May 1916 he was executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol Dublin. Prior to his execution his wife Cathleen was allowed visit him in his cell in the prison. He told her he was relieved to be executed, as he dreaded a return to prison. Giving her a note to the Irish people his epitaph read:

I and my fellow prisoners believe we have struck the first successful blow for Irish freedom. The next blow, which we have no doubt Ireland will strike, will win through. In this we die happy.     

 Further reading

Clarke, Thomas, Glimpses of an Irish felons prison life (Dublin, 1922)

Terror in Ireland 1916-1923.

Edited by David Fitzpatrick

Lilliput Press, 2012

Reviewer: John Dorney

The purpose of terror, Lenin once said during the Red Terror of the Russian Civil War, is to terrify.

The term ‘terrorist’ was coined during the French revolution to describe Jacobin mass-killing of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ at a time of crisis and revolutionary war. In the late 19^th century the term morphed into a euphemism for non-state groups when it was adopted by French anarchist and Russian narodniki groups who used the bomb and the assassins bullet to terrorise the ruling classes.

Here in Ireland, as Shane Kenna’s interesting article tells us, the Fenians had the dubious honour of pioneering modern ‘terrorism’ with bomb attacks in London in the 1880s.

Today, when the term is almost always an epithet of abuse, NATO defines terrorism as: “Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience”.

This is clearly far too narrow a definition, as it excludes states themselves – including Robespierre and the original ‘terrorists’. In El Salvador for instance, during the civil war of the 1980s, out of 75,000 fatalities at least 40,000 were civilians sought out and murdered by either by the country’s police and military or groups under their protection (Another 8,000 people disappeared without a trace). If this does not count as terrorism and the leftist insurgency of the FMLN does, the phrase tends to lose all meaning.

So a more comprehensive definition of terror would be violence against non-military or disarmed targets by state or non-state actors with the aim of terrifying or otherwise intimidating a wider group of people for some political end.

Going by this definition, Ireland, during the upheaval of 1916 to 1923 saw various types of violence – rioting, conventional warfare, guerrilla warfare and also terrorism by both state and insurgent groups.

This book Terror in Ireland might therefore have been more usefully called ‘Political violence in Ireland’, to encompass all of these phenomena. The use of the term ‘terror’ and ‘terrorist’ does tend to imply a political or moral judgement.

Terror in Ireland

Brian Hanley in a well rounded opening chapter on violence in 20^th century Ireland, identifies state as well as non-state terror, including that practiced by the Free State during the civil war, including executions the assassinations by the CID, the use of force on strikers and so forth. He notes how Provisional IRA’s use of indiscriminate car bombs was a new departure in Irish political violence and undermined much of their support, and closes by noting the serious lack of research into loyalist paramilitary violence, both in the 1920s and in the 1969-1998 conflict.

Eunan O’Halpin’s chapter, based on his research in the Dead of the Irish Revolution project, shows in newly complied statistics that Crown forces killed significantly more civilians than the IRA in 1919-21 (381 compared to 281, the culpability for a further 236 civilian deaths was impossible to attribute). Similarly Fearghal McGarry’s piece on the  Easter Rising suggests that the rebels’ violence was actually much less indiscriminate than the British Army’s in 1916 and they deserve their chivalrous reputation to some degree.

(See interviews with Hanley, McGarry and O’Halpin on the Irish Story which expand on these points)

Some chapters offer very interesting micro-studies of the War of Independence, including Ross O’Mahony’s description of the Sack of Balbriggan by the Black and Tans and its aftermath in North County Dublin, Michael Murphy’s survey of the revolution in Kildare – where nearly three times as many people were killed in the civil war as in the war against the British – Justin Dolan’s piece on prison violence and Gerard Noonan’s on Republican Terrorism in Britain, which describes the IRA’s extensive campaign of arson and sabotage in England and Scotland.

Some chapters are somewhat critical of ‘terror’ as a political weapon. Anne Dolan in characteristically philosophical mood, writes about the nature of terror in the War of Independence, a war in which both sides called the other ‘terrorists’. The logic of shooting informers and publicly displaying the bodies for instance was to terrify other potential informers and enemies of the IRA. ‘Terror rippled out’, Dolan writes, and describes its effect on civilians and loved ones of those killed as well as the psychological effect (more than military) on Crown forces.

Jane Leonard’s chapter recounts in painful detail the biography of each British officer and civilian killed by IRA on Bloody Sunday 1920 – claiming that most were not Intelligence officers at all. Thomas Earls Fitzgerald’s piece describes the IRA shooting of informers in west Cork, 1921, noting that 8 out of 10 victims were Protestants, while Brian Hughes shows how intimidation of RIC constables and their families could be considered a form of low-level terrorism.

The tone in some of these pieces does seem more critical of republican than of state terror. Moreover, the civil war is under-represented – with the emphasis on British-Irish rather than intra-Irish confrontation. It is perfectly legitimate to criticize Irish political violence, both historically and more recently but it also important to acknowledge that terror often involves two sides.

Reprising Kilmichael

Finally, the most controversial chapter will no doubt be Eve Morrison’s reprisal of the Kilmichael ambush – the famous action where Tom Barry’s IRA column killed 18 Auxiliaries. Controversy has raged ever since November 1920 over this ambush – did the IRA wear British uniforms? Did they mutilate the dead? Was there a false surrender by the British? Did the IRA kill wounded and surrendered Auxiliaries? The late Peter Hart’s contention that there was no false surrender and that Barry had the surrendering Auxiliaries ‘exterminated’, has generated acres of bitter debate back and forth since 1998. Hart is often charged with faking the interviews he cites anonymously to support his version.

Morrison shows, through interviews with veterans recorded by a Father Chisholm in the 1960s and 1970s (and subsequently used by Hart) and the Bureau of Military History statements of veterans, that some of Hart’s version certainly stands up. Auxiliaries were indeed killed while wounded and after they had surrendered and on Barry’s orders – the veterans leave explicit first-hand confirmation. But Barry tacitly admitted this all along. His key defence was that the Auxiliaries had faked a surrender and then killed several of his men, forfeiting their right to be taken prisoner.

Morrison dismisses this outright but several accounts cited here do speak of some Auxiliaries surrendering and others continuing to fire when the IRA advanced to take them prisoner. This is not quite the same as Barry’s argument about a false surrender ploy, but he could well have interpreted it as such at the time.

Most likely what happened was that in the chaos of combat, some Auxiliaries were indeed trying to surrender and others trying to fight on, leading unfortunately for them, to the death of them all. John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) has a chapter devoted to the taking of prisoners which shows that exactly such lethal misunderstandings occur all the time in combat situations. In the Civil War the Free state forces made many allegations of false surrenders on the part of the anti-Treaty IRA when what probably happened was panicked and uncoordinated reactions by their fighters.

However, it should be noted I feel, that whatever exactly happened at Kilmichael before the order to cease fire was given, once the Auxiliaries had surrendered and been disarmed they should not have been killed. Indeed taking prisoners in such situations was standard IRA practice in 1919-23. In only one other incident that I know of – the Dromkeen ambush in Limerick in 1921 where 11 RIC men were killed – were there credible allegations of killing of prisoners after combat (though a number of others were killed in reprisal for the execution of IRA prisoners).

As for Peter Hart, as I have commented before on The Irish Story in relation to other controversies, his broad arguments tend to have much merit but he did tend to undermine them somewhat by exaggeration on important points of detail.

In short, this slim book, based on a history workshop at Trinity College Dublin, has some chapters which will be controversial, but much material that is interesting and illuminating.

Book Review: Frontiers of Violence, Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918-1922.

By T.K Wilson, Oxford 2010

Reviewer: John Dorney

Irish history often suffers from viewing itself entirely in its own terms, without reference to events elsewhere in the world. But comparison shows us more clearly what is different about Ireland and what is similar to other parts of the world.

This book is a fascinating comparison of communal conflict in two borderlands in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War and has much to say about the character of nationalist and ethnic conflict.

Comparative conflicts

One is Ulster, the northern Irish province, where 714 people according toWilson’s figures, lost their lives in political violence involving the IRA, Crown Forces, loyalist paramilitaries and on many occasions, rival Protestant and Catholic street mobs,  between 1920 and 1922. The question at stake was whether the north would follow the rest of Ireland into secession from the United Kingdom.

Unlike the rest of Ireland, in Ulster most casualties were caused not in confrontation between the IRA and Crown forces but in violence between Catholics and Protestants. As most Irish readers will be aware, the province was partitioned (first in 1920 and definitively in 1922), with three majority Catholic counties ending up in the Irish Free State and the remaining six staying in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland.

The other case is the province of Upper Silesia, on the border between a defeated Germany and a resurrected Poland at the end of the World War. Here 2,824 people were killed in a conflict between German and Polish nationalists in a dispute over the plebiscite which would decide the fate of the province in 1921. The vote of the province was, by just under 60-40 to stay part of Germany, however an insurrection (the last of three since 1918) by Polish nationalists secured Poland about a quarter of Upper Silesia and much of its heavy industry.

The casualties in Upper Silesia were, allowing for population, about 3 times higher than in Ulster. Moreover, there was greater use of ‘transgressive violence’ there – mutilation of the dead, rape of women and other extreme forms of violence.

Peace by separation?

Why this was is the subject of Wilson’s book. His answer is that in Ulster, social divisions between Catholic and Protestant were all but watertight. They lived, worshipped and were educated separately. Elections were simply a contest in getting out the maximum number of Catholic or Protestant voters or eliminating opposition ‘within’ the community. There was no prospect by and large of getting Catholics to support the Union or of Protestants, as a whole, supporting Irish independence.

In Upper Silesia, however, the ethnic difference was linguistic, between speakers of German and Polish and was much more fluid. Not only did people choose one language over the other for all kinds of reasons, most of the population also spoke ‘water Polish’ a Polish dialect with many German words. As such they were much freer than those in Ulster to ‘choose’ their nationality. Families and communities could be divided. No one’s loyalty was sure.

In Ulster therefore, violence to subdue a minority community was more straightforward. Everyone knew they were a potential target and it took relatively little violence to overawe a minority when they did not have the numbers to respond. Where they did it was obvious that they would retaliate against one’s ‘own’ community. Inner city Belfast therefore fought it out savagely until mid 1922 but in many parts of the province both communities – certain of retaliation - worked to restrain the violence.

In Upper Silesia on the other hand, people whose allegiance to one side or the other was uncertain could be terrorized into voting ‘the right way’. Hence the need for extreme violence. Those who did rape and mutilate the dead could also do it relatively free of the certainty of reprisal in kind that would have occurred in the north of Ireland.  Also, whereas in Ulster violence broke out at clear flashpoints, west Belfast and the village of Roslea for instance, in the German-Polish borderland it could break out anywhere – in pubs, in the street, at weddings.

The aftermath of a Belfast riot in 1922.

It is an intriguing argument and deserves consideration. In rural Cavan (which this reviewer has studied from a republican perspective) for instance the UVF had several thousand members and over 1,000 rifles but it took only some desultory raiding by the IRA to disarm and effectively neutralize them. Protestants were less than 20% of the county’s population and appeared to accept after partition that the numbers were against them and nothing could be done to change the political situation.

Another fascinating thought is that openly sectarian Irish nationalists such as the Hibernians (who did not admit Protestants)  were less of threat to Protestant unionists than the ostensibly non-sectarian Sinn Fein and Volunteers/IRA who refused to respect the sectarian headcount inUlster. This again is borne out by looking at County Cavan, where in 1918 republicans complained that to campaign for election they had to physically fight both Hibernians and Orangemen together in riots.

Ireland in a wider context

I am not qualified to judge whether Wilson’s analysis holds true for Upper Silesia or other ethnic borderlands in Europe or whether his contention that religious-national cleavages are ‘harder’ boundaries than linguistic-national ones is valid. However I suspect this generalization should not be taken too far. In pre-WWI Slovenia for instance, a memoir (Martin Pollack’s The Dead Man in the Bunker) tells of a society utterly divided, Ulster-style by language between Germans and Slovenes, with no social interaction across the divide despite  a shared religion. In Bosnia, where Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks are defined solely by religion, inter-marriage was high in postwar Yugoslavia and it took a vicious war to separate them into marked out communities in the 1990s.

This book is not a survey of either the Irish or Silesian conflict but rather a comparative analysis. The reader will have to look elsewhere to find out what actually happened in these two conflicts at either end of Europe.

Wilson may also have taken his theory on the why Upper Silesia was bloodier a little too far. For instance if all of Ireland is included from 1916 to 1923, the death toll rises to some 5,000 people. Moreover as he acknowledges, Upper Silesia’s casualties can also be explained in part by the conventional warfare that erupted between regular German troops and Polish nationalist fighters aided byPoland itself in the three Polish insurrections. With the partial exception of the IRA offensive of May 1922 (secretly endorsed by Michael Collins and the nascent Free State government) hostilities of this scale were not seen in Ulster.

The book is also prohibitively expensive for anyone without access to an academic library – at over 70 euros. (Though you can buy cheaper copies used on Amazon here).

However it is a welcome effort at putting Irish history in a wider context and has many interesting and thought provoking insights.

You can read another review of this book here.

Our final piece of Easter week material for 2012, a radio discussion on the insurrection. 

This is Episode 5 of The History Show on Near 90fm. On this episode, Cathal Brennan is joined by Fearghal McGarry, Róisín Higgins and John Dorney to discuss the 1916 Rising in Dublin.

We discuss; 

*Why the Easter Rising has such an enduring hold on people’s imaginations? 
 
* What was Ireland like under British rule? What were nationalist responses before the Rising?

* Why did some separatists feel the need for a resort to arms? 

* Was the Rising a serious military affair or armed propaganda?

* How has it been remembered and commemorated?

 
You can listen to the discussion here.

Fifteen civilians were shot or bayoneted to death by soldiers from the South Staffordshire regiment during the Easter Rising. By John Dorney.

Towards the end of the Easter Rising, on Friday April 28^th, 1916, some of the fiercest fighting and the worst atrocity against civilians in the week-long insurrection took place.

The insurgents’ position around North King Street was one of the most hard-contested combat zones of the week. It straddled the route towards the GPO along the north side of the river Liffey, only about ten minute’s walk from the rebel headquarters at the Post Office, in a mesh of little streets and tenements behind the Four Courts. Ned Daly’s Volunteers had barricaded each of the streets and it was here that the most vicious street fighting of the week occurred. Even with the aid of an armoured car, the British troops made slow progress in taking the street.

At close range, death was waiting around every corner, from behind every chimney and behind every barricade. Starting on Thursday, the British tried to smother the enclave. Mostly they avoided direct fire by tunneling through the walls of the slum houses, but one Major Sheppard decided on a frontal assault.

The platoon that made the bayonet charge on one of the barricades was blasted by heavy Mauser bullets, losing fifteen men, including Sheppard himself, who fell wounded. The Volunteers afterwards scrambled over the barricade to take arms and ammunition from the dead and wounded. One, Frank Shouldice, recalled, “one by one we knocked them all over. It was a terrible slaughter and to this day I can’t understand why they tried to rush things”. Another thought, “some officer… lost his head and sent those lads out to their deaths” [1].

‘Like wild animals or things possessed’

North King Street in 1920.

By the end of the week, the area was still not cleared. The South Staffordshire regiment under a colonel Taylor advanced, in two days, 150 yards down North King Street, losing 11 dead and 32 wounded. [2]

Taylor took over the Bolton Street Technical School with his men deployed on the roof of the building. When an armoured car arrived it went slowly up North King Street, firing all the time. The British troops sheltered behind it and were able to enter the houses.

General Lowe had ordered that, ‘no hesitation was to be shown in dealing with these rebels; that by their actions they had placed themselves outside the law and that they were not be made prisoners’.[3]  However it was the civilians on the street that took the brunt of the consequences of this order.

Infuriated with the losses they had suffered, the troops broke into the homes of the locals and shot or bayoneted 15 civilian men whom they accused of being rebels. They shot dead three men at 170 North Kings Street, then broke into number 172 and killed two men, in number 174 two more were shot dead and in 27 North King Street another four men were shot dead.[4]

Ellen Walsh, a resident of North King Street, recalled soldiers pounding on her door until she opened, and demanding, “Are there any men in this house?” Thirty soldiers ransacked the house, “like wild animals or things possessed”. They took the two men in the house aside, one of them Walsh’s husband, and killed them.[5]

At number 177, two men, Paddy Bealen, a 30 year old pub foreman and James Healy a 44-year-old labourer at the Jameson  Distillery were killed. 

A woman at number 177  told an inquest into  the death of Paddy Bealen, ‘They brought Paddy down into the cellar again and when they brought him into the cellar they were told to shoot him. [She asked the soldier] “Why couldn’t you let him off?”, and he said, “No because the officers have seen him”. The soldier said that the man said his prayers and though he was not of his creed the soldier helped him say his prayers, because he pitied him and then they said they could not shoot him fair-faced. They told him to go down to the foot of the stairs and they let bang at him’.[6]

About two weeks later, on the 10^th of May, Bealen and Healy’s bodies were found buried in the cellar of number 177. It was this discovery that prompted an inquest, in which the jury found that  the two had, ‘died from shock and haemorrhage, resulting from bullet wounds inflicted by a soldier or soldiers, in whose custody he was, an unarmed and unoffending prisoner’.[7]

Colonel Taylor, who had been in command that day told the court, ‘no persons were attacked by the troops other than those who were assisting the rebels or who had arms in their possession’.[8] The Court refused to accept his statement as accurate. The mothers and wives of those killed were invited to try to identify the soldiers in a line-up at Straffan barracks in Kildare, but were unable to pick them out.

‘Absolutely unavoidable in such a business as this’

At the military court of inquiry, the presiding officer Colonel Maconchy, who thought the South Staffords were, ‘a quiet and very respectable set of men’, ruled that no specific soldier could be held responsible for the killings.[9]

The Inquiry ultimately took no action against Colonel Taylor or his troops. Officer Commanding in Ireland, General Maxwell’s conclusion was that such incidents, “are absolutely unavoidable in such a business as this” and “responsibility for their deaths rests with those resisting His Majesty’s troops in the execution of their duty”.[10]

General Maxwell stated;

‘No doubt in the districts where fighting was fiercest, parties of men under the great provocation of being shot at from rear and front, seeing their comrades fall from the fire of snipers, burst into suspected houses and killed such male members as were found. It is perfectly possible that some were innocent but they could have left their houses if they so wished and the number of such incidents that have been brought to notice is happily few”…Under the circumstance the troops as a whole behaved with the greatest restraint”[11]

In a private brief prepared for the Prime Minister, Asquith, senior civil servant Edward Troupe judged that in at least one case, that of the killing of James Moore, one Sergeant Flanders should, under normal circumstances, be charged with murder. Elsewhere, he found that soldiers whose explicit orders were not to take prisoners, ‘took [it] to mean they could shoot anyone they suspected of being an active rebel’.

‘The root of the mischief’, he concluded, ‘was the military order to take no prisoners’.[12]

Troupe thought, ‘If the case had occurred in England, the right course would be to refer the case to the D of PP [Department of Public Prosecutions.] However, under the circumstances, he viewed taking any action against the troops as ‘undesirable’. ‘There are many points that could be used for hostile propaganda…nothing but harm could come from this’.[13]

The results of the Court of Inquiry were in fact buried and not brought to light until 2001.[14]

North King Street in perspective

The killing of 15 civilians at North King Street was one of the worst acts committed by British forces in Ireland in the 20^th century – on a par with the Croke Park shootings just a mile or so to the north of North King Street in 1920 in which 14 spectators at football match were gunned down.

As news seeped out of the killings it naturally caused indignation in Ireland. A popular ballad recovered by the RIC shortly after the Rising raged,

‘In Dublin Town they murdered them,

Like Dogs they shot them down.

God’s curse be on your England now.

God strike your London town.’

One Cumman na mBan activist remembered that news of the killings increased the hostility aroused  among the Irish public by the executions of the Rising’s leaders, ‘next came the news of our men killed in action, of soldiers shooting down our innocent people in their homes as occurred on North King Street’.[15]

However the incident is not very well remembered today and surprisingly little propaganda was made out of it, even at the time, by the republican movement.

One reason for this might be that the scale of death in the five days of fighting in Dublin- 447 people killed and 2,585 wounded (of whom 252 killed and 2,217 wounded were civilians) – was much greater than in any other single incident in the Irish revolution, dwarfing the events on North King Street.

Another reason is that there were other, more high profile cases of British misconduct  for nationalists to vilify. The leaders of the Rising were executed within days of surrendering and the famous pacifist, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who had been trying to organize “citizen police”, to stop the looting, was taken to a cellar and shot along with six others by an officer named Bowen Colthurst at Portobello barracks. A court martial was held but it found Bowen Colthurst to be insane and not liable for his actions[16].

What does the incident tell us about British rule in early 20^th century Ireland?

Let’s start with what it was not. It was not, like the Nazi suppression of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in 1944 in which tens of thousands of civilians were executed, a semi-genocidal regime in action. There were no wholesale massacres of men, women and children in Ireland in 1916 or afterwards. At North King Street, the men, accused of being irregular fighters, were shot out of hand by troops in the field. As such it had something in common with the German atrocities in Belgium against so-called franc tireurs in 1914. But again, in five months the Germans killed some 6,000 civilians in such reprisals.[17] The British total in Ireland from 1916-21 does not even come close to matching that figure.

And yet, there is something in the North King Street massacre that sums up how British rule in Ireland was never truly democratic. First of all the incident was not unique, even before 1916. In 1914, the Scottish Borderers’ Regiment fired on a riotous crowd at Bachelor’s Walk, in Dublin, killing three people and injuring 85. A Court Martial was duly held, but as in 1916, no punitive action was taken.

The civil servant Troupe noted that had the North King Street shootings taken place in England, the soldiers would certainly have been charged with murder. But Ireland was different. In the end, it was ruled without genuine consent and the authorities could not afford to publicise, let alone punish, the excesses of its soldiers.

The great achievement, in a sense of the Easter insurgents was to provoke the state into actions which under normal circumstances it would never have conceived of and thus pushing the nationalist public away from passive acceptance of British rule and towards opposition. Cold comfort this, though, to the families of the men shot before their eyes in a northside Dublin slum street in April 1916.

Enniscorthy Volunteers prior to 1916.

The republican tricolour flew for a week over Enniscorthy in 1916, this article recalls these little known events. By John Dorney

County Wexford is famous in Irish nationalist folklore as the site of the 1798 rebellion. In that year the republican Society of the United Irishmen proclaimed a “Wexford Republic”, which operated for a month before it was bloodily suppressed.

What is less well-known is the role of the county in the Easter Rising of 1916, when the town of Enniscorthy was taken over for a week by the local units of the Irish Volunteers. Although much less bloody than the celebrated events of ’98, or of the Rising in Dublin, in which almost 500 people were killed within five days of fighting, the Wexford rebellion of 1916 does provide a fascinating look at reactions to the insurrection in provincial Ireland.

‘Extreme National Views’

County Wexford, like most of Ireland in 1916, was dominated politically by the Irish Parliamentary Party and it auxiliary the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

The one exception to this was Enniscorthy, which had a nucleus of separatist activists. There was a strong Irish Republican Brotherhood presence in the town and in the local Volunteers. One local IRB man, James Cullen, recalled the revitalisation of ‘The Organisation’ in the town after 1907, led by a man named Larry De Lacey. With the aid of old Fenians of the 1867 generation, one of whom, Charlie Farrell, was known to say, “Ireland will never be free until Enniscorthy and every other Irish town runs red with blood”, they recruited men carefully, selecting only those, “we knew held extreme national views”.[1]

Cultural nationalism seems to have been the dominant ideology among IRB men of this generation. CountyWexford also had a strong labour movement and 1911 had seen a bitter strike at the foundry in Wexford town in which a worker was killed by the police. However if social or labour radicalism played a role in radicalising people in Wexford, as it did in Dublin, it goes altogether unmentioned in the accounts local republicans left of the Rising.

Much is often made of the IRB’s anti-clericalism, but  in Wexford at least the separatists were also believers.  It seems to have helped their cause that they had the support of some local priests, including a Father Patrick Murphy, who according to his own testimony, “was associated with Sinn Fein, The Volunteers and every National movement”.[2] At one point, concern arose among the IRB circle as to whether the Brotherhood’s secret oath was irreligious. An IRB man had to be brought by the leadership to a meeting in Dublin where a Father Sheehy told the republicans that, “the IRB oath was not contrary to the teachings of the Church”, in order to assuage their fears. “When we returned to Wexford we explained the position to our members and they all appeared to be satisfied”.[3]

By 1913, there over 100 sworn-in IRB members in Enniscorthy and when the Irish Volunteers was formed in 1913, they, like other IRB circles where organisation had a presence, joined and took over the organisation from the inside. They used their influence to keep Home Rulers and Hibernians away from positions of authority in the Volunteers and, for this reason, the local companies were not as affected as those elsewhere by the split in the Volunteers over Redmond’s support for Britain’s war effort in 1914.[4]

There were also companies in nearby Ferns and Gorey and others in Wexford town, Ballymurrin, Ballindaggin, New Ross along with a number of smaller units throughout the county. However most of the original Volunteers outside Enniscorthy had sided with Redmond’s National Volunteers.  They were, however very short of arms and ammunition.

In late 1915 a dispute arose in County Wexford between Brennan Whitmore, who was Officer-in-charge of the Volunteers’ Enniscorthy Battalion and the Brigade staff in Wexford. Paul Galligan recalled, “The dispute was of  a trivial nature and arose over the right of Volunteers to attend dances”. Brennan Whitmore wanted disciplinary action taken against men who spent their money on dances rather than on the arms fund. A rather unseemly squabble broke out and Whitmore ended up resigning.

Thomas MacDonagh, the Volunteers’ Director of Training, sent Paul Galligan, a Cavan native and IRB man since 1911, from Dublin  to the south-eastern town, to sort out the mess, and as Galligan himself put it, “to take charge of advanced training”. [5]

MacDonagh, as a member of the IRB’s military council which was secretly planning a rising, knew that armed action was looming and Enniscorthy was a very strategic military location, commanding the railway route to Dublin from the ports at Rosslare and Waterford. It was therefore important for those at the heart of the conspiracy to get a reliable man in charge there, who would carry out orders when the time came.

In Enniscorthy, Galligan, who was known to the police, lived under the alias “O‘Reilly”, and was set up with a job in Bolger’s drapery establishment.[6] In the evenings he intensively trained 26 local Volunteer officers, at their hall named “Antwerp” in Enniscorthy. One Volunteer, John O’Reilly, remembered Galligan telling them, “If the day would come, which we all believed was near, for a fight against the enemy (Britain), we would not have too many men and not enough officers”.[7]

Galligan’s arrival in Wexford created a certain amount of confusion over who was in command of the Volunteers in the county. According to various accounts the commandant of the Wexford Brigade was either Seamus Doyle or Seamus Rafter, with Galligan as Vice Commandant. However it seems that Paul Galligan’s ties to the Military Committee, at the heart of the Rising, meant that he was the main source of accurate orders for County Wexford from the capital once the Rising was underway.

In March 1916, Patrick Pearse visited Enniscorthy for the commemoration of Robert Emmet, the Republican leader hanged for his rising of 1803. In public, in the Athenium theatre, Pearse delivered what Paul Galligan remembered as an, “impressive lecture” on Emmet. The Enniscorthy battalion provided a guard of honour. Such rallies, like the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa in Dublin in 1915, allowed the Volunteers to openly flout the authority of the British state. John O’Reilly remembered, “we had the buildings under armed guard that night and were prepared to resist any interference from the RIC or other authorities”.[8]

In private, Pearse told local Volunteer officers such as Seamus Doyle that the orders for an armed uprising would come soon. In the second week of April, the police seized a motor car in College Green, central Dublin, which contained a quantity of shot-guns, revolvers and ammunition, all of which were destined for County Wexford. The two occupants of the car were Irish Volunteers from Ferns.

On again off again.

The Easter Rising very nearly did not happen. Eoin MacNeill, the titular head of the Volunteers, had been kept in the dark by the IRB-dominated Military Committee and when informed of the plans for insurrection, on Easter Sunday 1916, tried to call it off. In Dublin itself, O’Neill and his ally in the IRB, Bulmer Hobson, were sidelined and the Rising duly broke out the following day.

In the provinces, however, the stream of contradictory orders coming from Dublin caused chaos among the Volunteers. J.J. O’Connell, who was supposed to be in command of the Rising in the south-east, told Wexford officers Seamus Rafter, Seamus Doyle and Paul Galligan that,  “he would take no part in the forthcoming rising and, further, it would be our responsibility whatever action we took.”[9]

The Volunteer officers in Enniscorthy were, understandably, at a loss. Galligan remembered, “As a result of O’Connell’s actions we were left without instructions and could take no further action and on Easter Saturday there was an air of indecision prevailing among the officers owing to this lack of instruction.”

To try to find out what was happening, Paul Galligan travelled to Dublin late on Easter Saturday night. On Sunday, he read MacNeill’s order cancelling “manouvres” and assumed the Rising was off. But the following day, at a house in Dalkey, in south County Dublin he learned of the events in the city centre and went to O’Connell Street to try to find out in person what was going on and what was expected of the Enniscorthy Volunteers.

At the insurgent headquarters at the General Post Office, Galligan met with three of the Rising’s principle leaders, James Connolly, Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett.

“Connolly said to me that they had enough men in Dublin and that it would be better to join my unit in Wexford. After a talk with Pearse and Plunkett in which I could hear the word ‘mountains’ being used, Connolly instructed me to go back to Wexford as quickly as I could to mobilise the Enniscorthy Battalion and to hold the railway line to prevent troops coming through from Wexford as he expected they would be landed there. He said to reserve our ammunition and not to waste it attacking barracks or such like.”

It was now 2 am on Tuesday morning. Connolly told him to get something to eat – Desmond Fitzgerald gave him tea and two buns – and a “good bicycle”, which Gearoid O’Sullivan took from the GPO storehouse.

At first light, “I started straight away for Enniscorthy. It was just breaking day as I left the GPO…When I got to the Parnell monument, I looked back and I noticed that there were two flags flying from masts on the front of the GPO…a green flag and the tricolour of today”.[10]

Galligan was more fortunate than many provincial Volunteer officers in that he had received clear and realistic orders from the head of what was now calling itself the Army of the Irish Republic – get back to Enniscorthy and cut the railway line to prevent the British from bringing reinforcements to Dublin.

The Rising in Enniscorthy

Galligan’s subsequent 200 km cycle took him on a wide detour to avoid British troops, via the North Circular Road, Mulhuddart and Maynooth and through County Carlow. It was late on Wednesday evening before he reached Enniscorthy.

On the outskirts of the town he happened across a Volunteer who was delivering bread and told him to gather the officers, as he had instructions for them from Connolly.

In Enniscorthy itself, the local Volunteers under Seamus Doyle had received an order from Pearse on Monday afternoon, telling them, “we start at noon today, obey your orders”. Since it was not at all clear what these orders were, Doyle consulted with Sean Sinnott, the Brigade commander in Wexford town who told him, “in consequence of the conflicting orders he would not have anything to do with the matter”. Back in Enniscorthy on Tuesday, Doyle found a few Volunteers waiting at the ammunition dump, unsure of what to do.[11]

It was only Paul Galligan’s return with Connolly’s orders that galvanised the Enniscorthy men. James Cullen recalled, “A meeting of the officers was held at ‘Antwerp’ and Commandant Galligan gave full details of the fighting in Dublin and of the positions held by the Volunteers. It was then decided to rise. It was really Commandant Galligan who was responsible for this decision.”[12]

In the early hours of Thursday, around 100-200 Volunteers took over the town hall and the castle and surrounded the RIC barracks in the town, to which they cut off the supply of gas and water. The insurgents’ armament was meagre though – only 20 rifles and 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Many carried only pikes, which, effective enough in 1798, would have been useless in an encounter with either armed police or British troops in 1916.

The Enniscorthy Volunteers were very conscious of themselves as heirs of the 1798 rebels in County Wexford. One of the symbolic actions they undertook was to occupy Vinegar Hill, scene of the United Irishmen’s final defeat in 1798, and fire some shots from it at the RIC barracks.

Whereas in Dublin, the rebels were initially highly unpopular with the general public, in Enniscorthy the reaction to the Rising seems to have been largely positive. According to Seamus Doyle, “Feeling in the town was generally friendly towards us, excepting the families of some British Army soldiers”.[13]

Sean Etchingham of Gorey, was in charge of recruiting and recruits. Not only did Volunteer companies come in from Gorey and Ferns, but hundreds of local men and boys wanted to join the rebels, Galligan recalled, “Large numbers of men were presenting themselves to join us and our biggest problem was feeding these men.” Cumman na mBan, for whom Galligan felt, “nothing but admiration and appreciation is due”, helped to house and feed the new arrivals. [14]

Even two of the local priests – Fr. Coad and Fr. Murphy – were anxious to join the Enniscorthy volunteers, but were persuaded otherwise and left after blessing the men.

Part of the reason for the Wexford rebels’ popularity may have been that the rebellion in Enniscorthy was, in stark contrast to Dublin, nearly bloodless. There was a brief exchange of shots between the Volunteers and the RIC, in which two civilians and an RIC constable were wounded, but the rebels never tried to assault the barracks – they had in any case been ordered not to waste their limited ammunition by doing so.

Another factor was that the Volunteers made great efforts to present themselves as responsible soldiers and representatives of an Irish government. According to Paul Galligan, “All of the officers and most of the men were in uniform… Food, bedding, cars (which were returned to the owners after the surrender) and clothing were commandeered from local shops and receipts were issued in all cases”. “It was admitted in all cases afterwards that there was no undue commandeering and no one was victimised on account of his political leaning. The police (RIC) in the town were put off-duty and confined to barracks. We established our own police and town patrols”.[15]

The Athenaeum theatre was made the Republicans’ headquarters, over which they flew the green, white and orange tricolour. All the public houses in the town were closed down and as Father Patrick Murphy, a priest who publicly blessed the rebels, recalled, “during the four days of Republican rule, not a single person was under the influence of drink”. The railway station was taken over and a train to Arklow was stopped and  commandeered.[16]

Paul Galligan was officer in charge of field operations and commanded a guard of honour as the Republican flag was raised. Seamus Doyle issued the Proclamation of the Republic, “calling on the people to support and defend it.” [18]

The diary of Sean Etchingham, a future Dail government minister, conveys the sense of liberation and exhilaration experienced by the Volunteers: “We had at least one day of blissful freedom. We have had Enniscorthy under the laws of the Irish Republic for at least one day and it pleases me to learn that the citizens are appreciably surprised……….a more orderly town could not be imagined. The people of the town are great. The manhood of Enniscorthy is worthy of its manhood.”[20]

By Saturday morning, up to 1,000 insurgents had been mobilised. News had reached the Volunteers, via some railway workers, that the British garrison in Arklow were preparing an assault. Galligan set up an outpost at Ferns, with 40-50 men, who they took over the R.I.C. barracks, (which had been vacated by the police) and the national school. Roads were blocked and advanced posts of scouts were established. A telegraph discovered in Ferns barracks stated that “enormous force would be required to suppress it” (the rebellion)

British Response

On Saturday, the RIC County Inspector reported, “ the rebels are concentrated at Enniscorthy and are stated to be entrenching themselves there, the Police are still holding out (presumably in the Police Barracks). The approaches to Enniscorthy within a radius of three miles of the town were blocked with felled trees and in one case by a telegraph pole which has been brought down. The damage to the Barrow Bridge on the Dublin and South Eastern Railway is now reported not to be serious.”[22]

 Meanwhile, the British War Office sent a telegraph to Lieutenant-Colonel G.A. French, a retired British Army Officer who lived about two miles outside Wexford in Newbay,   instructing him to take over the command of the British Forces in Wexford and advising that reinforcements were on their way from Waterford along with an armoured train with a field gun.

 Patrick Pearse had in fact already surrendered on Friday afternoon on behalf of the Republican forces in Dublin, “to prevent the further slaughter of the civilian population and in the hope of saving our followers, now hopelessly surrounded and outnumbered”.

According to James O’Connor, a Home Ruler who joined the RIC as a Special Constable  for the duration of the Rising, Colonel French sent word to a Protestant clergyman and Dr. Furlong, the administrator of the Catholic parish of Enniscorthy, “suggesting that they should seek out the leaders of the Rebellion and advise them that they had no hope of  victory and that there would be considerable loss of life and damage to property if he had to shell Enniscorthy”. If they surrendered, “All the leaders and the men would be allowed to walk out of town. Colonel French was a gentleman and kept his word. But what explanation he gave to the British War Office I do not know”.[24]

It is a good story, but while Seamus Doyle  records meeting Furlong, his and the other Volunteers’ accounts state that it was Pearse’s surrender order, conveyed by the British to the Volunteer leaders in Wexford, that ended the Rising there.

The Surrender

By Sunday morning, there had still not been any sight in Enniscorthy or Ferns of the British Arklow garrison or the mobile column from Cobh that had landed at Wexford town. Later that afternoon, one of the Volunteers’ cycle patrols returned to the outpost at Ferns and told Paul Galligan that an RIC District Inspector and Sergeant had arrived under a flag of truce with a copy of Pearse’s surrender order.

Galligan was sceptical but inspected Pearse’s surrender order which was addressed to the O/C Enniscorthy Volunteers and sent the policemen to Enniscorthy under armed escort.[25]

At first, Seamus Doyle and his officers in Enniscorthy refused to believe the surrender order. He and Sean Etchingham of Gorey applied to Colonel French for permission to travel to Dublin and see Pearse in person. Despite the misgivings of the local RIC, who wanted the pair arrested, French put them in a military car and had them driven to Arbour Hill prison in Dublin where Pearse was being kept. Pearse looked, “physically exhausted but spiritually exulted. He told us that the Dublin Brigade had done splendidly – five days and nights of continuous fighting…Etchingham asked him, ‘Why did you surrender?’, Pearse answered, ‘because they were shooting women and children in the streets. I saw them myself’.”[26]

Pearse had not been aware of the Rising in Enniscorthy but agreed to sign a written order to the Wexford Volunteers confirming the surrender, that Doyle and Etchingham brought back to Enniscorthy.[27]

Doyle and Etchingham returned to Enniscorthy on Monday, April 31^st. Paul Galligan, still in Ferns, received a dispatch from Enniscorthy confirming the surrender order and telling him to return to the town.

Some of the Volunteers in Enniscorthy, such as James Cullen, took to the hills in the hope of starting a campaign of guerrilla warfare, but after a few days decided to come back down and “face the music”. Those who remained formally surrendered to Colonel French and were taken by ship to captivity in Dublin.[28] If French had indeed promised to let the rebels “walk out of town”, he was unable to deliver on his commitment.

It might have seemed, during the Republican occupation of Enniscorthy that everyone in the town was on their side, but after the Rising it became clear that this was not so. Some 200 of the Volunteers’ various political opponents in Enniscorthy, who had lain low during the rebellion, “National Volunteers, Hibernians, and Unionists”, helped the RIC to patrol the town. As one Republican, Maire Fitzgerald, bitterly recalled, “the rats all came out of their holes to welcome the British soldiers”.[29]

Volunteer John O’Reilly was shocked to see the British Army entering Enniscorthy, “accompanied by some of the Wexford (so called) National Volunteers or Redmondites.”[30]

Enniscorthy was a particular stronghold of radical nationalism – the RIC noted that the Irish Volunteers, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League (and though they didn’t know it, the IRB) were the most influential nationalist organisations there. Elsewhere  in the county, the IPP, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the National Volunteers were dominant and those places remained hostile to the rebellion.

The RIC Yearly Police report for 1916 writes of County Wexford, “Apart from the places affected by the rebellion, the county was peaceable during the year…Elsewhere in the county, the feeling of the people was quite hostile to the rebels and large numbers assembled under arms to assist the police in the towns  of Wexford, New Ross and Gorey.”[31]

Rival nationalists did not actually come to blows in Wexford in 1916, but Home Rulers did take up arms under British command and help to round up republicans. It may be significant that the County’s experience of the intra-nationalist civil war of 1922-23 was unusually severe by the standards of surrounding counties. The seeds of this may have been laid to some extent by the enmities of 1916.

A total of 3,430 men and 79 women were rounded up by the British in Ireland after the Rising, though 1,400 were released within a week.[32] In County Wexford, 270 men were arrested after the rebellion, of whom ten were sentenced to imprisonment or penal servitude.[33]

Due mainly to the destruction of roads and rail lines, the estimated damage to property in the Enniscorthy Rising came to £3,000.[34]

The Rising in Wexford – A Failure?

The Rising in Wexford therefore amounted to a great political spectacle but not much in military terms.

Nearly thirty years later, in the Dail, the independent Irish parliament, Deputy Corish of Wexford complained that only 70 of the 260 men who had submitted claims for a state pension for their service in the Easter Rising in Enniscorthy had had their claims accepted. “The Departments of Finance and Defence insist that the Enniscorthy men had no contact with the enemy. The Enniscorthy men came out to establish the Republic and were prepared to die for the Republic, if necessary. They came out under the order of Pearse and never thought that the struggle was going to end so quickly.”[35]

The Volunteers in Wexford, grouped around a militant nucleus of IRB men in Enniscorthy, were no doubt serious about fighting and they surrendered only under orders and with great reluctance.

The outcome of any battle in Wexford, however, was not in doubt. The poorly armed Volunteers might have made a good stand – only 17 Volunteers at Mount Street in Dublin had held off a regiment for two days and killed and wounded 240 British troops – but they would certainly have been beaten. Many of them and probably many civilians also, would have been killed had Enniscorthy been bombarded by the British heavy guns. Paul Galligan said during the week that without the German arms, they, “had no hope of success”.

So why rise at all? For one thing, Paul Galligan had clear and achievable orders from James Connolly to block the railway line to Dublin. There was also a certain amount of personal pride at stake. Galligan wrote to this brother that, “all the officers of Wexford decided to fight, even if it was only for 12 hours as they would not stand by and watch their brothers in Dublin fall without striking a blow”.[36]

In the longer term, the British reaction to the Rising, in Wexford as elsewhere, pushed many moderate nationalists, who had been hostile to the Rising, into the separatist camp.

The final word should be left to the County Wexford RIC who reported that, “Although the majority of people did not approve of the rebellion and were anxious that law and order should be maintained, they were unwilling to see any of the rebels punished and their punishment excited considerable sympathy.”[37]

This is an archive of Irish Story articles on the 1916 Rising from 2010 and 2011, including articles, interview and book reviews. Look out for more contributions on the Rising here in 2012.

Articles

A good place to start is here -

* An Overview of the Easter Rising - laying out the need-to-know facts. 

 This article by John Dorney,

* ‘Slaves or Freemen’, Sean McDermott, the IRB and the psychology of the Easter Rising, tries to delve into IRB thinking about nationalism and revolution before the rebellion.

A series of  ‘Today in Irish History’ posts look at some of the the week’s events;

The first day of the Rising – April 24.  The rebels occupy their positions, both the British and the Dublin public are taken by surprise.

The next day, Tuesday the 25th. Fighting continues, civilians suffer. By Eoin Purcell.

The Battle at Mount Street, April 26th. The bloodiest day of the Rising for the British, at Mount Street Bridge. 

The Surrender – April 30th, 1916. Over three days, the rebels in Dublin and elsewhere surrender. 

*Cathal Brennan’s article -A TV pageant – the Rising commemorations in 1966 - looks at the public marking of the Rising 50 years later.

Interviews

Fearghal McGarry on the Easter Rising - historian Fearghal McGarry discusses his book ’The Rising’.

Perspectives on the Easter Rising, Part I, Rebels – Fearghal McGarry and Padraig Yeates talk about the planning of the Rising.

Perspectives on the Easter Rising Part II, Combat - McGarry and Yeates talk about the fighting in Easter week.

Perspectives on the Easter Rising Part III, Aftermath - McGarry and Yeates discuss the long term and short term consequences of the rebellion.

1916 A Military Falure? - Author Paul O’Brien gives his thoughts on the Rising as a military operation.

Book Reviews

Rebels by Fearghal McGarry, Reviewed by John Dorney – a collection of eyewitness testimony from veterans.

A City in Wartime by Padraig Yeates, Reviewed by John Dorney. This book on Dublin in 1914-18 contains a meaty chapter on the Rising. 

Turning Points in Twentieth Century Irish History - Reviewed by John Dorney – Includes a provocative chapter by Peter Hart on 1916.

Unlikely Rebels by Anne Clare - On the Gifford sisters and their role in the Easter Rising. Reviewed by Mairead Carew.

The Story of the Easter Rising, By John Dorney, Reviewed by Cathal Brennan. 

The Rising, Ireland, 1916, by Fearghal McGarry, Reviewed by John Dorney.

A 19th century painting of High Street, Kilmallock, the buildings are 16th century and the street would have looked much the same in 1600.

Kilmallock 1600. An episode of the failure of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland. By John Dorney

In the summer of 1600, at the height of the Nine Years War, an English military party accompanied by Miler McGrath, the Protestant Bishop of Cashel and Master Job Clarke of the Council of State, made their way into the town of Kilmallock in county Limerick.

With them was sickly young man of 30, James Fitzgerald. He was the son of the last Earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, who had been killed  in 1580, after rebelling against the encroachment of the English state into Munster– ending some 400 years of Fitzgerald or Geraldine power in southern Ireland.

James Fitzgerald had been ten at time of his father’s death in the Desmond Rebellion and had spent 16 years in the Towerof London. He was slight and in perpetual poor health, but he had one advantage for the government, he had been brought up in England and was a Protestant.

Since October 1598, there had been a rebel Earl of Desmond, committed to the war of Hugh O’Neill against the English and Protestant dominance in Ireland; James FitzThomas Fitzgerald, derided by his enemies as the Súgán (‘straw rope’ ie fake) Earl.

  The Annals of the Four Masters record that,

‘As the country was left in the power of the Irish on this occasion, they conferred the title of Earl of Desmond, by the authority of O’Neill, upon James, the son of Thomas Roe, son of James, son of John, son of the Earl; and in the course of seventeen days they left not, within the length or breadth of the country of the Geraldines … which the Saxons had well cultivated and filled with habitations and various wealth, a single son of a Saxon whom they did not either kill or expel. Nor did they leave, within this time, a single head residence, castle, or one sod of Geraldine territory, which they did not put into the possession of the Earl of Desmond, excepting only Castlemaine’.[1]

In order to try to win back the support of the Fitzgeralds’ kin and dependants, George Carew, the Lord President of Munster took James, the son of the Earl from the Tower and re-introduced him as a new, loyal Earl of Desmond.

It was a bold and somewhat desperate move. The English Undertakers or colonists, who had possessed themselves of confiscated Geraldine land were not impressed, fearing, “that in after times he might be restored to his Fathers Inheritances, and thereby become their Lord, and their rents (now paid to the Crowne} would in time be conferred upon him”.[2]

At the crisis point of the Nine Years’ War, Geroge Carew was prepared to disregard them in the interests of the state.

‘A trial of dispositions and affections’

 But first, as with a modern marketing campaign, Carew had to test his audience’s response. His secretary, Thomas Stafford, recorded, “For the President to make trial of the disposition and affection of the young Earl’s kindred and Followers, at his desire consented that he should make a Journey from Moyalla into the Countyof Limerick. And to Master Boyle his Lordship gave secret charge, as well to observe the Earl’s ways and carriage, as what men of quality or others made their address unto him ; and with what respects and behaviour they carried themselves towards the Earle, who came to Kilmallock upon a Saturday in the Evening.”[3]

At first, the new Earl seemed wildly popular. The townspeople of Kilmallock flocked to catch a glimpse of him,

“all the Streets, Doors and Windows, yea the very Gutters and tops of the Houses were so filled with them, as if they came to see him, whom God had sent to bee that Comfort and Delight, their souls and hearts most desired, and they welcomed him with all the expressions and signs of love, every one throwing upon him Wheat and Salt (an ancient Ceremony used in that Province, upon the Election of their new Majors and Officers, as a prediction of future peace and plenty.”

 Like a modern day celebrity, James Fitzgerald was mobbed everywhere he went in the town. When he went for supper to the house of one George Thornton,

“The Earl had a Guard of Soldiers, which made Lane from his lodgings to Sir George Thornton’s House, yet the confluence of people that flocked thither to see him was so great, as in half an hour he could not make his passage through the crowd; and after Supper he had the like encounters at his return to his lodging.”[4]

Why was James Fitzgerald so popular in a province where he had not been since he was a child? One reason was that FitzThomas, the rebel Earl, was widely seen as an upstart. James was clearly the legitimate heir to the Desmond title, and in early modern society such things mattered.

But also, the people of Kilmallock must have pined for some peace and stability. In 1570, during the first Desmond rebellion, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald had burned Kilmallock, making it, ‘an abode of wolves”. John Perrot, the Lord President of Munster claimed that no one could walk in safety a mile outside the town for fear of the Geraldine guerrillas.[5]

No one wanted a repeat of those dark days.

 But the late 16^th century also saw a Catholic religious re-awakening in the Munster towns, in which the population increasingly refused to conform to the established Protestant Church of the English.

 Between 1593 and 1595 the size of congregations attending the Protestant services at Cork Cathedral fell from over 1,000 to less than 10 people. Protestant Christenings, marriages and burials services in the city also dried up in the same years. The early 1590s also saw the founding of Irish seminaries in Catholic Europe at Salamanca, Lisbon and Douai. [6] According to Sir John Dowdall who fought as an officer of foot in Munster, (writing in 1595) they, “do transport them [priests] from Spain to Ireland and from Ireland to Spain again, and likewise to France which swarm up and down the whole country, seducing the people and the best sorts, to draw them from God and their allegiance to the Prince”.[7]

Kilmallock even had its own martyr. In 1579, the Lord President Drury had hanged Patrick O’Healy, Catholic Bishop of Mayo in Kilmallock on a charge of treason.[8]

‘Loud and Rude Dehortations’

So the big test for James Fitzgerald’s popularity came on Sunday, the day after he arrived in Kilmallock. Thomas Stafford recalled with dismay,

 “The next day being Sunday, the Earl went to Church to hear divine Service ; and all the way his Country people used loud and rude dehortations to keep him from Church; unto which he lent a deaf ear; thus after Service and the Sermon was ended, the Earl coming forth of the church, was railed at, & spat upon by those that before his going to Church were so desirous to see and salute him.”

It was obvious that Carew’s experiment in introducing a Protestant Earl of Desmond was a failure.

“After that public expression of his Religion, the Towne was cleared of that multitude of strangers, and the Earl from thenceforward, might walk as quietly and freely in the Towne, as little in effect followed or regarded as any other private Gentleman.”

The conclusions, to Thomas Stafford at least, were obvious;

 “This true relation I the rather make, that all men may observe how hateful our Religion and the professors thereof, are to the ruder and ignorant sort of people in that Kingdom: For from thence forward none of his Fathers followers, (except some few of the meaner sort of Free-holders) resorted unto him ; … But the truth is, his Religion, being a Protestant, was the only cause that has bred this coyness in them all : for if he had been a Romish Catholic, the hearts and knees of all degrees in the Province would have bowed unto him.”

James Fitzgerald, known to contemporaries as the ‘Tower Earl’, was discarded as an instrument of English policy. He returned toLondon, where he died, penniless in 1601.

Winning the war, losing the peace

The English won the Nine Years War. Munster, in particular had been somewhat lukewarm towards Hugh O’Neill’s campaign, as he put it over, “the great questions of the nation’s liberty and of religion”.[9]

 But, in so far as the state was Protestant and it required its subjects to conform to this religion, they lost the peace.

 Catholic clerical observers were not that impressed with piety in Ireland.  Father Fitzsimon, a Jesuit operating in Ireland, expressed this in 1598 in a letter to Claudio Aquaviva, the General of the Jesuits, “Religion does not strike firm roots here; people by a kind of general propensity, follow more the name than the reality of the Catholic Faith and thus are borne to and fro by the winds of edicts and threats”.[10] But it seems clear that by this time most ofIreland’s indigenous communities both Gaelic and Old English, regarded themselves as committed Catholics.

In 1603, not long after O’Neill’s final surrender at Mellifont. The Old English towns of Munster, including Waterford, Corkand Limerickrebelled, expelling Protestant ministers, imprisoning English officials, seizing the municipal arsenals and demanding freedom of worship for Catholics. They refused to admit English commander Mountjoy’s army when he marched south, citing their ancient charters from 12^th century. Mountjoy retorted that he would, “cut King John his charter with King James his sword”,  and arrested the ringleaders, thus ending the revolt.

The effect of the episode though, was to show just how estranged the primarily Old English Irish towns had become from the Protestant state.  In an age when states and monarchs felt they could not tolerate dissenting religions among their subjects, it was an ominous sign for the coming century. [11]

References