On 31 May 1918 reports of ‘mysterious maladies’ in Spain and Sweden vied for attention with news of the great German offensive in France on the leader page of the Irish Times. It was some time before the source of the pandemic was identified as an unusually powerful variant of the H1N1 flu virus that attacked children and healthy young adults. It was first identified in these neutral states because there was no war censorship to suppress the details. After King Alfonso XIII of Spain fell ill with the mystery malady it was dubbed the ‘Spanish flu’.
Dublin was singularly ill prepared to meet the challenge. In the first decade of the twentieth century it had the highest rate of urban mortality in Europe, exceeding those of many Asian cities. James Connolly seared the figures into the collective consciousness of the trade union movement when he quoted them at length in The Re-conquest of Ireland, his most important work after Labour in Irish History. A temporary improvement in 1912 and early 1913 was negated by the suffering inflicted during the lock-out.
Mortality rates provide the simplest criterion of Dubliners’ health. During the First World War they showed an initial deterioration followed by a continuous improvement until the influenza pandemic drove the figure up again in late 1918. However, once the pandemic was over the rate resumed its downward trend, suggesting that, in general, the war had been good for the health of Dubliners.
The figures for the first quarter of every year tend to be the worst, as winter takes its toll, especially on the young, the old and the poor. As can be seen from table 16, the mortality rate in the city in the first quarter of 1913 was 23.3 per thousand; this rose to 25.9 in the first quarter of 1914, when the lock-out had been in force for four months.
Mortality rate (per thousand), 1913–20
After recovering somewhat later in 1914 the rate rose again in the first winter of the war. It reached 29.5 per thousand in the first quarter of 1915 for the greater metropolitan area and 31.4 per thousand within the city itself. The main cause appears to have been a rise in the incidence of infectious diseases, particularly for children, with diarrhoea, enteritis and dysentery (DED) and whooping cough featuring prominently. The birth rate also rose temporarily with the onset of the war; but the figure for the first winter of the war is not exceptional in the context of pre-war mortality rates. What is more striking is the general improvement in the mortality rate as the war progressed.
This is not to say that seasonal trends no longer mattered. On the contrary, they continued to assert themselves, but to a less pronounced degree. The Easter Rising also had a small but significant impact on mortality for the second quarter of 1916, which broke with the seasonal trend. However, even within the city boundary the fighting was less lethal than General Winter’s yearly visitation. Once the spring of 1917 arrived, the mortality rate showed a steady improvement on previous years until the third quarter of 1918. This suggests that the reforms adopted by the Public Health Committee of the corporation, under the chairmanship of P. T. Daly, and the work of such bodies as the NSPCC, the Women’s National Health Association and the voluntary bodies running communal kitchens had a beneficial effect, as well as the financial impact of separation allowances to mothers with young families in the tenements.
It was from mid-1918 until the end of March 1919 that Dublin felt the full brunt of the influenza pandemic. There appears to have been an initial surge in deaths in July 1918, followed by a short remission, before the rate soared to 34.1 per thousand in the metropolitan area and 36.1 in the city for the last quarter of 1918. It rose again in the first quarter of 1919, to 35 per thousand in the metropolitan area and 37.7 in the city. These rates were between 75 and 100 per cent more than for comparable quarters in the previous years.1
Figures published in the newspapers suggest that mortality was even higher in some weeks, especially for children, a high proportion of whom had fallen ill in June 1918, leading to the closure of about 120 schools. Sunday schools were cancelled, and ‘a notable falling away at … Church services’ was reported. The effectiveness of these measures was probably limited, as factories, shops, cinemas, pubs and theatres remained open.2 What stayed open and what closed was determined by commercial considerations, not concern for public health.
On 1 July 1918 the Local Government Board placed public notices on the ‘Spanish influenza epidemic’ in the newspapers. These warned readers that the disease was ‘most infectious’ and the symptoms ‘readily recognisable, consisting of extreme lassitude, aching of the limbs and headaches. There is generally but not always nasal catarrh.’ It recommended Formamint tablets (highly dubious throat lozenges made from formaldehyde and lactose), which were used by the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Red Cross Society and hospitals. They cost 2s 2d a bottle—a not inconsiderable sum for tenement-dwellers with large families.
Military censorship prevented full reportage of the pandemic, and considerable discrepancies in the figures provided by different newspapers added to the confusion. For instance, the Irish Independent reported a significantly higher number of deaths in Dublin in the week ending 3 July than the Irish Times. It also stated that almost a third of those who died were children, while the Times quoted the Registrar-General’s returns as containing no child fatalities.3
The reports were too vague to be useful for the purposes of public health or education. A typical example from the Irish Times in July reads: ‘Several fresh cases were reported yesterday, especially among members of the police force and employees of the Dublin United Tramways Company, while the staffs of many commercial firms are being seriously depleted.’ Occasionally the indisposition of a prominent individual, such as the Lord Mayor, Laurence O’Neill, was mentioned because it meant that public engagements had to be cancelled.4 However, all the reports agreed that the infection rate was increasing. Of deaths in the second week of July, 92 were from influenza, compared with 35 the previous week.5 By late November the death rate from influenza had reached 250 a week, seriously disrupting many businesses and services in the city. The Dublin and South-Eastern Railway, which provided most of the commuter services, complained of significant loss in income because ‘fraudulent passengers’ were taking advantage of sickness among checkers to avoid paying fares.
Dr Kathleen Lynn, who was working as a GP in Rathmines, advised people to avoid overcrowding and to eat nourishing food. Oatmeal porridge would suffice, with milk and eggs ‘for those who could afford it.’ More controversially, she called on soldiers returning from Europe to be quarantined ‘until they were certified all right before being allowed to mix with the population.’ At the very least she believed that uniforms and demob clothes should be thoroughly disinfected.6 There was a lot of sense in what she advocated, and it was probably inevitable, given her politics, that she would hold the British military authorities primarily responsible for the serious threat now posed to the health of Dublin’s civilian population. She would describe the battlefields of Flanders as the ‘factory of fever’; and she had already jointly written a circular in February 1918 with her fellow-director of Sinn Féin’s Public Health Committee, Dr Richard Hayes, warning of the threat that sexually transmitted disease would pose for the civilian population, especially women, when mass demobilisation began.
The same arguments applied, with even greater force, to highly infectious diseases such as influenza and TB. But both positions were charged politically. While the city’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Charles Cameron, was capable of taking a broad view of the situation, his natural conservatism and desire to avoid unnecessary conflict, which had made him more accommodating than he should have been of vested interests such as slum landlords, now led to procrastination. About the flu virus Lynn wrote in exasperation to Arthur Griffith:
People say it is the work of the Corporation or L.G.B. [Local Government Board]. Well, my experience is that the epidemic will be over before they had done considering the matter.7
She was almost right: it was not until 25 February 1919 that the corporation made influenza and pneumonia notifiable diseases. Even then its powers were limited. It could not force social events to be cancelled, or places of public entertainment to close. The British government, which was quick enough to ban public protests or seditious speeches, could have undertaken such measures, but it failed to do so.
When the Registrar-General’s annual figures for 1918 were finally published in March 1919 they showed that in the Dublin Registration Area, which included the suburban townships and Co. Dublin, there had been 9,008 births and 9,397 deaths, a net excess of 389 deaths over births. The total mortality rate for 1918 had been 23.6 per thousand, compared with an average of 20.6 for the previous ten years.
In the first quarter of 1919 the influenza pandemic reached a peak at 35 deaths per thousand in the metropolitan area and 37.7 in the city. However, in the second week of February the death rate went as high as 44.8 per thousand in the metropolitan area and 50.2 in the city.8 This translates into 2,476 births in the Dublin metropolitan area, offset by 3,544 deaths. In the city there were 2,030 births but 2,923 deaths; in other words, in the first three months of the year 1,961 more people died than were born. As in 1916, severe restrictions were placed on the number of mourners permitted to accompany the dead to the cemetery.
The higher mortality rates are entirely accounted for by the flu pandemic. The number of people dying from influenza in 1918 was 1,506, against a yearly average over the previous decade of 95. Deaths from pneumonia, which also affected many flu victims, tell a similar story: there were 1,140 deaths from pneumonia in 1918, compared with an average of 667 a year in the previous decade.
Hampered by lack of resources, and of adequate statutory powers, Sir Charles Cameron did what he could to meet the crisis through public education, the closing of schools, the disinfection of buildings, including cinemas and theatres, the nightly cleaning and disinfecting of trams, and the spraying of streets and laneways with disinfectant. At one point so much disinfectant was being used that the Street Cleansing Committee wrote to Cameron complaining at the cost. Extra stocks to the value of £64 14s 9d had been purchased in the last quarter of 1918.9
The money was well spent. By contrast to the soaring death rate from influenza and pneumonia, there was a general falling off in cases of other infectious diseases. For instance, there were only 906 deaths from bronchitis in 1918, compared with a yearly average of 1,001 over the previous five years.10
Altogether, deaths from the principal infectious diseases in the metropolitan area fell from 1.4 per thousand in the fourth quarter of 1917 to 1.0 per thousand in the fourth quarter of 1918. The comparable returns for the city show that the rate fell from 1.6 per thousand to 1.1 per thousand. In the first quarter of 1918 the rate of deaths from infectious diseases was 1.7 per thousand; this fell to 0.8 in the first quarter of 1919. The comparable figures for the city were 2.0 in 1918 and 1.0 in 1919.
Another anomaly was that the infant mortality rate, horrifying as it was, at 149 per thousand, was actually lower in 1918 than the rate of 152 in 1917 and 153 in 1916. The big killers of babies were diarrhoea, enteritis and dysentery (DED). These diseases accounted for 148 out of 192 deaths from infectious diseases in the third quarter of 1918, but the figure fell to 51 out of 81 deaths from infectious diseases in the last quarter of 1918. In the first quarter of 1919 the number of deaths from DED fell to 40, and the total number of deaths from infectious diseases was only 74. However, once the public disinfecting campaign ended, mortality from these diseases rose again: by the third quarter of 1919 it was back at 194, and DED accounted for 177 of them.
No doubt some of the other measures taken by Cameron to reduce the transmission of influenza, such as closing schools, also helped reduce the level of other infectious diseases.11 Even more lives could have been saved if places of public entertainment had closed, not to mention the appallingly insanitary tenements themselves.
Meanwhile Cameron had to apply moral suasion in his liaison with the hospitals and medical profession throughout the city to co-ordinate interests with colleagues such as Kathleen Lynn, his complete antithesis. She was a modern, ground-breaking professional and political radical; he was the last standard-bearer of the old corporate unionist identity of Dublin. He personified the old regime, in part because of the sheer number of responsibilities, both public and private, that resided in his person. He was medical superintendent officer of health, executive sanitary officer, secretary to the Public Health Committee and city analyst. In a private capacity he was deputy grand master of the Freemasons, and de facto grand master while the head of the organisation, the Earl of Donoughmore, was a serving officer who spent most of the war abroad.
The link with the Freemasons was a familial one. Cameron came from an old Scottish military family. An ancestor was beheaded in London for his part in the ‘45, and his father had fought under the Duke of Wellington at Talavera in the Peninsular War. However, after studying philosophy and qualifying as a doctor in Germany, the centre of academic excellence in his youth, Cameron returned to Dublin to practise medicine and to write extensively on the arts as well as medical and scientific matters. He undertook much voluntary work and campaigned vigorously for public health reforms before being appointed city analyst in 1862. By 1879 he had assumed responsibility for most aspects of public health policy in Dublin. A grateful city awarded him a salary of £1,000 per annum in 1911, but by the outbreak of war he was in his eighties, and some of his policies had begun to attract criticism and even ridicule, such as his campaign to eradicate houseflies by offering 3d to every child who handed in a bag of dead flies. (It was estimated that it would take six thousand flies to fill one of his bags, and the bounty was never claimed, even when the size of the bags was halved.)
His sons reverted to the family’s military tradition,12 and the death of the youngest, Ewen, a lieutenant in the ‘Pals Battalion’ of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, cast a shadow over his declining years. Cameron’s diary entries for August 1915 tell their own story.
[Thursday 26 August] Meeting at the Mansion House on food question. Presided at Council of the RDS.
Ewen came today. He appears very upset, apparently by the bad news from Dardanelles—death of Major Tippet and some of his late companions in the Seventh Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
[Friday 27 August] The dreadful news that poor Ewen had shot himself in the train between Greystones and Newcastle came today. He and Maitland went by the 10.30 train. After leaving Greystones Ewen went to the lavatory and shot dear head with revolver. I was telephoned to come home at once. Gladys Collins told me that something very serious had occurred to Ewen. I knew at once what had happened and I said has (Ewen died?) and [she] said Yes. I nearly fainted. Later on Sir Lambert Connolly told me the whole tragedy. This terrible blow will [make] the little of life left to me joyless. I was prostrate for the rest of the day.
Cameron would resign as deputy grand master of the Freemasons in 1919, citing ill health, and in March 1919 surrendered most of his day-to-day duties as chief medical officer of the city to his deputy, Dr M. J. Russell.13
If the Freemasons were regarded with suspicion, fear and envy by Catholic nationalists because of their hidden influence in the professions, the government, the police and the armed forces, they certainly paid the price in the Great War, especially in the case of the British army. The losses suffered by Sir Charles Cameron were not uncommon among masons. More than 350 members of the Dublin lodges served in the war, including members of such well-known families as Arnott, Atkinson, Ball, Bewley, D’Alton, Dawson, Dickinson, Dockrell, Fry, Goulding, Hewat, Jellett, Lawrence, Lee, Overend, Shaw, Swifte, Taylor, Watson, Weir and Wynne. There were also Dublin masons in the Curragh and Dublin Garrison lodges. Other members formed lodges in units to which they were assigned, including D Company of the 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Some of these lodges were able not only to hold meetings at the front but to engage in ‘Masonic labour’ behind the lines. The last wartime commander in chief of the forces in Ireland, Sir Frederick Shaw, was in a Dublin lodge, as was Sir Auckland Geddes, a member of the Cabinet.
Cameron does not appear to have allowed his politics to interfere with his duties. He enjoyed a good working relationship with councillors of all political complexions as well as with professional colleagues. When Kathleen Lynn was arrested in October 1918 because of her membership of the executive committee of Sinn Féin he joined with the Lord Mayor, Laurence O’Neill, in securing her release in recognition of the important work she was doing in combating the influenza pandemic and raising public awareness of health issues.
In many respects Cameron was not far from being indispensable. After his death the corporation ceased publishing quarterly health breviates—a retrograde step with regard to collating information and identifying important social as well as health trends. This had serious implications for policy planning. If he often expressed nostalgia for the long-departed nobility who had populated the city of his youth, he also welcomed the emergence of trade unions to champion workers’ rights.14 In short, he represented much of what was best in Dublin’s liberal unionist tradition.
The greatest impact of the flu pandemic was among the poor. The fate of the Phelan family in Corporation Buildings was unusual only in that it took them all. On Saturday 22 February 1919, not having seen them for some days, neighbours forced the door of their flat. The mother was dead in the bed. Her husband and their daughter were lying beside her, too weak to move. Mrs Phelan’s sister lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, also unable to move. They were brought to the Dublin Union hospital, where all died within a few hours.
The influenza pandemic obscured a greater long-term health threat for Dubliners from the prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases that had been bred for generations by the poverty of the slums. In 1914 deaths from the main sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, gonorrhoea and phagedaena, were 1.4 per 10,000, compared with 0.51 in Belfast and 0.76 in London. STD-related deaths, especially those of infants, were often attributed to other causes.15
Even before the war began these closely linked problems had assumed social and political dimensions. The British army had been regarded as the main source of the problem for decades, and public figures who agreed on very little else, such as Arthur Griffith and Jim Larkin, routinely denounced soldiers as the despoilers of Irish maidenhood.
There had been improvements over the years. There was a marked decline in the number of arrests for prostitution from the 1890s onwards, when the advent of large-scale factory employment for women in enterprises such as Jacob’s began providing alternative sources of income. By the early 1900s the number of prostitutes in the city was reckoned to have fallen by three-quarters, though the DMP estimated that there were still 1,677—about 2 per cent of the city’s female population.16
A ‘white slavery’ scare in the years immediately before the war brought renewed interest in the problems of prostitution, sexual mores and disease. Groups expressing concern included conservative Catholic nationalists, for whom it was the most sordid manifestation of English materialism and its power to corrupt traditional Irish values, as well as feminists fighting for the dignity of women and for equality. The two strands were brought together in the person of Alice Abadan of the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, who made well-publicised tours of Ireland in 1912 and 1913. More than a thousand women attended her meeting in Dublin in 1912 to hear her denounce the evils of ‘white slavery’, and many people supported the demand that the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill (1912) should include Ireland in its remit. Fears that the country would be excluded from the legislation appear to have been unfounded, but they gave added momentum to the campaign for women’s rights in general. As Abadan reminded her audience on her return trip to Dublin in early 1913, ‘where there was one slavery, there were many.’
The outbreak of war brought with it more soldiers, Irish and British, and with the deluge of uniforms on the streets came renewed concern for the morals and health of Irish women.
Table 17
Prosecutions of brothel-keepers and prostitutes, 1912–19
The anxiety of feminists and nationalists would be shared by the military authorities, which helps explain the vigour of the DMP’s crackdown on brothels. The absence of any prosecutions in the year preceding the outbreak of the war is easily explained by the lock-out, as is the dramatic falling off in arrests of women for soliciting, because police resources were fully stretched in the second half of the year in dealing with labour unrest. Once the war began, and especially from 1915 onwards, there was a considerable increase in the number of prosecutions of brothel-keepers.
The temporary increase in the number of arrests for soliciting on the streets in 1915 probably reflects the suppression of the brothels. The DMP could also use new powers under the Defence of the Realm Act to arrest women they suspected of having sexually transmitted disease in order to prevent them infecting soldiers.
At the same time voices as varied as the advanced nationalist journal Hibernian and the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Bernard, expressed concern over the corrupting influence of the military on Irish recruits. The Hibernian warned that
conscription leads to immorality … It has happened too often that decent young Irishmen removed from the restraint of home life, and placed in the corrupting surroundings of a barracks, have taken to drink and got into the habit of keeping company with the unfortunate women who are found wherever soldiers are stationed.
Dr Bernard bewailed the fact that it was impossible to police the situation, as there were hundreds of single women living in single rooms in Dublin. The view that single women living alone could become prostitutes and ‘contaminate the other respectable women living in the house’ worried churchmen of all denominations. The Catholic Primate, Cardinal Logue, asked rhetorically, ‘Shall we allow the brightest jewel in the crown of Ireland to be wrested from her?’ And the revolutionary socialist James Connolly told the authorities: ‘If you want to make Dublin clean in its moral standards remove your garrison.’17 At the other end of the social spectrum Lady Fingall organised a committee to establish a hostel for young domestic servants who were between jobs, where they could live free from the risk of contamination by vice.18
Two days after Lady Fingall told a meeting of the Catholic Truth Society in the Mansion House that ‘the state of the City of Dublin and its suburbs at night are a disgrace to Christianity and above all a disgrace to Catholic Ireland,’ P. T. Daly was relating to fellow-members of the corporation that fathers in his constituency could not let ‘the females of their families’ go out after nightfall in the area between the Custom House and the end of the North Wall. ‘The immorality that is going on is scandalous.’ He was ‘informed that the men responsible were not Dublin men,’ and stated that if the police did not do their duty others would. ‘I do not want to see bloodshed, but I may tell you that a vigilance committee is being formed, and it will be stopped once for all.’19
The Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association had already launched its own patrols under the leadership of its redoubtable founder and driving force, then eighty-six years old, Anna Haslam. A Quaker by religion and unionist in politics, she had no difficulty taking the initiative in conjunction with the National Union of Women Workers in Britain and the Chief Secretary’s Office. The patrols were made up of women, usually working in pairs, who policed what were considered the worst areas, from Sackville Street eastwards along the quays and into P. T. Daly’s North Wall area. They were usually accompanied by plain-clothes DMP constables. The association was affiliated to the National Union of Women Workers, whose support for the war effort did not lessen its commitment to advancing women’s rights through trade union organising and educational, political and philanthropic activities.
In the same week that the Weekly Irish Times published the speeches by Lady Fingall and P. T. Daly a member of the women’s patrol said she was ‘aghast at the scenes my night walks have shown me.’ She normally patrolled from 9:30 until 11:30 p.m., when Sackville Street
appears to be one great, low saloon, where young girls, soldiers, sailors and civilians loiter about. It goes to one’s heart to see how very young most of the girls are; also how drunk many of them are. They accost one another without apparently any shame, and more times than I can count have I turned my flashlight on to dark doorways and corners in laneways and disclosed scenes that are indescribable.
The culprits were ‘too cute’ for the police to catch them. ‘We try to impress these poor girls with the fact that we are their friends and out in their interests, but it is very hard.’ Some of them ‘are quite gentle,’ but
more often they give us great abuse and they have even raised their hands to us. The drunken ones are particularly hard to deal with.
The men included many foreign sailors but also well-dressed locals. Nor was economic need the only imperative.
Factory girls that I know do not care to go to their miserable homes till bedtime; so they frequent the streets, where mischief is just waiting for them. The filthy, ill-lighted, uncared for, and unprotected laneways in the city are veritable nurseries of evil.
This type of activity allowed suffrage campaigners and feminists generally to raise the issue of women’s rights and the vulnerability of children in such circumstances. The Irish Worker, on the other hand, had no time for the ‘new form of inquisition’ by ‘a number of ladies to interfere with the lives of the poor, to boss, to direct, to control and … keep in subjection … their poorer sisters.’ Over time, however, the women won grudging admiration, even from their critics, for their courage and their determination to prosecute men who used prostitutes, including ‘suburban swanks,’ thus seeking to redress the traditional attitude that dissolute women were the cause of the problem. If they were not particularly successful this was mainly due to the prevailing attitudes among the DMP and police magistrates.
Although their numbers were tiny, the publicity these patrols generated raised public awareness of the problem, and by January 1916 a Dublin Watch Committee had been set up, with sub-committees to tackle drunkenness, vice, immorality, moneylending, gambling, child abuse and, in early 1917, sexually transmitted disease. Later in 1917 the women’s patrols were incorporated in the DMP, with eight paid full-time workers.
As the war dragged on, a consensus would emerge that drew together different strands of opinion that shared concerns about its effects on Irish society and where it was taking the country morally. As a result, none of these groups appears to have allowed the DMP returns for the years after 1915 to revise their opinions, even though the number of arrests for soliciting continued to fall.
The main reason for the declining rate of prostitution in the city was increased prosperity, including the flow of separation allowances into the tenements and the growth of gainful employment for women in munitions, clothing and other war-related industries. This meant that far fewer engaged in more desperate ways of earning a living. Ironically, as the war progressed the concerns and fears of many nationalists would crystallise instead around the issue of separation women.20
‘From 1914 a new figure to the Irish scene became an odious symbol of British rule in Ireland, and a symbol that overtook the prostitute in the public understanding of immorality.’ This is how Maria Luddy characterises the way that separation women were regarded during the war years, and after.21 No figures exist for the number of women receiving allowances as dependants of men serving in the British forces, but it must have been significant.
Separation women formed the second-largest group in the corporation’s survey of the north inner-city tenements, after labourers, when classified by source of income. There were 3,476 heads of households who were labourers and 1,705 who were separation women. Coincidentally, the range of incomes was almost identical, with labourers earning between 7s and 60s a week and separation women between 6s and 60s. The returns do not provide details of the spread of incomes, but for labourers the great majority are likely to have been earning under 30s a week; and, unlike separation women, the amount a labourer earned bore no relation to the number of mouths he had to feed.
Most craft workers and even shopkeepers in the north city earned no more than 40s or 50s a week, so that resentment against separation women is easy to understand as regards comparative deprivation, especially given the widespread perception that much of the money the women received was spent on drink rather than on children.22 This view crossed the political spectrum, and the decision by the British government in 1916 to extend the payment of separation allowances to unmarried mothers outraged Irish public opinion. The military authorities were accused of promoting ‘illegitimacy’ and immorality; but the city’s councillors were relieved all the same that these women and their children were not thrown on the mercy of the workhouse system and the charity of the ratepayer.
The DMP reports during the war years do lend support to the popular nationalist perception of these women. Indeed the figures suggest that there was some truth, in Dublin at least, in the old maxim that when it came to drink ‘the women were worse than the men.’
Table 18
Drunk and disorderly offences, 1911–19
Even before the war a significant proportion of those arrested for drunkenness were women, and in 1912 they actually outnumbered male offenders for being drunk and disorderly. Arrests generally for this offence fell during the war years, but the proportion of women arrested rose, so that in 1918 and 1919 there were almost three times more female offenders than male offenders. The general falling off in arrests for both sexes after 1915 can be put down to declining consumption because of the increasing price of drink, shortage of supply, especially where spirits were concerned, reduced specific gravity levels, and the restrictive licensing laws. All of this was in tune with the thinking of David Lloyd George, who famously denounced the ‘drink traffic’ as ‘a greater danger even than Germany.’23 But perhaps some credit for increased sobriety can also be given to the pioneering work of the NSPCC and other voluntary bodies.
Separation women were not, of course, the only ones in the city with high incomes. These included dealers and, in the latter stages of the war, munitions workers. Many of these women would have frequented pubs just as much as prostitutes—or men, for that matter—because, as the woman vigilante referred to above recognised, Dublin tenement life was so appalling.
Ultimately the behaviour of some separation women towards rebel prisoners would seal their fate in the popular collective national memory. The recollections of the prisoners are almost unanimous in condemning what Dr Brighid Lyons Thornton referred to as ‘savage women’ from whom they had to be protected by their guards. What many prisoners probably did not know, and popular Dublin opinion quickly forgot, was that the rising coincided with the anniversary of the attack on Saint-Julien, where the ‘Old Contemptibles’ element of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, including many working-class reservists, suffered such heavy losses. At least some of the women who abused the rebels would have been mothers, widows, wives, daughters or sisters of the dead and wounded.
People took what they wanted from the drama played out on the city’s streets during and after the rising. For increasing numbers of Dubliners, drunken separation women—like the slums, the raging inflation, food and fuel shortages, lewd music-hall shows, censorship and military repression—were a manifestation of the blight that Britain’s imperial war machine had visited on the city. Conversely, they believed that Irish freedom would banish immorality along with its most visible and potent source, the British army.
The most extreme expression of this view came from the Irish Society for the Combating of the Spread of Venereal Disease, an ad hoc body in which Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan members were particularly active. They seemed to develop a particular obsession with the threat that syphilis posed to young children. Maud Gonne MacBride, widow of the executed 1916 leader John MacBride, told one meeting that the village of Artane was ‘crowded with war babies and some of them were suffering from syphilis.’ But, as Ann Matthews points out, the general effect of their campaign was to push ‘unmarried mothers and their children beyond the margins of social respectability’ rather than to generate informed debate.24
In reality, of course, the problems of poverty, prostitution and sexually transmitted disease could not be banished by the demonising of separation women, the British army or Dublin Castle. If Kathleen Lynn and Richard Hayes were correct in demanding that the military authorities take responsibility for treating the fifteen thousand Irish soldiers they estimated would have contracted syphilis before returning home, they were also wishfully misdiagnosing the bigger problem. As events proved, the blight of sexually transmitted disease could not be laid solely at the door of the British army. However, this does not mean that their efforts were wasted. The concerns raised by Dr Lynn in particular helped mobilise other feminists, political activists and champions of public health reform to support the establishment of St Ultan’s Hospital in Charlemont Street in early 1919. However, to gather public support its aims had to be broadened beyond that of eradicating the threat posed by syphilis to young mothers and their babies.25
Meanwhile the corporation moved to tackle the threat from STDs to adults by using recently activated Local Government Board legislation. In June 1918 a two-ward unit was set up in Dr Steevens’ Hospital to supplement existing facilities at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital and the Westmorland Lock Hospital in Townsend Street (an old facility for treating prostitutes and their children). It was proposed by P. T. Daly, chairman of the Public Health Committee, who had been so exercised by scenes on the North Wall in 1915 and had even advocated vigilantism. The unit opened in January 1919 and in its first three months recorded 452 male attendances and 59 female attendances; by the first quarter of 1920 the figures were 2,298 and 529, respectively, a fivefold increase in male attendances and a tenfold increase in female attendances. The number of cases increased after the establishment of the Irish Free State: there were 10,624 attendances at Dr Steevens’ Hospital in 1921/2, and the figure rose to 19,531 by 1924/5, when the British army could no longer be blamed for the problem.
At Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital over the same period the figures were 3,737 and 6,545, respectively, and a similar trend occurred at the Westmorland Lock Hospital. Altogether, attendances at outpatient clinics did not reach their maximum of 40,086 until 1934/5, when the number of inpatient days was 10,487. The number of inpatient days in 1922/3 had been 6,783.26
An Interdepartmental Report on Venereal Disease in 1926 found that infection was widespread, not only among prostitutes and members of the new Free State army but the wider population as well. Salvation came in the form of Salvarsan (arsphenamine), an organo-arsenic compound developed in 1910 that treated syphilis without the damaging long-term side effects of the old mercury-based treatments. There was also final acceptance by the new regime that sexually transmitted disease was primarily a health problem and not a malign manifestation of British oppression. Indeed the government even considered adopting the Continental model of registering prostitutes and regulating their trade to contain the threat to public health; but the moral guardians of Irish society, the Catholic hierarchy, vetoed any such revolutionary measure.27
The end of the war on 11 November 1918 no doubt provided countless occasions of sin, but it is unlikely that public health concerns were uppermost in anyone’s mind. The Irish Times reported:
Dublin gave itself over to rejoicings. The feelings that had been pent up for years were suddenly let loose and the whole city seemed to go mad with joy.
Flags of the Allies ‘were profusely displayed from the principal buildings … the Union Jack being, of course, in largest request.’ In the afternoon a dense crowd filled the area from College Green to St Stephen’s Green
and cheered themselves hoarse. The windows of the houses were occupied by people waving flags; the tops of tramcars were packed with cheering passengers; motor cars were laden with jubilant occupiers; the jarveys had more ‘fares’ than their cars could carry; military wagons bedecked with flags and carrying scores of happy ‘WAACs’ [members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps] pushed their way cautiously through the crowds,
while overhead, ‘areoplanes’ could be seen ‘gracefully gambolling in a cloudless sky, their wings flashing in the sunlight.’
The only reference to local political differences was a mock funeral for the Kaiser organised by students from the Royal College of Surgeons. They wheeled an effigy of Wilhelm II through the streets wrapped in ‘a Sinn Fein flag.’28
Arthur Lynch, whose recruitment efforts had been booed a few weeks earlier, was cheered by the crowd and a speech demanded in College Green. He declared that ‘barbarism is killed, now and for ever,’ before being carried shoulder high to Trinity College by British soldiers. However, the college authorities had ordered the gates closed, and Lynch had to make a less dramatic entrance through a side door.29
Sinn Féin was caught on the hop by news of the armistice. It had organised a meeting in the Mansion House that night, addressed by Alderman Tom Kelly and Harry Boland, where all the speakers could do was declare that the Allies’ victory would not deflect them from the campaign for independence. To raise morale, Boland predicted that the party would win ‘between seventy-five and eighty seats’ in the general election that must follow the ending of the war.
The celebrations continued on Tuesday with a military display at Wellington Barracks for the children of the Liberties. It was also the day when spontaneous joy at the ending of the war gave way to events driven by conflicting political agendas and aspirations about what the peace should bring.
For most soldiers it was a holiday, and they thronged the streets. The only incidents during the daylight hours were some stone-throwing by youths at a military band on St Patrick’s Hill and a few attacks on Union Jacks. The most prominent incident was at the head office of the National University in Merrion Square, where a group of students overpowered the staff and tore down a large Union Jack. A Sinn Féin supporter in Glasnevin hit on the simple expedient of mounting a lighted piece of turf on a pole and setting fire to flags on display.
Serious trouble erupted in the evening. Staff members in the Sinn Féin offices at 6 Harcourt Street received a last-minute warning that a group of Trinity students were planning an attack at 7 p.m. They barely had time to bar the doors before the building was bombarded with stones. The besieged workers retaliated with lumps of coal from the cellar but were finding it hard to hold out until two Irish Volunteer officers, Simon Donnelly and Harry Boland, arrived and dispersed the students by firing over their heads.30
The appearance of Donnelly and Boland marked the beginning of a counter-mobilisation by the Volunteers. Joseph McDonagh, a member of the 1st Battalion of the Dublin Brigade, recalled: ‘At seven o’clock that Monday evening members of the Dublin Brigade, including my own unit, acting on orders from GHQ proceeded to clear the streets of the British Military and their supporters.’ The main confrontation came when a group of soldiers decided to hold an impromptu victory march from St Stephen’s Green to Sackville Street at about 7:30 p.m. There were no incidents until they were approaching the GPO, where a large number of Volunteers and Sinn Féin supporters had gathered with flags. The soldiers turned into Middle Abbey Street to avoid a confrontation, only to be set upon by a fresh crowd. They were driven back across the river, and a rush of young men and youths waving Tricolours pushed though a DMP cordon on O’Connell Bridge and reached Grafton Street before being dispersed by a baton charge. During the riot a window in Switzer’s drapery shop was smashed and a group of British officers set upon in Wicklow Street.
Fresh trouble erupted north of the river when a group of women marched up Sackville Street carrying a Union Jack. After reaching the Parnell Monument they turned around and marched back to the GPO, taking up a position around Nelson’s Pillar. This was too much for the Volunteers and Sinn Féin supporters gathered nearby: they drove off the women, grabbed their Union Jack and burnt it to the accompaniment of rebel songs and shouts of ‘Up Dev!’ Undeterred, the women returned with a larger Union Jack and an escort of off-duty soldiers and sailors. Battle resumed at the corner of Henry Street, where the Sinn Féin supporters were once more victorious. However, on this occasion the flag was too large to burn easily and had to be torn into fragments first.
Other fights flared in the area between local people and off-duty soldiers. The latter were often accompanied by women ‘friends’, as the Irish Independent called them, and it was this factor that seemed to spark the most violence. In one instance where a woman collapsed at the O’Connell Monument the hostile crowd let an ambulance through but blocked it again when a soldier tried to accompany her to hospital.
The Independent stressed that most of the soldiers and sailors involved in the disturbances were from ‘England, Scotland and Wales,’ while the Irish Times played down the scale of the trouble and pointed out that ‘soldiers and civilians mingled in harmony’ in many parts of the city that night. But Volunteers claimed that they had control of the streets by 11 p.m., having defeated the ‘military, Dublin Metropolitan Police and loyalists.’31
Lloyd George called a general election for 14 December. The British Parliament also enacted the long-promised Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, enfranchising women over the age of thirty as voters and as candidates. By calling the election quickly and presenting voters with an opportunity to re-elect the war-winning coalition before the disillusionment of peace set in, Lloyd George ensured his own return to power with the loss of a few dissident Liberals. But it was a strategy that did the Irish Party no favours. It did not even attempt to contest twenty-five seats that were claimed by Sinn Féin, mainly in Munster. It would also have to secure a pan-nationalist electoral pact with Sinn Féin to ensure victory in some of its Ulster strongholds.
Another difficulty it had to contend with was the hostility of William Martin Murphy and his newspapers. Like many home-rulers, Murphy had lost relatives in the war and had also been disgusted by Redmond’s acceptance of partition. While not openly supporting Sinn Féin, Murphy’s papers subjected the Irish Party and Redmond’s successor, John Dillon, to relentless criticism. Most editions of the Irish Independent in the weeks before the election had front-page displays attacking the record of the Irish Party. On 5 December 1918 the display was printed under the heading ‘The Policy of Parnell.’ It used the lost leader’s famous statement that ‘no man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation’ and listed opposite this ‘What the Party Did.’ Among the climb-downs catalogued were:
| 1905–18 | Customs and Excise given up |
| 1905 | Devolution accepted |
| 1910 | Party declare for a Provincial, NOT a Dominion Parliament |
| 1914–1917 | Partition of Ireland agreed to |
It also contained damaging quotations from John Dillon and concluded: ‘Whoever Represents Parnell Mr. Dillon Definitely DOES NOT!’
On 6 December it listed all twenty-five constituencies where Sinn Féin was standing uncontested:
EXCELSIOR!
474,778 Electors have now declared for an INDEPENDENT IRELAND!
and urged other voters to do likewise. On 7 December the display included a ‘Message from the Poles Defence Committee, New York,’ declaring:
The sympathy of the world is with Ireland. Will you help Sinn Fein to make Ireland worthy of it by VOTING FOR INDEPENDENCE?’
On 10 December the paper published two quotations from Éamon de Valera in Lincoln Prison, ‘(As passed by the Censor).’ The next day the headline was ‘WHY DID THEY DIE?’ followed by a list of national martyrs from Brian Bórú to Thomas Ashe and Richard Coleman,32 who ‘died to secure the liberation of the oldest political prisoner in the world—IRELAND!’ Finally, on the day before the election, under the heading ‘TE DEUM!’ it quoted Cardinal William Henry O’Connell of Boston declaring that
IRELAND must be allowed TO TELL the world freely what she wanted, how she wished to be governed, and IRELAND must make the world hear HER.
The Independent added that ‘25,000,000 Irish-Americans back this demand AND 474,788 Irish Electors at home affirm it.’
In Dublin every constituency would be contested by the Irish Party. Only three sitting MPs had survived since 1914: William Field in the St Patrick’s division, P. J. Brady in the St Stephen’s Green division and J. J. Clancy in North County Dublin. The number of constituencies in the city and county had also been increased, from six to ten, reflecting changes in population and, most significantly, the massive increase in the electorate resulting from women having a vote for the first time. Other sitting MPs were Alfie Byrne, who would be defending his seat in the Harbour division, and John Dillon Nugent of the AOH, who would be running in the new St Michan’s division.
Suffrage groups were at first hopeful that many women would be nominated. There was certainly no lack of eligible candidates. Cissie Cahalan, one of the few working-class women to play a leading role in the suffrage movement and secretary of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, wrote to the newspapers urging Sinn Féin to nominate such figures as ‘Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington, Madam Markievicz, Mrs. Tom Clarke … Mrs. Wyse Power … Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Madam Gonne McBride, Countess Plunkett, Miss Gavan Duffy and Miss Nora Connolly.’ She also suggested Prof. Mary Hayden, Alice Stopford Green, Sarah Harrison, Mary Louisa Gwynn (wife of Stephen Gwynn) and Mary Kettle (widow of Tom Kettle) as candidates for the Irish Party. Only when it came to the Unionists were most of the candidates on her list from outside the capital, but even here she could propose Lady Dockrell, a Unionist member of Blackrock Town Council.33
Constance Markievicz would be the sole candidate who had been on Cissie Cahalan’s list, although Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was nominated for the Harbour division. Why she did not stand is not clear.34 It may have been that she felt, like many members of Sinn Féin, that Alfie Byrne’s position was unassailable. Whatever the reason, it was the second time in four years that the most working-class constituency in Dublin was denied the opportunity to vote for one of the country’s leading republican socialists. Instead a local publican, Phil Shanahan, who had been ‘out’ in Easter Week, was nominated for Sinn Féin.
The party’s campaign got off to a brisk start with a rally in the Liberties presided over by the long-standing local Sinn Féin councillor William T. Cosgrave. As he had been re-elected unopposed for Kilkenny, the party used the tried and tested tactic of nominating a prisoner for the seat. In this case it was the ITGWU finance officer and 1916 veteran Joseph McGrath, who was serving a sentence for sedition in Usk Prison in Monmouthshire. More than two thousand people attended the rally at the Fountain, including five hundred Volunteers in military formation.35
It was a symptom of the bankruptcy of the Irish Party in Dublin that its candidate in the Liberties should be John Saturninus Kelly, a renegade Labour councillor widely reviled for his attacks on Larkin during the lock-out, his condemnation of Connolly as a ‘pro-German’ and his unstinting support for the British war effort. He was general secretary of the Irish Railway Workers’ Trade Union, whose members ‘scabbed’ in numerous disputes, and he was suspected of surviving on secret subsidies from employers.
The early display of support by the Volunteers for Sinn Féin candidates was ominous for the Irish Party. The DMP estimated that there were twenty-three Sinn Féin ‘clubs’ in Dublin on the eve of the election, with a membership of 4,640. It warned that these activists would be supplemented by the efforts of the Irish Volunteers, which contained ‘all the younger members … and most fanatical Sinn Feiners.’36 Irish Citizen Army members would also canvass for Sinn Féin, especially for Constance Markievicz in the St Patrick’s division.
Markievicz benefited even more from the support of many Dublin women activists, angry as well as disappointed at the party’s failure to nominate more women. Some even suspected that Markievicz would be left without support by the organisation’s national office. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington described St Patrick’s as ‘the worst managed constituency in Dublin’ and said that women had a duty to go there to campaign for Markievicz.37
Her opponent was the old Parnellite and friend of ‘craft’ labour, William Field. Field’s problem was his voting record, which was exemplary for a Redmondite. His only policy initiative was the advocacy of a ‘dead meat’ plant for Dublin. It evoked an appropriate electoral image for the party.
Councillor Coghlan Briscoe, executive officer of the Town Tenants’ League, former sheriff and a pillar of the old political order in the city, ran as an independent against the long-established Sinn Féin councillor Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh in College Green. Rather than make any attempt to defend the Irish Party’s record, Briscoe urged electors to vote for him because of his expertise on rent legislation. As with Field, his programme did not inspire voters.
John Dillon Nugent faced another 1916 veteran, Michael Staines, in the St Michan’s constituency. Dillon ran the weakest of all campaigns in the city, pleading ill health as the reason for his absence from the hustings. Staines was a senior member of the IRB and the Irish Volunteers and had served as a very effective quartermaster of the Dublin Brigade in the period before the Easter Rising. However, his main claim to fame with the wider public at this point in his career was that he had been one of Connolly’s stretcher-bearers at the GPO.38
In Clontarf East the Irish Party candidate was Sir Patrick Shortall, whose anti-union record as an employer in 1913 would not be as damaging to his prospects as it would have been in one of the main city divisions, and he could hope for tactical support from the substantial Protestant electorate in the absence of a Unionist candidate. However, he faced a strong Sinn Féin opponent in Richard Mulcahy, Thomas Ashe’s lieutenant at Ashbourne.
The Unionists contested five seats. One of the most interesting contests was in Rathmines, where Sir Maurice Dockrell was the candidate. Dockrell was a pillar of the Unionist Party in Dublin. Since the outbreak of the war he had served on the Dublin Recruitment Committee and in 1918 had been appointed to the Recruiting Council of Ireland. He was chairman of the British Red Cross Society and of the St John Ambulance Brigade in Co. Dublin and was Deputy Lieutenant of the city. Although he had been involved in the 1913 Lock-out and had even issued revolvers to strike-breakers in his capacity as a justice of the peace, he had not initiated any lock-out at his own builders’ supply business. Rather he had to close when employees engaged in sympathetic strike action. As a consequence he was widely regarded as a ‘good employer.’
His own campaign was directed at the new women voters. He presented himself as a champion of women’s rights, especially those of soldiers’ wives and widows. He accused Sinn Féin, not without justification, of abandoning this group who had suffered so much in the war. Lady Dockrell campaigned actively for her husband, as did Lady Arnott, president of the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club. A coup for Dockrell was the endorsement of the veteran suffrage campaigner Anna Haslam, who had pioneered the women’s patrols. She and her late husband, Thomas, had been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1860s. She told women that their long-term interests were best served by being united with a large urban liberal democracy such as Britain rather than being tolerated in a small peasant society as a subordinate sex.
P. J. Little, the Sinn Féin candidate, laboured under the handicap of not having been ‘out’ in 1916. He was the editor of New Ireland and had been involved in the Irish National League, one of the more conservative groups that merged with Sinn Féin in its 1918 reincarnation. He was probably considered suitably conservative to be acceptable to the Rathmines electorate.39 His nationalist rival was George Moonan, a businessman and founder-member of the Knights of Saint Columbanus. Little was approached by UIL members to discuss an electoral pact against Dockrell. He immediately denounced Moonan, only to have to apologise when Moonan claimed that the proposal had been made without his knowledge. Moonan in turn embarrassed one of his most important supporters, Mary Kettle, by drawing her into another spat with Little about women’s rights. Dockrell left them to it.
Henry Hanna KC was the Unionist candidate in the St Stephen’s Green ward, where P. J. Brady had narrowly won the seat for the Irish Party in 1910. Hanna had hopes of winning it back. He was a liberal unionist, and he had defended Larkin and other strike leaders in the courts in 1913. He argued that the slum clearance and health reforms Dublin needed could be achieved only through the largesse of the British Treasury, and that meant maintaining the Union.
Alderman Tom Kelly was the Sinn Féin candidate in the constituency. If Kelly had not been ‘out’ in 1916 he had at least been interned and was also widely respected as a long-standing advocate of slum clearance. The Irish Party incumbent, Brady, could reasonably claim to have done what he could in Parliament to secure funds for slum clearance. He had worked with Archbishop Walsh to mobilise support from the business community for a housing programme to be financed by the American loans market but had failed, like many before him, to achieve anything of substance. He was perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a relatively weak and colourless candidate whose main power base lay in the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
The Pembroke division also had a three-cornered contest. Another 1916 man, Desmond Fitzgerald, was the Sinn Féin candidate, and John Good was the Unionist, with Charles O’Neill standing for the Irish Party. O’Neill was chairman of Pembroke Town Commission and was popular; but he had also been a member of the ill-fated Irish Convention and had to defend himself against allegations of being a ‘conscriptionist’. Good was a leading figure in the Dublin Master Builders’ Association and had recently secured the contract to build Collinstown aerodrome (precursor of Dublin Airport) for the Royal Air Force. He had been one of the hard-line supporters of William Martin Murphy in the lock-out. His position was simple and uncompromising: he opposed partition and predicted that the ‘flow of capital’ would cease ‘if the Sinn Feiners got into power.’ Fitzgerald was an IRB London-Irish blow-in but, as well as having served in the GPO garrison, was the beneficiary of a new phenomenon whereby leading figures in the old home rule establishment endorsed Sinn Féin candidates. In his case the blessing came from Michael Davitt Junior. Few expected Good to win, but nationalists were hopeful that O’Neill could see off the Sinn Féin challenge.
Unionists believed they had a good chance of winning South County Dublin, where the seat had often hung in the balance between nationalist and unionist. With the nationalist vote split, Sir Thomas Robinson, a hotelier and popular businessman, might have done better if he had not tried to tar the Irish Party candidate, Thomas Clarke, with the Sinn Féin brush. He said the only difference between the Irish Party and Sinn Féin was that Sinn Féin wanted a Republic ‘at one swoop’ while the Irish Party was willing ‘to take two bites of the cherry.’ In turn, any hope Clarke had of winning unionist votes evaporated when he asked the electorate of South County Dublin if they wanted to be ‘represented by an Orangeman,’ while one of Clarke’s supporters, J. J. Kennedy, chairman of Kingstown Urban District Council, said that Robinson represented ‘Carson, the “King of Ireland” of whom the present Government was afraid.’ By contrast, the Sinn Féin candidate, George Gavan Duffy, who had an impeccable nationalist family background, was moderation itself and sidestepped the sectarian row.
In North County Dublin, J. J. Clancy fought a rearguard action against Frank Lawless, who had been with Thomas Ashe at Ashbourne and was yet another Sinn Féin candidate in prison. The outcome was regarded as a foregone conclusion.
Unlike some parts of Ireland, most notably the Dillon heartland of Co. Roscommon and East Mayo, there was relatively little violence between Volunteers and Irish Party ‘bludgeon men’ in Dublin. But it was by no means absent, particularly in the Harbour division, where Alfie Byrne had a formidable election machine. Thomas Leahy, an Irish Citizen Army veteran of 1916 who worked for Sinn Féin in the area, recalled:
During one of our meetings down … East Wall, we met with a very hostile crowd who were mostly all Scotch people working in the Dockyard, and the followers of Alfie were also strong there. When I rose to open the meeting and to introduce Seán T. O’Kelly and … Phil Shanahan, we were met with a shower of sods and Union Jack Flags waving all around us. But it did not last long, as the precaution was taken … for this and a company of the Second Battalion Volunteers were near at hand and, with batons, cleared the place of the objectors in quick time. We were allowed to hold our meetings without interruption after that.40
The reality was that the remnants of the Irish Party’s strong-arm men were no match for the Volunteers. On polling day Sinn Féin ‘peace patrols’ appeared alongside military pickets, underlining the supremacy of the advanced nationalists over their opponents on the ground. Only in one instance did this innovation threaten to turn ugly and serve as a warning of what the future might hold for their opponents. This was in South County Dublin when Sir Thomas Robinson visited the Shankill polling station with Robert Potterton, an election worker and unionist solicitor in Kingstown. They arrived in their touring car at the top of the lane leading to the polling station to find it blocked by ‘a cordon of young men.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Potterton.
‘Soldiers of the Irish Republic,’was the reply.
‘You haven’t got a republic yet, so get out of the way,’ said Potterton.
The situation was defused by the appearance of an RIC constable. He explained that the ‘peace patrol’ was assisting him with the direction of traffic, as the lane was too narrow for vehicles to turn in. They had done such a good job that he had left them in charge while he took a break.
The remaining Dublin constituency was that of the University of Dublin. Elections for these seats, as for the National University, would take place over a number of days, hence the delay in counting the ballot papers until 28 December. As Carson had opted to run in Belfast, there were two vacancies to be contested in the university. The Irish Attorney-General, A. W. Samuels, was defending his seat, and Sir Robert Woods, professor of laryngology and otology, was renewing his challenge to the lawyers’ monopoly of representation for the university. The other candidates were William Morgan Jellett KC, another lawyer, and Captain Stephen Gwynn.
Samuels and Jellett were both unionists labouring under the handicap of having to defend government policy on Ireland, while Woods was a unionist in principle but reserved the right to freedom of action in representing the college’s best interests and in seeking a negotiated political settlement for southern unionists with the nationalist majority. Gwynn’s politics were a vaguer version of those espoused by Woods. The one firm assurance he gave the electorate was that he would oppose partition, although the implication was that he would prefer home rule or dominion status if necessary in order to do so. His main assets were his youth and his war service. The fact that his proposers were also junior officers in the armed forces showed that he was a rank outsider. By contrast, Samuels was nominated by the Primate of the Church of Ireland and seconded by the vice-provost of the university, while Woods was proposed by the Archbishop of Dublin and Jellett by the Bishop of Cashel.
Samuels and Woods would be returned, showing that an endorsement by the Unionist Party was not sufficient in itself to guarantee election. Eoin MacNeill would secure a National University seat for Sinn Féin.
When the votes in the other Dublin constituencies were counted, Sinn Féin failed to secure only one seat, that in Rathmines.
The margin of Sinn Féin victory was comfortable in most of the constituencies. Michael Staines defeated John Dillon Nugent by 7,553 votes to 3,996 in the St Michan’s division. Nugent did surprisingly well, given that he failed to campaign and had a knack of antagonising the electorate when he did. Just as Farren had to appeal to the crowd to allow the victorious Nugent to address them in 1915, so Staines had to repeat the request in 1918 for Nugent in defeat. Staines took the opportunity of his own acceptance speech to respond to the charge by Nugent’s AOH election workers that he only represented poor people. To loud cheers, he said he was proud of the charge and proud of the poor people of St Michan’s who had put him at the head of the poll. Many of the voters in the hall that day were probably men and women who would not have had a vote when Nugent defeated the Labour candidate, Tom Farren, three years earlier.
Joseph McGrath won the most crushing Sinn Féin victory in Dublin, with 8,256 to 1,389 for John Saturninus Kelly in the St James’s division. In College Green, Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh won by 9,662 votes to 2,853 for the former sheriff, Coghlan Briscoe.
Sir Patrick Shortall did better than expected in Clontarf, polling a respectable 3,228 to the 5,974 votes for Richard Mulcahy. Shortall clearly benefited from tactical voting by Protestants in the absence of any unionist candidate in a constituency that regularly returned an alderman and at least two unionist councillors.
In North County Dublin, Frank Lawless won by 9,138 votes to 4,428 for the Irish Party veteran J. J. Clancy. It was the same in the other constituencies where a straight fight took place between Sinn Féin and the Irish Party. In the St Patrick’s division Constance Markievicz secured a comfortable win—despite the fears of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington—with 7,835 votes to 3,752 for William Field. J. J. Kelly, the publican who had run as an unsuccessful ‘Home Rule Labour’ candidate in 1914, ran again as an independent, securing 372 votes.
In the Harbour division Alfie Byrne put up the most redoubtable fight of any Irish Party candidate in Dublin. He won 5,368 votes, but it was not enough to see off the Sinn Féin challenge from his fellow-publican Phil Shanahan, who won with 7,707 votes.
In the three-way contests with unionist candidates, Sinn Féin also outperformed the Irish Party. In St Stephen’s Green, Alderman Tom Kelly topped the poll with 8,461 votes. This was more than double the combined vote of P. J. Brady, with 2,902, and Henry Hanna, with a disappointing 2,775.
In Pembroke and South County Dublin the results were much closer. In Pembroke, Desmond Fitzgerald won by only 6,113 votes to 4,137 for John Good and 2,630 for Charles O’Neill. In South County Dublin, George Gavan Duffy won with 5,133 to 4,354 votes for Sir Thomas Robinson and 3,819 for Thomas Clarke. In both these constituencies the unionist candidates might have won if the nationalist vote had split more evenly, or if significant numbers of conservative middle-class Catholics had opted, as they had in the past, for the unionist candidate. But those days were gone.
In Rathmines, however, Sir Maurice Dockrell secured a convincing victory by polling more votes than the combined total of his opponents. Little won 5,566 votes, Moonan 1,780 and Dockrell 7,400. Rathmines was also the only Dublin constituency where the votes of servicemen played a significant though not a decisive role. More than 1,500 soldiers and sailors were entitled to vote in Rathmines. Of the 539 who bothered to do so, 459 voted for Sir Maurice Dockrell, 50 voted for Moonan and 30 for Little. Given the demographics of Rathmines, the high turn-out by servicemen probably reflected the relatively high proportion of middle-class and Protestant recruits from the constituency, although Dockrell’s championing of the rights of war widows and their families no doubt secured votes from the families of nationalist servicemen as well.
It would be January 1920 before municipal elections would consolidate the power of Sinn Féin on Dublin Corporation—supplemented by a large Labour contingent. But the 1918 general election had served formal notice on the old home rule regime in City Hall.
Nationally, Sinn Féin had won 73 seats to 6 for the Irish Party, of which 4 were in Ulster constituencies, where pan-nationalist electoral pacts had allowed it a clear run against the unionists. The other big losers were Asquith’s anti-coalition Liberals, who won 28 seats. The Irish Times quipped that if the dissident Liberals could fly to London in a Handley-Page aeroplane, an Irish jaunting car could accommodate the remnants of the Irish Party.
Unfortunately, the spectacular Sinn Féin electoral victory of December 1918 made very little difference to the practical lives and problems of Dubliners. One threat that neither Sinn Féin nor the end of the war could remove was that of power cuts. In fact the situation grew more critical in the city during the winter of 1918/19. Reduced heating in hospitals and the temporary closing of public baths were already in force when the corporation’s Electricity Supply Committee produced new proposals on 1 October 1918 for conserving dwindling coal supplies. These included the introduction of lighting restrictions and increased charges to dampen demand. The committee told councillors that consumption would have to be reduced by two-thirds compared with the winter of 1917/18. The only alternative would be to cut power supplies to industry, causing even greater disruption to the economic and social life of the city. The committee proposed, therefore, that offices close by 4:30 p.m. and shops by 5:30 p.m. four days a week. This was rejected in favour of an amendment from an alliance of shopkeepers and ratepayers’ champions that shops would remain open until 7 and keep their lights on until 7:30. It was also agreed that the restrictions would last only until 28 February 1919, instead of the end of March, as proposed by the committee.
While industry was spared power cuts, it would have to bear the brunt of the price increases. Lighting rates for consumers would rise by 1d per unit from 1 October, but rates for machines used in workshops and factories would rise by between 2½d and 5¼d per unit. Vital utilities and large-scale employers, such as the corporation’s pumping station and the National Shell Factory, would be charged at the lower rate of 2½d per unit.41
The restrictions on opening hours were quite acceptable to the banks, which had repeatedly expressed a willingness to close at 2:30 p.m., and to the insurance industry, which had stated that it could close offices by 4:30; but even in their modified form the restrictions provoked a strong reaction from shopkeepers. The Irish Retail Confectioners’ Association complained that the proposed Early Closing Order was unacceptable, ‘as it affects so many small traders and also causes great inconvenience to the general public who are compelled to be in business all day.’
However, the power to determine lighting orders lay ultimately with the British government. On Armistice Day, 11 November, the Lord Lieutenant made orders for all cities in Ireland. Under these, every retail shop in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Derry and Waterford had to close no later than 5:30 p.m. on weekdays, no later than 7 p.m. on Fridays and no later than 9:30 p.m. on Saturdays. Businesses such as hairdressing, temperance bars and fish-and-chip shops could remain open until 9:30 p.m., provided they closed for an equivalent number of hours during the afternoon to make up the difference. Fines of up to £100 could be imposed under the Defence of the Realm Act for breaches of the regulations.42
On the coal supply front, an offer of help came from an unexpected quarter when the Director-General of Transport, H. G. Burgess, who also represented the British Coal Controller’s Department in Dublin, advised Fred Allan that a shipment of 1,000 tons of high-quality coal could be purchased for 42s per ton—admittedly a high price but no more than the market now commanded. Perhaps mindful of the power of the retail lobby, Burgess said it would be available only if it was kept in reserve for emergencies, when all other stocks were exhausted. P. T. Daly immediately proposed that the offer be accepted, with the proviso that it would be used only in extremity to provide fuel at cost to families with a weekly income below 8s per capita. This was agreed by the corporation.43 Even the situation of better-off households was now desperate. Since the summer, coal merchants had had their daily ration reduced from 3¾ tons to 1¼.44
The battle for supplies continued into December, with Allan complaining that councillors did not appreciate the gravity of the situation. He had never been able to secure supplies for more than four weeks at a time over the previous six months, and as Christmas approached he reported that there was only a fortnight’s supply left in the city. Consumption was exceeding supply by 30 per cent.
Nevertheless, the retailers continued their lobbying, with some success. Eventually the Under-Secretary, Sir William Byrne, met a corporation delegation on 16 December and agreed to lift lighting restrictions for shopkeepers from 20 December until the 24th, so that they could avail of the pre-Christmas sales bonanza.45 As so often in the past, the old UIL machine had proved its ability to focus on the short-term interests of the ‘shopocracy’ before the common good of Dubliners.
The longer opening hours did at least make the peace seem a little more tangible, and all the newspapers dipped into their reserves of ink and newsprint to carry the largest advertisements for the Christmas and January sales since before the war. It would be March before restrictions on the importation of such luxury items would be relaxed.46
It was April 1919 before coal supplies improved, partly because of industrial unrest in Britain and the chaotic state of the mining industry there.47 Nevertheless, the general situation was improving, and a sense of normality began to prevail from 1 March, when businesses were allowed to light their premises until 9:30 p.m. every evening.
The price of essential items such as coal and food would begin to fall only when controls on production and imports were relaxed. Once more the British government was blamed for the slow relaxation of controls, with nationalists of all hues blaming the coal shortages in particular on the British government’s reluctance to allow cheap American coal into the market. By March coal merchants were warning that the stock for domestic use had fallen to one week’s supply and supplies for industry to four weeks. The Dublin United Tramways Company could maintain its services only with assistance from one of its directors, William Hewat. He was also one of the city’s leading coal merchants and helped ensure a continuity of supply.48
The retail price of coal in Dublin was now between 56s and 60s a ton, while Londoners paid 30s. The merchants pointed out that allowing in cheaper American coal, even if freight and shipping costs remained the same, could cut prices by 7s a ton. They also protested that shipping rates remained unchanged, despite the disappearance of the German submarine menace.
Even wholesale customers in Dublin were paying more than household consumers in Britain for supplies, because of the high shipping and freight rates. The corporation’s Electricity Supply Department was still paying 42s 6d a ton in early 1919. As a result, wartime tariffs on customers had to be extended into the second quarter of 1919. On the positive side, many large drapery shops and other businesses had managed to reduce their bills to pre-war levels through cost-efficiency measures.
Similar discrepancies persisted in prices for other staple items, some of them hard to explain, such as the price of Irish eggs at between 3s 9d and 5s 6d a dozen in Dublin and only 3s in Britain.49
Meanwhile, Laurence O’Neill was re-elected Lord Mayor for the third time on 25 February 1919. In many respects the election resembled the two previous occasions, not least in that some leading councillors, most notably W. T. Cosgrave, were in prison. O’Neill admitted that practically all his promises to keep down rates, contain costs and build new houses for the working class had not been honoured. He had pushed new housing schemes in Spitalfields, the McCaffrey estate (Mount Brown), St James’s Walk and Fairbrother’s Fields as far as he could without central government funds, and he sharply criticised the failure of the government to notify Dublin Corporation of the availability of grants in aid for housing, unlike its British counterparts. In his own defence and that of the corporation he reminded his colleagues, not unreasonably, that ‘all our critics, whether of the press or public, invariably left out the fact that there had been a war on.’
The only discordant note came with the vote of thanks to the outgoing high sheriff, Sir Andrew Beattie, whom Tom Kelly criticised for entertaining Lord French in the middle of the conscription crisis. Beattie said he ‘may not have pleased everyone, any more than myself, but I have the satisfaction of knowing I have conscientiously done my duty.’50 It was an apologia for all the aldermen and councillors of the old regime as they awaited the events that would inevitably sweep them away.
The first step had already been taken a month earlier, on 21 January, when the twenty-four Sinn Féin MPs at liberty met in the Mansion House to constitute themselves as Dáil Éireann and to issue the Declaration of Independence, which gave democratic ratification to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and its establishment in arms on Easter Monday 1916.
The Dáil, the first legislative assembly to gather in Ireland since the Act of Union, also adopted the Democratic Programme. The idea for such a document, outlining the social and economic aspirations of the infant Republic, had first been mooted by the Dublin Trades Council. The invitation to draft it came from the Sinn Féin leadership, in recognition of the role Labour had played in its own victory, especially in Dublin. The main author was Thomas Johnson, assisted by William O’Brien and Cathal O’Shannon of the ITGWU. It was amended by Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh to meet objections from Michael Collins and other senior IRB members. They wanted the removal of explicit affirmations of socialist principles, such as the right of the nation ‘to resume possession’ of the nation’s wealth ‘whenever the trust is abused or the trustee fails to give faithful service.’ Ó Ceallaigh also had to remove a reference that encouraged ‘the organisation of people into trade unions and co-operative societies.’51
Nevertheless, the document finally adopted reasserted the claim in the Proclamation that national sovereignty ‘extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation.’ It further reaffirmed ‘that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.’
‘In return for willing service,’ every citizen had the right to ‘an adequate share of the produce of the Nation’s labour,’ and ‘it shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.’
Thomas Johnson would cry as he sat listening to the declaration being read into the Dáil record by ‘the Alderman’, Tom Kelly.52 Whether they would have been tears of joy if he could have seen the future is a moot point; but the fact remains that such a radical document could not have been conjured into existence anywhere in Ireland other than Dublin.
On the same day a group of Irish Volunteers in Co. Tipperary shot and killed two RIC constables who were escorting a consignment of gelignite. The ringleaders would soon be on their way to Dublin to assist Michael Collins, the man who objected to the Democratic Programme’s socialist content, in bringing the war to the streets of the capital.
The unfolding situation was neatly summed up in the editorial of the Irish Times on 1 January 1919. ‘We stand on the threshold of a New Year. It is the year of a new order in international affairs, of a new order in British politics, of a new and strange disorder in Irish life.’