The first formal sign that the traditional dominance of the United Irish League in Dublin civic politics was coming to an end was the election of the maverick nationalist councillor Laurence O’Neill, unopposed, as Lord Mayor on 24 January 1917. The establishment nationalist figure, Sir Patrick Shortall, freshly knighted for his services to the war effort, withdrew his nomination. O’Neill had been among those arrested briefly as a suspected rebel after the rising. In his election speech he compared his fate a few months previously as a prisoner ‘marched between a company of soldiers with fixed bayonets’ with his elevation to first citizen of Dublin. It was the template for many more illustrious political careers to come.
While O’Neill attributed his past relative obscurity to the fact that he ‘took a little interest in the uplifting of the poor class of worker in the city,’ he was in fact an auctioneer, property-owner and even slum landlord in a small way. His proposer, Alderman Patrick Corrigan, was an undertaker and a slum landlord in a large way; his seconder, Councillor McAvin, was a bakery-owner. Meanwhile O’Neill’s predecessor, Sir James Gallagher, the saviour of Grafton Street, was lucky to scrape the traditional vote of thanks by 24 votes to 19 after being denounced as the ‘embodiment of British rule in Ireland’ by Alderman Tom Kelly.1
The shifting sentiment had less impact when it came to hard shillings-and-pence issues, as the bitter battle over the widening of North Earl Street showed. The damage caused during the rising provided an opportunity to widen the thoroughfare, but this was fiercely resisted by owners who would lose frontage as a result. Sir Joseph Downes, ‘Lord Barmbrack’, was the largest landlord affected, and he used his position as a councillor to fight the British government for every square inch as fiercely as any Prussian. He argued, with some legitimacy, that the best shopping streets in Dublin were narrow ones, such as Henry Street, Grafton Street and, of course, North Earl Street. He had some initial success lobbying his fellow-members, and threatened to sue for £50,000 compensation if the authorities tried to widen the street by more than three feet, even though he was being offered compensatory space at the rear. Eventually a compulsory purchase order was used and the street was widened by 14 feet, rather than the 30 feet envisaged in the original proposal. Sir Joseph Downes and his neighbour, the vintner Philip Meagher, received £33,150 between them, or half the £66,000 paid out in the first tranche of payments to landlords.2
It is no wonder that small traders, such as Repetto Byrne, could complain at a meeting of the Property Owners’ Association in August that ‘the big dogs have all been very well paid but nobody seems to care about the poorer owners.’ Their anger was all the more understandable given that in many cases they had lost not only their business but their home.
One ‘big dog,’ T. Stafford O’Farrell, went so far as to propose that ratepayers would be better served if the government bypassed small leaseholders and bought the damaged sites outright from the owners at pre-rebellion values. Many of these small leaseholders were under-insured, or not insured at all, as well as homeless, making them totally dependent on compensation from the government and the corporation. Some were paying interest on loans to tide them over, which they wanted factored in to the compensation. However, the British government was reluctant to consider any claims for losses other than those directly linked to military activity. Even looting and fire damage were omitted from the terms of reference.
Issues such as bank interest charges and notional lost business were a slippery slope, as claims from the railway companies showed. The Midland Great Western Railway had suffered damage amounting to less than £700 but claimed £20,000 in lost income. The Dublin and South-Eastern Railway was by far the hardest hit, as the rebels had occupied all three of its termini: Wexford, Harcourt Street and Westland Row. It suffered damage amounting to £2,000 as a consequence, particularly through the occupation and desultory fighting around Westland Row, which was out of action from 24 April until 3 May. The company also claimed £14,000 in lost income. The Great Southern and Western Railway suffered relatively little damage directly attributable to the rising but claimed £21,000 in lost income.3
It was not until December 1917 that the claims were settled. The MGWR received £10,525, the GSWR £8,543 and the DSER £11,937.4 By then the British government had taken over control of Ireland’s railway network. Ironically, this move, which was to pre-empt the threatened strike in December 1916, had been welcomed by the Irish stock market, which feared that the companies would be sunk by inadequate compensation for the losses incurred during the rising.5
The churches, which were among the largest landowners in the city, came out of the rising almost unscathed. The only religious building destroyed was the Presbyterian church in Lower Abbey Street. The General Assembly received £1,150 in compensation and a rebuilding grant of £8,700, plus £2,000 for other property damaged in the city.6
One enterprise that did exceptionally well out of the compensation scheme was the Freeman’s Journal, mouthpiece of the Irish Party. It claimed £74,000, although it was insured for only £32,000. In contrast to its treatment of other claimants, the Defence of the Realm Property Losses Committee made an award of £60,000. The rival Irish Independent complained that much of the stock on which the Freeman’s Journal received compensation, including Linotype machines, vans and horses, was obsolete or had not been lost at all. In fact the paper’s premises were badly damaged, and all the Linotype machines destroyed. Whether it was obsolete or not, such equipment was extremely expensive to replace. The paper’s ledgers were also destroyed. By June 1917 a modest £800 in funds before the rising had been transformed into a £20,000 overdraft.
Despite the generosity of the exchequer, the Freeman’s Journal would never again pose a serious threat to the Murphy empire. It passed under new ownership in 1919 and adopted a militant nationalist stance more in keeping with public opinion. Eventually the title was acquired by the Independent group, and it ceased publication in 1924.7
The families of civilians killed in the fighting did not fare nearly so well as big business. There were only 450 claims, as opposed to more than 820 from property-owners. There were a little more than sixty awards, and the Dublin Victims Committee was initially restricted to considering cases where the main breadwinner in a household, usually the father, had been killed or seriously injured.
The rates of payment were based on the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906), which covered death and injury at work. Like the act, the scheme applied to those earning no more than £250 a year. There were a handful of cases where claims were based on earnings over this amount, but almost all failed. The largest claim was for £5,216 13s 4d, made by Mrs John Murphy of Delgany, who claimed that her husband earned £360 a year. Unfortunately, all his financial records perished with him in the fire that consumed his offices in the city centre. The committee rejected his widow’s claim in the absence of proof of earnings.8
The committee did try to apply some flexibility and compassion, but it was confounded by the Irish Treasury and its Remembrancer, Maurice Headlam. He in turn was backed by the new Assistant Under-Secretary, John Taylor.9 Both men acted as if public funds were their own, except when pressing their own claims. Taylor, in particular, felt that his services were grossly undervalued.10
The secretary of the committee, Hugh Love, did succeed in persuading the Treasury to widen its terms of reference so that some payment might be made to parents for the loss of a child, or to a husband for the loss of a wife.
The loss of a wife represents a considerable pecuniary loss, in view of the fact that the wife acted as an unpaid housekeeper; and where there are young children this loss is increased seeing that some other guardian for them must be provided.
Love’s argument prevailed more in principle than in practice. For instance, in four cases where the committee awarded £25 to parents for the death of children aged between three and fourteen the Treasury reduced the amount involved to £10. In four cases where awards of £50 were made to husbands who had lost a wife who was not a breadwinner the Treasury similarly reduced the awards to £10 each. However, it made no reductions in five other cases where parents were awarded £50 each for the loss of children ‘who were earning.’
In truth, the sheer variety and complexity of cases would have tried the most compassionate of committees. A case in point is that of Kate Golding, a widow in Longford Street, who claimed first for herself and three children. When visited by the DMP she produced two children and said the third was at the shops. When questioned about the fact that the children appeared to be too old to be hers, she said they were from her late husband’s first marriage. Detective-Officer Thomas Mannion concluded that Mrs Golding was unreliable, and ‘fond of drink.’ Having established that there were no children from the dead man’s first marriage, and that the youngest child, Kate Golding Junior, was not the natural daughter of Mrs Golding or her late husband, the detective reported:
She admitted that … it was an adopted child. She then said, ‘I was living at 132 Townsend Street in April 1913, and saw the child with a girl, whom I do not know and never saw since. The baby was then nine or ten days old, and the girl said that she would drown it. She slept on my landing outside my door for two nights with the baby. I took the baby from her and brought it to City Quay Roman Catholic Church and had it baptised by Fr Gaynor there. He charged me one shilling and said that I would have a great reward for keeping it. The child was christened Kate Golding, my own name. I kept it since. That happened on April 4th, 1914.’
However, the detective could find no reference to a Kate Golding in the baptismal record, and when he enquired of Father Gaynor the priest had no recollection of the incident. The detective concluded that the woman was claiming for more children in the hope of a bigger award, unaware that the amount would be based on her husband’s earnings rather than on the number of dependants he left.
In fact the situation was even more complex, and it was not until Detective-Officer Mannion reported again on 13 June 1917 that the real mother of Kate Golding Junior was revealed. She was a Kate Clinton, whose husband had been imprisoned for neglect. Mrs Clinton took up with Patrick O’Neill, a waiter in the Friendly Brothers’ Club, St Stephen’s Green, who was the father of the child. He was now serving in France. On 26 October 1917 the Treasury concluded:
If she [Mrs Golding] had declared truthfully that there were no children by either marriage she would have been entitled to the full amount of the award instead of having to take only a share if there were children. Her false declaration has consequently reacted on herself by the diminution, as proposed of her share of the award from £234 to £94 and in our opinion this is a sufficient punishment for her conduct in the matter. As regards the child of whom a soldier serving in France is the reputed father and a Mrs. Clinton the mother, it was adopted as stated when ten days old by Mrs. Golding with the knowledge and consent of the deceased and continues to live with her. The Chief Secretary who has the papers before him agreed to the proposal that the balance of the award should be lodged in Court for the benefit of the child.11
Another hard case was that of Margaret Naylor of 101 Great Brunswick Street, who was killed almost at the same time as her husband, John, a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who died in the Battle of Loos between 27 and 29 April. They left three children. If either parent had survived they would have received an allowance for the loss of the other. In the event, Mrs Naylor’s sister was awarded 19s a week for the children and a lump sum of £10 ‘in full discharge’ of compensation. A funeral plot at Blackhorse Lane (now Blackhorse Avenue) military cemetery was also provided for the dead woman.
Nor could other families who provided volunteers for the British war effort expect better treatment. A Mrs Dorgan was denied assistance after her husband was killed because she had four sons, of whom two were unmarried. All four were in the British army. It was not until May 1917 that the Treasury finally agreed to sanction the award of the £150 she was entitled to on the grounds of her husband’s earnings, after the committee wrote to ‘respectfully suggest that the fact that the deceased had four sons at the front would be reason for generous treatment by Their Lordships.’
Even the most tragic circumstances failed to elicit generosity. The Dublin Victims Committee awarded £25 to Christina Caffrey of 27B Corporation Place (commonly called Corporation Buildings) for the loss of her two-year-old son, only to be overruled by the Treasury. Love asked the Treasury to reconsider, given
the very sad nature of the case … the child having been shot in its mother’s arms while the mother was endeavouring to recall one of her other children, which had wandered into the street, on the second day of the Rebellion.
The Treasury finally allowed £5 in compensation, plus the funeral expenses, provided the latter did not exceed another £5. But the second £5 was never released, as Detective-Sergeant John Byrne of Store Street station reported that the family had not incurred any funeral expenses.
In the absence of more adequate social services, the DMP provided the eyes and ears of the Treasury, investigating the details of each case. Most investigations were completed in 1917, but some lasted into 1918. The detective responsible often advised on the ability of individual claimants to handle awards. Sergeant Cummins reported that Bridget O’Grady of 29 Thomas Court was totally incapacitated by a bullet wound to the thigh and faced the workhouse without assistance. She received an award of £150; but he cautioned against a lump sum. She was ‘a very respectable woman but she is unable to leave her room in the tenement where she resides, which is not in a very respectable locality and … the amount awarded to her could not, with safety, be given to her.’ He added that the local clergy were of the same opinion. Two local priests at Meath Street church were willing to act as trustees.
Local Catholic clergy were the main source of trustees when the recipient of an award was considered unfit to handle their own finances or when it was feared they might fall prey to unscrupulous relatives or neighbours. But on occasion local public representatives, including the ubiquitous Alfie Byrne, also served.
Many cases required repeated medical examination, and, given the choice between sanctioning a lump sum and extending ‘hurt pay’ at either the full rate or the ‘materially impaired’ rate, the Treasury would usually opt for the extension.
Much responsibility fell on Sir Thomas Myles, the government’s medical referee. Like Love, he was frequently frustrated at the imperviousness of the Treasury to the situation of the victims. One such case was that of 24-year-old Ann Lovett of 20 Delahunt Buildings, off Lower Mount Street, who had been shot in the stomach. She not alone survived but became pregnant, though injuries left her suffering from numbness in her right leg and unfit to resume work. After she had been kept on weekly payments of between 4s 6d and 3s 4d for more than a year Myles urged the committee to give especially sympathetic consideration to the young woman.
She has a very grave wound; she is weak and anaemic and looks as if she was insufficiently fed; she is about to become a mother and this together with her injuries, in my opinion, quite incapacitates her from heavy and laborious work. I gathered from her conversation that she has had a great deal of domestic trouble lately, her mother died of puerperal fever in June 1916 and she … has been trying to look after her father’s six children; to add to her trouble her father has been out of work for some time past. She is already the mother of one child and has a husband to look after. You can readily understand that the wretched girl has hardly been given the most favourable circumstances for such convalescence.
The committee was not unsympathetic, but the Treasury’s response was characteristically minimalist: it approved the extension of the 3s 4d ‘materially impaired’ payment for another three months.
Even for those who did receive awards the amounts were often too little to preserve victims from the spectre of poverty. Bertha Mackenzie and her two children, aged thirteen and eleven, enjoyed a life of comfort and security until her husband, Robert, was shot dead in his grocery shop at 3 Cavendish Row during the rising. An award of £50 a year or a lump sum of £300 was recommended by the Victims Committee. However, the Treasury expressed concern that she had inadequate records to support her claim, and those she had made no provision for depreciation or bad debts. C. Friery of the English and Scottish Law Life Assurance Association protested over the inadequacy of the award and reminded the committee that he had produced a certificate from Cooper and Kenny, chartered accountants, showing that Robert Mackenzie had made a net profit of £77 7s 1d in the three months before his death. He had also examined Mrs Mackenzie before the committee about the business and satisfied it that she
took very little part therein. Since deceased’s death the widow has been compelled to give up a private house in which she and the children resided during deceased’s life time and live in rooms. She is also endeavouring to carry on the business as this is her only livelihood, but I regret to say that the trade is in decline and the profits fast diminishing.
He enclosed accounts from Cooper and Kenny showing a profit of only £86 16s 6d for the six months to 31 March 1917.
It will be apparent to you therefore that there has been a considerable falling off in trade and if the present decline continues it seems only a matter of a few months when this poor woman will be out of trade altogether. My Client’s health has been impaired, and she has been advised that unless an improvement in her health sets in at once she must give up business entirely.
The Treasury relented somewhat and allowed the £300 award; but the widow was to receive only £120, with the balance of £180 to be held by the Recorder’s Court for the children. A yearly allowance was out of the question. Even questions in the House of Commons had no effect. The Chief Secretary, Henry Duke, sympathised with Mrs Mackenzie but told MPs that no more money was payable.12
A similar case was that of Mrs Harris Abrahams, who claimed £2,500 against her lost husband’s earnings of £290 a year. She received £100; another £200 was lodged with the Recorder’s Court for five of the couple’s eight children. Her eldest, Isaac, had his own tailoring business in Lower Ormond Quay, where her two oldest daughters worked for 18s and 15s a week, respectively. All three were excluded from any compensation.
William Holmes, who owned a tea room in Railway Street and suffered ‘drop foot’ as a result of a bullet traversing his leg, had a claim for £500 reduced to £150 by the committee and then to £17 5s by the Irish Treasury, even though Detective-Officer John Byrne confirmed that the business was making only £1 a week and Holmes’s opportunities for other work had ended because of his injury. He had a couple of slum properties nearby, but these had been closed as unfit for human habitation some time before. The comment that his brother ‘occasionally assists the family with small amounts’ may have sealed his fate.
Sometimes a man was better off having a good employer than being in business for himself. Patrick Behan of Irishtown claimed £100 against lost earnings of £1 a week. He received an award of only £6 10s for a bullet wound to his left arm and abdomen but in fact was better off than normally because he received ‘hurt pay’ of 10s a week, half pay of another 10s from his employer, and national health insurance benefit of a further 10s while incapacitated.
On the other hand, an employer’s kindness could rebound, as it did on Catherine Hegarty. She was a domestic servant and had been shot during the Northumberland Road fight. Her employer, Frances Neweth, allowed her to return to work in 1917, and when the committee discovered this it immediately stopped her ‘hurt pay’ and held an investigation into an overpayment of £3 10s 4d. Mrs Neweth protested that Miss Hegarty could carry out only limited duties, assisted by her other servant and herself. ‘In my opinion,’ she wrote to the committee, ‘she is not yet capable, in the open market, of earning the same rate of wages she received before her injury.’ This view was confirmed by Sir Thomas Myles, who confirmed that ‘Miss Hegarty cannot do any hard work of any kind and … it is possible the condition may continue for a very long period.’ The allowance was not renewed, but it is not clear whether the overpayment was ever reclaimed.
One of the few successful appeals against awards was made by Alderman David Quaid, acting as solicitor for one of his constituents, two-year-old Mary Ann Reilly from Greek Street. She had been shot in the right leg; the wound became gangrenous, and the leg had to be amputated above the knee. It was ‘a very serious and permanent mutilation,’ Quaid wrote to the committee. The award of £100 offered was ‘entirely inadequate for the loss of a leg, practically limiting the earning power of this girl during her life and even preventing her from having marriage chances.’ He proposed the Workmen’s Compensation Act rate as more appropriate, and he accepted an improved offer of £150 on her behalf. This was the highest payment for an infant and, as in other cases, the award included legal costs.
Amounts paid ranged from £300 to £5. All but five of the claimants had an address in fairly close vicinity to the fighting. Two of the exceptions were a woman who lived in Harold’s Cross and a widow in Kingstown. The woman in Harold’s Cross had lost a son; the Kingstown widow, who had two children, was partially dependent on her dead brother.
There were three claims from dependants of men living in Cos. Sligo, Limerick and Roscommon. The Sligo case involved a teacher passing through Dublin on his way to a conference in Cork who, according to his brother, was ‘shot like a dog’ in the street and then robbed of all his possessions. The other men were on bank holiday outings.
Of the remaining sixty successful claimants, thirty-six lived in the north inner city and twenty-three in the south inner city. One woman was committed to the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, which means she had probably lived in the catchment area of the North Dublin Union. Twenty-six of the north city claimants lived between the Five Lamps (Amiens Street) and Capel Street and seventeen in tenements in streets close to Sackville Street, such as Corporation Street, Gardiner Street and Rutland Street. In contrast, only five came from the North King Street area, where the allegations of soldiers shooting civilians had been most prevalent.
The addresses on the south side of the Liffey were more dispersed, again reflecting the spread of the fighting. There was one successful claim from Ringsend, three from the Lower Mount Street area and a scattering from the vicinity of Jacob’s factory. The use of the Workmen’s Compensation Act inevitably meant that payments were based on lost earnings, with scant regard for the size or circumstances of families. Elizabeth Watson of 55 Middle Abbey Street had no dependants but received £273, while Anne O’Grady of 28 East Arran Street, who had six children, received £265.
There were ninety-nine children altogether among the families covered by awards, including the child of the woman committed to the Richmond Asylum. Eleven claimants were awarded the maximum amount of £300, twenty-eight received between £200 and £293 and the remainder received between £199 and £5.13
Dependants of participants in the rising fared much better. The Veteran Fenian Tom Clarke had given his wife £3,000 to relieve distress among Volunteers and their dependants. By May there were two bodies collecting funds for the prisoners and their families, the one established by Kathleen Clarke and another one closer to the Irish Party. In August they amalgamated to form the Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund, which embraced the Irish Relief Committee in America. More donations flowed in from sympathisers in Britain and Australia. As a result, the fund was able not alone to make small weekly payments to the dependants of prisoners but to invest £20,000 in Dublin Corporation loans in September 1916 and to allocate £1,500 to each widow. This could be taken as a lump sum or in a weekly stipend based on the interest. Unlike payments by the government, no account was taken of the income of the lost breadwinner, but neither was any account taken of the number of dependants: all families were treated equally. In some instances the families were substantially better off than ever before, such as James Connolly’s widow, Lillie, and their six surviving children. Instead of having to subsist on her husband’s pay of £2 a week as a union official, supplemented by the earnings of her two working daughters, Nora and Ina, Lillie Connolly took the lump sum of £1,500, as well as additional donations worth £325.
Near the other end of the income scale was Éamonn Ceannt, who had earned £220 a year as a senior clerk in the corporation. His widow, Áine, took the £1,500 lump sum together with additional donations worth £300 and used it to set up a market garden for the upkeep of herself and her ten-year-old son.14 The second in command of the Citizen Army, Michael Mallin, left a wife and five children; his widow, Úna, received £1 7s a week, later increased to £2 10s, plus £100 from American funds. She opted to have her £1,500 invested for her children’s education.
The Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund decided to set up an education subcommittee to look after the education of all the orphans from Easter Week. The subcommittee, fourteen strong, included no less than four Catholic priests, including Father Aloysius, who heard the last confession of Connolly and other executed leaders. Most of the thirty-nine boys were sent to St Enda’s, the school founded by Pearse, and the twenty-eight girls to various boarding schools. Lillie Connolly dissented, asking for the money to be paid to her directly for the education of her son, Roddy.
The commitment to equality of treatment of the widows and orphans of 1916 was commendable, but it was also an inadvertent early indicator that those loyal to the Republic and the values of Irish Ireland could expect preferential treatment under the new political dispensation. The independent Irish state would treat some of its children more equally than others.15
Casualties of the rising were not restricted to those who lost their lives, property or homes as a result of the fighting. The largest group of non-combatants adversely affected were ordinary workers, such as employees of the Great Southern and Western Railway. The company had traditionally adopted a very hostile attitude towards trade unions and anything that smacked of radical politics. It had seen off protracted strikes in 1902 and 1911, so successfully that the railways operated normally during the 1913 Lock-out.16 Nevertheless, as one of the largest employers in Ireland, with nine thousand workers, it contained a microcosm of the national work force.
Fatal casualties in 1916 included the Limerick district auditor, William Moore, shot on an Easter bank holiday day trip to Dublin, and a junior clerk, Seán Heuston, who was executed by order of a court-martial for his role in defending the Mendicity Institute a couple of hundred yards away. Employees who scabbed in the 1911 strike and joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1914 were among those killed or wounded in the fighting around the Mendicity Institute and the South Dublin Union.17
The living proved more of a problem than the dead. Any GSWR employees arrested during the rising were subjected to intense scrutiny and not readmitted to employment on release unless they could prove themselves free from any taint of suspicion. On 6 October 1916 the company received a petition from thirty employees seeking reinstatement after being released without charge. Their plea was supported by Richard Bowden, administrator of the presbytery in Marlborough Street, who wrote to the company urging their reinstatement ‘having regard to the difficulty of obtaining employment in the city at the present time.’ He testified that ‘I know some of these employees personally as being very decent, hard working, sober and good living men.’ In April 1922 the Provisional Government of the new Irish Free State was still seeking reinstatement for seventeen of them.18
Edward Whelan, a senior clerk in the GSWR Solicitor’s Office, with twenty-two years’ service, had great difficulty being reinstated. He explained his absence from work between the Tuesday and Thursday of Easter Week by saying he was trapped by the fighting in his elderly father’s home in Dorset Street. When military control of the area allowed him to return to work he did so immediately, only to be arrested at Kingsbridge station for being in possession of a circular for the Sinn Féin Loan Fund. He was released from Kilmainham Jail after a few days, and the military authorities confirmed that there was ‘nothing known against him.’ He still had to sign a declaration stating that he had no involvement in the rising or association with the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army or Sinn Féin before being allowed to return to work.
Sixteen-year-old Thomas Kavanagh was less fortunate. In 1920 his father, Patrick, who had fifty years’ service with the GSWR, was still seeking his reinstatement. In a letter to the chief engineer, E. A. Watson, he wrote:
I beg to address you on behalf of the boy. My son entered the Works in May 1914, being attached to the Fitting and Machine Shop. He was then 14 years of age and then in April 1916, when the Rebellion occurred, he was unfortunately and unconsciously lured into it as a result of which he had to forfeit his job at your works. He was at the time arrested by the Military but owing to his age was released.
Now you will understand what foolish things youths of his age will do, especially when they are led by older and irresponsible persons and only years show them the follies of youth. The boy is now 19 years old with about 40 years more sense than he had when he was 14. Under the circumstances and seeing the boy’s foolishness was forgiven by the Military Authorities, I honestly appeal to you to place the matter before the boards and ask the directors to consider the case and give the boy a chance to start afresh.
But even the fact that the boy had lost his mother a year after he was born and was now living with his sister beside the Inchicore works failed to move the directors. Those who were deemed absent from work through no fault of their own, such as signalling staff and the women who cleaned the head office, were refused payment for lost time during the rebellion.
In contrast, the Midland Great Western Railway provided half-pay for all its employees, and the Dublin and South-Eastern Railway provided full pay and even some bonuses, ranging from 10s to £2 5s, to employees who ‘went about their work in a whole hearted and loyal way.’ P. Franklin, a chargehand smith, and J. Barnwell, a chargehand wagonmaker, received 10s each as a reward for retrieving stolen property from ‘a number of boys’ on the line near Lansdowne Road station and securing the stores although ‘Sinn Feiners’ were occupying the premises at the time. Ganger Kearney received an award after being twice arrested by rebels in Enniscorthy. He managed to make his way back to Dublin with ‘very useful information … on the state of the lines.’ The same man was struck with a rifle by a rebel in Harcourt Street station for obstructing their activities.
While seventeen employees qualified for a reward, ninety-six absented themselves for anything from one to four days, of whom only five were considered to have acceptable excuses. It is not clear what happened to the remainder.
Passengers of the Dublin and South-Eastern Railway also fared poorly. Requests for refunds on tickets were rejected, on the grounds that the military authorities had ordered the cessation of traffic and, in some cases, had removed track. This did not prevent the company seeking compensation for lost receipts.19
It was against this background of the little war in Dublin compounding the hardship caused by the Great War in Europe that two parliamentary by-elections took place early in 1917. One was in North Roscommon, caused by the death of the sitting home-rule MP, the former Fenian J. J. O’Kelly. The other was for the vacancy in the University of Dublin caused by the elevation of the junior member, Sir James Campbell, to the bench as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Like the mayoralty, both reflected the realignments taking place in Irish politics.
The University of Dublin contest was between the eminent surgeon Sir Robert Woods and Arthur Warren Samuels KC, a distinguished barrister who had previously run unsuccessfully against Campbell. The senior member for the university was another lawyer, Sir Edward Carson, and the challenge from Woods had as much to do with opposition to the near-monopoly the legal profession held on the seats as with the intricacies of southern unionist politics. Since the Act of Union only two MPs for the university had not been lawyers.20
The refusal of Woods to espouse any party allegiance alarmed many of the electorate. After he won the seat on a show of hands on 3 February and was carried in triumph by undergraduates up and down Grafton Street, Samuels demanded a full vote by all eligible graduates. He denounced the ‘bathos’ of an election between a doctor and a lawyer being made the primary issue when the electorate was ‘overwhelmingly’ composed of southern unionists. It was with some relief that the Irish Times subsequently reported the barrister’s comfortable election by 1,481 votes to 679 and that Samuels would take his place in Parliament alongside ‘our greatest Irishman, Sir Edward Carson.’21 Samuels would go on to serve as Irish Attorney-General until the general election in 1918.
The North Roscommon election understandably elicited a lot more interest in the city than the contest in the university. The first major political test of public opinion since the rising was the nomination of George Noble Plunkett,22 father of the 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett, by a radical nationalist coalition conveniently dubbed ‘Sinn Féin’. The fact that Plunkett had always been a Whig in politics served to reassure conservative nationalists, while the income he derived from his slum properties in Dublin mattered not a jot.
Dublin’s premier Catholic capitalist, William Martin Murphy, had lost all sympathy for what he regarded as Redmond’s capitulationist policy on home rule and partition. From now on the Irish Independent and its sister publications had free rein to hound the Irish Party establishment in the same way that it had once hounded Larkin and Connolly. When the Roscommon result came in, the Independent crowed that the Irish Party machine was ‘routed hopelessly.’ Plunkett secured 3,022 votes to 1,708 for the UIL candidate, T. J. Devine, and 687 for Jasper Tully, a former Irish Party MP who ran as an independent nationalist.
A certain piquancy was added to the contest by the candidature of Count Plunkett, just home from his post-rebellion banishment, hot on the heels of his expulsion by the Royal Dublin Society, and with the memory of the execution of one of his sons and the imprisonment of two others for association with the rebellion still fresh in the public mind.23
The Irish Catholic, like the Independent a mouthpiece for Murphy, said the result ‘sounded the death knell’ for UIL constituency machines, although it was sceptical about Plunkett’s ‘erratic politics.’ In a reference to his previous career as director of the National Museum it said ‘his capacity for practical usefulness was greater in the Museum than it will ever be in Parliament.’ The Irish Times dismissed Plunkett as
a person of no importance, but the Sinn Feiners found in his family’s association with the late rebellion an occasion to advertise their disloyalty, and the constitutional Nationalists voted for him—would have voted for anybody—in order to advertise their discontent with the official party.
The Times succinctly identified the Irish Party’s twin mistakes as acquiescing in the partition of Ireland and agreeing to become ‘a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the people who gloried and still glory in the rebellion.’ The two sins were equally unforgivable to southern unionists, for whom partition was as abhorrent as it was for nationalists.
Dublin Corporation was in full session when the Roscommon result was announced. Members greeted it with ‘wild excitement and much cheering and waving of hats by councillors and the crowd in the gallery.’ Alderman J. J. Kelly pinned a celebratory note on the curtains over the Lord Mayor’s chair, and Alderman Corrigan, another former stalwart of the United Irish League, proposed the adjournment of the council. The incoming Lord Mayor, Alderman O’Neill, seconded the motion. It was defeated by 39 votes to 24, but only by unionists voting en bloc with the main UIL faction.24
The reaction of the corporation members was mirrored on the streets. When Plunkett’s train stopped at Mullingar on its way to Dublin local councillors and other notables presented him with an address that declared: ‘By opposing your candidature in this election your opponents have sounded the doom of their political influence in Ireland.’ Their ‘puerile policy of inaction, jobbery and sycophancy’ had been ‘wiped out in a storm of popular indignation.’
In Dublin large crowds awaited the train, which did not complete its triumphal progress into Broadstone station until 10 p.m. Like Sir Robert Woods a few days earlier, Plunkett was carried shoulder-high to a waiting motor car and escorted by crowds through the main thoroughfares to his residence in Fitzwilliam Square. His escort sang nationalist anthems, such as ‘The West’s Awake’, ‘God Save Ireland’ and ‘The Soldier’s Song’.
The next day the Irish Times correspondent, who had been traversing the snows of North Roscommon on the campaign trail, gave a new view on Plunkett’s victory. He attributed it to the activities of ‘the Rev. Michael O’Flanagan, the Roman Catholic curate of Crossna … For twelve days and nights he was up and down the constituency, going like a whirlwind.’ The burden of Father O’Flanagan’s election speeches was that
conscription would have been applied to Ireland last year were it not for the rebellion … As Father O’Flanagan put it in all his speeches, it was better and easier for the young men to carry their fathers on their backs to the polls to vote for Plunkett than to serve as conscripts in the trenches of Flanders. This appeal went straight home to the parental instincts of the voters with sons of military age.25
In Dublin the war itself found myriad ways of exacerbating divisions between local unionists and the new breed of nationalist. Four days after the Roscommon by-election a war loan was launched at a public meeting in the city. The new president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, R. W. Booth, urged the banks and life assurance companies to encourage clients to purchase the new bonds, and Sir Maurice Dockrell told the audience that ‘if the Empire went down, Ireland would go down with it.’26
The Central Advisory Committee of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers’ Association passed a resolution the same day thanking the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club
for so kindly during the past year granting the use of their office and the services of their secretary … and bearing the administrative expenses of the branch, thus enabling the grants … to be spent on … food and tobacco for the men.
There was no longer even a semblance of nationalist involvement in the Central Advisory Committee: the membership, from Lady Arnott down, was staunchly unionist.27
Black bread or ‘war bread’ was introduced at the beginning of the year,28 and potatoes were becoming a luxury by the time of the by-elections. Although the government had introduced some food controls in late 1916, including fixed prices, there was virtually no enforcement of the regulations. Neither the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, Dublin Corporation nor the DMP accepted responsibility.
The official price of potatoes was set at £9 a ton, but the retail price in the shops was between £1s 8d and £1s 10d a pound, equivalent to between £13 16s 8d and £14 a ton. Even retailers buying in bulk had to pay farmers at least £10 a ton, plus freight and delivery. A ban on potato exports introduced in early 1917 failed to bring prices down. Potato factors in Dublin accused farmers of holding back up to half the crop, and growers could quite legally sell their produce in areas outside Dublin that were not covered by the prices orders, or export them. The vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, T. W. Russell, told the Irish Independent that if ‘British merchants and Ulster exporters had their way … there would not be a potato left in the country.’29
Worse was to follow. The budget for school meals in Dublin ran out at the end of February, and the new rate would not be struck until the end of March. The id rate provided £4,150 a year for school dinners in Dublin, but the cost of providing meals for five days a week throughout the year had risen to £12,000, starkly illustrating the shortfall in nutrition for thousands of children in the poorer districts. Unfortunately the corporation could not afford such largesse, nor could private charity. In Britain a grant in aid from the exchequer could make up the difference for local authorities, but the Local Government Board in Ireland lacked such resources. For the same reason appeals to set up communal kitchens similar to those operating in deprived areas of London fell at first on deaf ears. This sort of discrimination was one of the few things that united loyalist and nationalist in Dublin, particularly women activists in the community.30
Later in March a probation officer, Miss Gargan, told the Irish Independent that starvation was widespread among the poorer classes because of food prices. School meals had temporarily stopped, and even ‘Army separation allowances, with the utmost economy, are barely sufficient to provide a family with food—and nothing can be allowed for clothing.’ She criticised mothers ‘who squandered the allowance on drink,’ and she advocated drastic steps ‘to stop the rush of women from the post offices to the public houses. I have no hesitation in saying that such women are starving their children.’
Of the 1,500 families on the books of the Women’s National Health Association she estimated that 500 of the main breadwinners earned between 15s and 25s a week and most of the rest were dependent on casual work, or were not fit for work. She gave an example from the previous week of a family of eight where the father gave 22s of his weekly pay of 24s to the mother. She spent 16s on twenty-eight loaves of bread, a half pound of tea, a pound of sugar and a pound of margarine. The rent was 3s, and the remaining 2s 4d went on fuel, light and milk. ‘Absolutely no provision could be made for meat or cheese and the wage earner had to work hard on his share of the poor quality of food.’
A WNHA doctor said that almost all the fifty-nine children treated in February suffered from malnutrition, and even families with a regular wage coming in were living on dry bread and tea, ‘often very black tea.’ A clinic had been opened recently to ensure that mothers ate adequately, because ‘it was found utterly hopeless to do anything for the children while the mothers were starving.’ By making the women eat on the premises it was possible to make sure they would not take the food home to give their children: but only about twenty meals a day could be provided.
The migration of men to jobs in England was aggravating the situation. The WNHA found that the average remittance was only 10s a week and many men left in Dublin were too ill or unfit for work. Miss Gargan said that rebuilding the city centre should be a priority to get the able-bodied back to work, and light employment schemes suitable for ‘weak workers’ should be developed.31
So serious was the potato shortage that in early April the military authorities took the unusual step of opening some of their own stores and setting up a market at Amiens Street station, where retailers were offered produce at the current official price of £11 a ton. Small shopkeepers and community groups were allowed to pool their resources to purchase produce if they could not afford to pay for large orders individually.32 The measure had at least the temporary effect of forcing large farmers to release stock ahead of the more plentiful supplies that would be available in the summer.