The céilís, concerts, drama, Gaelic sport and Irish classes and romances were largely convivial, social aspects of the Irish Ireland dream, yet, distinct from that, with the borders inevitably blurring at times, were the starker features of what was evolving around the country. ‘John’ Gifford wrote of the men and women involved: ‘Some were in Sinn Féin; others in the Irish Republican Brotherhood; others in the Inghínidhe na hÉireann. Still more were in the ranks of the Gaelic League or the GAA. Within a few years these scattered groups had coalesced, and an Irish revolutionary force was in being.’[1]
These were obvious milestones on the road to rebellion. After 1913, it became obvious that the influence of the republican press, the bitterness engendered by the lock-out strike and the consequent formation of the Citizen Army were slanting events closer to armed confrontation. At the same time, the unionists in the northern counties, reacting to the ‘threat’ of John Redmond’s dream of Home Rule for Ireland, decided to arm. Apart from private purchases from Germany of arms and ammunition by wealthy unionists, £100,000 – a huge sum in those days – was subscribed to buy the arms that were smuggled into Larne, County Antrim, in April 1914. The importers deliberately cut off public communications on the day of the arms arrival, and, in a convoy of motor cars, 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition were distributed across Ulster. No police stopped the convoy, though what they did was illegal. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the Conservative Party, the unionist Ulster landlords – none of them wanted Home Rule either, and this illegal army had their tacit support. Even more significantly, the British army officers in the Curragh, County Kildare, mutinied and refused to march against the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). They resigned their commissions rather than oppose those they perceived to be friends.
They were to have no such misgivings when the nationalists in the south proceeded to arm. In fact, the UVF did the south of Ireland militants a favour: they pointed the way. Three months later, in July 1914, a nationalist Protestant, Erskine Childers, lent his yacht, The Asgard, to enable the importation into Howth Harbour, County Dublin, of a much humbler cargo than that at Larne. The subscribers of the purchase price of £1,500, in comparison with the north of Ireland’s £100,000, were fellow Anglo-Irish Protestants: Sir Roger Casement, the Honourable Mary Spring Rice (a daughter of Lord Monteagle and sister of a British ambassador), Alice Stopford Green (later a senator in Seanad Éireann) and a Captain Berkeley. In all 1,500 rifles were bought, of which 900 came on The Asgard. That figure made the purchase price approximately £1 per rifle, so it is obvious they were not the best rifles in the world. One might even wonder if they were not relics of the Napoleonic wars. No matter how it is viewed, numerically or qualitatively, this was David confronting Goliath. Apart from the £100,000 UVF importation, the republicans also faced the weaponry of the three official armed agencies supporting unionists, north and south. On one small island there were now nine ‘armies’:
1. the British army of occupation (armed)
2. the Royal Irish Constabulary (armed)
3. the Dublin Metropolitan Police (armed)
4. the Ulster Volunteer Force (armed)
On the republican side, minimally or not at all armed:
5. the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)
6. Na Fianna (a sort of boy-scout nationalist movement set up in Dublin in 1909 by Bulmer Hobson and Countess Markievicz among others)
7. the Irish Citizen Army (ICA)
8. the Hibernian Rifles (a small, exclusively Catholic militia based in Dublin)
9. the Irish Volunteer Force (which included the IRB)
Goliath had far superior numbers and equipment. David had 700 years of resentment, a dream of freedom and, of course, 1,500 weapons worth approximately £1 each. It is interesting to contrast the smooth, unopposed importation passage of the huge UVF purchase at Larne with that at Howth, where the gunrunners were almost entirely without transport. The Fianna had brought along a small horse and cart and a trek cart – a very narrow, short, covered cart, manually powered. In a photograph of them running along with their quaint wagonette, it looks like a mobile fruit stall from the Moore Street market. There were also some bicycles, whose crossbars neatly accommodated a rifle, and the rest were just hidden under jackets. While all this compares pathetically with the Larne fleet of cars, headlights ablaze to illuminate the scene, nevertheless the Fianna’s arrangements were adequate for the delivery, and the strange little wagon proved very useful, taking a major stash of the rifles. Darrell Figgis and Conor O’Brien had been involved in the purchase of the guns at Antwerp. Childers’ wife, Molly, in the yacht, was to wear a crimson garment as a signal to the waiting party, which included Mary Spring Rice, Gordon Shephard (an English friend of Childers) and two fishermen from Tory Island.
Also at Howth that day was Cathal Brugha with a group of his IRB men to guard the shipment. Another group of approximately 800 Irish Volunteers had allegedly made a routine march from Fairview to arrive ‘coincidentally’ at Howth. On the way back to the city with their haul they were stopped in the Raheny-Clontarf area by W. A. Harrel, Assistant Commissioner of the DMP, backed up by a large contingent of Scottish Borderers. He demanded surrender of the arms, but Bulmer Hobson, who was in charge of the delivery, refused. Hobson left Thomas MacDonagh and Darrell Figgis to argue with the Assistant Commissioner while he slipped away to move his men quietly and quickly through fields and round the backs of houses, each carrying rifles. A word of pity may be allowed W. A. Harrel: the man was only doing his duty and he was confronted by two of the ablest talkers in the movement. MacDonagh, the persuasive university lecturer, a wordsmith by profession, and Figgis, a worthy debater in any company, used their ‘blarney’ to give time to the fleeing convoy. In the event, only nineteen rifles were lost. It was an occasion for glee, but unfortunately the day was to end on a tragic note. Dubliners, having heard of the successful manoeuvre, jeered the Scottish Borderers as they marched back to barracks along the Liffey quays. Hasty tempers combined with tired, irate, trigger-happy soldiers, left three people dead: the first casualties, it could be said, of the War of Independence, unarmed and shot without trial.
Superintendent Brangan, in charge of a contingent of the DMP who had been ordered to Howth, was brought before a tribunal which accused him, because he was Irish, of turning a blind eye to the dispersal of the guns. He was summarily dismissed and deprived of his pension rights. On appeal, his conviction was quashed and his job and pension restored.[2]
Some Howth residents were given weapons to store. They were instructed to keep the weapons oiled and serviceable. One such ‘minder’ was Molly Brohoon, who eventually went on the run.[3]
Another very different episode took place the following year, edging Ireland towards use of those imported arms. Words can undoubtedly be weapons, and never were they more so than when Pádraig Pearse stood before those assembled in Glasnevin Cemetery, in 1915, at the interment of the old Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, whose remains had been brought from America. It was, at least partly, an orchestrated exercise in emotional political blackmail, and the conductor was Thomas MacDonagh. The occasion had all the ingredients for drama: one of the revered, though defeated, ‘Bold Fenian Men’, O’Donovan Rossa, had been brought home for burial in his native land. There was dignity and a reverence for the old warrior in the thousands who lined the route and in the marching feet representing every Irish Ireland ideology and every organisation, however insignificant, involved in the movement.
If the funeral itself was impressive, Pearse’s oration at the grave was electrifying. Even the cadence of his words was intrinsically dramatic, and the concluding triad rang out unforgettably in the hushed air, challenging the might of England with its simple thirteen words:
The fools, the fools, the fools: they have left us our Fenian dead.
Pearse, the poet and dreamer, who was certainly no Sarsfield mili-tarily speaking, mesmerised his listeners with his monosyllabic challenge. It was a defining day in Irish history.[4]
Reaction around the city was divided, as in the Gifford household: the daughters deeply moved and involved, their mother indignant at such fuss about a Fenian and their father feeling, perhaps, a little uneasy about the future.
Notes
[1] Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 40.
[2]Conversation with Fr Dermot Brangan, SJ, Hong Kong Mission (grandson of Superintendent Brangan).
[3]Conversation with John Murphy, Molly Brohoon’s grandson, librarian in All Hallows library.
[4]A lady to whom I spoke was there that day and remembered the hushed atmosphere as the words rang out in the clear air, with the accompaniment of faint twittering of birds and the slight, but audible, shift of gravel near the graveside.