Chapter 1: First blood
1. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 1043, Joseph V. Lawless. He subsequently rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Free State army. Captain Judge appears to have been a naturally argumentative individual, as he subsequently managed to fall out first with the Redmondite faction in the Volunteers and then with republicans, resigning his commission and his place on the Executive in December 1914.
2. The manner in which the guns were spirited away also told a story. The upwardly mobile Kathleen Boland, widow of a Fenian and mother of the future republican leaders Harry and Gerry Boland, hid some of the Howth Mausers in her garden at 15 Marino Crescent while the confrontation with the Crown forces took place a few yards away. Volunteers retrieved them later. Rifles left in the grounds of the ITGWU premises at nearby Croydon Park that day were moved into the union’s head office in Liberty Hall and retained for use by the Citizen Army. Fitzpatrick, Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution, p. 15; Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 1043, Joseph V. Lawless.
3. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 140–41.
4. The account of the Howth gun-running and subsequent events is based on contemporaneous reports in the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Freeman’s Journal, supplemented by Martin, The Howth Gun-Running and the Kilcoole Gun-Running.
5. British unions and socialist organisations sent more than £110,000 to help the strikers. The Dublin relief fund set up by the Lord Mayor raised less than £6,500 to help the families of non-unionised workers. See Yeates, Lockout.
6. Yeates, Lockout.
7. Irish Independent, 14 and 15 July 1914; Keane, Ishbel, p. 201–9; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 69.
8. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 69.
9. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 139.
10. One commentator in 1912 expressed the fear that ‘the Irish parliament will be similar in character to the present Dublin Corporation, which is shunned by all decent men and … is an object of contempt to the citizens.’ John Moynihan, quoted by Ferriter in The Transformation of Ireland, p. 41–2.
11. Yeates, Lockout, p. 109.
12. Tenants received only six months’ rent to cover the cost of moving.
13. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 1, p. 341–3.
14. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, chap. 4 and 5; Report of the Departmental Committee into the Housing Conditions of the Working Classes in the City of Dublin, appendix 15; Yeates, Lockout, chap. 9.
15. McManus, Dublin, p. 23–4.
16. Father Finlay’s 1901 quotation is from Pašeta, Before the Revolution. The 1914 quotation is from the Irish Times, 7 March 1914.
17. Housing Committee, Dublin Corporation Reports, 1914, vol. 3.
18. For a discussion of the falling numbers of Protestants in Dublin during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, p. 291–5; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 39–40; Pašeta, Before the Revolution, p. 82.
19. Yeates, Lockout, p. 440–46.
20. Most of the details on Dublin’s Protestant community are taken from Maguire, ‘The Church of Ireland and the problem of the Protestant working class of Dublin, 1870s–1930s,’ in Ford, McGuire and Milne, As by Law Established, Maguire, ‘The organisation and activism of Dublin’s Protestant working class, 1883–1935,’ Irish Historical Studies, May 1994, Maguire, ‘A socio-economic analysis of the Dublin working class, 1870–1926,’ Irish Economic and Social History, 20, 1993, and Maguire, ‘The Dublin Working Class, 1870s–1930s: Economy, society, politics,’ in Bartlett, History and Environment.
21. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p. 9–10.
22. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p. 20.
23. The gunfire did not prevent the mob from wrecking the Conservative Working Men’s Club premises.
24. Ó Maitiú, W. and R. Jacob, p. 17.
25. Geraghty, William Patrick Partridge and His Times, p. 15–16; Yeates, Lockout, p. 608, n. 6.
26. Goulding was reputedly the richest businessman in Ireland after Lord Iveagh. Ironically, the Belfast shipping magnate Lord Pirrie, a Liberal, threatened to lock out workers if they opposed home rule.
27. Maguire, ‘The Church of Ireland and the problem of the Protestant working class of Dublin, 1870s–1930s,’ in Ford, McGuire and Milne, As by Law Established; Maguire, ‘The organisation and activism of Dublin’s Protestant working class, 1883–1935,’ Irish Historical Studies, May 1994; Maguire, ‘A socio-economic analysis of the Dublin working class, 1870–1926,’ Irish Economic and Social History, 20, 1993; Maguire, ‘The Dublin Working Class, 1870s–1930s: Economy, society, politics,’ in Bartlett, History and Environment. See Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, p. 22–6, Morrissey, Introduction to McKenna, The Social Teachings of James Connolly, p. 14, Newsinger, Rebel City, p. 148, and Murray, Seán O’Casey, p. 34–5.
28. He was also chairman of the Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien bakery and therefore a major employer in the city.
29. Herbert may also have felt circumscribed in what he could say because he was related by marriage to the general officer commanding the forces in Ireland, Sir Arthur Paget.
30. McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p. 33.
31. Up to eighty members of the corps joined the Dublin ‘Pals Battalion’ shortly after the war broke out. Dublin Evening Mail, 14 September 1914.
32. Irish Times, 28 January and 1 and 3 April 1914; Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Annual Report, 1914; Yeates, Lockout, p. 445, 537–8.
33. Yeates, Lockout, p. 423.
34. Nationalist MP for West Belfast and founder of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. See the confidential report on proselytism in the Walsh Papers, Laity File, Dublin Diocesan Archive, for a flavour of the proselytism wars; also Montefiore, From a Victorian to a Modern. For a general overview see Yeates, Lockout, especially chap. 20–23; Irish Times, 26 November 1913.
35. Irish Times, 27 and 28 October 1913.
36. Morrissey, A Man Called Hughes, p. 14–15; Maume, D. P. Moran, p. 19–20; Bolster, The Knights of St Columbanus, chap. 1.
37. Morrissey, William J. Walsh, chap. 12.
38. Yeates, Lockout, p. 85–93.
39. Yeates, Lockout, p. 75.
40. Maume, The Long Gestation, p. 125; Yeates, Lockout, p. 44–5.
41. It is now the head office of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
42. Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Annual Report, 1914; Irish Times, 28 January 1914 and 19 February 1914; Yeates, Lockout, p. 104.
43. Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question, p. 16, 47.
44. Yeates, Lockout, p. 102–3.
45. Shane Leslie, ‘Archbishop Walsh,’ in Cruise O’Brien, The Shaping of Modern Ireland.
46. O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound, p. 23.
Chapter 2: ‘The desolating cloudburst of war’
1. Freeman’s Journal, 4 August 1914, Irish Times, 4 August 1914, Irish Independent, 5 August 1914, Dublin Evening Mail, 5 August 1914, and Irish Times, 14 August 1914.
2. Freeman’s Journal, 1 September 1914.
3. Peter Martin, ‘Dulce et decorum: Irish nobles and the Great War,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, p. 32–3.
4. Irish Times, 5 August 1914.
5. Ironically, the British government lifted the ban on the importation of arms into Ireland on 5 August, largely in response to complaints from Unionists that their isolated brethren in the South were vulnerable to attack by armed nationalists.
6. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, General Correspondence on Great War, Part 1, file 2314.
7. Irish Worker, 22 August 1914; O’Riordan, ‘Connolly reassessed’; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 252.
8. Dublin Evening Mail, 17 August 1914.
9. Dublin Evening Mail, 17 August 1914; O’Riordan, ‘Connolly reassessed.’ In 1920 Dublin councillors voted unanimously to restore the now dead Kuno Meyer to the city’s roll of freemen.
10. Irish Times, 11 August 1914; Dublin Evening Mail, 21 August 1914.
11. Freeman’s Journal, 21 August 1914.
12. The non-residential unemployment assistance.
13. Irish Times, 11 August 1914; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 10 August 1914.
14. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution.’ The act provided grants of 10 per cent for approved schemes, plus loans repayable at 4½ per cent.
15. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution.’
16. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution.’
17. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 69.
18. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 69; McManus, Dublin, p. 46.
19. Irish Independent, 13 August 1914.
20. Irish Independent, 21 September 1914. Despite their name, the United Irishwomen had no republican overtones. The organisation was sponsored by the liberal unionist Horace Plunkett and was a forerunner of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. Likewise, the Irish Volunteers Aid Association had been set up in the wake of Redmond’s pledge to support the war effort and was dominated by moderate nationalists and members of the gentry, including Anglo-Irish peers such as Viscount Gormanston and the Earl of Fingall.
21. See Eileen Reilly, ‘Women and voluntary war work,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War.
22. Eileen Reilly, ‘Women and voluntary war work,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War; Fingall, Seventy Years Young, p. 363–4. O’Farrelly won the post against stiff opposition; among the unsuccessful candidates was Patrick Pearse. McCartney, UCD, p. 29.
23. Eileen Reilly, ‘Women and voluntary war work,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War.
24. Many of them were placed in workhouses. They do not appear to have stayed long, because of the poor accommodation, and moved to Britain. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 252; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 96.
25. Eileen Reilly, ‘Women and voluntary war work,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War.
26. Eileen Reilly, ‘Women and voluntary war work,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War.
27. Irish Independent, 21 September 1914; Keane, Ishbel, p. 219–20.
28. Asquith Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms. 38, f. 236.
29. An indication of Lady Aberdeen’s wide range of friends, and poor political judgement, was that among her confidants was Margaret MacNeill, sister of Eoin MacNeill, first chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers.
30. Irish Independent, 21 September 1914; ‘Redmond’s double-refusal to Lord Kitchener,’ in Tierney, Eoin MacNeill, p. 151.
31. Though a founder-member of the Volunteers and secretary of the organisation, Kettle was a moderate nationalist. His father, Andrew Kettle, had been a leading member of the Land League and a Parnellite; his brother Tom was a former Irish Party MP, professor of national economics at University College, Dublin, and a leading commentator on public affairs. Kettle himself served in a number of senior posts with Dublin Corporation, including Treasurer and manager of the municipal power station in Ringsend.
32. Martin, The Irish Volunteers, p. 152–5.
33. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 241.
34. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 37.
35. Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare, p. 51. He accepts the low figure of 350 from the statements of some former Dublin Volunteers in the Ernie O’Malley papers, while police intelligence figures are noticeably higher. The police had obvious reasons for exaggerating the nature of the threat; but four thousand men joined the Volunteers at the launch in November 1913, long before the movement had Redmond’s blessing. Large numbers were also mobilised for the Howth and Kilcoole gun-running, and the indications are that the militants hung on to the rifles. This suggests that there was a substantial appetite for militant nationalism in Dublin. DMP estimates may include Citizen Army and Fianna Éireann members.
36. Dublin Castle Special Branch File, National Archives, CO 904/193/1.
37. Dublin Castle Special Branch File, National Archives, CO 904/193/1.
38. Ashe Papers, mss 46,788, NLI. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 32.
39. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 35.
40. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 56.
41. O’Farrelly wanted to reduce the Coiste Gnótha to 25, but an amendment proposed by Éamon de Valera to reduce it to 30 was accepted. De Valera was perceived as less radical than Ashe, who unsuccessfully proposed increasing the size of the committee to 35.
42. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 29.
43. Irish Freedom, November 1913. Blythe had moved from his native Magheragall, Co. Antrim, to work as a boy clerk in the Department of Justice and was soon immersed in radical nationalism. He was inducted into the IRB and worked for a season on the Ashe family farm in Co. Kerry to learn Irish.
44. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause.
45. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 41–2.
46. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, especially chap. 15.
47. Ashe Papers, mss 46,788. The comments were actually made to a Gaelic League meeting in Cork as Ashe was about to depart for America. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 63.
48. Ashe Papers, mss 46,788/2, NLI. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 66; Hugh Oram, “An Irishman’s Diary,” Irish Times, 24 February 2005.
49. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 66; Cathal O’Shannon, Evening Press, 15 September 1961.
50. See, for instance, Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 284, Michael Staines. The venue was the Broadmeadow Estuary, just north of Malahide.
51. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 72.
52. 20,000 Dublin servicemen would survive to be demobilised in 1918.
53. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 245. From 1899 to 1913, 12,561 men joined the regular army in the Dublin recruiting area, compared with 8,067 in Belfast. The total recruitment figure for Ireland was 44,975.
54. Daly, Dublin, p. 102–7; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 199–210.
55. Yeates, Lockout, Prologue, xxii. Irish Times, 7 March 1914. Dublin Evening Post, 14 September 1914. Not only did dockers earn a bonanza in overtime in August 1914, but ITGWU records suggest that many men blacklisted during the lock-out were re-employed on a temporary basis. Ms 3097, NLI.
56. Dooley, Irishmen or English Soldiers?, Introduction.
57. Dublin Evening Mail, 8 August 1914; Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1, p. 160.
58. The chief medical officer for Dublin, Sir Charles Cameron, attributed the ‘Pals’ soubriquet to the Dublin music-hall entertainer Alfred ‘the Great’ Vance, whose song ‘He’s a Pal o’ Mine’ was a great favourite with Dublin audiences. In fact several wartime battalions in Britain had already been given this nickname. Cameron, whose father and sons served as officers in the British army, believed Vance’s ‘song clung to public memory’ and was adopted by ‘the heroic 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers … How little Dublin thought when it chanted and whistled that song which Vance sung many years ago, at the Rotunda, that the name of “The Pals” was destined to thus live in the fighting record of our island story.’ Cameron Papers.
59. Findlater, Findlater’s, p. 252.
60. Dublin Evening Mail, 18 August 1914; Orr, Field of Bones, p. 25.
61. Dublin Evening Mail, 25 and 28 September 1914.
62. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, 84.
63. Hart, The IRA at War, p. 118–9.
64. Some 7 per cent of the population of the city joined up, compared with 2 per cent of the county. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 44–5 and appendix 3. Dublin’s recruitment level was exceeded only by Belfast and Derry. Dooley, Irishmen or English Soldiers?, p. 7.
65. Reservists were paid between 3s 6d and 7s a week and were liable for annual training camps as well as military duty for up to twelve years after being discharged.
66. See, for example, the case of Francis Fitzpatrick of the Paving Department, whose half pay was stopped in mid-1915 on the grounds that his family were not enduring any hardship. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 1915, p. 13; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1915, vol. 2, p. 279, 378.
67. Arthur Guinness, Commemorative Roll. The figure for officers includes a small number of cadets and warrant officers. Murray, ‘The First World War and a Dublin distillery workforce.’
68. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, European War, General Correspondence, Part 1, file 2314; Irish Times, 18 February 1915.
69. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, European War, Recruitment, file 2600.
70. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 1, Report no. 67.
71. Daly, Dublin, p. 109–11; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 36, 52.
72. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 44–5.
73. Emmet Dalton served as an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross. His younger brother Charlie joined the Irish Volunteers after the Easter Rising and became a member of the GHQ Intelligence Department. Sergeant William Malone was a reservist in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and was killed at Mouse Trap Farm on 24 May 1915. A year later his brother Michael Malone, a lieutenant in the Irish Volunteers, was shot by British soldiers while defending Mount Street Bridge during the rising.
74. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p. 44.
75. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 8, 10, 17. The Irwins had a long association with the British army. The author’s grandfather had been an NCO in the East Yorkshire Regiment and his brother served as an officer in the First World War. The maid, Rosie, was married ‘out of the house’ to a soldier as she was an orphan.
Chapter 3: ‘Blood, horror, shrieks and groans’
1. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 9.
2. Strachan, The First World War, p. 867–8.
3. Guinness managed to mitigate some of the worst aspects of the duty later in the war by reducing the specific gravity and thus the alcoholic strength of its stout. Dennison and MacDonagh, Guinness, p. 158–9.
4. Freeman’s Journal and Irish Times, 30 April 1915; Irish Independent, 1 May 1915.
5. Irish Independent, 3 May 1915.
6. Cork Free Press, 1 May 1915, quoted in the Irish Independent of 1 May 1915.
7. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 14–15; Murray, ‘The First World War and a Dublin distillery workforce’; Saothar, 15, 1990.
8. Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 111.
9. Clarkson, Labour and Nationalism in Ireland, p. 253.
10. Yeates, Lockout, p. 282–3, 286.
11. Connolly, Workers’ Republic, 12 June 1915.
12. Manifesto to the Electors of College Green, reprinted in the Workers’ Republic.
13. Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 112.
14. Irish Independent, 12 and 14 June 1915; Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, p. 63–6; Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 111–13; O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, p. 262–4.
15. Dublin Evening Mail, 15 September 1914.
16. Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, p. 75–9; Irish Independent, 27 April 1915.
17. Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, p. 75–9.
18. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 1915, p. 248.
19. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 1915, p. 410–15; Yeates, Lockout, p. 506–7.
20. Irish Independent, 21 July 1915.
21. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 1915, p. 416–17.
22. Johnston, Home or Away, p. 80. Mahon resumed command of the division shortly afterwards for its Balkan campaign.
23. Orr, Field of Bones, p. 123–32.
24. Irish Independent, 19 August 1915.
25. ‘The Dubsters’ was the title given, only half-jokingly, to an amalgamated battalion of Royal Munster Fusiliers and Royal Dublin Fusiliers at Gallipoli after their losses became too heavy to sustain separate units.
26. Irish Independent, 25 August 1915.
27. Irish Independent, 27 August 1915.
28. Irish Independent, 27 August 1915.
29. Irish Independent, 27 August 1915.
30. Dickinson, The Dublin of Yesterday, p. 69.
31. Dickinson, The Dublin of Yesterday, p. 71.
32. Irish Independent, 28 August 1915.
33. The first letter of condolence Cameron received was from the Catholic parish priest at Haddington Road church, indicating the strong cross-community support that still existed at this time for the war and the sense of mutual loss. Cameron Papers.
34. Tom Kettle, a former Irish Party MP and professor of national economics at University College, Dublin, had joined the British army in 1914 and was serving as a recruiting officer in 1915.
35. Freeman’s Journal, 10 September 1915.
36. Irish Independent, 9 August 1915.
37. O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, p. 264.
38. Irish Worker, 8 August 1914.
39. Irish Independent, 16 and 17 September 1915.
40. Maume, The Long Gestation, p. 223.
41. Irish Worker, 17 January 1914.
42. See above.
43. Irish Independent, 30 September to 2 October 1915. The Pillar survived the 1916 Rising only to fall prey to the fast-food restaurant plague that engulfed Dublin’s premier street in more recent times. Bullet holes can still be seen below the McDonald’s sign.
44. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 178.
45. Irish Times, 4 September 1915.
46. Orr, Field of Bones, p. 22.
47. The Belfast recruitment area included Cos. Antrim and Down. The Dublin recruitment area consisted of the city and county.
48. Murray, Seán O’Casey, p. 93.
49. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1915, vol. 1, p. 351–2.
50. Dublin Corporation Reports, vol. 2, p. 115–18.
51. Dublin Corporation Reports, vol. 1, p. 319, 916.
52. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 1915, p. 287, 311.
53. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1915, vol. 1, p. 975. The amounts paid in allowances for employees who joined the British army are not given separately but cannot have been large. See chap. 2 above.
54. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 23.
55. Irish Independent, 28 September 1915.
56. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 24 to 30 September 1915; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 23.
57. Freeman’s Journal, 23 September 1915.
58. Evening Standard, 23 September 1915.
59. Irish Independent, 8 August 1915.
60. Irish Independent, 4 October 1915.
61. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 125.
Chapter 4: ‘Without the shedding of Blood’
1. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, p. 36.
2. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, p. 48; Irish Independent circulation figures for 1913 to 1915.
3. Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, p. 297–8.
4. O’Riordan, ‘Michael O’Leary, Kuno Meyer and Peadar Ó Laoghaire.’ Ben Novick, in Conceiving Revolution, argues that the ability of anti-war propaganda to strike a deeper resonance with its audience than the more numerous and technically better-produced pro-British propaganda was an important factor in their success.
5. Irish Independent, 10 June 1915.
6. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 140–42. His father-in-law was David Sheehy. Tom Kettle was his brother-in-law; another brother-in-law, Francis Cruise O’Brien, was a prominent journalist in Dublin.
7. Irish Independent, 25 September 1914.
8. Valiulis, Portrait of a Revolutionary, p. 10–12.
9. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 35–6.
10. Valiulis, Portrait of a Revolutionary, p. 10–12.
11. Yeates, Lockout, p. 439. The fact that his father, Andrew Kettle, had been a leading figure in the Land League in the 1880s cut no ice with the Citizen Army men.
12. Newsinger, Rebel City, p. 120. Colonel Moore would adhere to the Redmondite Volunteers at the split but later joined the post-1916 independence movement. He would serve in the Free State Senate, become a founder-member of Fianna Fáil, and campaign against land annuities. He was a brother of the novelist George Moore.
13. Newsinger, Rebel City, p. 117–18. There was almost a social cachet to being in the Citizen Army. Its women members included Constance Markievicz, Dr Kathleen Lynn, her companion Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, the Abbey actor Helena Molony, and Nellie Gifford, whose sisters Grace and Muriel married the 1916 signatories Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh, respectively. It also reflected the fact that, unlike the Volunteers, the Citizen Army admitted women to full membership.
14. Irish Worker, 3 October 1914.
15. Yeates, Lockout, chap. 41.
16. O Cathasaigh, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, p. 52.
17. Irish Independent, 2 August 1915.
18. Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse, p. 235.
19. Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches, p. 137.
20. McGarry, The Rising, p. 92.
21. Quoted by Newsinger, Rebel City, p. 125.
22. Workers‘ Republic, 5 February 1916.
23. Irish Independent, 14 August 1915.
24. Irish Independent, 18 September 1915.
25. Ireland’s Memorial Records. This compared with an average fatality rate for Ireland of 23 per cent. However, these figures are not directly comparable. For instance, they do not take account of reservists recalled on the outbreak of war, or recruits from Britain allocated to Irish regiments. Another factor affecting the figures is the lack of details on Irishmen who enlisted in the navy or air force.
26. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 45–53; Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 17–18; Valiulis, Portrait of a Revolutionary, p. 10–12.
27. Ben Novick, ‘Gun running and the Great War,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, p. 104–7. The Martini rifles would have been considered obsolescent but would have been at least as effective as the Mausers landed at Howth the previous year. The identification of E Company as the culprits is in Frank Henderson’s Easter Rising, p. 35. Henderson is generally regarded as extremely reliable. The company commander was Captain Patrick Weafer, a native of Enniscorthy who was killed in action in the Imperial Hotel during the rising. O’Farrell, Who’s Who in the Irish War of Independence.
28. Connolly to Peter Keeley, 25 February 1915, in Connolly, Between Comrades, p. 526; Woggon, ‘Not merely a labour organisation.’
29. Theresa Moriarty, ‘Work, warfare and wages: Industrial controls and Irish trade unionism in the First World War,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, p. 73; Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, p. 318. Former soldiers were liable for service for up to twelve years after their term of enlistment ended. Connolly’s almost pathological hatred of the British army is one of the unexplored mysteries of his life.
30. Woggon, ‘Not merely a labour organisation.’
31. Watson’s stockbroker brother George was a spokesman for the Unionist business interests in Dublin and a strong critic of home rule, which added to the political undertones in the dispute.
32. Woggon, ‘Not merely a labour organisation,’ p. 45–9.
33. Irish Independent, 30 June 1916. In June 1916 William O’Brien had been allowed to travel under guard from Fron Goch, where he was detained after the Easter Rising, to London to attend an earlier unsuccessful mediation hearing into the dispute. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 108. The company faced another major dispute with the National Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union and the ITGWU in November 1916 when seamen, firemen, waggoners and other non-dockers secured 40s for a 60-hour week from Sir George Askwith. Labour Gazette, December 1916.
34. Irish Independent, 3 April 1916.
35. Irish Independent, 31 May 1916.
36. Irish Times, 14 and 31 May and 10 June 1916.
37. Wolfe, Labour Supply and Regulation, p. 99–147.
38. Theresa Moriarty, ‘Work, warfare and wages: Industrial controls and Irish trade unionism in the First World War,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, p. 79.
39. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 94.
40. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, p. 176. Redmond had latched on to an apocryphal report of a German officer captured with a map of Ireland, so detailed that it showed ‘every farm in every parish.’ The Gael was quick to point out that a map with so much detail would have to be at least at the scale of six inches to the mile and so would measure 150 feet by 80 feet, and it suggested that the Germans had disguised it as a groundsheet for two hundred men. That Redmond could be ridiculed so savagely showed that his stock was falling. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 62. Connolly was convinced that the real target of the raid was the union’s own printing press.
41. See Kevin Nowlan, ‘Tom Clarke, MacDermott and the IRB,’ in Martin, Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising, p. 113; Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, chap. 9; Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 134–8; Cody, The Remarkable Patrick Daly.
42. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 1, p. 52–3.
43. Light labouring jobs, such as night watchman, were often given to ex-soldiers invalided out or to older workers no longer fit for heavier duties.
44. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 24 January 1916, p. 127–9.
45. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 6 and 14 March 1916, p. 138, 149–158; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 1, p. 243–4. For the first time the war bonus was secured for most, but not all, of the non-permanent corporation workers.
46. Like other major housing projects, the Sheriff Street slum clearance proved politically and financially impossible before the advent of the Irish Free State.
47. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 6 March 1916, p. 145–6.
48. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 14 March 1916, p. 154. Further evidence of the softening of the constitutional nationalists towards the Volunteers came on 30 March 1916 when Alderman Patrick Corrigan, a UIL stalwart and slum landlord indicted in the 1914 Housing Commission report, presided at a public meeting in the Mansion House to protest at the deportation of Irish Volunteer organisers to Britain for making seditious speeches. Carden, The Alderman, p. 97.
49. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 18 March 1916. No provision seems to have been made for meeting the religious obligations of non-Catholics.
50. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 18 March 1916; Henderson, Frank Henderson’s Easter Rising; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 75.
51. Irish Times, 18 March 1916.
52. Irish Independent, 18 March 1916; letter from Private Thomas Finn, C Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to Monica Roberts, 23 March 1916, Roberts Collection, vol. 2.
53. Irish Times, 13 February 1918; Roberts Collection, introduction.
54. See, for instance, correspondence from Sergeant Brooks, Private Kirwin (or Kirwan) and Private J. O’Halloran to Monica Roberts, Roberts Collection, vol. 2.
55. Monica Roberts to Private J. May, 10 July 1915, Roberts Collection, vol. 2.
56. Sergeant Brooks to Monica Roberts, December 1915, Roberts Collection, vol. 2.
57. Sergeant Brooks to Monica Roberts, 29 October 1915, Roberts Collection, vol. 2.
58. Private Edward Mordaunt, B Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to Monica Roberts, 18 July 1915, Roberts Collection, vol. 1.
59. Private Edward Mordaunt, B Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to Monica Roberts, 28 August 1915, Roberts Collection, vol. 1.
60. Private Joseph Clarke, 7th Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to Monica Roberts, 22 April 1916, Roberts Collection, vol. 1.
61. Private Edward Mordaunt, B Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to Monica Roberts, 28 August 1915, Roberts Collection, vol. 1.
62. Private Edward Mordaunt, B Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to Monica Roberts, 7 and 17 December 1915 and 25 January 1916, Roberts Collection, vol. 1.
63. Private Harry Loughlin, 20 August 1915, to Monica Roberts, Roberts Collection, vol. 1. By the end of the year he was in hospital at Alexandria with shrapnel wounds to his right hand and left leg.
64. Private Thomas Finn, 8 April 1916, and Sergeant Edward Heafey, 14 April 1916, to Monica Roberts, Roberts Collection, vol. 2.
65. Irish Times, 18 March 1916; Plunkett Dillon, All in the Blood, p. 169.
66. The Irish Times had begun publishing lists of past and present students of TCD and UCD who had served in the Crown forces. On St Patrick’s Day eighty-six names were published; many of those mentioned had died or been seriously wounded and invalided out.
67. Robinson, Memories, p. 232.
68. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, p. 66.
69. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 20–23; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 75.
70. Richard Mulcahy, television interview, 2 February 1966, quoted by Valiulis, Portrait of a Revolutionary, p. 6.
71. Valiulis, Portrait of a Revolutionary, p. 8–12.
72. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 819, Liam Archer.
73. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 284, Michael Staines.
74. James Connolly, ‘Physical force in Irish politics,’ in Socialism and Nationalism, p. 53–7.
75. Plunkett Dillon, All in the Blood, p. 197–9; Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 70–73.
76. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 77; Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 251, Richard Balfe.
77. Moran, Staging the Easter Rising, p. 15.
Chapter 5: ‘A scene of greater splendour … never before witnessed’
1. Smith passed the information to the IRB Military Council through the writer Liam O’Flaherty, a member of the Volunteers. It is generally accepted that the author of the forgery was Joseph Plunkett.
2. Carden, The Alderman, p. 97–9; Irish Independent, 20 April 1916. In contrast, the liberal unionist Irish Times omitted any reference to Kelly’s speech in its report of the corporation’s proceedings that day, as did the official minutes of the meeting.
3. The great majority of members of the IRB and of the Irish Volunteers knew nothing about the rising, and some leading members of both who did know were opposed to the project. Like MacNeill, they believed that armed resistance was justified, or likely to succeed, only if it was in response to attempts to introduce conscription.
4. Lynch had only been informed shortly beforehand, by Seán Mac Diarmada, a member of the Military Council and one of the prime movers in the rising.
5. Estimates of the number vary. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 76–9, says twenty to thirty; McGarry, The Rising, p. 235, says sixty. Ó Lúing spoke to participants, while McGarry uses witness statements from the Bureau of Military History.
6. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 91.
7. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 78; Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 1043, Joseph V. Lawless.
8. Henderson, Frank Henderson’s Easter Rising, p. 33–5.
9. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 63–73; Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 819, Liam Archer.
10. When the British captured Liberty Hall they were puzzled to find that only the type for the second half of the Proclamation could be found. The reason was that lack of type meant that the top half had to be printed first and then the same type used again for the bottom half, though Brady’s skill as a compositor made the document appear seamless. Devine and O’Riordan, James Connolly, Liberty Hall and the 1916 Rising, p. 43–7.
11. Murray, Seán O’Casey, p. 88. There was apparently one signatory of the Proclamation who was most reluctant to sign a document giving equality to women, but his identity remains a secret. It was not, however, Clarke himself: the old Fenian seems to have been infected by the general social radicalism of the city during his sojourn there. Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 69.
12. Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 113–15.
13. Irish Times, 25 April 1916.
14. Irish Times, 25 April 1916.
15. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 20–22.
16. She was the first of twenty-eight children (aged between two and sixteen) to be shot dead during the rising. Matthews, Renegades, p. 145–6.
17. Orr, Field of Bones, p. 195; 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 56. The obituary of Browning in the Irish Times of 2 May 1916 devotes most space to his prowess as a cricketer: ‘no more brilliant exponent of the game has ever done duty for Dublin University, of which he was a graduate.’
18. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 251, Richard Balfe.
19. Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 85–8.
20. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 99.
21. O’Casey, Drums Under the Windows, p. 272.
22. McGarry, The Rising, p. 146.
23. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 260; Irish Times, 7 August 1916; DMP Statistical Returns, 1919.
24. Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin, p. 19–21; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 59; DMP Report for 1916, 1919.
25. The headquarters of de Valera’s battalion is usually given as Boland’s Mills, which dominated the Grand Canal Docks and Ringsend Bridge; in fact it was the less imposing Boland’s Bakery in Grand Canal Street.
26. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 25–6.
27. Cottrell, The War for Ireland, p. 57, 62.
28. Townshend, Easter 1916, p. 189; Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 198, James Walsh.
29. Catholic Bulletin, December 1917, quoted by Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 80–81.
30. O’Brien, Blood on the Streets, p. 64–5.
31. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 280–81.
32. O’Brien, Blood on the Streets, p. 57–8; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 78–9. Medical personnel from Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital continued to treat wounded soldiers, as well as circumstances permitted, throughout the rest of the fighting.
33. Townshend, Easter 1916, p. 181–4. Marlborough Barracks is now McKee Barracks; Richmond Barracks, Inchicore (later Keogh Barracks, later Keogh Square), was demolished in 1969 to make way for St Michael’s Estate; the Royal Barracks became Collins Barracks (now part of the National Museum); Portobello Barracks is now Cathal Brugha Barracks.
34. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659.
35. Townshend, Easter 1916, p. 184.
36. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 97–103; Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 76–9, 287–90.
37. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 251, Richard Balfe; Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 215–19.
38. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 117. Up to four hundred civilians found refuge there, mainly women and children.
39. One of the bakers who remained at work was among the civilians killed in the area.
40. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 117.
41. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 819, Liam Archer.
42. In contrast, the British army put a machine gun post on the roof of Jervis Street Hospital to strafe the GPO garrison.
43. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 819, Liam Archer.
44. The original vehicles were imported in 1913 to combat mass pickets on the docks during the lock-out.
45. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 50–51, 269; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 120, 189.
46. The officer commanding the Dublin University Officers’ Training Corps, Major Harris, was conducting the field day with the Dublin Veterans’ Corps in Kingstown when the rising began. He took the main contingent safely back to Beggars’ Bush Barracks, while F. H. Browning led a smaller contingent towards the city—possibly against orders—with fatal consequences. Irish Times, 5 May 1916 and 7 August 1916. Many members of the OTC who had gone home for the Easter break reported for duty to the nearest military post. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 15–16; Dooney, ‘Trinity College and the War.’
47. According to some accounts he was shot straight through the heart. Either way death appears to have been instantaneous.
48. Lyons, The Enigma of Tom Kettle, p. 293.
49. O’Brien, Blood on the Streets, p. 67–8. Among the clergymen was Father Thomas McNevin from Westland Row, who had gained some notoriety in the 1913 Lock-out as a prosecution witness against Dora Montefiore and Lucille Rand for ‘kidnapping’ strikers’ children. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 310, James Grace.
50. Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 124. Brosnan was on leave with his family in Dublin when the rising occurred. He immediately went to offer his services to the army. He disarmed a rebel outside Dublin Castle but was still wearing civilian clothes and so was mistaken for a rebel and shot. Several British soldiers with Irish regiments were also killed or injured.
51. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 49–53.
52. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 187.
53. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 184.
54. John J. Reynolds, ‘The Four Courts and North King Street area in 1916,’ An tÓglach, 15 and 29 May 1926, quoted by Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 116.
55. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 209.
56. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 232–45; Geraghty and Whitehead, The Dublin Fire Brigade, p. 148.
57. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 280–81.
58. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 232–45.
59. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 232–45.
60. One of Father Eugene Sheehy’s altar boys in Bruree had been Éamon de Valera, later commandant of the 3rd Battalion, holding the south-east quadrant of the city, who owed much of his early political as well as religious formation to the priest.
61. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 155.
62. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 155; Levenson and Natterstad, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 78.
63. 1916 Rebellion Handbook; Shooting of Three Men in Portobello Barracks, Royal Commission of Inquiry, p. 215.
64. Shooting of Three Men in Portobello Barracks, Royal Commission of Inquiry, p. 215.
Chapter 6: ‘These Sinn Feiners are a lot of murderers’
1. Yeates, Lockout, p. 577.
2. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 32–4.
3. Letter to Monica Roberts, 14 June 1916, Roberts Collection. Of course soldiers who felt differently would hardly have confided such seditious thoughts to Monica Roberts.
4. Letter to Monica Roberts, 18 July 1917, Roberts Collection.
5. William de Comb to Monica Roberts, 25 July 1917, Roberts Collection.
6. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 35.
7. Dalton, With the Dublin Brigade, p. 40–43.
8. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 269.
9. Irish Independent, 4 May 1916; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 263.
10. Irish Independent, 4 May 1916.
11. Irish Times, 11 May 1916.
12. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 117; Irish Independent and Irish Times, 4 May 1916.
13. Irish Times, 15 May 1916.
14. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 206.
15. Murphy always denied any prior knowledge of the editorial.
16. Irish Times, 5 May 1916.
17. Dangerfield, The Damnable Question, p. 213–17.
18. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 7 July 1916.
19. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 5 June 1916.
20. Geraghty and Whitehead, The Dublin Fire Brigade, p. 148; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 210.
21. Irish Times, 15 June 1916.
22. When Arthur Lynch, MP for Clare, raised in the House of Commons the issue of compensation for wrongful imprisonment on behalf of one prominent Dubliner, Arthur Griffith, who was ‘head of a lawful political association,’ namely Sinn Féin, Griffith wrote an angry letter to the papers from Reading Prison denouncing Lynch’s ‘reprehensible’ conduct. ‘Your questions I regard as an insult in their suggestion that I dissociate myself in any way from the actions of my brother Irishmen now dead or in prison.’
23. Report of the Dublin Metropolitan Police for 1916, Parliamentary Papers, 1919; Irish Independent, 25 May, 4 August and 8 August 1916 and 24 March and 8 April 1917. The rate was reduced by 1s 6d to 10s 11d in the pound north of the Liffey and 10s 2d on the south side.
24. McManus, Dublin, p. 68–74; Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, p. 152–3.
25. McManus, Dublin, p. 68–75; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 271–4; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution’; Dublin Metropolitan Police Report for 1916, Parliamentary Papers, 1919.
26. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 268, W. T. Cosgrave.
27. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 10 May 1916; Irish Times, 11 May 1916.
Chapter 7: The ‘calamity of rebellion’
1. Cosgrave’s motion remained on the order paper even though he was in prison.
2. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916. The ETU comparators were craftsmen in the corporation’s Stanley Street workshop.
3. Jeffrey, Ireland and the Great War, p. 39; Fingall, Seventy Years Young, p. 348. Nor did Kitchener receive any credit for ordering the court-martial of Bowen-Colthurst for the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, which began the day beforehand: that went to Major Vane.
4. Irish Times, 12 June 1916.
5. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 5 and 19 June 1916. The unsuccessful Unionist nominee was W. E. Taylor, a wholesale printer and stationer.
6. Dangerfield, The Damnable Question, p. 195. Though committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire, Bowen-Colthurst was released after twenty months and emigrated to Canada on a military pension.
7. Irish Times, 13 and 16 May 1916; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 2 August 1916; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 188.
8. Dillon represented Mayo in the House of Commons.
9. Lyons, John Dillon, p. 372–83.
10. Irish Independent, 22 May 1916.
11. Irish Times, 8 June 1915; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 3 July 1916.
12. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916.
13. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 26.
14. Allan was a former senior figure in the IRB who resigned all positions in the organisation in 1910 after serious policy differences with Tom Clarke; nevertheless he remained committed to old comrades in the organisation. John MacBride, later executed for his role in the Easter Rising, stayed in Allan’s house on the night before the rising began. Allan later worked for Michael Collins, and his position in the corporation provided the latter with invaluable contacts and information.
15. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916; Irish Times, 4 December 1917; Irish Times, 25 February 1919.
16. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 15.
17. Irish Times, 7 July 1917.
18. Irish Times, 27 October 1915.
19. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 202; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 25.
20. Irish Times, 1 February 1915 and 8 May 1915. In fact sailing under false colours became the rule, with German submarines flying Royal Navy ensigns when approaching potential victims and British ‘Q ships’ flying the colours of neutral countries as they hunted German submarines, leading to the notorious Baralong incident in August 1915, when a Q ship of that name, flying American colours, sank a German submarine and then shot all the survivors. Irish Times, 19 August 1915.
21. The Irish Times, 2 November 1917, cited the examples of a six-year-old vessel with a premium of £54,000, compared with £39,800 in 1914, and a fourteen-year-old vessel on which the premium had risen from £27,000 to £44,500.
22. The Dublin Corporation Electricity Supplies Committee, which was also battling with higher fuel prices, could increase prices for consumers or seek subsidies from the city. See chap. 2 above.
23. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 2 October 1916.
24. Irish Independent, 9 January 1917.
25. Irish Times, 26 October 1917
26. Irish Times, 26 March 1918, and Irish Independent, 26 March 1918.
27. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916. The corporation’s representatives on the Pensions Committee consisted mainly of nationalist councillors, with one Unionist. Besides Mrs Williams, the committee included two hoteliers, a tobacconist, a cigar merchant and a builder. None appeared to have skills particularly requisite, but they may have seen membership as a valuable source of political patronage that would yield votes from servicemen and their families when the war was over.
28. Irish Times, 25 November 1916. Midwives earned between £23 and £24 per annum. Ó Móráin, Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery, p. 20.
29. Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin, p. 200.
30. Edith Cavell was the British matron of the Berkendael Medical Institute who was shot by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape.
31. Ó Móráin, Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery, p. 27.
32. Irish Times, 8 and 19 August, 1 September and 1 November 1916; Minutes of Grand Lodge, 7 December 1916; Grand Lodge Annual Report, 1917. A doctor and former army officer, Geddes was the Unionist MP for Basingstoke and was Minister of National Service in 1917. His Dublin connection was a result of his appointment as professor of anatomy at the College of Surgeons from 1909 to 1913. He was probably recruited to the Freemasons through the Chief Medical Officer for Dublin and deputy grand master in Ireland, Sir Charles Cameron.
33. Irish Independent, 4 October 1916. Besides Lord Donoughmore as grand master, Sir William Goulding was a junior grand warden and Sir Maurice Dockrell a junior grand deacon in the Masons. Grand Lodge Annual Report, 1917.
34. Irish Times, 18 November 1916.
35. Irish Independent, 21 October 1916; Irish Times, 27 November 1916.
36. Irish Independent, 17 and 27 November and 19 December 1916; Irish Times, 12, 13, 15 and 18 December.
Chapter 8: ‘Would anyone seriously suggest for a moment that Willie Cosgrave was a criminal?’
1. Irish Times, 3 and 6 July; Irish Independent, 3, 4 and 10 July.
2. Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, p. 209–10. In fact it was a mine that sank the Hampshire.
3. Irish Times, 10 October 1916.
4. Irish Independent, 5 September 1916.
5. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 22 January 1917.
6. Irish Independent, 10 October 1916.
7. Irish Times, 9 September 1916.
8. Irish Times, 8 February 1917.
9. Details of the admittedly small sample are available at www.glasnevintrust.ie. I have excluded from the figures an English naval petty officer, Robert Glaister, shot in the 1916 Rising. The remainder are all from Dublin city and county.
10. Johnston, Home or Away, p. 214–15; Dungan, They Shall Not Grow Old, p. 38–9. That there were no references to the raid in the press could be due to military censorship; but the fact that an operation on such a scale, which would have virtually rearmed the Dublin Brigade, passed unremarked in rebel circles suggests that the number of weapons taken was relatively small.
11. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 4 September 1917; Irish Independent, 5 September 1917.
12. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 46.
13. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 51.
14. Irish Times, 3 July 1915. It was chaired by Patrick J. Leonard, president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.
15. Other members of the committee included Richard W. Booth, Arthur W. Spence, David Baird and Henry Dockrell.
16. Grigg, Lloyd George, p. 256; Irish Times, 8 August and 25 September 1915; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 11–13. The other plants were established in Cork, Limerick and Galway.
17. Smellie would later provide a detailed account of the company’s activities, Ship Building and Repairing in Dublin, 1901–1923 [1935], from which most of the following details are taken.
18. Sweeney, Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding, p. 78–82. In 1923 the Helga became the Muirchú, the Irish Free State’s first (and only) naval vessel.
19. See, for example, letter from William O’Brien, secretary of Dublin United Trades Council and Labour League, to Dublin Corporation, 5 March 1917, and reports of a stormy meeting of the Ports and Docks Board, Irish Times and Irish Independent, 20 April 1917.
20. Fourteen vessels were built in British yards to this model and ten in Dublin. Sweeney, Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding, p. 107.
21. While £520 was subscribed to the Prince of Wales Fund by the end of the war, more than £1,500 was subscribed to war loans in early 1917 alone through a Post Office Savings Bank scheme.
22. Smellie, Ship Building and Repairing in Dublin, chap. 9.
23. Labour Gazette, Report on Employment of Women in Munitions Factories, February 1916.
24. Weekly Irish Times, 25 December 1916.
25. Labour Gazette, January 1916; Irish Times, 8 March 1917. Margaret Culhane was one of a growing band of middle-class women who sought careers as much out of necessity as choice. She turned to professional social work to support her two children after her husband, Frank, a solicitor, died.
26. Irish Independent, 12 February 1917.
27. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 9 October 1916.
28. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 9 October 1916 and 2 April 1917; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1920, no. 61.
29. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 173, and 1918, no. 272. Mrs Smith was one of the few female members of the Corporation Inspectorate, starting off as a sanitary sub-officer in 1890 and progressing to full sanitary inspector in 1913. She was later appointed an inspector under the Shops Acts. Although at the top of the salary scale by then, she was paid £20 a year less than her male counterparts, until December 1920, when the councillors approved a pay parity increase. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1920, no. 8.
30. Irish Independent, 27 July 1918; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, no. 243.
31. It kept this basic format through a series of incarnations before its final closure in 1962. See Zimmermann, The History of Dublin Cinemas, p. 169–70.
32. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1920, no. 243. The cinema closed in 1919 and reopened under new management in 1921.
33. Collins, The Cosgrave Legacy, p. 12–13. Collins and Cosgrave family lore is wrong to imagine that Cosgrave was in the first wave of releases: like others convicted of serious offences, he had to wait until June.
34. Geraghty, William Patrick Partridge and His Times, p. 276–94.
35. Maguire, The Civil Service and the Revolution in Ireland, p. 35–7. McElligott took up a successful career in journalism, editing the Statist, and returned to Ireland in 1923 to take up the position of assistant secretary of the Department of Finance in the new Free State government. He succeeded Joseph Brennan as secretary in 1927 and retired in 1953, becoming governor of the Central Bank.
36. Hart, Mick, p. 38–9.
37. Hart, Mick, p. 115.
38. National Archives, CO 904/193/11a.
39. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 3; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 10 February and 19 and 23 June 1917; Irish Times, 15 April and 3 and 4 August 1919.
40. Irish Independent, 4 September 1917; Irish Times, 17 September 1917.
Chapter 9: ‘The baby was then nine or ten days old, and the girl said that she would drown it’
1. Irish Independent, 24 January 1917.
2. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 248; Irish Times, 1 July 1916.
3. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 27–8.
4. Irish Independent, 28 July 1917; Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659; Irish Times, 12 December 1916 and 3 December 1917.
5. Irish Times, 1 January 1917.
6. Irish Independent, 6 June 1917.
7. Irish Independent, 30 March 1917; Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, p. 152–3.
8. National Archives, CSORP/1918/5778, 25183–25271.
9. Maurice Headlam and Sir John J. Taylor (the latter knighted for his services in 1919) were both protégés of Walter Long, a former leader of the Unionist Party and MP for South County Dublin.
10. O’Halpin, The Decline of the Union, p. 209.
11. Memo by Sir William F. Byrne, Under-Secretary, 1916–18, National Archives, CSORP 25183–25271.
12. Mrs Mackenzie’s business must have revived, as she was still trading in the mid-1920s.
13. Irish Independent, 9 February 1917; Irish Times, 9 February 1917.
14. The wealthiest widow was Nannie, wife of Michael O’Rahilly, who refused to take anything from the fund. Ironically, one of Lillie Connolly’s minor benefactors was a Catholic priest.
15. Matthews, Renegades, p. 160–71.
16. Rigney, ‘Military service and GSWR staff.’
17. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659.
18. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659.
19. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659, and DSER, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 1404.
20. They were W. E. H. Lecky, the liberal Unionist and historian who wrote the landmark History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, and Edward Dowden, professor of English literature, an imperial Unionist who dismissed the Irish literary movement of Yeats and Lady Gregory as ‘flapping green banners.’ He declined to intensify his ‘spiritual brogue’ on their behalf.
21. Irish Times, 3 and 6 February 1917.
22. Plunkett was generally referred to as Count Plunkett after being made a Papal count in 1877.
23. Irish Independent, 6 February 1917.
24. Irish Independent, 6 February 1917; Irish Times, 7 February 1917.
25. Irish Times, 8 February 1917.
26. Irish Independent, 1 January and 10 February 1917.
27. Irish Times, 8 February 1917.
28. Lord Barmbrack would later be prosecuted for overcharging on ‘war’ bread but pleaded, successfully, that the law applied to retailers whereas he was a wholesale baker. Irish Independent, 18 October 1917.
29. Irish Independent, 12 February 1917. Russell was a former Ulster Unionist MP who had defected to the Liberals.
30. Irish Times, 8 March and 13 April 1917; Irish Independent, 20 October 1917.
31. Irish Independent, 27 March 1917.
32. Weekly Irish Times, 7 April 1917.
Chapter 10: ‘The most destructive bird that could possibly be’
1. Irish Times, 23 January 1917.
2. Irish Times, 18 September 1916.
3. Irish Times, 17 February, 29 March, 25 September and 9 October 1916 and 13 November 1917.
4. Irish Times, 14 October 1917.
5. Irish Times, 20 September and 14 October 1917.
6. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 2 December 1916.
7. Irish Times, 6 March 1917.
8. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 5 February and 6 March 1917.
9. Irish Times, 11 July 1919; Meenan, The Irish Economy, p. 90–91.
10. It would be a persistent problem: boundary walls on railways were raised and barbed wire used as late as 1918 to deter gangs. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, no. 207.
11. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 27, 48; Irish Independent, 13 January 1917.
12. The reference is to Cathedral Street, where the fire consumed Lawrence’s toy shop.
13. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 7 February 1917; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 266.
14. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 267. A new scale of £150 to £200 a year was approved, with annual increments of £10. The Belfast rate was £156, plus a war bonus of £23 8s. The Dublin war bonus was only £13.
15. Sir Charles Cameron, The Quality of the Milk Used in Dublin, appendix to Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 122.
16. Dublin Corporation Reports, Pubic Health Reports, 1916–17.
17. See chap. 6 above.
18. Irish Independent, 9 October 1917.
19. Irish Times, 4 December 1917.
20. Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 25–6.
21. Irish Independent, 9 October 1917; Irish Times, 12 December 1917.
22. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 8 March 1917.
23. Quoted by Devine, Organising History, p. 90. Ironically, in later life O’Brien would become a virulent anti-communist.
24. Devine, Organising History, p. 68, 89–93. The figure may well have dropped to as low as 3,500 in early 1916.
25. Morrissey, A Man Called Hughes, p. 90.
26. Irish Times, 9 and 10 April 1917; Irish Independent, 10 April 1917.
27. Irish Independent, 10 April 1917.
28. Irish Times, 4, 9 and 13 April 1917.
29. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 20 April 1917.
30. Irish Independent, 30 April and 11 May 1917; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 120–23.
31. Morrissey, William J. Walsh, p. 300–22; Coleman, County Longford and the Irish Revolution, p. 62–4.
32. Irish Times, 11 and 13 June 1917.
33. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 151. He gives the date of his release as August 1916, but this is not possible. The details suggest it was June 1917, when all the convicted prisoners were released.
34. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 18, 19 and 20 June 1917; Weekly Irish Times, 23 June 1917.
35. Irish Times, 31 January 1910.
36. Irish Times, 10 and 26 June and 7 July 1917. A contest almost ensued nevertheless when at two minutes to the close of nominations a woman appeared with a male companion seeking to place her brother, Captain Charles Vincent Fox VC, on the ballot paper. She said he had recently escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp and would soon be in a position to take up his duties if elected. However, representatives of the other parties were not prepared to take her word, and Hearn was duly declared elected unopposed.
37. McDowell, The Irish Convention, p. 103.
38. Irish Independent, 7 August 1917.
39. Irish Times, 13 August 1917.
40. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 9 September 1917.
41. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 8 October 1917.
42. Irish Independent, 9 October 1917.
Chapter 11: ‘I die in a good cause’
1. One of his cousins was the American actor Gregory Peck.
2. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 140–41.
3. Irish Times, 4 September 1917.
4. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 157–64.
5. Ashe had a penchant for poetry and doggerel. In contrast to ‘Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord’ he also penned the following item in his American Diary: ‘And when I die don’t bury me at all, But pitch my bones in alcohol, Put a bottle of boose [sic] at my head and feet, And then my bones, they will surely keep. My story is told and you’ll agree, That this is what boose [sic] has done to me.’ Mss 46,788, NLI. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause; O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, p. 16.
6. Irish Times, 2 October 1917.
7. O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, p. 16; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 174–82.
8. Irish Times, 6 November 1917.
9. Sir Bryan Mahon was later nominated to the Free State Senate by W. T. Cosgrave in recognition of the role he played during this difficult period. Cosgrave had been chairman of the Estates Committee. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 268, W. T. Cosgrave.
10. Irish Independent, 1 and 4 October 1917; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 175–82.
11. After their release from Mountjoy, Thomas Ashe’s fellow hunger-strikers visited the graveside and took a vow that if they were ever rearrested they would immediately go on hunger strike. One of them, Seán Treacy, decided he would never again go to prison. He was killed three years later resisting arrest in Talbot Street, Dublin.
12. Irish Independent, 12 January and 23 February 1918.
13. Irish Times, 20 April 1917.
14. Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 232.
15. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, p. 118.
16. Irish Times, 26 October 1917.
17. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p. 99–100.
18. Irish Times, 26 October 1917.
19. Irish Times, 26 October 1917; Pádraig Yeates, ‘Craft workers during the Irish revolution,’ Saothar, 33.
20. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 128.
21. Stokes, Death in the Irish Sea, p. 26.
22. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 275.
23. Irish Times, 3 November 1917.
24. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, no. 13; Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 328–33; Yeates, Lockout, p. 108.
25. The occupations are listed separately for first-class tenements and the rest. However, as there is no significant divergence between individuals within occupations, their earnings, and which class of tenement they inhabited, the totals have been combined.
26. See Mona Hearn, ‘Life for domestic servants in Dublin,’ in Luddy and Murphy, Women Surviving; McCaffrey, ‘Jacob’s women workers in the 1913 lock-out.’
27. Labour Gazette, May 1919.
28. Irish Times, 28 August and 11 December 1917.
29. Quoted by Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, p. 290–91; Irish Independent, 27 August 1917; Irish Times, 1 September 1917.
30. Irish Independent, 6 January 1917.
Chapter 12: ‘A coercionist, conscriptionist Lord Lieutenant’
1. Irish Independent, 25 January 1918.
2. Irish Independent, 26 January 1918.
3. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 6 April 1918. Gaisford St Lawrence was a frequent contributor to charities, across the religious divide: see, for example, the Society of St Vincent de Paul subscription lists.
4. Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the First World War, p. 79–80. Between 1914 and 1918 only one German submarine was sunk in the Irish Sea, out of a total of 178. Irish Times, 15 March 1918.
5. Irish Independent, 2 January 1918.
6. Irish Independent, 26 February 1918.
7. See chap. 6 above for the milk price controversy.
8. Irish Independent, 26 January 1918.
9. Irish Times, 6 February 1918.
10. Dalton, With the Dublin Brigade, p. 51–5.
11. Irish Times, 27 April 1918.
12. Irish Times, 5 February 1918.
13. Irish Independent, 5 February 1918; Irish Times, 9 February 1918.
14. See, for example, Irish Times, 9 February 1918.
15. London Express, 4 February 1918, editorial comment.
16. See chap. 9 above.
17. Devine, Organising History, p. 92.
18. Devine, Organising History. See also chap. 4 and 7 above. Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour; Theresa Moriarty, ‘Work, warfare and wages: Industrial controls and Irish trade unionism in the First World War,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War. The British National Federation of Women Workers was heavily dependent for growth in membership on the munitions industry, and when the industry was wound down in 1919 its Irish membership collapsed fairly rapidly. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 5 and 6 November 1917; Labour Gazette.
19. Labour Gazette, January 1919.
20. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 31 October 1917.
21. Some 56 per cent of Irish recruits in 1918 joined the newly formed Royal Air Force. Jeffrey, Ireland and the Great War, p. 6.
22. Irish Times, 26 January 1918.
23. Adrian Gregory, ‘You might as well recruit Germans,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, p. 113–32.
24. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 146–7. O’Brien succeeded in sidelining his main rival, P. T. Daly, secretary of the ITUC, by proposing that the congress delegation consist of one delegate from Belfast, another from Cork, and himself as president.
25. John Redmond had died on 6 March 1918.
26. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 9 April 1918.
27. McDowell, The Irish Convention, p. 103. Many public bodies in the South, including the Dublin Trades Council, had refused to nominate delegates to the convention, although Northern trade union organisations did so.
28. Irish Independent, 19 April 1918.
29. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 147–8.
30. Irish Independent, 19 April 1918.
31. Irish Times, 22 April 1918.
32. Irish Independent, 24 April 1918.
33. The details of the night are well recorded by sources as varied as Taylor, Michael Collins, p. 70, Dwyer, The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins, p. 8–12, and Foy, Michael Collins’s Intelligence War, p. 11–14; McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, p. 24–5.
34. National Archives, CAB/24/59.
35. The ‘advanced Sinn Feiner’ editing the journal could have been Frank Gallagher or Cathal O’Shannon. Gallagher later joined the Sinn Féin publicity department, and O’Shannon was a veteran member of the IRB and the Labour Party. The journal changed its name from Irish Opinion to Voice of Labour in January 1918. It was financed by J. Malcolm Lyon, a British businessman who tried, unsuccessfully, to wean Irish Labour away from Sinn Féin. The Dublin link was E. A. Aston, a consultant engineer who came from a liberal Unionist background and was active in the Dublin Citizens’ Association. Over time suspicions developed that British intelligence might be behind the funding operation.
36. National Archives, CAB/24/59.
37. The Irish Independent put the crowd at the Cullen funeral at five thousand and the DMP at two thousand. National Archives, CAB/24/59; Irish Independent, 3 June 1918; Irish Times, 15 June 1918.
38. Irish Times, 10 June 1918.
39. Irish Independent, 10 June 1918.
40. Denmark House was a former nursing home in Great Denmark Street that had been converted to offices for use by various groups of women workers.
41. See Jones, These Obstreperous Lassies, and Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett. Bennett would go on to become the first woman to be elected president of the ITUC and served two terms, 1932 and 1948. Helena Molony was elected president in 1937 and Helen Chenevix in 1951.
42. Matthews, Renegades, p. 218.
43. Irish Independent, 10 June 1918.
44. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 10 June 1918.
45. Irish Times, 4 June 1918.
46. See chap. 5 above.
47. The former director of intelligence for the Volunteers, Éamonn Duggan, was his solicitor. Duggan would later serve as a Sinn Féin MP and was one of the negotiators at the talks on the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
48. Irish Times, 4 June 1918; National Archives, CAB/24/59.
49. Irish Independent, 14 June 1918; and see Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, for Daly and Allan.
50. Irish Independent, 14 June 1918.
Chapter 13: ‘The torpedo exploded in the middle of the Post Office, destroying the stairs, the only means of escape’
1. The ban on the Gaelic League surprised many observers; it was included by mistake for the Gaelic Athletic Association. The GAA thus escaped the ban.
2. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 4, 9, 10 and 23 July 1918.
3. An added cost was that Rathdown Rural District Union in south Co. Dublin availed of the reorganisation to close its workhouse and export the problem to Dublin.
4. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 98–9.
5. Wolfe, Labour Supply and Regulation, chap. 13.
6. Irish Times, 4 to 7 September 12918.
7. Irish Times, 7 September 1918.
8. Weekly Irish Times, 16 November 1918.
9. Dublin Corporation Minutes, p. 502–4, 558–60.
10. Irish Times, 9 September 1918.
11. See McCracken, MacBride’s Brigade, chap. 7.
12. Irish Times, 31 August 1918.
13. National Archives, CAB 24/70.
14. See chap. 8 above.
15. Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 121.
16. Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, p. 92–3; Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 154–5; Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 111–21. For Louie Bennett see chap. 8 above, Fox, Louie Bennett, and Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett, p. 41–3. Neil O’Flanagan, in ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ argues that the Daly-O’Brien split was the main reason for Labour’s failure to dominate politics in Dublin after the Easter Rising.
17. Irish Times, 12 October 1918.
18. See chap. 4 above.
19. Irish Times, 12 October 1918; Stokes, Death in the Irish Sea, p. 46.
20. Higgins, ‘The sinking of the RMS Leinster recalled.’
21. Irish Independent, 12 October 1918, and Michael Lee.
22. Irish Times, 12 October 1918.
23. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, p. 76–9.
24. Among the naval vessels to race to the scene and pick up survivors was the Helga, which had shelled Liberty Hall during the rising.
25. National Archives, CAB/24/70; Stokes, Death in the Irish Sea, p. 136. The sinking of the Leinster may have boosted recruitment, because Dublin’s figures rose to 2,591 by the end of October.
26. See chap. 3 above.
27. See chap. 4 above.
28. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Annual Reports.
29. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Annual Report, 1919–1920.
30. Jane Leonard, ‘Survivors,’ in Horne, Our War.
31. Most offences under the Shops Acts involved employers failing to give employees their half day off.
32. Irish Independent, 21 December 1918; Irish Times, 27 February 1919.
33. Irish Independent, 16 December 1918.
34. Labour Gazette.
35. Labour Gazette.
36. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 90–95; Raftery and O’Sullivan, Suffer Little Children, p. 69–72; Robbins, Fools and Mad, p. 183–95
37. Robbins, Fools and Mad, p. 183; Robbins, Grangegorman, p. 210–19.
38. Irish Times, 5 November 1917.
39. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1919, no. 194.
40. Irish Times, 18 September and 3 November 1914, 1 January, 31 March and 10 May 1915, 3 April 1916, 1 January and 28 May 1917, and 3 September 1919.
Chapter 14: ‘You haven’t got a republic yet, so get out of the way!’
1. Dublin Corporation, Quarterly Breviate Reports of Public Health Committee, 1913–1920.
2. Irish Times, 29 June and 9 July 1918.
3. In the week ending 3 July, 25 deaths out of 120 in Dublin were among children aged one to five years old and a further 15 were of children under twelve months, according to the Irish Independent, 4 July 1918. The Irish Times of 6 July 1918 reported that there had been five deaths from influenza in the city for the same period (all of them adults).
4. Irish Times, 2 and 6 July 1918.
5. Irish Times, 20 July 1918. Other deaths were accounted for as follows: 31 from TB, 14 from heart disease and 12 from bronchitis.
6. Irish Independent, 21 November 1918.
7. Ó hÓgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn, p. 42.
8. Irish Times, 26 and 28 February 1918.
9. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1919, no. 254; Irish Times, 26 February 1919; Irish Independent, 27 March 1919.
10. Irish Independent, 27 March 1919. These figures exclude the deaths of those admitted to Dublin hospitals from places outside the capital.
11. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1919, no. 263, 265, 284.
12. See chap. 3 above.
13. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1921, no. 60; Annual Report of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, 1920.
14. Cameron Papers, Report of the Deputy Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, 1920; Irish Times, 28 February 1921; Ó hÓgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn, p. 41; Freemasons Roll of Honour; Parkinson, History of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Ireland, vol. 1.
15. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, p. 186. Joseph O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 116, argues that if stillbirths and premature births related to syphilis are included in death rates these would rank as one of the main causes of infant mortality, as well as leaving many children with serious medical conditions.
16. Yeates, Lockout, p. 53–4, 363–4.
17. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, p. 165–72.
18. Yeates, Lockout, p. 502.
19. Weekly Irish Times, 23 October 1915.
20. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society. See chap. 5, and Johnston-Keogh, ‘Dublin’s Women Patrol and women’s entry into policy.’
21. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, p. 178.
22. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, no. 13. I use the term ‘comparative deprivation’ in the industrial relations sense, where the erosion of a differential in pay or conditions can cause resentment among the group adversely affected. This often manifests itself in various forms of negative behaviour.
23. Quoted by Dennison and MacDonagh, Guinness; see especially chap. 10 and 13.
24. Matthews, Renegades, p. 211–12.
25. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, p. 191; Ó hÓgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn, p. 39.
26. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, p. 204–5; Matthews, Renegades, p. 222.
27. For a detailed debate on the issues raised by the 1926 Interdepartmental Report see Howell, ‘Venereal disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State,’ Riordan, ‘Venereal disease in the Irish Free State,’ and Howell, ‘The politics of prostitution and the politics of public health in the Irish Free State.’
28. Irish Times, 16 November 1918.
29. Lynch’s peculiar political trajectory had seen him fight against the British Empire during the Boer War and subsequently be condemned to death for high treason, only to have the sentence commuted to a short prison sentence, then become Home Rule MP for Galway. After the First World War he continued his parliamentary career as a Labour MP for Battersea South.
30. Ryan, Comrades, p. 41, 42.
31. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 1119, Joseph McDonagh; Irish Times and Irish Independent, 12 to 16 November 1918.
32. Richard Coleman had died on 12 December in Usk Prison in Monmouthshire. By coincidence, he had served under Thomas Ashe at Ashbourne in 1916.
33. Irish Independent, 13 November 1918. Cissie Cahalan was a shop worker and a member of the Irish Linen Drapers’ Assistants’ Association.
34. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 226.
35. Irish Times, 6 December 1918.
36. National Archives, CAB 24/70.
37. Mulholland, The Politics and Relationships of Kathleen Lynn, p. 63.
38. He would later serve briefly as first Commissioner of the Garda Síochána.
39. Originally opposed to the militarism of the Volunteers, Little would later take the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and served in the Four Courts garrison. He subsequently edited An Phoblacht, the IRA newspaper, and served as a Fianna Fáil TD and as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs during the Second World War.
40. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 660, Thomas Leahy.
41. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 18 October 1918, item no. 646.
42. Irish Times, 12 November 1918.
43. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 2 November 1919, item no. 666.
44. Irish Independent, 16 July 1918.
45. Irish Times, 3 December 1918.
46. Irish Times, 1 March 1919.
47. It would take another world war to resolve the chaos of the British coal industry through nationalisation. One permanent benefit from the coal shortage was government funding to extend the Cavan and Leitrim Light Railway into the Arigna Valley and open up its seams for the Dublin market.
48. McCamley, Dublin Tramworkers, p. 119.
49. Irish Independent, 25 March 1918; Irish Times, 27 and 28 February, 11 and 21 March and 8 April 1919.
50. Irish Times, 25 February 1918.
51. Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, p. 107–10. Even after it was amended, the Democratic Programme was considered ‘communistic’ by some senior members of the Dáil, including Piaras Béaslaí, Kevin O’Higgins and Cathal Brugha. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 162.
52. Dáil Éireann, Minutes of Proceedings, 21 January 1919, p. 22–4; Gaughan, Thomas Johnson, p. 157. At the same time central figures, such as Collins and Cosgrave, did show statist tendencies, which came to characterise the approach of successive Irish governments to economic development. Collins believed that the development of mining and natural resources was the proper domain of the state, while Cosgrave was an advocate of the state as the sole provider of insurance policies and products for commercial and social purposes. Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland, p. 49.
Chapter 15: A flickering green light at the end of a long tunnel
1. This is not to deny that that there were occasional clashes in Dublin city centre, usually outside Trinity College, between students and republicans, such as the highly publicised riot on VE Day involving a young Charles Haughey. See contemporaneous news reports, Irish Times, 1926–49; Wills, That Neutral Island, p. 170–72.
2. The attitude of the unions to the company would change after the war, but that is another story.
3. Irish Independent, 5 February 1919.