It was hardly surprising, given the widespread food shortages, that the allotment movement came into its own in Dublin during 1917. It was already a massive success in British cities and in Belfast.
The Vacant Land Cultivation Society had been established in Dublin in 1909 by Sarah Harrison, an artist by profession, a sister of Charles Stewart Parnell’s secretary, Henry Harrison, and the first woman to be elected to Dublin Corporation, as an independent (Parnellite) nationalist. The society made little progress until 1915, when food shortages and price increases were posing problems for the city’s lower middle class as well as for the poor. In response to the crisis the corporation gave Harrison ten acres at Fairbrother’s Fields, between Donore Avenue and Cork Street, which had been earmarked for housing before the war. It acquired other fields and derelict sites in or near the city for allotments.1 By the end of the year the society had 31 acres under cultivation and by the end of 1917 more than 60 acres.
The Rathmines Technical College and the School of Gardening for Women in Upper Kimmage provided expert advice to smallholders, and the first exhibition of produce at the Leo Hall, Inchicore, in September 1916 was graced by ‘massive cabbages’ from allotments on the Pigeon House Road, ‘burly potatoes’ from Broadstone and ‘huge onions’ from Inchicore. Neither politics nor religion intruded on the society’s activities. Harrison served as secretary; other members included the distinguished Trinity College botanist Sir Frederick Moore, the Presbyterian minister for the north inner city, Rev. Dr Denham Osborne, and the Rev J. McDonnell SJ, who served as president.2
The benefits of the scheme were evident from the experience of allotment-holders elsewhere. In Belfast eight hundred plots had been established by the end of 1915, with produce worth about £10,000 being grown to feed local people, and the lower prices of staple vegetables in Belfast were attributed in part to the ‘homegrown’ competition faced by farmers. Dublin’s smallholders soon proved they could be every bit as productive as their northern counterparts, although removing rubbish, levelling the ground and clearing it of weeds and slugs were problems at first. A more persistent threat was sparrows, which Sir Frederick Moore described as ‘the most destructive bird that could possibly be.’
An eighth of an acre was found to be the optimum size for a plot cultivated by a man in his spare time. Women and children joined in, especially when it came to clearing sites of cinders, refuse and old brickwork. Sites varied in price from 6s to 16s 8d, with a proportion set aside for casual labourers and the unemployed to work free of charge.
Sites were taken by a wide spectrum of people, including labourers in full-time employment, skilled workers, teachers, clerks, policemen and a large contingent of Guinness employees. The allotment-holders formed their own committees to allocate sites, organise work, collect rents and purchase seed. Subletting was prohibited; and anyone who failed to work their plot might forfeit it. They erected fences, sometimes with barbed wire, to prevent thefts, such as a dawn raid on a hundred freshly dibbled cabbages from a railway worker’s plot in the port in early 1917.
The allotments provided not alone badly needed food supplies and an education in horticulture but a useful exercise in democracy that broadened people’s sense of solidarity, their social skills and their horizons. This led eventually to the formation of the Irish Plotholders’ Union, which claimed to represent twenty-four associations in Dublin and Kingstown. In an echo of Land League days, their demands included fair rents and fixity of tenure.3
As in Belfast, a typical plot could produce well over £10 worth of food a year. The Irish Times gave the example of a man with a family of eight who kept £2 10s worth of crops to help feed them and sold the balance for £9 11s 6d. Rent and other expenses amounted to £2 5s.4
By October 1916 the Vacant Land Cultivation Society’s plots had generated £2,500 worth of produce, and the demand for plots far exceeded supply. Harrison reported ‘a pathetic eagerness on the part of men, and women too, to secure plots, and a long list of applicants remains yet unsatisfied.’ By then pressure was mounting on the corporation to become more actively involved, and hungry eyes turned on the 1,760 acres of the Phoenix Park, which many citizens wanted turned into one vast allotment. The Chief Secretary, Henry Duke, had no objection in principle, but the Board of Works had other ideas: it took over a section of the park for tillage to meet its own requirements, and pickets placed on the board’s operations failed to sway the government. Instead the corporation agreed to acquire sites to supplement those of the society.5
The big problem for the corporation and the society alike was that no compulsory powers were granted to local authorities (unlike their counterparts in England, Scotland and Wales) to acquire land either directly or for voluntary bodies. As early as February 1916 a meeting was held in the Mansion House to demand the extension of the Small Holdings and Allotments Act (1908) to Ireland. There was no doubting the wide support for such a measure. Father J. McDonnell presided, and on the platform was the Rev. Denham Osborne, Sir Frederick Moore and most of the city’s MPs. Letters of apology were read from the Lord Mayors of Belfast and Limerick and several leading home-rulers, including John Redmond.
The main motion was proposed by Moore and seconded by Tom McPartlin on behalf of the Labour Party and Dublin Trades Council. There was ‘some unrest’ when J. J. Clancy, the Irish Party MP for North County Dublin, said that the extension of British legislation ‘was not only in the interests of workers, but for the general community and even for the British Empire,’ and this turned into outright booing when John Dillon Nugent, secretary of the AOH and MP for Dublin City, rose to make an innocuous speech in support of the campaign. By contrast, the Chief Secretary was cheered when it was announced that he supported the extension of the 1908 act to Ireland.6
There was no doubting the demand for land. In March 1917 the corporation received 1,200 applications for 269 plots.7 As a result additional land was acquired at the Model Farm in Glasnevin, at Clontarf and at Islandbridge, so that by the summer the Vacant Land Cultivation Society was able to accommodate 460 plot-holders and the corporation could accommodate another 2,000. While corporation allotment-holders were at first supposed to grow only potatoes and oats, the latter quickly gave way to cabbages, beetroot, turnips, leeks, parsnips, onions, runner beans, carrots, lettuce and celery. Celery was particularly profitable, as it was in demand as an alleged cure for persons of a nervous disposition.
The movement spread to the southern townships of Rathmines, Pembroke, Blackrock and Kingstown. The main restriction on expansion was the ever-rising rent that landowners demanded in the absence of compulsory purchase legislation. What land was available at reasonable prices was on the north side of the city: 96 of the 113 acres available in early 1917 were there. However, such was the demand that Dubliners did not mind trekking across the city to work their allotments.
In an effort to redress the balance, 37 acres were made available at Islandbridge, but only 10 acres were workable, because of the proximity of the barracks with its adjoining gas house and bomb house for training recruits in trench warfare. The site itself was riddled with trenches, and there were hundreds of army horses ‘all over the place,’ which constantly sampled the produce.8
It was not until the end of 1917 that the government finally introduced the Local Government (Allotments and Land Cultivation) (Ireland) Act, authorising local authorities to acquire land in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. In 1918 Dublin Corporation was able to acquire another 100 acres for cultivation, some of it to compensate for the loss of allotments at Fairbrother’s Fields, where the housing scheme had belatedly begun. By the end of the war the value of produce grown in the city was estimated at between £150,000 and £160,000.
Once the war was over farmers and landlords generally protested at the continued existence of the allotments. As one substantial landowner in Clontarf, Thomas Picton Bradshaw, put it, the Irish Plotholders’ Union was trying to make ‘a temporary war emergency scheme’ a permanent feature of Dublin life, ‘to enable professional men, trade union members and others to oust market gardeners, dairymen, cattle salesmen, schools and sports committees from property on which they had expended money and in which they had an interest.’ However, the Plotholders’ Union was strong enough to see off the challenge until 1926, by which time agricultural prices had fallen by 42 per cent from their wartime maximum.9
Fuel was the other major shortage confronting Dubliners, and unfortunately it could be neither mined nor grown in Ireland. Wages were rising, particularly in unionised trades, such as the crafts and in Dublin Corporation, but prices were rising faster. In January the Mansion House Coal Fund and the Lord Mayor’s Coal Fund were amalgamated to generate greater efficiency and more effective fund-raising. The proposer was the Rev J. Denham Osborne, the Presbyterian minister actively involved in the allotments movement. He lived and worked in the north inner city and was a regular contributor to the proceedings of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. He told the society that his pastoral work meant he had recently ‘come into contact with cases where people were living in respectable dwellings who were [hit] harder than even some of the very poor’ by inflation. He estimated that there were four thousand families in the area of the North Dublin Union unable to afford adequate food or fuel.
The fuel shortage also had other implications. The theft of coal was becoming a persistent problem, especially in the North Wall and East Wall areas, where boys climbed on moving railway wagons to throw it down to accomplices.10 The Coal Fund was as much for social control as for charity, and it had support across the political and religious spectrum. It provided good-quality coal at 1s 6d a bag, while the market price was 3s 6d. It sought primarily to assist the working poor, families of workmen earning less than 25s a week.
After a sample survey undertaken later in 1917 the chief sanitary officer for the city, Charles Travers, estimated that there were eight thousand families in the city with an income of less than 25s. While this was half the figure for 1913, the year of the lock-out, he said the rising cost of living made ‘the economic condition of the working class in Dublin disquietingly unsatisfactory.’ He found that the pawning of possessions was on the increase, and that the greatest effect of food poverty was on children. Families lodging in the tenements took it in turns to heat their rooms, cooking food jointly. He found that the traditional cheerfulness of the mothers had given way to concern about procuring adequate food for their families, displacing concern over the sanitary state of their environment.
As we have seen, the consumption of coal fell by 30 per cent in 1917 and a further 25 per cent in 1918. Such large institutions as hospitals, asylums and schools had little choice but to reduce heating levels, public lighting hours were cut drastically and banks agreed to close at 2:30 p.m. each day to reduce energy consumption. However, insurance companies insisted on remaining open until 4:30 p.m. and most retailers until much later. The chairman of the Electricity Supply Committee, Lorcan Sherlock, told the Rotary Club that efforts to conserve energy and to share the burden equitably were received with ‘indifference from the general public, sneers from the Irish Times, and hardly a word of public support from any section of the press in the city.’11
The mood of the chairman of the other major generator of electricity in the city, Dublin United Tramways Company, was very different when he addressed the annual general meeting on 6 February 1917 in the company’s head office in Upper Sackville Street. Despite being at the vortex of the rising, Murphy’s company had made an even more remarkable recovery than the rebels. Although the company’s power station in Ringsend had been occupied by rebel forces it had not been damaged, only two trams had been burnt and, miraculously, the artillery bombardment had not damaged the tramlines, which could have been catastrophic, as it was almost impossible to obtain replacement track during the war. In contrast, the corporation’s electricity infrastructure had suffered more than £8,000 worth of damage, plunging its operations into the red for the foreseeable future.
While the fighting had cost the DUTC almost £17,000 (made up of £13,898 in damage and £3,000 in lost business during April and May), traffic had increased. At £335,335, receipts were £1,850 higher in 1916 than in 1915, and further growth was expected despite rising fuel costs. The company had paid 24s 5d a ton for coal in 1916, compared with £18s 5d a ton in 1915, an increase of almost a third. Before the war it had cost the company only 9s 8d a ton. Murphy attributed the company’s success to the continuous rise in demand for services, the replacement of some old trams with new cars and the conversion of other vehicles to new and more economical motors. The staff had also played an important role, he said.
Honourable mention is due to our Traffic Manager, Mr. D. Brophy. He remained in charge until the fire reached the opposite side of the lane,12 when in the early hours of Friday morning, the 28th of April, he succeeded in making his way to the Pro-Cathedral, where many people had taken refuge. While there he found the officer in charge of the military operations preparing to bombard the building in the belief that there were rebels sniping from the windows, but Mr. Brophy was able to satisfy him that the report … was entirely devoid of truth. To this incident we owe it that we have a convenient place to meet in today, even though it is rather cramped as our old meeting room at the Imperial Hotel no longer exists.
A dividend of 5 per cent was paid to the shareholders for the second half of 1916, up from 4½ per cent for the first half. The rising had actually hurt the DUTC less than the 1913 Lock-out. Murphy could not resist contrasting the company’s performance as a private transport monopoly with the tribulations of the corporation’s Electricity Supply Committee. Unlike the corporation, the DUTC had absorbed costs rather than passing them on as increases to the customer.13 Naturally Murphy omitted to mention that the cross-subsidisation of business by Dublin’s domestic users benefited the DUTC as a consumer of municipal electricity.
P. T Daly, who had been released from internment just before Christmas 1916, was less resigned about the inability of the corporation to tackle the city’s problems than fellow-councillors such as Lorcan Sherlock. He quickly reinvigorated the Food Committee and spurred on the pursuit of dairymen who were adulterating milk. The more rigorous enforcement of regulations had its desired effect. Only one trader had ever been sent to prison under the Food, Drugs and Margarine Acts, and that had been in 1906. By the end of 1917 there were 200 inspections under the acts, compared with 163 in 1916, and £467 5s 6d had been collected in fines, compared with £244 15s 8d in the previous year. One trader had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment and two more had been sentenced to two months each.
Characteristically, Daly insisted on a pay increase for the two inspectors, pointing out that they were paid far less than their counterparts in Britain and £30 to £70 a year less than inspectors of the same grades in Belfast. He did not question the probity of the inspectors, he told the corporation, but decent wages would remove the temptation to take bribes.14
He was pushing an open door. Sir James Cameron had just provided councillors with a summary of a report by the Carnegie Trust on mothers and children that was scathing about Ireland. ‘I am afraid there is a woeful lack of cleanliness, as well as inattention to such details as straining and cooling,’ he said. ‘In a large number of cases the milk delivered is so foul and acrid that it cannot stand without curdling,’ while Dublin milk showed very few samples uncontaminated by the coliforms found in manure. He believed that a lot of this contaminated milk came from the country, where the delay in getting it to the market allowed bacteria to proliferate, especially in warm weather.
Monitoring milk produced in the city was a major operation. There were 205 dairy yards, accommodating five thousand cows, and 459 shops sold milk. Samples could be taken only from a handful of these places on any given day. In rural areas the situation was even worse, with dispensary physicians and relieving officers doubling as medical officers of health and sanitary officers. Infection by dairymen who were typhoid carriers and by cattle that carried tuberculosis was a further concern.15
Milk samples were routinely adulterated with water and the fat content abstracted. A fairly typical case was that of Christopher Dempsey, who ran a milk parlour in Summerhill and had a farm at Betaghstown, Clane, Co. Kildare. He was fined £5 for each of two samples taken from his premises in which the milk was between 70 and 77 per cent water and between 27 and 33 per cent of the fat had been abstracted. While these levels were higher than average, samples with anything up to 25 per cent water and 16 per cent fat deficiency were common, and cases with up to 86 per cent of fat abstracted were uncovered.16
Poor people were particularly dependent on milk, but the problems of the dairy industry affected every family with babies and young children, and it was no wonder that public anger rose rapidly when the cowmen again threatened price increases. In October 1917 a mass meeting was held in Smithfield after the Dairymen’s Association increased the price from 4d to 6d a quart and warned of another increase to 8d before the winter was out. This compared with a price of 3d a quart twelve months earlier.17
The normally moderate Councillor Coghlan Briscoe, executive officer of the Town Tenants’ League, denounced ‘the octopus grip of the profiteer on the food of the people.’ He knew of milk suppliers ‘outside the profiteering ring’ who were willing to sell milk at 4d a quart, and do so profitably. P. T. Daly commended the police magistrates for taking a tougher line on sentencing adulterators. There was unanimous support for a motion proposed by Percy Robinson of the National Union of Clerks that ‘under no circumstances would the workers and the poor of Dublin tolerate the raising of the price of milk.’18
Even the Irish Times declared in exasperation that there were
people in the trade who would not hesitate to bring about a national famine by giving up their business and selling their cattle for export to England. The vice of the Dublin dairymen is not only that they have no sense of public decency but also [that they] produce milk … under a most pernicious and costly system.19
On the same day as the Irish Times editorial the cowkeepers proved that they deserved their reputation by carrying out their threat of raising the price to 8d a quart. The vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, T. W. Russell, promptly used his powers to fix the price at 4d or 5d a quart, depending on quality. To make sure the producers complied he prohibited the export of milk. It would be October 1918 before the price was allowed to rise again and then by only 1d.20
Of course Russell received little credit for his action. The cowkeepers complained, with some justification, that the cost of feed was unacceptably high, because the British army’s demand for fodder had pushed up animal feed prices generally. Their last stand came in a protest at a corporation meeting on 10 December when their spokesman, Councillor Michael Maher, told the meeting that his members would defy the Food Controller and sell their cattle on the city’s streets if need be, because cattle dealers were exporting cows anyway as ‘strippers’ only to rehabilitate them as ‘milchers’ once they reached Holyhead.
There were also claims that ‘cows were being milked just before reaching the boats for the purpose of deceiving the portal inspectors,’ and they should be detained for twelve hours before sailing to ensure they were not lactating. The department rejected the idea out of hand as impractical and admitted that licences were being issued for about a quarter of Irish milch cows to meet demand in Britain and to contain milk prices generally in the United Kingdom.
It was further grist to the advanced nationalist mill. A few councillors even expressed continued sympathy for the cowmen, but the majority remained sceptical. W. T. Cosgrave, once more the leader of the Sinn Féin group after his release from prison, denounced the British government as the main culprit for depriving cowkeepers of cheap feed by virtually shutting down the city’s breweries and distilleries. He demanded that some of the tax on excess profits from Dublin’s war industries, such as the National Shell Factory, be used to subsidise milk and other essential foodstuffs.21
By the time Cosgrave made his intervention in the dairy controversy he was Sinn Féin’s first urban MP, but he was elected for Kilkenny City, not Dublin. He was the fourth Sinn Féin MP in 1917 to defeat a UIL candidate in a by-election.
Redmond and the Irish Party had withdrawn from Parliament on 7 March in an effort to retrieve their political fortunes after Lloyd George confirmed unequivocally that the Government of Ireland Act would exclude Ulster. Redmond accused Lloyd George ‘of treason to the interests of Ireland and the Empire.’ Before leading his party out of the House of Commons he warned, more presciently than he probably realised, that
the Prime Minister is playing into the hands of those in Ireland who are seeking to destroy the Constitutional movement. If that occurs the Premier will have to govern Ireland by the naked sword.
The Irish Independent commented that the leadership of the Irish Party was now paying the price for fawning ‘like nerveless creatures’ on successive English governments rather than acting like men and securing home rule in 1912. The Irish Times took the opposite tack and bewailed the fact that Redmond had been ‘overborne’ by John Dillon and other opponents of the war. It believed that had others emulated Redmond’s enthusiasm the unity of nationalist and unionist would have been secured, although on what basis and to what purpose was unclear. The paper was on sounder ground when it predicted that partition would only deepen existing divisions.22
The next day, on the other side of Europe, the Russian Revolution began when Cossacks refused to disperse mass demonstrations in Petrograd, called on International Women’s Day to demand bread. Its reverberations would soon be felt in Ireland through the renewed pressure for conscription as the Russian military effort flagged. The revolution was hailed in Irish labour circles and especially in the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, where tensions between some of the members and James Connolly over the use of Liberty Hall by the Citizen Army before the Easter Rising were long forgotten.
The triumph of the Bolshevik rising in November would strike a particular resonance with some of Connolly’s former comrades. As William O’Brien told the Irish Labour Party and Trades Union Congress in 1918, when Connolly
laid down his life for the Irish working class he laid it down for the working class in all countries, for he believed that an example of action ought to be given to the workers to spur them to resistance to the powers of imperialism and capitalism which have plunged Europe into the war of empire and conquest … We know the influence it exercised among those great men and women who have given us the great Russian Revolution.23
Meanwhile the ITGWU was in the middle of a Lazarus-like resurrection. It had struggled as an organisation in the aftermath of the lock-out. Larkin had departed to the United States on a fund-raising trip that was also meant to provide him with an opportunity to recuperate from the strain of struggle and defeat, while his successor, Connolly, became increasingly preoccupied with the Citizen Army and plans for the rising. Membership fell from 30,000 at its peak in 1913 to 15,000 in 1914, 10,000 in 1915 and probably less than 5,000 on the eve of the rising.24 To add to its woes, Liberty Hall had been bombarded, its records seized and many leading members shot or imprisoned. The union had to accept an offer of temporary accommodation at the Trades Council Hall in Capel Street. Miraculously, membership reached 14,000 by the end of the year and 25,000 by the end of 1917. Thomas Foran, the president, doubled as general secretary on his release from prison, and he was joined by his fellow-internee William O’Brien, an organiser of genius. Although O’Brien would not be formally appointed general treasurer of the ITGWU until February 1919, he devoted most of his time after his release from internment to the union.
Two other key figures in the revival of the union were Joseph McGrath, who took over management of the ITGWU’s National Health Insurance Approved Society, and J. J. (Séamus) Hughes, who served as financial and corresponding secretary. Liberty Hall was renovated through a building fund to which members contributed the first week’s pay of any increase achieved by the union. ‘In this way [the] Liberty Hall frontage has actually been rebuilt by the employers of Dublin!’ the union boasted.
Another critical factor in the union’s success was its close association with Connolly and Easter Week. It was becoming patriotic as well as economically beneficial to join the union. Many small ‘land and labour’ unions in rural Ireland joined the ITGWU en masse, and in Dublin new groups of workers, such as cinema projectionists, did so. Of course the authorities and employers were far from happy at the unexpected resurgence of the union. After the rising John Dillon Nugent, the Dublin MP who was also secretary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, had approached Dublin Castle with a view to ‘buying’ the union. It is probable that he meant making a bid for the insurance section, as he was head of the Hibernian Insurance Fund, the largest Irish insurance company.
Fortunately for the union, the recruitment of McGrath ensured the continuing financial viability of the union. McGrath had worked for the accountancy firm Craig Gardner before taking part in the rising, was a close associate of Michael Collins and a senior figure in the IRB. Séamus Hughes, also a participant in the rising, was a prominent figure on the cultural scene. A former seminarian and a contributor to the Irish Worker in its heyday under Larkin, he saw no problem in people believing in ‘economic socialism without attaching themselves to atheistic doctrines.’25
It was against this surge in the new patriotism that the legacy of the Irish Party had to contend. As it had never opposed political violence on principle and had frequently invoked the memory of the ‘hillside men’, the party could only criticise the British government for betraying constitutional nationalism and the rebels for subverting it. The futility of its position was demonstrated by a return to Parliament, having made its protest over partition. The alternative was to adopt the abstentionist position of Sinn Féin that it had consistently attacked.
Any hopes that the post-rising mood in Dublin was a passing fancy were dispelled on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, regarded as the first anniversary of the rising. A proclamation was issued by Lieutenant-General Sir Bryan Mahon, who had commanded the 10th (Irish) Division at Gallipoli and was now general officer commanding the forces in Ireland, banning public meetings and assemblies in Dublin during Easter Week, except for the annual Lord Mayor’s procession to the Pro-Cathedral on Easter Sunday. The procession passed off peacefully, but on Easter Monday a large Tricolour was flying at half mast from a temporary flagstaff on the parapet of the GPO. The parapet is 90 feet above ground level, so that the flag was visible over a wide area and drew crowds into Sackville Street. ‘Thousands of holiday makers … raised their hats in passing it, and waved handkerchiefs.’ When the flagstaff toppled over at about 10 a.m. a young man promptly walked along the parapet to fix it back in position. ‘That was the signal for an outburst of cheering and various other demonstrations of approval on a wide scale,’ the Irish Times reported.
One such demonstration was by a group of young men who occupied Nelson’s Pillar and flew another ‘Sinn Fein flag’ from the top for about a quarter of an hour. They were allowed to leave the Pillar unmolested, but a policeman then climbed onto the parapet of the GPO to remove the flagstaff. It was secured so firmly that it took an hour to cut it down. As soon as it hit the ground three boys tore the flag off the staff and ran down Prince’s Street into the ruins with their prize. Again there were loud cheers, and a large section of the crowd made its way down Lower Abbey Street to Liberty Hall, where there were further cheers and flag-waving.
Many in the crowds that gathered at Liberty Hall and continued to occupy Sackville Street wore black armbands surmounted by ribbons with ‘Sinn Fein colours.’ Flags appeared on other buildings, and during the afternoon gangs of youths used the debris on derelict sites to stone the police. The fighting grew particularly fierce outside the Abbey Theatre, where a DMP superintendent and inspector were among the casualties. Eventually the police retreated to Sackville Street, while an unarmed military detachment passing along Eden Quay had to flee across Butt Bridge.
Some rioters turned their attention to the Methodist church in Lower Abbey Street, while others made for the richer pickings in the shops erected in temporary buildings nearby. The worst of the rioting was at the junction of Talbot Street and North Earl Street, and several trams were damaged as well as shops. Peace was eventually restored when a sharp hailstorm just after dark scattered the crowds.
Only two arrests were made on a day when a mixture of rebel sympathisers and what the Times termed ‘young toughs’ effectually took over the north city. Republicans had retrieved their honour by defying the authorities; but the only people able to re-enact fully their role in the rising were the looters from the slums.26
Meanwhile, in the stately atmosphere of City Hall across the river, the Irish Drapers’ Assistants’ Association, Ireland’s largest, oldest and richest white-collar union, was holding its annual general meeting. At the top of the agenda was the lack of compensation from the government for members who had been laid off as a result of the destruction of department stores during the rising. Although the Drapers were the wealthiest union in Dublin, their resources had been severely tried. During the winter £3,000 had been paid out to offset hardship and another £3,000 by the insurance section. Despite the disturbed state of the country and the lack of sympathy from government and employers alike, the association’s president, W. J. McNabb, appealed to members not to allow politics to affect their work.
Membership had reached a record figure, largely because of expansion in Belfast and the North; it had also held up in Dublin, although £500 had had to be paid out in unemployment benefit. Despite McNabb’s plea, politics did intrude with a debate on a motion dealing with conscription. Southern delegates insisted that the issue was an ‘economic matter,’ while northern members insisted it was ‘political.’ There does not appear to have been a vote. Delegates adjourned to dinner at the Dolphin Hotel, where the general secretary, Michael O’Lehane, a long-standing member of Sinn Féin, assured them that with the growth of education labour could, without bloodshed, achieve all its objectives.27
The militant mood on Dublin’s streets was about to be further inflamed by news that another six hundred jobs were to go in the city’s breweries and distilleries. Distress was now so widespread and so obviously feeding into civic disorder that the Local Government Board finally sanctioned £1,250 for setting up communal kitchens in the poorer areas of the city.
Any kudos from the measure was cancelled out by the angry public reaction to a letter from Lieutenant-General Mahon, published in the Irish Times, urging the men who lost their jobs ‘owing to the limitations placed on brewing and distilling industries and allied concerns’ to join the British army. He described the attractions of increased separation and dependants’ allowances and stated that skilled workers would be welcome in technical services such as the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Engineers.
The Times welcomed the general’s ‘attractive’ offer to recruits and contrasted their prospects with those of men who went to England under the National Service scheme to work ‘among strangers in a strange land.’ Army recruits, even if they ended up in a strange land, would be among their own ‘gallant Irish regiments.’ The general boasted, quite truthfully, that ‘there are more Dublin men in the trenches today than in all the Dublin breweries and distilleries.’28 It was not an argument to boost recruitment: most Dubliners now preferred to see fewer fellow-citizens in the trenches.
If the events of Easter Monday 1917 demonstrated the mood on the streets, the first serious attempt to channel that anger organisationally came with a conference convened by Count Plunkett in the Mansion House on 19 April. Well over a thousand representatives of various organisations attended. They included delegates from local authorities, boards of Poor Law guardians and other bodies that were traditionally dominated by Irish Party stalwarts, as well as thirty divisions of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. They were leavened by representatives of radical nationalist bodies, such as Sinn Féin, the Irish National League, Cumann na mBan, and nineteen trades councils. The prevalence of Tricolours, including one carried by a fourteen-year-old boy who had allegedly been interned, indicated the prevailing mood.
There was a minute’s silence for those who had died in the rising and a call for those still in custody to be treated as prisoners of war. But the most significant action was the adoption of a declaration asserting ‘Ireland’s right to freedom from all foreign control.’ The conference further demanded representation at the post-war Peace Conference convening in Paris so that it could release ‘the small nations from the control of the Greater powers.’ The delegates affirmed their commitment ‘to use every means in their power to obtain complete liberty.’ The Dublin Trades Council delegation, led by Thomas Farren and William O’Brien, ‘wished God-speed to the great work begun that day for Ireland.’ O’Brien declared that ‘Irish labour was absolutely united against partition—even those [workers] opposed to Irish self-government in the North.’
Plunkett stressed that the National Alliance he was launching was not another party ‘to machine public opinion’ but was for building an organisation in every parish ‘prepared to deal with any emergency such as the introduction of a fraudulent Home Rule business.’ However, Arthur Griffith made it clear that Sinn Féin would continue to pursue its own policies, and it was agreed that all interested bodies, including the Irish Volunteers, then reorganising, should hold talks on creating a new movement to ‘smash’ the Irish Party.29 Calls from the floor for food exports to be banned and for conscription to be resisted reflected the more immediate concerns of delegates.
The editorial in the next day’s Irish Independent summed up the conundrum now facing many moderate nationalists. The paper admitted that Plunkett’s programme appeared increasingly attractive, although his gathering ‘would have been inconceivable three or four years previously’ and was possible now only because of the
repeated muddling, chronic weakness and inactivity of the Nationalist leaders and Party … On the other hand we are not believers in the methods or policy of the Party whose battle cry is an Irish Republic.
It questioned how much support the abstention policy advocated by Plunkett and Griffith really had.
It would receive the answer three weeks later in the South Longford by-election. The Sinn Féin candidate on this occasion was not a Papal count and grieving father of an executed leader of the rising but a draper’s assistant in Dublin convicted of armed rebellion. What was worse, Joe McGuinness was a native of Co. Roscommon and had no links to the constituency in which he was standing. In fact he did not even want to stand, and most of his imprisoned comrades did not want to nominate him, including Éamon de Valera, who felt that participation in a parliamentary election was tantamount to recognising British rule in Ireland.
His only fellow-prisoners who felt strongly that he should run were Thomas Ashe, the teacher from Lusk who had won the battle of Ashbourne, and Harry Boland, a Dublin tailor. Both were senior members of the IRB—Ashe was to be elected president on his release from prison—and they worked closely with another rising IRB man on the outside, Michael Collins, to promote McGuinness’s candidature. When the candidate still refused to run they nominated him anyway under the famous slogan ‘Put him in to get him out.’
It was a dirty campaign, even by Irish standards. No fewer than twenty Irish Party MPs campaigned for their candidate, Patrick McKenna, while Dublin radicals, such as Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, William O’Brien and the ITGWU’s new financial officer, Joseph McGrath, invaded the constituency. The large convoys of Sinn Féin motor cars bedecked with Tricolours touring the county were denounced as evidence of ‘German gold’, while the Irish Party members were accused of cheering the executions of the 1916 leaders in the House of Commons.
Past internecine strife within the Irish Party came back to haunt it when one of McKenna’s supporters, J. P. Farrell, editor of the Longford Leader, was reminded that he had described the candidate ‘as a dyspeptic visaged humbug … from the Irish Pig Buyers’ Association.’ There was also a destructive dimension to the Irish Party’s campaign. On the weekend before polling the mothers of two of the executed 1916 leaders, Mary Josephine Plunkett and Margaret Pearse, together with the widow of a third, Kathleen Clarke, were stoned in Longford by a number of ‘drunken and abandoned females … from suitable cover behind the Bludgeon men’ of the Irish Party. The Irish Independent intimated that the women had been plied with free drink before the incident. On his return to Dublin, John Dillon Nugent was alleged by the same newspaper to have sacked a number of employees for travelling to Co. Longford in their own time to canvass for McGuinness.30 This brought the Irish Party more bad publicity; but far worse was to come.
On the eve of the election more than twenty senior churchmen, including three Protestant bishops, signed a manifesto opposing partition; one of them, Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, issued a letter denouncing the Irish Party for political cowardice.31 Dr Walsh’s letter was in effect an endorsement of McGuinness, who won the hard-fought contest by 1,493 votes to 1,461.
If the Irish Party could be defeated in its heartland it could be defeated anywhere in Ireland. The Walsh letter symbolised the alienation of many traditional supporters of home rule from the Irish Party and their despair at its inability to prosecute the nationalist cause effectively. But the archbishop had gone even further: he had made support for McGuinness and the other Easter rebels politically respectable.
Now that a rebel prisoner was a member of Parliament, the emphasis of advanced nationalists shifted quickly to securing the release of the 120 remaining prisoners in Britain, all of whom had been sentenced to varying terms. On the evening of Sunday 10 June a demonstration was held in Beresford Place in support of the prisoners in Lewes Jail in the Isle of Wight who had begun a hunger strike for prisoner-of-war status. It had been banned by Lieutenant-General Mahon, but that did not prevent three thousand people turning out to greet the hackney car carrying the speakers, Count Plunkett and Cathal Brugha.
As it drew up in front of Liberty Hall at 7:30 p.m. Inspector John Mills of the DMP arrested the two men. A large force of police was needed to clear a route to Store Street station nearby, and stones were thrown freely. As they neared the station Mills was felled by a blow to the head from a hurley. His assailant was pursued by two constables down Abbey Street, but one was obstructed by the crowd and the other was himself attacked when he attempted an arrest. Inspector Mills was taken to Jervis Street Hospital, where he died shortly afterwards, leaving a widow and three children aged between thirteen and nineteen. A carriage-driver at an undertaker’s was subsequently arrested, but it proved impossible to find any witnesses to give evidence. The DMP would find this to be a recurring pattern over the next few years. Four policemen were injured that night in riots along South Great George’s Street and Aungier Street as word spread of the arrests of Plunkett and Brugha. Again looters were busy.
A fund was set up to assist the inspector’s family, but, as with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers’ Association, its membership was dominated by the old ascendancy and southern unionists, with the Earl of Meath as president, Sir John Arnott and Sir Maurice Dockrell as vice-presidents, and the baker John Mooney as deputy chairman. Apart from Alderman Laurence O’Neill, the Lord Mayor, there were no prominent nationalists on the committee.32
Five days after the death of Inspector Mills, Lloyd George announced the release of the prisoners. It was timed to coincide with the launch of the Irish Convention, which would be a forum of ‘Irishmen of all parties for the purpose of producing a scheme of Irish self-government.’ The hope that the prisoners’ release would create an atmosphere of good will in which the spirit of compromise could flourish proved ill-founded. The Irish Party claimed credit, with some justification, for the government’s change of heart, but the opening of the convention received none from the ecstatic crowds who greeted the prisoners.
The government, while wishing to appear conciliatory, made the releases as low-key as possible, with no prior announcement to the prisoners or their families. Nevertheless by 4:30 a.m. on Monday 18 June a crowd of three thousand with a convoy of wagonettes was waiting at the North Wall to greet their heroes. Word that they were being transported via Holyhead to Kingstown did not filter through until the prisoners were reported disembarking shortly after 8 a.m. While the crowd was marching quickly across the city the released men found themselves having to share the railway carriages from Kingstown with soldiers on leave from France; but the only unpleasantness, as reported by the Irish Times, was when some civilian passengers demanded that they be moved to another part of the train.
As they left Westland Row the prisoners were seized by the crowd and led up Great Brunswick Street before the organisers of the welcome could rescue them and install them in the wagonettes for their triumphal return to the scene of their defeat at the GPO. There was some confusion over the identity of some released prisoners, who stood out only by the uniformity of their cropped heads and unshaved stubble. They were loudly cheered as they were led past the ruins of the GPO and on to Fleming’s Hotel in Gardiner Place for a celebratory luncheon. Later they called on the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House before heading home.
Frank Robbins of the Citizen Army probably spoke for most of the prisoners when he described his homecoming as
one of the greatest surprises of my life. What a contrast with the humiliating day of our departure. The reception given to us by the Dublin people was beyond description. A very large force of D.M.P. was around Westland Row but they were simply overwhelmed by the throng of people that greeted us on our appearance at the exits. From there up to Tara Street not one of us had a moment without some man’s or woman’s arms around us, kissing us, slapping us on the back, and practically carrying us through the streets. It was our moment of real triumph which well repaid us for our day of surrender and the subsequent insults.33
The Weekly Irish Times reported it as ‘noteworthy that there was no enthusiasm and no cheering along the footpaths, or the tram cars,’ as the procession of prisoners and their supporters made their way through the city. But these would have been early-morning commuters on their way to shops and offices and largely unaware of the nature or significance of the event they were witnessing.
As the paper reported later, a festive mood gradually took hold of the city as word of the releases spread. Crowds of young men and women colonised the city centre with ‘Sinn Fein’ flags. Not one but two Tricolours were flown by ‘an athletic young man’ from the top of the GPO, and wooden hoardings around shelled sites were torn down for a bonfire at 10:30 p.m. More railings were used by youths for mock military drill.
Even the Times had to concede that whenever a released Sinn Féiner, or anyone remotely suspected of being one, was observed they were warmly congratulated. When, however, a detachment of soldiers went through the city on its way to France ‘not a cheer was given.’
Similar scenes occurred over the next few days as other prisoners returned home, most notably Constance Markievicz, who was released on the day following the main batch of prisoners. She was met by a fellow-veteran of the rising, Dr Kathleen Lynn, in her car. Lynn had been chief medical officer of the Citizen Army and, as a captain, actually outranked Lieutenant Markievicz. She drove her through cheering crowds from Westland Row to Liberty Hall, where Markievicz addressed the crowd in her usual fiery style. The Irish Independent reported that she looked ‘very well and was most cheerful.’ While she declined to talk about the political situation until she had acquainted herself with the facts, she was scathing of the British prison system, which she denounced as dirty in both the material and the moral sense. She called for prisoners to be allowed to join trade unions as the best means of cleaning it up. She was attired in a blue silk dress and wore a large water-lily. Her sister, Eva Gore-Booth, explained that Constance had chosen the flower because it combined the Sinn Féin colours of green, white and orange. By Friday the Dublin cinemas were showing newsreels of her return.34
Almost as a protest at the way the country was drifting, on the Saturday after the release of the prisoners the Weekly Irish Times published a large block of sixteen photographs of Irish soldiers who had been killed recently at the front alongside its report of the rebel prisoners’ return to the city. Pride of place went to Major Willie Redmond, brother of the Irish Party leader, who had died in the attack on Messines Ridge on 7 June. It was a combined operation by the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division, in which Redmond served, and it typified the type of sacrifice he believed could form the basis for Irish unity in the future, although there were few enough Irish replacements to fill the gaps in the ranks of either division by this stage in the war.
Redmond’s passing was widely mourned, but its main significance was that it left a vacancy in the House of Commons. When the released prisoners gathered in Fleming’s Hotel on their return to Ireland they decided to nominate Éamon de Valera, the senior surviving commandant from 1916.
Willie Redmond’s popularity, his personal integrity and the manner of his death should have been strong cards for the Irish Party to play, even with de Valera nominated to run against its candidate, Patrick Lynch. A ditty to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Green’ summed up the Irish Party’s hopes.
Oh, Paddy dear, you need not fear
The Spaniard going round,
For we are Irish, and our hearts
To Redmond still are bound.
The ‘Spaniard’ won East Clare by 5,020 votes to 2,025.
There was another by-election on the same day in South County Dublin. It attracted far less attention but was no less an indication of the political gale now blowing. It had been caused by the death of Alderman William F. Cotton, chairman of the Alliance and Dublin Consumers’ Gas Company, who had narrowly won the seat from the unionists in the second election of 1910. He was described by the Irish Times as ‘one of the most widely known and most popular members of the business community in Dublin,’ though ‘his political opinions were … of the most fluid and contradictory character.’ In putting him forward in such a solidly middle-class constituency, where many Catholic voters had supported unionist candidates in the past, ‘it was hoped that a good many Unionists, being satisfied of Mr. Cotton’s harmlessness as a politician would give him their vote for personal reasons.’35
As Cotton had been defeated by the unionist candidate, Captain Bryan Cooper, by a mere 65 votes in the first election of 1910 and had in turn defeated Cooper by only 133 votes in December 1910, the unionist bloc remained a force to be reckoned with. At first it appeared that there could be a crowded field in 1917, with a unionist, independent unionist and at least two nationalist candidates running. The UIL candidate was Michael L. Hearn, a solicitor and chairman of the board of directors of the Freeman’s Journal. Sinn Féin was not expected to put forward a candidate in such a conservative constituency; but on 30 June Dr James S. Ashe, a unionist, wrote to John Redmond as a precautionary measure, proposing that all the declared candidates withdraw in favour of Sir Horace Plunkett. Plunkett had represented the constituency previously as a unionist. A man of progressive views who had been nominated by the British government to chair the forthcoming Irish Convention, he could be seen as a champion of moderation and reconciliation.
The initiative might have appealed to Redmond had it not been scuttled immediately by one of the unionist candidates, Sir Frederick Falkiner. He said that rather than allow the constituency to be handed over to Plunkett ‘as a gift’ he would prefer to see a nationalist elected ‘on the ground that an avowed opponent whose views are unmistakable is to be preferred to an administrator whose views on important questions seem colourless.’ This effectually sealed the outcome of the election in favour of the main nationalist candidate.
Still fearful of the danger of Sinn Féin romping home between the warring home rule and unionist blocs, all the other candidates agreed to withdraw in favour of Hearn. As James Creed Meredith told a meeting in support of Sir John O’Connell before Hearn was endorsed as the agreed candidate, they could not blind themselves to the fact that ‘the machinery of the Nationalist organisation in almost every respect has broken down.’
As it happened, Sinn Féin decided not to contest South County Dublin but to concentrate its efforts on getting de Valera elected. Unfortunately for unionists and home-rulers, there was not another constituency in Ireland where such an unlikely pact was possible.36
The Irish Convention, designed to allow the leaders of unionism and constitutional nationalism to reach a settlement that would deny advanced nationalists their victory, opened on 25 July. Far from smoothing the way, the release of the prisoners had served to alarm unionists, north and south. The Ulstermen insisted on continuing acceptance of partition by Redmond as a precondition for talks, while the choice of Trinity College as a venue further alienated nationalist opinion.
The mood of the crowd outside was unenthusiastic. An attempt by supporters to raise a cheer for Redmond as the first session ended backfired, serving only to attract a group of hostile youths who followed him all the way back to the Gresham Hotel.37 The following month brought further humiliation for Redmond and his party when the recently released councillor for the Liberties, William T. Cosgrave, was elected comfortably in Kilkenny to take Sinn Féin’s first urban seat. The victory was celebrated in Dublin with a rally outside the Sinn Féin meeting rooms in Westmorland Street.
One particularly damaging tactic of Sinn Féin in Kilkenny had been to emphasise the opposition of the Irish Party to the increase in the old-age pension introduced by the British government in June to help offset wartime inflation. Redmond had told the House of Commons that the increase of 2s 6d a week was an ‘extravagance which would not have been indulged in by an Irish Parliament comprised of Irishmen responsible to the country and knowing the country.’38 He may well have been right, and defending the ratepayer was good politics for the party in normal times. It was one of history’s little ironies that when normality did return in the 1920s it was an Irish government headed by W.T. Cosgrave that cut the old-age pension for precisely the same reasons Redmond had outlined in the House of Commons in June 1917.
Meanwhile the death of Cotton had left a vacancy for alderman on Dublin Corporation. The agreement between Labour, Sinn Féin and nationalist councillors on filling these posts by co-option frayed at this point. There were two nationalist candidates for Cotton’s seat in the South Dock ward. The official candidate was a sitting councillor, Thomas Murty O’Beirne, a temperance hotelier and tenement-owner. However, some Labour councillors opted to support a challenge by Sinn Féin for the seat on behalf of Charles Murphy, a local man nominated by Alderman Tom Kelly and seconded by the independent nationalist Lorcan O’Toole. O’Beirne, who had the support of the UIL and AOH machines, won comfortably by 44 votes to 14.39
Labour’s support for Murphy backfired the following month when the vacancy for a councillor in New Kilmainham arose. This had been caused by the death of William Partridge in July from Bright’s disease, contracted in prison. Peter S. Doyle was a mechanical engineer at the Inchicore railway works, where Partridge himself had once worked, and, like Partridge, he had been ‘out’ in 1916. He received a plethora of endorsements, including the Inchicore United Workmen’s Club, the local branch of the Town Tenants’ Association and the Number 1 Branch of John Saturninus Kelly’s ‘scab’ Railway Workers’ Trade Union, as well as numerous ‘local merchants and traders.’ By contrast, the official Labour nominee, Thomas Lawlor of the Tailors’ Society, only had the endorsement of Dublin United Trades Council. It had expected this to be sufficient, as it was effectually the nominating body for Labour candidates in the city; but when it came to a vote Doyle won by 32 votes to 16. Some Sinn Féin councillors voted with the dominant nationalist faction, as did the renegade Labour councillor John Saturninus Kelly.40
It then became necessary to fill O’Beirne’s vacancy as a councillor, and the same battle was played out in the council chamber. The Sinn Féin candidate, Joseph Curran, had a petition signed by two thousand local residents in his favour, but he was rejected in favour of J. J. O’Looney, who had endorsements from the Irish National Foresters’ Benefit Society and the City of Dublin Stonecutters’ Trade Union. The latter endorsement was a reminder that some of the craft unions still had strong links to the old nationalist machine.41
In exasperation, Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin said that the sooner direct elections to council seats were restored the better.42 Meanwhile Alderman Laurence O’Neill, the man who had been marched through Dublin after the rising ‘between fixed bayonets,’ would continue to preside with his increasing political dexterity and would remain in the mayoral chair for the next seven years.