The first full meeting of Dublin Corporation after the rising took place on 5 June. It was necessary to tread sensitively, as the first item on the agenda was the potentially inflammatory series of votes of sympathy for deceased members and their relations. The choreography suggests that items were discussed well in advance.
The first vote was not contentious. The unionist alderman for Glasnevin, William Dinnage, proposed a vote of sympathy to the family of his recently deceased party colleague John Thornton, who had died of natural causes. The vote was seconded by Councillor James Cummins, a nationalist who represented the same ward.
Councillor John J. Higgins proposed and Councillor Sir Patrick Shortall seconded a vote of sympathy for Richard O’Carroll, the former Labour member and Volunteer officer killed in the rising by Captain Bowen-Colthurst. Shortall, a builder, had been knighted for his contribution to the war effort. Ironically, he had crossed swords with O’Carroll in the 1913 Lock-out, when the latter was secretary of the Bricklayers’ Union and a member of the trades council strike committee.
Alderman William O’Connor proposed and Councillor Patrick Lennon seconded a vote of sympathy to Sir Thomas Esmonde MP, the head of a respected nationalist political dynasty, on the death of his ‘youthful son … through the destruction of His Majesty’s ship Invincible.’ It was the nearest Dublin Corporation would ever come to acknowledging the Battle of Jutland, one of the most decisive engagements of the First World War. The politics of this model for a home rule parliament remained resolutely parochial.
Finally, Councillor Thomas Murty O’Beirne proposed and Councillor Patrick Lennon seconded a vote extending the sympathy of the corporation’s members ‘to the relatives of the citizens who lost their lives during the recent rebellion.’
The Lord Mayor then referred to the ‘calamity of rebellion,’ which had fallen on the city ‘like a thunderbolt.’ He contrasted ‘the steadiness of public opinion and calmness’ with the ‘unprecedented and almost incredible inaction of the Irish Executive.’ The rateable value of the premises destroyed in the city was £33,000, which meant a loss of £16,000 a year in municipal revenue. He announced an embargo on recruitment by the corporation and called for extra financial assistance from the government, ‘which had blown down the centre and most beautiful part of their city.’
Far from introducing any acrimony over the causes or progress of the rising, the corporation unanimously called for the release of Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin, chairman of the Housing Committee. Councillor Coghlan Briscoe, who was deputising for Kelly as chairman of the committee, moved the motion calling for the speedy release of this ‘invaluable member’ of the corporation. There were no similar calls for the release of W. T. Cosgrave or William Partridge; but then Kelly had not taken up arms against the state.
Housing continued to dominate the proceedings as Alderman Alfie Byrne proposed a motion deferred from before the rising that all the extra revenue raised from Dublin as a result of increased land valuations, income tax and duty on the licensed trade be used for slum clearance. The city had 2,288 dwellings ‘fast approaching the borderline for being unfit for habitation,’ on top of the 1,518 already in that category needing replacement. It was a shrewd move by Byrne. Councillor Joseph Isaacs, a well-regarded figure in the business community and the only Jewish member of the corporation, seconded the motion.
Byrne’s next motion was more controversial. He proposed a 50 per cent increase in the old age pension, to 7s 6d, to relieve some of the increase in food and fuel prices since the start of the war, and he proposed a reduction in the age qualification from 70 to 65. Despite opposition from the Lord Mayor, the unionist group and the ratepayers’ lobby, the motion was passed. Again the British government would be picking up the bill if it ever came to fruition.
Another proposal from Byrne was for a weekly war bonus of 3s to all officers of the corporation earning less than £100 a year. This would be an increase of 1s a week on the bonus secured by P. T. Daly for blue-collar workers before the rising. The motion, seconded by Councillor Gately, dovetailed with an earlier proposal from W. T. Cosgrave that no member of the clerical and administrative staff should be paid ‘less than a labourer.’1 The proposals reflected the fact that pay rates were rising faster for manual workers than for their white-collar colleagues, because the former were better organised in unions and better placed to exploit the labour shortage brought on by the war.
Despite sympathy for white-collar employees among corporation members, resistance to the proposal was as vociferous as usual from the ratepayers’ champions. The Lord Mayor said it would be ‘shameful for the Corporation to pass such a motion without knowing the cost.’ The tried and trusted tactic of an amendment was proposed, to refer the matter to the Estates and Finance Committee for a report. This was defeated by 25 votes to 9. Gallagher was almost alone in voting with the unionists to oppose the pay increase.
By August the corporation had extended the 3s per week war bonus to all employees. It then faced a demand from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers for an extra 4s for craft workers, to bring them into line with an increase already conceded by the Dublin Engineers Employers’ Association in the private sector. This concession led in turn to a similar claim from the Electrical Trade Union on the grounds of internal comparators.2 These were successful, thanks largely to strong support from the Labour group and from Alfie Byrne.
In contrast, the relief provided under section 13 of the Local Government Act for those left destitute by the rising was minimal, as the figures for June 1916 (table 6) demonstrate.
Relief paid to those left destitute by the rising, June 1916
| Husband and wife | 8s |
| One child | 1s 6d |
| Two children | 2S 6d |
| Three children | 3S |
| For each child over three years of age | 6d |
| Widow or widower | 5S |
| Adult dependant over seventy | 3S |
| Able-bodied single people | No relief |
Two days after Dublin Corporation passed its various votes of sympathy, Field-Marshal Kitchener perished when the cruiser Hampshire, carrying him to Russia, sank off Orkney. It was a blow to morale in Britain but failed to elicit much interest in Dublin. Even the Unionist Central Council and the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club were too preoccupied with petitions for blocking the implementation of home rule to note the passing of Ireland’s premier soldier, creator of Britain’s modern army and the colonel of the Irish Guards.
For nationalists of all hues Kitchener epitomised the anti-Irish bias of the British military establishment. He had facilitated the reorganisation of the UVF as the 36th (Ulster) Division of the British army but refused to make similar arrangements for members of Redmond’s National Volunteers. ‘Kitchener never liked or trusted the Irish and I always believe that but for him Ireland would have been wholeheartedly in the war,’ the Countess of Fingall wrote many years later. She was one of Kitchener’s few female friends, but this did not prevent her recalling his many snubs to the Irish war effort, including the return of proposed colours for a suggested Irish brigade produced by the Countess of Mayo’s School of Art.
The Irish were distrusted and knew it. They distrusted in their turn … Although thousands of Irishmen joined the Irish regiments … their brothers who might have gone with them joined the Volunteers.3
Nor did the Irish Party mark his passing when it met in the Mansion House on 10 June. It could hardly avoid a vote of sympathy to Sir Thomas Esmonde on the death of his teenage son at Jutland, but it did so in silence. There were no speeches in support of the British war effort, and Redmond even used the opportunity to argue that the Easter Rising had demonstrated the need to bring forward home rule.4
Another indicator of the changing political climate came at the corporation meeting on 19 June, when councillors met to fill the seats left vacant by the deaths of John Thornton and Richard O’Carroll. There had been a tradition of co-opting nominees of the party of the deceased in accordance with the outcome of the last election. But on this occasion Labour and Sinn Féin councillors supported the UIL nominee, Michael Maher, dairyman and cowkeeper, to fill Thornton’s seat. When Alderman William Dinnage, a unionist, protested that Maher did not even live in Glasnevin, his own candidate, Hubbard Clarke, was denounced as the director of a British company. The unionists found themselves isolated, apart from the support of a couple of ratepayer independents such as Sir Andrew Beattie, a former member of their own group, and Alderman James Moran, a nationalist and hotelier from Clontarf East who had a large unionist electorate and was a member of the Dublin Recruitment Committee for the British forces.
For unionists the outcome was worrying. In 1915 the British government had suspended elections for the duration of the war, and if a pact emerged between the UIL, Sinn Féin and Labour on how to fill vacancies, unionists could become an endangered species. Their fears were confirmed when nationalist councillors supported John Long, a Labour nominee, to replace O’Carroll. The unionists unsuccessfully proposed an independent ‘businessman-rates payer’ candidate for the seat.5
A replacement for O’Carroll was a particularly sensitive question, because the man who shot him, Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, had just been convicted of the murders of Sheehy Skeffington and his fellow-journalists after a highly publicised trial. The trial began on 6 June, lasted five days and told a dismal tale of confused command structures in which inexperienced young officers allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Bowen-Colthurst into ignoring all procedures and into complicity in the summary execution of prisoners by firing squad. The fact that most of the officers concerned, including the accused, were Irish and that the court-martial found Bowen-Colthurst guilty but insane added to the general air of disillusionment in the city.6
The corporation was even more exercised by the discovery of the bodies of fifteen civilians in the ruins of North King Street. Among them were those of Patrick Bealen, the 24-year-old foreman of a pub at 177 North King Street, and James Healy, a 44-year-old employee of the Jameson distillery nearby. The inquests were held immediately after the last of the 1916 leaders were executed.
Bealen had been shot six times and Healy twice. The military authorities were unable to establish which units, let alone which individuals, might have occupied this or any other house in the street when the men died. However, the position certainly registered with Major Rhodes of the Staffordshire Regiment, who gave evidence that the regiment sustained its heaviest casualties in four hours of intense fighting around the pub. Fourteen members of the regiment had been killed and thirty-three wounded. ‘I am satisfied that during these operations the troops under my command showed great restraint under exceptionally difficult and trying circumstances,’ he said.
The jury did not agree: they found that Bealen ‘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.’ A similar verdict was brought in for Healy.
A specially convened meeting of the corporation condemned the deaths and those of ‘other unoffending citizens’ in the North King Street area. Only one independent, Alderman David Quaid, a solicitor representing Drumcondra with its large unionist electorate, voted against the motion. No unionist representative voted on the issue.7 That a coroner’s jury, selected from the ranks of the city’s business community and normally sympathetic to the authorities, could bring in such verdicts was another troubling sign of the changing public mood. A precedent was being set for many similar inquests throughout the country in the years ahead.
It was this mood of simmering discontent that John Dillon had tried to capture when he spoke of the rising in the House of Commons on 11 May. Although Dillon represented Mayo he spent the week of the rising trapped in his Dublin home in North Great George’s Street with his family, within earshot of the rifle and machine-gun fire and later the artillery.
Few constitutional nationalists living in the capital had been so out of touch with its mood than this old rural radical.8 But he was quick to grasp the significance of the rising, and he wrote to Redmond urging him to try to stop the executions. When that failed Dillon told the House of Commons: ‘It is not murderers who are being executed; it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would have been a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin.’ It was a speech that shocked colleagues in the Irish Party as well as British MPs; but then they had not seen the destruction wrought and had not caught the mood of the citizens, including members of the United Irish League who had come to Dillon’s door pleading for leadership while he was unable to offer even meaningful advice. It was an anger also driven by Dillon’s realisation that the life’s work of constitutional nationalists was being washed away with blood and that men like himself would be ‘held up to odium as traitors by the men who made this rebellion.’9
He did not have to wait long. On 21 May, Tim Healy made a speech that was vitriolic even by his standards. He listed the slights against the Irish regiments, the bungling of the Volunteer question, the crippling tax burden imposed on Ireland and the cutting of urgently needed housing grants for Dublin as reasons for so much disaffection. ‘New crystallisations are taking place,’ he told the House of Commons. ‘The jobbery of the official party [Irish Party] disgusted all earnest and unselfish minds amongst the youth of Ireland.’ The corruption and ineffectiveness of the constitutional movement represented by men like Dillon meant that ‘all that was sober, unselfish, self-respecting and self-reliant quitted [the Irish Party] … and joined Sinn Féin.’10
There were other, less exalted political casualties of the war in the city. One was Dr James McWalter, who notified the Lord Mayor in early July that he had ‘received orders from the War Office to take up duty at “some place in the Mediterranean” and therefore I cannot attend the Council for some time.’ McWalter had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in June 1915 and had been congratulated by his fellow-councillors when he appeared in his lieutenant’s uniform at the next corporation meeting. But now, barely noting the contents of his letter, they went on to demand an end to martial law in the city, the release of ‘hundreds of citizens, men, women and boys,’ suspected of having sympathy with the insurgents, and compensation for the dependants of those who had lost their lives during the rising.11
There was even sympathy to spare for members of the staff of the Town Clerk’s office who sought compensation for loss of earnings because of the wartime suspension of elections under the Elections and Registration Act (1915). This meant they no longer had to prepare electoral lists and registers or oversee the electoral process. The loss of earnings ranged from £12 for junior staff to £110 for senior colleagues. The councillors approved the claim and forwarded it to the Local Government Board with hardly any debate.12
The war effort was imposing much greater burdens on the city. As in 1915, the British military authorities requisitioned all hay crops within ten miles of Dublin for its cavalry regiments and transport corps. On this occasion, however, the move was accompanied by a government order that allowed the Army Council to fix maximum prices. While provision was made for releasing unused fodder, the process proved slow and cumbersome. As early as July the Dublin Chamber of Commerce was complaining of shortages.13
Even more affected than business was the city’s health. The secretary of the corporation, Fred Allan, an old IRB man,14 wrote to the military authorities ‘in the strongest terms’ on the matter. He told the corporation that
during the present hot weather it is highly important that the portion of the City cleansing work which most vitally affects the public health, viz., the house to house removal of refuse must be efficiently maintained, and it would be extremely serious if, through either a deficiency of proper foodstuffs or the enforced use of inferior material, any large proportion of their stud were put out of action.
The fodder shortage remained a problem throughout the war, adding to the general air of resentment against the army. The fact that thousands of tons of hay were stored openly for the army at the docks while horses and cattle in the city starved only inflamed public opinion. On 1 August 1916, 1,400 tons of fodder, worth £11,200, were destroyed by fire, along with lorries worth £125 11s. As four ricks were set alight simultaneously, and the hay had been thoroughly pressed and dried, spontaneous combustion could be ruled out. This meant that the cost of compensation under the malicious damages legislation fell on the corporation.
Fortunately for the ratepayers, there were no further serious incidents, but complaints continued to be voiced to the military authorities about their purchasing policies. In December 1917 Colonel McCullagh, the officer responsible for fodder collection in the Dublin area, told a delegation of city councillors that he had checked that very week and found that large quantities of hay had been released by the army for sale. If it could be shown that private suppliers were abusing their position he would cancel their licences and offer the forage to the city and commercial customers at military rates. For their part the city councillors urged the army to extend the catchment area from a ten-mile radius of the city to twenty-five miles to allow military fodder targets to be achieved faster and the balance of the crop to be released onto the market.15
Beyond business needs and those of the corporation, the most pressing requirement for fodder came from the city’s dairies. There were five hundred of these, with 7,500 head of cattle, represented by the Cow Keepers’ and Dairymen’s Association. Members ranged in size from relatively large businesses to small dairies such as that of Todd Andrews’ parents and even smaller enterprises dependent on one or two animals to keep their owners from penury. Besides fodder, the cowkeepers had enjoyed access to cheap feed in the form of waste from the city’s breweries and distilleries. Guinness’s brewery found its overseas customers, including the Prussian cavalry, cut off by the outbreak of war. The closing of these markets helped increase the flow of feed to the Dublin market, and, true to its tradition of civic responsibility, the Guinness brewery continued to supply what was prime material at pre-war prices. This helped keep the price of milk at pre-war prices until the summer of 1916.
However, in the long run there was an inexorable decline in the supply of feedstuffs as a result of the production of beer and spirits. The replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George as Prime Minister at the end of 1916 accelerated state intervention in the drinks industry and the economy at large. In December the Dublin distilleries, which had been ordered in August 1916 to cut their already reduced output by a further 30 per cent, were taken over completely by the Department of Munitions. From then on they concentrated on the production of industrial alcohol for the war effort. Beer production had already fallen by 7 per cent in the first two years of the war, but now it tumbled rapidly, from 3.53 million barrels in 1914 to 3.28 million in 1916 and to 1.46 million in 1919, only 59 per cent of production in 1914. Employment in the distilleries and breweries had fallen by 50 per cent by 1917.16
From the summer of 1916 onwards the city’s cowkeepers had no option but to bid on the open market for fodder, much of it of inferior quality. Higher costs and reduced output caused milk prices to rise from 3d to 4d a quart in October. This was a relatively small increase compared with other staples. Retail prices generally had increased by about 150 per cent by the middle of 1916 and would reach 240 per cent by 1919. However, the increase in milk prices struck a nerve, as the poverty of many Dubliners made them heavily dependent on milk as one of the cheapest and most efficient sources of nourishment. Children were the most dependent of all, and the city’s infant mortality rate, already the highest in the United Kingdom when the war began, at 141 per thousand, rose to over 155. As the Minister of Food Control, Lord Rhondda, told a Baby Week conference in Dublin, more British babies died of disease, malnourishment and neglect in 1915 than men on active service in France and Flanders. He believed that infant mortality in a city such as Dublin, where infants accounted for a fifth of all deaths, could be halved by better nutrition and hygiene.17
If a major cause of infant mortality was the poor quality of milk, the fines were paltry. The chief medical officer of the city, Dr Charles Cameron, said after a tour of the dairies that ‘many were so situated and managed that the chances of milk being uncontaminated are remarkably slight.’ It was commonly accepted not only that hygiene in the dairies was poor but that milk sold before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m. was routinely adulterated, as the food inspectors rarely worked outside office hours.18
At its meeting on 9 October the Dublin Trades Council denounced the cowkeepers as members of ‘a criminal class’ conspiring to rob the public. A Milk Prices Order introduced in November only aggravated shortages, as Dublin dairies followed the example of their Belfast counterparts and began selling milch cows for the export market to Britain. In November the corporation’s Public Health Committee debated buying milk in bulk from rural creameries to supply at subsidised prices in the city. But market pressures were such that the corporation was forced to offer 1s 2d a gallon to rural dairies, and even then it was relying on a large measure of good will, because British bulk buyers for the dried-milk industry were already offering up to 1s 8d to meet War Office contracts.19
The price of other staples, such as sugar, meat, eggs, potatoes and tea, rose far faster than milk. Tea was one of the worst-affected items, because it had to be imported on ships that ran the gauntlet of mines and German submarines. The price doubled from 3d a pound in 1914 to 6d a pound by 1916 and would rise even faster in 1917 when the German submarine campaign was stepped up.
The Irish Sea attracted relatively little submarine activity before the introduction of the convoy system in 1917, because of the richer pickings in the North Sea, the English Channel and the Western Approaches. There had been some serious incidents, most notably in January 1915 when the Leinster, one of the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company’s mail boats, had a narrow escape east of the Kish Bank on a home run from Holyhead. Its luck would hold out almost to the end of the war; but smaller, slower steamers and fishing boats were not so lucky.
At first German submarine commanders allowed crews to take to the lifeboats before sinking vessels, but attitudes hardened as the war progressed and allied counter-measures made it dangerous for submarines to linger on the surface. The sinking of vessels such as the 3,839-ton Hartdale with the loss of two lives in March 1915 and of the 2,114-ton Aguila with the loss of three lives in April paled before the almost 1,200 lives lost when the Lusitania went down off Galley Head, Co. Cork. Part of the cultural collateral damage for Dublin was the loss of Sir Hugh Lane, a passenger on board. He was not only the director of the National Gallery but had left a bequest of his priceless impressionist paintings to the city. Unfortunately the codicil to his will had never been witnessed, and ownership of the collection would be a matter of controversy for decades.
Meanwhile many of the Lusitania’s survivors were brought to Dublin. The Irish Times, which had confidently predicted that ‘any steamer of moderate speed which gets fair warning can escape’ a German submarine, had to revise its opinions after the loss of the Lusitania, and it published advice from the Admiralty that British ships should not scruple about sailing under neutral colours to increase their chances of survival.20
The British government had moved quickly to pre-empt a collapse of the maritime insurance business by underwriting 80 per cent of potential shipping losses, but the cost of Irish imports was nevertheless bound to rise. By 1917 premiums would increase by almost 50 per cent for relatively new vessels but had almost doubled for the older ships that were the mainstay of the Irish mercantile marine.21
If higher tea prices were a hardship, the shortage of coal threatened an already ailing economy. When members of the Irish Association of Gas Managers assembled for their annual general meeting in City Hall they denounced British contractors, merchants and ship-owners for ‘availing of their position as monopolists to make huge profits out of the opportunities afforded them by the war.’ The behaviour of the ship-owners was singled out as ‘very unpatriotic.’ They had gone one better than the mine-owners and railways by raising freight prices even faster than the price of coal. While coal was 80 per cent dearer in August 1916 than in August 1914, shipping freight rates were 229 per cent higher. What was particularly galling for the association was that the Price of Coal (Limitation) Act (1915) had not been applied to Ireland, although Irish municipal gas companies were still locked in to price control mechanisms based on pre-war legislation that meant they could not pass on the costs.22
When it convened after the rising, Dublin Corporation, hardly a socialist gathering, passed a motion proposed by Alfie Byrne calling on the British government to place all shipping under state control, ‘so as to limit the monstrous and utterly indefensible prices charged for coal and food, which is being caused by the extraordinary freights charged by companies who are making vast fortunes out of the War.’23 The high prices were also fuelled by an increase of 75 per cent in handling charges for stevedoring companies by the Dublin Port and Docks Board and a 10 per cent increase for shipping lines in 1916. At the same time dredging operations were scaled back, and there was a moratorium on purchasing new equipment.
In the new year, dissatisfaction with the performance of the board led city councillors to call for legislation so that the Port and Docks Board could be elected directly by the ratepayers rather than dominated by business interests. However, the Irish Independent accused the councillors of ‘impertinence’ and said they had ‘made a muddle of every important undertaking … attempted during the last twenty-five years.’ The lack of a response from the government suggested that it concurred.24
When the Ministry of Shipping eventually granted Byrne’s wish in late 1917 by taking over control of the industry, it placed the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company under the direction of the London and North-Western Railway. There was outrage at the following meeting of the Port and Docks board. No-one was louder in his denunciations than Alderman Byrne at ‘the only Irish company they had’ being put under the control of its main British rival. Representatives of the company assured the board that it was all for the best, as the company could no longer afford to pay the insurance premiums needed to cover the loss of vessels, cargoes, passengers or crews. They had no fears about loss of trade, because of the insatiable demand for Irish livestock and other agricultural exports by Britain.25 Regrettably, their optimism proved ill-founded, and it was the beginning of the end for the world’s oldest steamship company.
The primary reason that prices of essential items, such as insurance and fuel, continued to rise was that priority had to be given to war industries and to the armed forces. If coal supplies in 1916 were ‘a trickle of the peace time supply and the city faced the perpetual fear of a coal famine,’ supplies would fall by a further third in 1917 and another quarter in 1918. The reduction in 1918 was due to the withdrawal of coastal steamers for use by the Admiralty. This affected coal shipments to the south of England as well, but only by 17 per cent, because road and rail traffic in England could make up much of the difference.
The Admiralty’s decision reinforced the feeling in Dublin that the city was being discriminated against by the British establishment. A meeting of Dublin Corporation in March 1918 passed a motion protesting against ‘the unfair proportion of reduction applied to Ireland as opposed with S. England.’ The same motion called for the Public Health Committee to be given powers to investigate the hoarding of coal and food by householders and businesses. Unionist and ratepayer elements on the corporation joined with UIL nationalists, Sinn Féin and Labour in ‘demanding that adequate shipping be secured for Dublin to allow the city’s trade to continue’ and ‘proper protection for all Dublin-trading boats.’ When P. T. Daly added that they should ‘take immediate strong action’ if fuel shortages caused the loss of further jobs in the city, Alderman Dinnage, leader of the unionist group, concurred.26
These difficulties still lay ahead when the corporation received another unpleasant reminder of the burdens of war at its meeting on 7 August 1916. A letter from Lieutenant-Colonel A. Welby, secretary of the statutory committee for the implementation of the Naval and Military War Pensions Act, demanded to know why the corporation had not established a scheme for making various contingency payments to the dependants of servicemen for loss of income due to enlistment, death or injury. He pointed out that Belfast and Cork had already established schemes and that Dublin County Council was in the process of doing so. Dublin Corporation was given a month to follow suit.
So far the administration of these emergency payments had been done by voluntary bodies, but these could no longer cope with the volume of claims. The government had taken over the responsibility for making all payments and voted £6 million to put the administration of the scheme on a more uniform and structured basis. The need for a more efficient system was vital in ensuring that would-be recruits were not discouraged by worries that dependants might have to wait weeks for separation allowances to be processed. There was also a need to show that war widows and men returning disabled from the war were not suffering undue hardship.
The statutory committee recommended that, in taking over the duties of the voluntary agencies, the corporation should co-opt some members of the latter to the new body. In fact it was quite precise on membership: besides the Lord Mayor and eight members of the corporation it proposed
two persons (one a lady) nominated by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families’ Association, two persons nominated by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Help Society (one a lady), two persons nominated by Local Representative Relief Committees (one a lady), two persons from the Irish Automobile Club, and four persons from local Labour organisations.27
The inclusion of women nominees from so many bodies illustrated their increasing role in the war effort.
Nowhere were women more needed for war work than in nursing; but the pay for staff nurses set by the military authorities was only £40 to £45 a year, less than that of an unskilled labourer. Many nurses in Dublin earned even less, and in some country areas pay as low as 11s 6d a week was reported. In contrast, a doctor entering military service received an officer’s commission and was paid at least the Royal Army Medical Corps rates and often significantly more, depending on qualifications and experience. Attempts within the profession to set up a nursing register to improve training standards and pay had been disrupted by the war; but such was the demand for nurses that the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Service and Joint War Committee advertised in Ireland in late 1916 for women aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, single or widowed, with at least three years’ training in a large civilian hospital, with the promise of an annual ‘clothing and cloak’ allowance of £8 to £9 to top up their pay.28
The Irish Nurses’ Association and Irish Matrons’ Association, which tended to share the same leadership, lobbied the Lord Lieutenant and the British government strongly for a system of statutory training and registration. They frequently did so in conjunction with their English counterparts, with whom they enjoyed a love-hate relationship during the war. A relatively large proportion of Irish nurses came from a Protestant middle-class background, which probably helped account for a strong affinity with the war effort. There was also a growing realisation that the high losses of potential marriage partners in the war meant that many nurses would have to be economically self-sufficient in the long run, and their pay and conditions should reflect this.29
The Matrons’ Association sought to promote these concerns without overtly challenging the British authorities. Its members held much the same views on many issues. For instance, it condemned the shooting of Edith Cavell by the Germans as a spy,30 and it supported a proposal from Lady Fingall, in her capacity as president of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, to have a woman inspector appointed to monitor separation women and war widows to ensure that they were not cohabiting. These inspections served the dual purpose of reassuring men at the front that their wives were being morally policed and saving the exchequer money by not supporting ‘fallen’ women.
The Irish Matrons’ Association also affiliated to the National Union of Women Workers, the main campaigning body in Britain for working women in a wide variety of occupations during the war. This helped to significantly widen the association’s views on women’s issues. This wider view of the world fuelled the association’s growing resentment at attempts by their British counterparts to dictate policy, including proposals that Irish nurses should go to London to sit qualifying examinations. There was widespread anger when a plan was unveiled for establishing a British College of Nursing in which Ireland would have only six of the thirty-six places on the board. Irish matrons would have none of it. ‘Patriotic Irishwoman’ wrote in the May 1916 issue of the British Journal of Nursing: ‘Nurses are mostly strong loyalists, although I know patriots who are not, and it is because it is so difficult for the English to understand the Irish, and to realise their real feelings and convictions, that there has always been trouble in governing them.’
By the time of the association’s next annual conference in February 1917 it was ready to condemn attempts at subjecting the governance of Irish nurses to any British institution. Instead it claimed the same professional independence for nurses that the medical profession enjoyed, and it strongly resisted proposals that the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses who had played such a vital role in military hospitals should be allowed to qualify on the grounds of wartime experience. ‘Three years in the wards of a recognised training school or schools is essential to entitle the VAD to the certificate of a trained nurse,’ the matrons ruled. When the war ended, the Matrons’ Association secured its objectives with the Nurses Registration (Ireland) Act (1919).31
Members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police were another group that fared poorly in the fast-changing political environment. After the rising they were issued with arms, only to have them withdrawn the next day. The DMP attracted considerable obloquy, from loyalist and republican alike: many of the former saw them as epitomising the ineffectiveness of the Castle in dealing with sedition, while the latter had not forgotten their role in the lock-out three years before.
Now the DMP had its own industrial troubles. Following the rising, members contrasted the relatively generous compensation paid to members of the military who died or were incapacitated fighting against the rebels with their own frugal payments. This provided a catalyst for a campaign to achieve a long-denied pay increase. Members held a series of meetings in the Irish National Foresters’ Hall at 41 Rutland Square. The venue was significant, in that it was a regular meeting place for radical nationalists, including members of the Irish Volunteers and Fianna Éireann.
In an effort to defuse the situation the Commissioner granted them the use of the band room in Kevin Street station. The men availed of the offer, but many also continued to attend meetings outside the stations, using the simple expedient of joining the Ancient Order of Hibernians so as to meet in its hall at 31 Rutland Square. The secretary of the AOH, John Dillon Nugent, raised their case in the House of Commons, along with Alfie Byrne. Representatives of the DMP rank and file and station sergeants also sought help from the Lord Mayor.
They had genuine enough grievances. At the outbreak of war DMP members had received a pay increase of 1s a week—their first since 1884. They received another 3s 6d weekly ‘war bonus’ on 1 July 1916. They now demanded another 12s a week—a 50 per cent increase in basic pay—with full retrospection from 1 September 1914. Like that of white-collar corporation employees, their demand was driven as much by comparative deprivation as by wartime inflation. DMP men were angered by the spectacle of manual workers in unions passing them out in the pay stakes.
Although Dublin Corporation paid a large contribution towards the cost of the DMP, it had no say in how the force was managed or deployed. The demands of the policemen gave nationalists an opportunity to raise this long-standing grievance and to emphasise how little autonomy the Irish local authorities had when it came to such areas as policing compared with Britain.
Given the disturbed state of Ireland, the government had little choice but to give ground. It provided a pay increase of 2s a week to men with less than three years’ service and 3s a week for longer-serving members. However, it gave the same increases to the RIC, and ordered DMP men who had joined the AOH to leave it. Nugent and other champions of Catholic nationalism were outraged, as it was well known that many Protestant members of the force were Freemasons, and the masons were credited with the much higher promotion rate of Protestants.
The government did not seriously dispute the claim, and, rather than argue the point with the Irish Party in the House of Commons, the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Henry Duke, decided to rule that membership of the Freemasons would be forbidden for future recruits to both the DMP and the RIC. The decision was understandable, given that most Protestant policemen who were Freemasons had been in the organisation for many years, while the influx of six hundred Catholic DMP men—about half the force—into the AOH had occurred over the previous few months and that the AOH had strong links to the Irish Party.
However, this did nothing to assuage the wrath of either side. There was ‘a great deal of surprise and indignation amongst the Brethren’ over the withdrawal of their right to recruit from within the ranks of the RIC and DMP. Lord Donoughmore, grand master of the Freemasons in Ireland, wrote to Duke protesting at the decision and pointing out that several members of the Cabinet were Freemasons, including Sir Auckland Geddes, who was a member of a Dublin lodge.32
Even charitable efforts to help the families of RIC and DMP men killed or injured in the rising indicated the deepening divisions in Dublin. Although William Martin Murphy sent a message of support to the launch of a committee to set up a compensation fund, stating ‘it would be a public scandal if the government did not fully compensate the widows and dependants,’ it consisted almost exclusively of members of the unionist community in the city, including several prominent Freemasons, thus further fuelling rumours about the influence of the lodges in the police and elsewhere. The president of the committee was the Earl of Meath, the vice-president was Sir John Arnott, the chairman was Sir Maurice Dockrell, and the treasurer was R. W. Booth, a director of the Bank of Ireland. It also included such luminaries as Lord Powerscourt, Sir William Goulding and the Earl of Donoughmore. Donations were largely from the aristocracy, the business community and employees in the enterprises they controlled.33
The AOH and nationalists generally felt it was another example of the government and the Castle aligning themselves with the hereditary enemy. This view was reinforced when an example was made of the perceived ringleaders of the DMP rank and file. Constable William Hetherton, who had thirteen years’ service, was dismissed, while four other constables were fined or stopped a week’s pay and transferred to outlying stations. All four were subsequently dismissed for gross insubordination when they organised a mock funeral, complete with hearse, and marched behind it to Dalkey via the city centre, Blackrock and Kingstown as they accompanied the first of their number to be transferred to his new posting.34
By then industrial unrest, spurred by the high prices, had become widespread in the city. Coalmen, Glasnevin cemetery workers, gas workers, dockers and others struck for higher wages; but by far the most serious disputes that autumn involved the bakeries and the railways.
The battle in the bakeries was as much about union recognition and a campaign to end night work as about pay. A baker asked in the Irish Independent:
What does ‘recognition’ mean? It simply means the elimination of non-union labour and that the master bakers [employers] of Dublin are required to sit down and arrange working agreements with representatives of their employees—a condition which obtains in every other trade in the United Kingdom. [There is] nothing revolutionary about these demands. Anyone who knows the lot of the operative baker will sympathise with our efforts.
The writer added that the average baker
commences the week’s work, in most cases on Sunday morning when he should be attending to his religious duties, and having left everything ready for the night’s work, he adjourns at 10 or 11 o’clock to return again at 7 or 8 p.m., working at high crisis until 6 a.m. When other workers are going to their places of employment, after a refreshing night’s sleep, they meet the baker wending his weary way home to snatch a few hours rest.
A baker’s working life meant he was ‘completely cut off from all the activities of society.’
Because of the central role bread played in the city’s diet, any strike would cause as great a crisis as the earlier disputes involving coalmen and gravediggers. Once the strike began the Board of Trade quickly intervened and secured agreement within the week. The employers agreed to recognise the Irish Bakers’ National Amalgamated Union and to fill positions through the union’s hall in Abbey Street. The possibility of eliminating night work would be examined, but not until three months after the declaration of peace.35
Even more serious was the railway dispute. The ‘war allowance’ conceded to Irish railway workers in early 1915 failed to defuse discontent, as it amounted to only half the increase conceded in England at the time. The disparity in pay continued to grow and was aggravated by the fact that English workers employed by British companies, such as the London and North-Western Railway in its Dublin port facility, were earning 10s a week more than Irish dockers for identical work. John Redmond urged the British government to provide funds for removing the anomaly, as most of the Irish railway companies could not afford to pay the increases needed to bridge the gap. The president of the Board of Trade, Lord Runciman, responded sharply that ‘as the Irish railways are run for the benefit of the shareholders, the shareholders ought to pay. Any profit made by English railways at present goes to the State.’
In November Irish railway workers gave notice of a strike, although they lacked the backing of their British union, which was bound by the wartime legislation banning strikes. An offer of 2s a week from Sir William Goulding, on behalf of all the railway companies, was rejected: the men were looking for an increase of 6s a week in basic pay or a war bonus of 10s a week. The prospect of a national railway strike in the week before Christmas caused alarm throughout the country. Alfie Byrne joined Redmond in a last-minute appeal for government intervention.
Their wish was granted. The government announced on the eve of the strike that it was putting the Irish railways under the control of the military authorities. The men would receive the increases granted in England, while the companies were to be paid a dividend based on 1913 receipts for the duration of military control. It was probably the most popular decision the British government made in Ireland during the Great War, welcomed unanimously by the railway companies, the unions, the wider business community, consumers and the travelling public.36