Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion

2 The Militarization of Politics

To drill, to learn the use of arms, to acquire the habit of concerted and disciplined action, is, beyond all doubt, a programme that appeals to all Ireland.

Manifesto of the Irish Volunteers, November 1913

That the authorities allowed a body of lawless and riotous men to be drilled and armed and to provide themselves with an arsenal of weapons and explosives was one of the most amazing things that could happen in any civilised country outside of Mexico.

William Martin Murphy, statement to Royal Commission, 1916

In 1911 Ireland, along with the whole United Kingdom, entered a protracted crisis that was to rewrite the script of Irish politics. By the time it was eventually choked off by an even bigger crisis, the outbreak of the Great War (in Winston Churchill’s phrase, the ‘world crisis’) in August 1914, there were over a quarter of a million men enrolled in citizen militias in Ireland. A substantial minority of them were armed with modern weapons, and more of these were on the way. During the last major gun-running, in Dublin in late July 1914, three people were to be killed in a street battle with British troops; the first people to lose their lives in the crisis, and a grim omen for the future. Ireland had entered a confused and volatile state that was not yet civil war, but no longer peace.

The trigger for this crisis, the confrontation between the Liberal government and the Tory-dominated House of Lords over the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’, had no direct connection with Ireland; but the outcome of this clash had profound implications. The abolition of the veto power of the Upper House removed the obstacle that had wrecked Gladstone’s project of Irish Home Rule. When the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, announced in late 1910 that a new Home Rule proposal would now be brought forward, he pitched the country back into the fierce conflict that had surrounded the first two Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893. But there was an important difference. While Liberal politicians had in the meantime done their best to forget about the whole issue, and Irish nationalists had descended into internecine conflicts, Unionists – especially in Ulster – had been carefully building their organizations in preparation for the next round of the fight. Then, as later, they were dourly pessimistic about the British government’s commitment to the Union. So when the ‘Third Home Rule Bill’ was announced, it ran into a more vigorous reaction than even the first two had. As it turned out, the House of Lords was not the final barrier to Home Rule: an Ulster-based mass mobilization brought to bear not the discredited privilege of the aristocracy, but a claim of democratic self-determination that matched the Irish nationalists’ own claim.

What would have happened if Home Rule had gone through? This is one of the great ‘what ifs?’ of Irish history, and indeed of British history. The entire twentieth-century relationship between Britain and Ireland would have been different, certainly. How different? Speculation, always risky, is unusually treacherous here because Home Rule as offered by Gladstone, and even by Asquith, was never a precise and unambiguous blueprint. Both sides of the argument stressed this. Parnell, the political leader who seemed to embody the Home Rule movement at its zenith, took care to point out that no one could ‘set bounds to the march of a nation’; and exactly the same point was hammered home by opponents of Home Rule, who argued that an Irish parliament, even if it began like ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ as a dependent body, would gradually enlarge its powers until Ireland became effectively independent. Gladstone offered Home Rule as a means of satisfying Irish aspirations within the framework of the United Kingdom, and – if Unionists had accepted this idea – it would have achieved Gladstone’s primary aim, to ‘pacify Ireland’.

So speculation about its possible impact, however treacherous, is irresistible.1 It would have divided the Irish nationalist movement, no doubt, but no more than it was already divided. Hardline republicans would have denounced it, but many other nationalists outside the ‘constitutionalist’ movement would have come on board: Patrick Pearse certainly, and maybe Arthur Griffith, and even Bulmer Hobson. Home Rule would have made the 1916 rebellion, in any case improbable, impossible in anything like the form it took. Thus 1916 followed directly from the failure of Home Rule, and it is vital to understand why – and still more how – Home Rule was frustrated. In formal terms, it actually succeeded. In September 1914, the Government of Ireland Act would receive the royal assent, through use of the Parliament Act: it was law, though it was suspended until the end of the European war. Paradoxically, this apparent success, as we shall see, was to lead the Home Rulers to ruin. But it had already become quite clear by that time that the Act would never come into effect without what the prime minister called some ‘special provision’ for northeastern Ireland. ‘Ulster’ had opted out of Home Rule, and had threatened armed rebellion to do so. It was this armed threat that transformed and militarized the language of Irish politics as the Home Rule crisis unfolded.

‘Militarism’ is a strong word. As it was used in Europe at this time, notably by critics of the Prussian-German monarchy, it meant the saturation of the entire political and social fabric by military values. In the German ‘Second Reich’, for instance, military uniform – even that of a reserve officer – gave greater status than any other social attribute. This would never quite happen in Ireland – even in the crisis of the civil war. Though the word has been applied to Irish history in this period, it has usually been without precise definition.² Those, like the German socialist Karl Liebknecht, who had to confront the ‘real thing’ up close, insisted on the need for precision.³ Merely putting people into military units, or uniforms, does not make them militarists. But the sudden emergence of large-scale military organizations to contest a political issue was a development that went far outside the normal conventions of liberal politics, and it is not misleading to call this ‘militarization’. It happened because the intensity of this political issue stretched the tolerances of the liberal political culture to breaking point: the characteristic British values of reasonableness, compromise and non-violence seemed unable to cope with the passions evoked by the threat of Home Rule.4

Looking back, a century on, it may seem hard to grasp why Home Rule unleashed such passionate hostility. It was a cautious measure of devolution, and the degree of independence it offered Ireland was sharply limited. (Ireland would not have defence forces, for instance, or the power to levy customs duties.) For Gladstone and his Liberal successors, its central purpose and justification was to strengthen the Union – not break it – by reducing Irish discontent to a manageable level. It was presented as heralding a wider scheme of devolution which would give the rest of the regions of the UK similar autonomous powers, so eliminating the sense of Irish ‘exceptionalism’ that had unbalanced British politics since the Union itself. Sadly, the force that might have made this prophetic scheme work, the demand for English self-government, was simply not present. UK federalism, sometimes called ‘home rule all round’, had many intelligent advocates, but it remained a fringe idea; ironically, it was the weakness of English nationalism that made it a political non-starter. Instead of welcoming Irish Home Rule as a way of making the Union work better, Unionists saw it as a secessionist challenge like that of the Confederacy in the American civil war. It would destroy the integrity of the state, and threaten Britain’s global power.

It was the mutual incomprehension of these two views of Home Rule that made the resulting crisis so jarring. With the benefit of hindsight, the seriousness of Unionist opposition should have been absolutely clear by the time Asquith brought in the third Home Rule Bill. The first Home Rule proposal, in 1886, had witnessed the century’s most destructive riots in Belfast, with the police becoming a prime target of loyalist anger, alongside the more familiar sectarian assaults on Catholics. By 1893, Unionists were threatening that resistance to Home Rule would take a military form if necessary. But these warning signs were ignored. The Liberal government, and still more the Irish Nationalist Party, dismissed these protests as bluster and bluff. Objections to Home Rule were dismissed as illegitimate, since Ireland had a right to national self-government; and also illogical, since the island of Ireland so evidently constituted a natural political, economic and administrative unit. Liberals took the view that resistance was a throwback to old sectarian hatreds, which would ultimately give way to the forces of progress; nationalism had history on its side. It was a key part of the Zeitgeist. The third Home Rule Bill was prepared with no more attention to the idea of accommodating Unionist resistance than the first two had been. The government was almost comically unprepared for the storm it unleashed; the results, however, were tragic.

Even before the launching of the third Home Rule Bill in April 1912, the Unionists movement had initiated a massive and dramatic protest movement. This was effectively concentrated in Ulster, or more precisely the four north-eastern counties, where Unionists (and Protestants) were in a substantial majority. The resistance preparations, in fact, precipitated a split within Unionism itself, as ‘southern’ Unionists – a weak minority in numerical terms – could not contemplate direct action. They depended on stopping Home Rule dead at Westminster, an all-or-nothing strategy, whereas the northerners had a fall-back option – rescuing ‘Ulster’ from the wreckage, if necessary by cutting it off from the rest of Ireland. It was this focus on Ulster that became decisively sharpened by the last Home Rule crisis. When the Parliament Act removed the final barrier of the House of Lords’ veto in 1911, Irish Unionism was already shifting its ground. A big rally at Craigavon in September 1911 was followed by a bigger one at the Balmoral showground on the day of the Bill’s first reading in parliament, when 100,000 men marched past Sir Edward Carson and a fifty-foot Union flag, the biggest ever woven, was broken out. The Ulster Solemn League and Covenant was signed by half a million people on 28 September – ‘Ulster Day’. The use of symbols like flag and covenant – loaded with potent Protestant historical significance – was highly effective political theatre, and the location of the demonstrations in Belfast rather than Dublin sent a signal whose meaning would become increasingly clear. Although Unionism’s most charismatic Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, was a Dubliner, southern Unionists simply could not muster the street muscle to dispute the issue. At the end of 1912, the Ulster Unionist Clubs, many of whose branches had spontaneously begun to practise military drilling, moved to form a citizen militia, whose name said it all – the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).5

Much of this process had been instinctive; its driving force was the long-established tradition of popular Loyalist militancy embodied in the Orange Order. The Order had an up-and-down history stretching back to the eighteenth century; it had seemed to die out from time to time, and had sometimes been denounced by the Unionist leadership, sometimes co-opted by them. By the early twentieth century, Orange Lodges had become more respectable, with the gentry taking on the role of Lodge Masters, but their fundamental urge to direct action never entirely disappeared. Their ‘walking’ was a euphemism for military-style marching, confrontational in body-language and symbolism. So the footsoldiers of Unionism were always ready to take to the streets; the problem was what they might do there. Throughout the crisis, there was an evident tension between the restive, visceral energy of the grassroots loyalists and the political caution (containing a healthy dash of middle-class anxiety) of the leadership. It was the spontaneous action of an Orange Lodge contingent from county Tyrone at the September 1911 rally that launched the craze for military drilling, and local paramilitary militia units had been forming up for well over a year before the UUC belatedly started to enrol them in a single force. The purpose of this was clearly to control them at least as much as to encourage them. The Unionist leadership talked violence but soft-pedalled on the business of providing the weapons to turn this ‘stage army’ into a real military force. Contrary to the view taken (and still taken today) by nationalists, there seem to have been very few service rifles in the hands of the UVF, even in late 1913, more than two years after the force began to emerge.⁶

In formal terms, the UVF accepted men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five who had signed the Ulster Covenant. Its total enrolment was limited to 100,000. Territorial battalions were formed, grouped initially into districts and subdivisions. Twenty battalions were raised in Belfast. In the summer of 1913, a number of former British officers (there were sixteen ‘known to the police’ by September) were recruited to inject leadership experience at the top; the most senior were General Sir George Richardson, who became commander-in-chief of the UVF, and Colonel W. Hacket Pain, who became chief of staff. They moved the force closer to the British army model, introducing county regiments. Belfast had four regiments, making up the Belfast Division. But when that impressive-sounding division, 10,390 strong, held a parade at Balmoral in October 1913, it was unarmed apart from fourteen modern Lee-Metford rifles, one carried by each battalion marker.7 Everyone believed, of course, that they had more, but no one knew how many. The idea of displaying so few, we may guess, was that their opponents should believe they had 10,000. Nationalists asserted that 25,000 rifles were in UVF hands by the time the government eventually banned the importation of arms in September 1913. But we know that as late as January 1914 the Antrim UVF had only 150 British and 50 Italian service weapons for its 10,700 men, and that there were several heated confrontations between the rank and file and the UVF leadership over the failure to provide rifles in significant quantities. And in fact it was the relatively small number of the guns known by the authorities to have reached Ulster that made it difficult to decide how to react. The law did not provide fixed rules about the illegality of arms imports: as the Irish government’s law officers noted, ‘forty-five rifles might be satisfactorily accounted for, while 100,000 could bear no innocent explanation’. In mid-1913, the police were reportedly ‘aware of’ about 1,100 rifles that had been imported over the previous year.⁸

Nationalists charged (and still do) that the government’s belated decision to prohibit the importation of arms was a way of giving the Unionists a head start. This says more about nationalist perceptions than about political realities; for the Liberal government the appearance of the UVF was an alarming and disorienting development.⁹ The crisis was outrunning the political experience of ‘liberal England’ and its language of consensus. When the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law denounced Asquith’s Cabinet as ‘a revolutionary committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud’, he was raising the political stakes to a vertiginous level, and his party threatened to push them off the charts when it talked of using the House of Lords to veto the annual Army Act. Even in its reduced two-year suspensory form, such a veto would have created an unprecedented situation in which (theoretically, at least) the government could no longer control the armed services. Merely to hint at such an action was a kind of extremism that threatened to unhinge the long-established restraints of British political life. In these fraught circumstances the Liberals trod with even more than their habitual caution, weighing their words and actions with extreme care. What should they do about the paramilitary drilling craze? Drilling was outlawed under the Unlawful Drilling Act of 1819 – except where two magistrates authorized it to make people ‘more efficient citizens for the purpose of maintaining their rights and liberties’. This loophole had been exploited to the full by Unionist magistrates since 1911. Sir John Simon, the Attorney General, argued that this was not ‘lawful authority’ when ‘the whole proceeding is a seditious conspiracy’. The whole movement was a crime, and the JPs who ‘gave such authority would be accessories to the crime’.10 These were forceful words, but the government did not act on them for fear of pushing the situation into open conflict.

Moreover, Simon nerved himself to this tough line only after illegal drilling had been going on for two years. The procrastination of the authorities laid them open to the charge of partiality, but the painfully cautious tone of their deliberations suggests that this was true vacillation. When, for instance, in May 1912 the army’s law officers looked into the possibility of ‘calling to account’ military officers who were known to have taken part in drilling in Ulster, they noted that these officers would probably have obtained legal authority (under 60 Geo.III cap.1), but this in itself ‘would be an admission that the officers in question were training the persons assembled at the meetings to the use of arms, or at least in military exercise, movements or evolutions’. The question then was the purpose of this training. Since ‘it cannot with any show of veracity be contended that it has a purely educational object, as in the case of the boy scouts’, it must be either ‘seditious resistance to constituted authority as has often been openly stated’, or ‘preparation for a political demonstration’. Either would be forbidden to serving officers. Again this was a muscular enough analysis, but its conclusion was distinctly limp – ‘there would not seem to be any objection to asking those officers who have taken part in drilling … how they explain their conduct’.¹¹

It is not clear whether even this cautious action was taken, but it is certain that officers persisted in this activity. Well over a year later, when some 200 members of the ‘Enniskillen Horse’ paraded through the town under their commander, the local magistrate William Copeland Trimble (editor of the implausibly named Unionist newspaper the Impartial Reporter), the police observed that this band of unofficial yeomanry, armed with 16 carbines and 143 lances, was inspected on Portora Football Ground by a regular officer, Major Viscount Crichton of the Royal Horse Guards, who complimented them on ‘the work they did so well’. The Irish Attorney General then declared bluntly that ‘these demonstrations of armed forces are highly criminal and in fact are acts of treason’ – but immediately added, ‘as regards the question whether the Police should take action, my answer is that the Police should not take any action in the matter as far as interfering with the demonstrations for the purpose of stopping them’; they should merely note the names of those involved. Six months later still, the military intelligence staff in Dublin put ‘the tolerance of the Government towards the systematic drilling and arming which has been going on for nearly two years in Ulster’ at the top of their list of outstanding issues.12 All this was fully exploited by the Ulster Unionist leadership, who revelled in their impunity – none more so than Carson, who crowed in September 1913, as the UUC prepared to launch its ‘Provisional Government’ of Ulster, ‘I am told that the government will be illegal. Of course it will. Drilling is illegal. The Volunteers are illegal, and the Government know they are illegal, and the Government dare not interfere.’

The UVF was the decisive spur to the militarization of nationalist politics. Whatever its limitations and internal tensions, and however short of arms it may have been, it impressed nationalists, maybe even more than it did the government. In early 1912 the Gaelic League activist Michael O’Rahilly (known to history by his Celticized title, ‘The O’Rahilly’) published a series of articles in the separatist paper Irish Freedom based on the proposition that ‘the foundation on which all government rests in the possession of arms and the ability to use them’, which went on to a detailed military history of the 1798 rebellion – ‘the most recent occasion when any considerable body of Irish people appealed to arms’. This kind of history-lesson-cum-parable was a staple of the republican press, and his peroration – ‘if you are serious in wanting freedom from British domination, get arms and be prepared to use them’, was hardly as novel as his recent biographer maintains. The very first issue of the journal in 1910 had insisted that arms were ‘the free man’s first essential’. A series of articles called ‘the Faith of a Fenian’ declared that ‘Ireland’s national attitude towards all things English is war’, while the journal’s Fianna column (written by Constance Markievicz) assured its young readers that ‘the history of the world proves that there is but one road to freedom, and that is the red road of war’. Freedom attained by ‘oratory, logic or votes’ was merely ‘a more secure form of slavery. The freedom that is not worth fighting and dying for is not worth having.’ Its second number reiterated the Fenian commitment to ‘directly seeking to establish a republic by force of arms’, mocking the idea of passive resistance (‘endeavouring to find rose-strewn paths to freedom’) as an attempt to avoid the old methods of ‘secret conspiracy and armed rebellion’; and in September 1911 the journal indicted ‘this generation’ with the ‘sin’ of ‘passing away – the first since Cromwell – without an armed denial of England’s right to rule it’.13

The rhetoric was familiar – maybe over-familiar. ‘We of the Wolfe Tone Clubs hold still that it is a greater and a better thing to lay up pikes, as Emmet did, than to lay up gold in banks or shares in profitable businesses.’ O’Rahilly, however, was plainly not talking about pikes: ‘Rifles can be bought by anyone who has the price of them’: there were no longer any ‘disarming Acts’, and he suggested that ‘a man who is dissatisfied with his form of Government, and has not got a rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition in a place where he can get them when he wants them, is only playing at politics’.¹⁴ What was perhaps most significant about these articles in the IRB’s newspaper was that their writer was not a member of the IRB (he followed the Catholic hierarchy’s condemnation of oathbound secret societies). He may be placed in a semi-political grouping of what one historian described as ‘constitutional separatists’, who were rapidly becoming increasingly radicalized in the face of the Ulster challenge, and who were to play a pivotal role in the seismic political shift that was to follow.

The key figures in this were Eoin MacNeill and Patrick Pearse, both formerly supporters of Redmond, and both prominent Gaelic Leaguers, and former editors of the League’s journal An Claideamh Soluis. By 1912 Pearse was ready to welcome the Home Rule Bill with the public warning, ‘Let the Gall [foreigner] understand that if we are cheated this time there will be red war in Ireland.’ MacNeill was moving dramatically from his early categorical rejection of ‘physical hostility’ in the cause of nationality to warning, in March 1912, that the younger generation might justifiably go beyond constitutional methods to secure ‘our rights’. O’Rahilly became editor of An Claideamh Soluis in mid-1913, and in the autumn he invited MacNeill to contribute an article urging nationalists to imitate the UVF. Taking his title, ‘The North Began’, from one of Thomas Davis’s martial ballads about the Volunteers of 1782 (‘The North began, the North held on / … Till Ireland rose and cowed her foes’), MacNeill built up a rather ambiguous and sophistical argument that the UVF were virtual Home Rulers, and that ‘Sir Edward Carson has knocked the bottom out of Unionism.’ The Ulster mobilization had certainly broken the unity of Irish Unionism, but in the process it had generated a vastly more formidable obstacle to Home Rule, a movement which could deploy the same rhetoric of democratic self-determination as the nationalists.

MacNeill, an Ulsterman himself, could not resist attacking Carson’s policy and his loyalist followers, though: he called the Provisional government ‘the most ridiculous piece of political histrionics ever staged’, and strongly implied that the whole Ulster Volunteer movement was a pretence; ‘the crowning sham’ was the million-pound insurance fund that had just been announced. ‘The real insurance fund for war’, MacNeill lectured, ‘is fighting material, and those who are in earnest about war will not devote a penny to any other sort of insurance.’ His positive proposals were less trenchant, but he suggested that, since it was now clear that the British army could not be used to prevent the drilling and reviewing of volunteers, ‘there is nothing to prevent the other twenty-eight counties from calling into existence citizen forces to hold Ireland “for the Empire”’. This argument was probably too subtle to convince most nationalists, but MacNeill had done enough to precipitate the process. He was aware that a ‘Midland Volunteer Force’ had already appeared – at least in the imagination of the pressmen of Athlone (some kind of drilling displays went on there, though probably on nothing like the scale suggested in the Westmeath Independent).15 In late October and early November, D. P. Moran’s Leader had twice urged the starting of local companies, asking ‘Why should not every Gaelic Athletic Club, for instance, turn out as Volunteers?’ The idea was in the air. What MacNeill and Moran probably did not know was that steps had actually been taken in this direction by the IRB in its various guises, under the presiding genius of Bulmer Hobson.

Hobson’s later fall from republican grace led to a fair bit of rewriting of the history of this crucial formative period, but there is no doubt that after he moved from Belfast to Dublin in 1908 his influence on the IRB grew steadily. When he became chairman of the Dublin Centres Board in 1912 he was the key organizer, and he fostered two key policies. He began preparing for a national military volunteer organization, and created a dedicated IRB circle for the reborn Fianna Eireann, the most definite military initiative taken so far. Even after he handed the presidency over to Markievicz, Hobson went on drawing the link with the IRB tighter, through protégés such as Con Colbert, Padraig O Riain, Seán McGarry and Liam Mellows, and (it seems) fixed the elections at each annual congress (ard-fheis). The Fianna programme – scouting, fieldcraft, and shooting – was unambiguously military. Con Colbert and Eamon Martin studied the British army manuals and started the process of training instructors. By the time Hobson proposed to the IRB Dublin Centres Board in July 1913 that a militia should be set up, he was able to bring in a substantial trained Fianna element to kickstart the process. Secret drilling began during the summer in the Irish National Foresters Hall in Parnell Square.

There can also be little doubt that Hobson was the IRB’s leading strategic thinker at this stage. A member who was present at a general IRB meeting in Parnell Square in 1914 found himself sitting next to Pearse while Hobson expounded his prediction that there would be a major war within ten years, and that would give the IRB its opportunity. Pearse drove him home in his pony trap afterwards, and ‘appeared doubtful whether Hobson was right’.¹⁶ Pearse’s own passage into the IRB was oddly long drawn-out, apparently being vetoed several times by some of the higher leadership – Charlie Burgess (Cathal Brugha) regarded Pearse’s financial dealings as dishonest, and Hobson said the same subsequently. (Many rank-and-file IRB men, however, seem to have been admitted without such high-level searching scrutiny.) A turning point seems to have come when the Supreme Council accepted Seán MacDermott’s proposal that Pearse should give the Emmet anniversary address in 1911. This was a high-profile republican event, and Tom Clarke was almost as impressed by his performance as Pat McCartan. But opposition still persisted, and his appearance on a Home Rule platform in April 1912 confirmed the view that he was not a true separatist, his sanguinary threats to ‘the Gall’ notwithstanding.

About the same time, he had launched his own Irish-language newspaper, An Barr Buadh (‘The Trumpet of Victory’), and kept it going for eight issues despite being effectively bankrupt. The series of political and economic articles he published in it still strayed from the republican line, though there also appeared his poem Mionn (‘Oath’), opening with a mesmeric, quasi-liturgical incantation of the nationalist pantheon, and ending with an almost blasphemous embrace of physical violence: ‘We swear the oaths our ancestors swore, / That we will free our race from bondage, / Or fall fighting hand to hand / Amen.’17 Eventually, in November 1913, the week after MacNeill’s article, he wrote the ultimate paean to armed rebellion. Since ‘nationhood is not achieved otherwise than in arms’, he was ‘glad that the Orangemen have armed, because it is a goodly thing to see arms in Irish hands’. Once again there was an incantatory rhythm in his repeated references to arms. ‘We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms’ – but now the rhetoric went all the way to the shedding of blood: ‘bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.’¹⁸ This last sentence was a familiar enough sentiment, perhaps, but the idea of the ‘cleansing and sanctifying’ power of bloodshed was much more unusual: here Pearse showed that he could speak simultaneously in both physical and symbolic terms.

Pearse finally joined the IRB by way of the Irish Volunteers, and this was itself evidence of the care taken by Hobson and his group to launch the Volunteer movement in a way that would maximize its cross-party support. MacNeill, in writing ‘the North began’, singled himself out as the natural public instigator, but undoubtedly the initiative and the impulse to the series of meetings leading up to the public inauguration of the Volunteers came from the IRB. It was Hobson’s guarantee that he could provide a nucleus of reliable men to launch the movement that persuaded O’Rahilly to go to MacNeill with the project.19 Twelve men from across the political spectrum were invited to the first meeting to form a steering committee, in Wynn’s Hotel on 11 November. It is not clear exactly how the list was drawn up, or why some crucial invitations (including those to Eamonn Ceannt, Piaras Béaslaí and Seán Fitzgibbon) were not sent until the day before. What is clear is that over the next couple of weeks the committee expanded by a process beyond IRB control. Of the original invitees, one of the few nationally known figures, D. P. Moran, made his excuses, but several others were added at each of the next four meetings, until the Provisional Committee reached the unwieldy total of thirty. This procrastinating fortnight (the meeting place itself was rearranged three times into progressively larger spaces) allowed the Irish Transport Workers Union to get in first by creating its own militia, the Irish Citizen Army, on 23 November. But at last a manifesto for the Irish Volunteers was put together, and launched at the Rotunda Rink on 25 November.

The manifesto levelled the charge – at ‘one of the great English political parties’ rather than the Ulster Unionists – of aiming ‘to make the display of military force and the menace of armed violence the determining factor in the future relations between this country and Great Britain’. Thus ‘the people of Ireland’ had either to ‘surrender’, and so ‘become politically the most degraded population in Europe, no longer worthy of the name of Nation’, or ‘take such measures as will effectually defeat this policy’. The manifesto declared the object of the Irish Volunteers to be ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland’, so carefully skirting the issue that had generated the Ulster crisis, the refusal of some of those people to accept ‘the name of Nation’. It argued for a Volunteer movement which would be permanent, ‘a prominent element in the national life under a National Government … as a guarantee of the liberties which the Irish people shall have secured’. The basis for the organization was to be as wide as possible – its ranks would be ‘open to all able-bodied Irishmen without distinction of creed, politics, or social grade’ (though ‘there will also be work for women to do’).20

The terms of the manifesto represented something of a balancing act, designed to make it possible for Redmondite nationalists to join up, even though Redmond himself – ever suspicious of any rival movements, and ever anxious to avoid provocation – would or could not (as MacNeill appreciated) give a lead. Indeed, an initiative to raise volunteers in Belfast had already been quashed by Joe Devlin, who ran the nationalist party there. ‘The two Johns and Joe’ (Redmond, John Dillon, and Devlin), the party’s controlling triumvirate, remained an awkward obstacle for those who wanted to move the Volunteers in a more confrontational direction over the following months. The party’s own strong-arm organization, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), dedicated not so much to opposing loyalists as to crushing dissent within the nationalist movement, often undermined Volunteer recruiting. But the movement’s biggest problem – and the biggest contrast with the Ulster movement – was shortage of funds. Although MacNeill might mock the UVF’s million-pound insurance fund, it showed the readiness of wealthy backers to dig deep in their pockets (Craig and Carson each subscribed a staggering £10,000). The initial subscription list for the Irish Volunteers totalled £87s. 6d., with the biggest contributors – Hobson, MacNeill, O’Rahilly and seven others – giving a pound each. A somewhat larger donation by Sir Roger Casement at the end of the year provided a vital boost. But the Volunteers would have to be self-supporting, and one of the primary functions of the organization set on foot at the turn of the year was to gather individual subscriptions and remit enough funds to the centre to allow the establishment of a headquarters at 206 Great Brunswick Street (later 2 Dawson Street). Drill halls and training grounds could be prohibitively costly, but the clergy often provided significant aid – the Capuchin friars, notably, gave the Dublin Volunteers the use of Father Mathew Park (named, suitably for the puritanical new militiamen, after the great nineteenth-century temperance campaigner).

The structure of the Volunteers was amorphous at the beginning. The manifesto suggested that they would be enrolled according to the district they lived in; then, as soon as possible, ‘the district sections will be called upon to make provision for the general administration and discipline, and for united co-operation’, through an elective body to replace the provisional Committee. In Kerry, the Tralee Volunteers ‘referred to the four Companies generally as the “Tralee Volunteers”, rather than forming a battalion.21 In Cork there was no battalion or brigade structure until 1915.²² Early in 1914 a set of military instructions laid down a basic structure closely modelled on the British army’s, with battalions consisting of eight companies, composed of two half-companies of four eight-man squads. Officers were to carry regular military ranks, non-commissioned and commissioned, from corporal to colonel.²³ But there was one big difference: they were to be elected. (After two months drilling, company elections were to take place, with only those who had attended 75 per cent of drills for those two months eligible to vote.) Their disciplinary powers were to be voluntary, and there was not even any form of attestation oath for recruits (the ‘general instructions for forming companies’ merely specified that those setting units up should ‘let everyone clearly understand that the aim of the Volunteers is to secure and maintain the rights common to all the people of Ireland’). The motive force of the movement was enthusiasm. ‘Each member’, as the instructions said, ‘must purchase his own uniform and his rifle.’²⁴ Companies needed to go out and buy copies of the British Infantry Manual, 1911, costing a shilling from Ponsonby’s of Grafton Street.

This democratic element reflected the hybrid military-political inspiration of the Irish Volunteers. A distinctly unmilitary tradition of collective command was established through the ‘battalion councils’, eventually to be formalized in 1915. Most significantly, the IV did not follow the UVF’s example of appointing a military man as commander-in-chief, despite Casement’s urging the need for ‘a general’ and his proposal of General Kelly-Kenny. Eoin MacNeill’s role as ‘Chief of Staff’ underlined the political as well as military logic of the movement.²⁵ Still, it proved true enough that, as the Volunteer manifesto claimed, ‘to drill, to learn the use of arms, to acquire the habit of concerted and disciplined action’ was ‘beyond all doubt, a programme that appeals to all Ireland, but especially to young Ireland’. This popular military enthusiasm was certainly not confined to Ireland; it appeared in varying intensities across pre-war Europe. But in the Irish case, it did not necessarily signify a military commitment. As one Volunteer organizer in the west said, ‘the public in general certainly did not anticipate that the military form of the new movement was directed to military action’.26

Most likely, age made a difference here, as the manifesto implied. ‘Young Ireland’ was the most enthusiastic and militant element of the movement. The average age of the Volunteers before 1916 was probably a little higher than it would be afterwards, though the available records do not allow us to be certain of this. One survey (of Cork county Volunteers) suggests that the median age in 1916 was twenty-seven. But undoubtedly youth was a marked feature of the movement. What was perhaps more important than the average age was the clear sense of identity of a ‘younger generation’, if not quite a youth revolt. In the countryside this carried potent associations with deep-set traditions of ritualized rebellion by groups of young and unmarried men under names such as ‘Wren Boys’, ‘Biddy Boys’ or ‘Straw Boys’ – all ‘boys’ for short.²⁷ Combined with ‘a simple but vibrant symbolism of resistance’ – the memory of old rebellions – this ensured that ‘Irish rural society was imbued with a sense of warfare.’²⁸ Nationalism may have been in a sense a pretext for this cocktail of recreation and male bonding, but ideology was a crucial factor in the self-definition and motivation of the Volunteers. Whatever social dynamics it might tap into, this was a movement whose rhetoric and imagery were highly politicized. This kind of ‘militarism’ can be seen as a vital agent of transition from tradition to modernity.²⁹

Recruitment into the Volunteers was not as spectacular as the UVF’s had been, though it reached 10,000 by the end of 1913, and steadily mounted through to the spring of 1914. Playing soldiers had novelty value, though its very novelty was a problem at the start. ‘In Ireland we had no knowledge of military training’, as one Dublin Volunteer noted; on principle ‘we would not watch a company of British soldiers training on the barrack square; we would not even watch the changing of the guard at the Bank of Ireland.’ As the self-confessedly puritanical Desmond FitzGerald, an organizer in Kerry found, the policy of enrolling anyone with or without military aptitude made it hard to impose standards. ‘I tackled one man who seemed incapable of forming fours and asked him what was the matter. He replied, “Erra, the way it is, after all you said about keeping away from drink, I drank so much lemonade last Sunday in Tralee that I can do nothing with my feet.”’30

But in Dublin, at least, ‘the ex-soldiers of the Dublin Fusiliers, Munster Fusiliers, Connaught Rangers … flocked to the drill halls and offered their services’. Military manners started to take hold: ‘In a short time we were knocked into shape. We could hold our heads up; we could drill; we could march. We were taught what discipline meant and we knew how to obey orders.’³¹ Learning the use of arms was more problematic, and actually getting a real rifle – the key ambition of every Volunteer – was an uncertain process. Energetic quartermasters such as Michael Staines, responsible for three companies of the 1st Battalion, ‘collected one shilling per week from every Volunteer who wanted a Martini rifle and two shillings and sixpence from any Volunteer who wanted a Lee Enfield’.³² The Tralee Volunteers – who unusually preferred to amass single-shot Martini Henrys (the type used by the RIC before the war), and got rid of their few Lee Enfields ‘so as to have a uniform type of rifle as far as possible’ – gave a rifle to any man who put down a subscription of five shillings.³³ Staines eventually secured a rifle for every man in his three companies, but not all were so successful. Though many had to make do with pistols, shotguns or even pikes, possession of a rifle was vital to the self-belief of Volunteers as a military force. It has been said, indeed, that ‘the rifle was almost fetishistically central to the Volunteers’ purpose and identity’.³⁴

Uniforms were also a key signal of military credibility, and also took some time to sort out – the Uniform Sub-Committee did not report until August 1914, and was still undecided on vital accoutrements such as headdress. ‘A considerable body of opinion favoured soft hats’ (on the model of the Boer slouch hat), ‘but it was found impossible to get a suitable hat of Irish manufacture.’ Instead they decided, for Dublin at least, on a cap of rather puzzling design – ‘a smart one somewhat after the Cossack style’. Some of the accumulated store of Gaelicist enthusiasm was funnelled into the Volunteers: the cap badge and belt buckles, for instance, evoked a prehistoric ancestry for the force with their sunburst symbols and ‘FF’ (Fianna Fáil) title. Possibly reflecting an ongoing debate about Ireland’s true ‘national colour’, early IV membership cards were blue rather than green. A final ruling on the correct flag for Volunteer units to carry – a plain gold harp on a green ground – did not follow until May 1915. Pearse was still tinkering with all these questions at the end of that year.35

The ‘work for women to do’ promised in the Volunteer Manifesto also emerged rather slowly; and, when it did, rather controversially. Not until April 1914 was an inaugural meeting held (in Wynn’s Hotel again) to establish a women’s auxiliary organization, Cumann na mBan (League of Women). Though this was greeted enthusiastically – certainly by the Volunteers’ womenfolk – its role was not to accelerate women’s emancipation. It took from its president, the Gaelic Leaguer Agnes O’Farrelly, a conventional rather than revolutionary tone: members were not to take part in political discussions, nor (except in the ‘last extremity’) to take a direct part in military operations. Their task was to support the Volunteers. ‘Each rifle we put in their hands will represent to us a bolt fastened behind the door of some Irish home to keep out the hostile stranger. Each cartridge will be a watchdog to fight for the sanctity of the hearth.’³⁶ Unlike the women’s section of the Citizen Army, which was barely distinct from the main body (and was to see several of its members in combat during the rebellion), Cumann na mBan remained a separate and subordinate body. This came in for some sharp criticism from the small but vocal feminist grouping, notably Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (daughter of the Nationalist MP David Sheehy). The Irish Citizen, edited by her husband Frank, challenged the use of the term ‘the people of Ireland’ in the Volunteer Manifesto, and regretted that they ‘had not the courage’ to add the phrase ‘without distinction of sex’ whenever it occurred. Frank Sheehy-Skeffington went on later to tax his friend Thomas MacDonagh, in an extraordinary open letter warning of the incipient militarism of the Volunteer movement, with the deeper significance of its exclusion of women. ‘When you have found the reason why women cannot be asked to enrol in this movement, you will be close to the reactionary element in the movement itself.’³⁷

It was not just MacDonagh and Pearse, but the majority of the Cumann na mBan themselves, who missed the point of this critique. They stoutly defended the independence of their organization, and repudiated any suggestion of subordination. They were not handmaidens, but allies. Not only did they make an essential contribution to the military viability of the Volunteers, they embodied the inspiration of the movement; as Mary Colum put it, ‘where the members of Cumann na mBan are the most numerous the spirit of the Volunteers is best’.38 And vice versa, of course: one member of the Belfast Cumann ruefully recorded that ‘it was impossible to obtain any central premises’ for the group of thirty-odd women to meet, ‘as our organisation was not popular or considered respectable in Belfast’.³⁹

Though the IV was a national organization, it was in more than one sense centred in Dublin, and drawn principally (like the Fenians of the past) from the respectable working class. Despite the prominence of teachers in the leadership, professionals were probably underrepresented in Dublin; shop assistants and clerks, who appeared to many observers to dominate the movement there, actually made up less than a fifth of the Dublin Volunteers who would be interned in 1916.⁴⁰ (They were, however, over-represented in relation to the national average – commercial clerks, for instance, by a factor of nine.)⁴¹ Skilled workers, on the other hand, made up 40 per cent. Plumbers, painters, carpenters, bakers, tailors, machinists, fitters, electricians and ‘artists’ were as important to the life of the Volunteer companies as they were to the life of the city. In the provinces, unsurprisingly, the proportion of skilled workers was half the Dublin figure; but more surprisingly, farmers and their sons accounted for less than a third of the Volunteers interned. This social structure may have exerted an influence on the decisions to be taken – or not taken – in Easter Week 1916.

Dublin would continue to generate most of the movement’s organizational energy. An organizer sent out from headquarters later in 1914 found that the great majority of provincial units ‘existed only in name’. In the Bandon area of south Cork, for instance, only one man of independent means, William McDonnell, committed himself to the IV movement in 1914. ‘Orange’ Bandon (which nationalists tirelessly recalled had been the first Irish town to welcome Cromwell) had a strong Unionist community, but ‘Loyalism was far less an obstacle than native apathy, so strikingly reflected in the almost total boycott of the Volunteers by prominent men in the town and countryside.’ McDonnell’s first task was educational. He found it ‘amazing’ how ignorant people were of the history of their country and indeed of their national identity. He had to ‘bring home to them an understanding of their status as Irishmen, to show that the English occupation was mere usurpation, that under Brehon law no one could forfeit land … The impact of this information raised a new sense of pride and power.’ But this took time.42 Florence O’Donoghue, later a leading IRA officer and historian, recorded that even in mid-1915 the Volunteer organization in Cork city and county was barely holding its own: small groups started, worked for a time, relapsed into inactivity and disintegrated. In the extensive territory of West Cork, only two IV companies (Bantry and Ballingeary) had been established.

An essay contributed under the name ‘Rapparee’ (possibly by O’Rahilly), in the September 1913 issue of Irish Freedom, presented a military analysis of Emmet’s rebellion, arguing that it came closer to success than was generally thought. Had Emmet’s intended attack on Dublin Castle come off, he wrote, ‘there is no doubt that the country would have risen like one man’. This argument may tell us more of the attitudes of the soon-to-be volunteers of 1913 than it does of the realities of 1803, but the essayist’s insistence that succeeding separatist leaders had erred in ignoring ‘the paramount strategical importance of the capital’ was highly significant for the future. Early twentieth-century Dublin was, in the words of one historian, ‘a city in distress’, and in September 1913 was in the grip of an intense crisis.⁴³ A tramway strike which broke out on 25 August had spread into a full-scale showdown between the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) under the leadership of Jim Larkin, and a coalition of employers led by William Martin Murphy, a pluralist proprietor in the modern capitalist mode, whose empire included the Dublin United Tramways Company as well as a national newspaper, the Irish Independent, and the Dublin Evening Herald. This ‘bloodsucking vampire’ (as he was characterized in the ITGWU’s own paper, the Irish Worker) was determined to destroy what he called ‘Larkinism’. By 22 September, 25,000 men had been locked out, and the city was paralysed.

This was a crisis not only for the livelihoods of Dublin workers but also for relations between Irish and British trades unions. It played a vital part, too, in the final unravelling of the great political movement of Irish nationalism as it had existed since the time of Parnell. Murphy represented the Catholic middle-class power-base of the parliamentary nationalist party, hostile from both Catholic and bourgeois standpoints to the menace of ‘syndicalism’. That menace was, of course, vastly exaggerated by both the church and Murphy’s press, but in the process of grinding down the resistance of the Dublin workers, he went some distance towards making it a reality. Now the vaguely syndicalist militancy of ‘Larkinism’ was focused in the shape of a workers’ militia, set up at first as a bodyguard for Larkin and other labour leaders in their frequent confrontations with the hired strikebreakers of the Tramways Company. In October, Larkin was arrested for seditious libel and conspiracy, and given a seven-month prison sentence. A wave of public protest impelled the government to release him after a fortnight, and at a big rally to celebrate his release on 14 November, his deputy, James Connolly, issued a dramatic call to arms: ‘Next time we are out for a march, I want to be accompanied by four battalions of trained men with their corporals and sergeants.’ A week later the Irish Citizen Army was formally announced. Larkin called it a ‘new Army of the people, so that Labour may be able to utilise that great physical power which it possesses to prevent its elementary rights being taken away’.44

The ICA was a Dublin outfit through and through, confined by its proletarian base and the financial constraints of a union movement battered and bruised by the 1913 dispute. Even so, it was weaker than it might have been. Although several thousand were enrolled in November, after the end of the strike the roll shrank to less than a thousand, and few more joined over the following months despite the enthusiastic efforts of the army’s chief organizer, Captain Jack White (the son of a British general). One key reason was the competition of the Irish Volunteers. The playwright and labour activist Sean O’Casey, Secretary of the ICA Council, found it ‘difficult to understand why the workers chose to join an organisation which was largely controlled by their enemies rather than one which was guided and governed by the men who were their elected leaders’.⁴⁵ One of those who did join the ICA, Frank Robbins, was clear enough about the problem. He thought that while some workers might have stayed away for ‘genuine reasons, such as shabby clothing and lack of proper footwear’, the plain fact was that most workers did not sympathize with the army’s purpose. ‘The socialist ideals expressed in the constitution of the ICA were not understood by the workers, and where understood, were not acceptable.’46 Unlike the IV, the ICA made no effort to dilute its revolutionary posture to widen its support. It suffered, too, from the inevitable fractiousness of the left. O’Casey became infuriated by Constance Markievicz’s flamboyant posing and her ‘bourgeois background’; he thought her sympathy for the workers a sham. Later in 1914 he tried to have her expelled from the ICA Council because of her close association with the Irish Volunteers, an organization ‘in its methods and aims inimical to the first interests of Labour’. This internal squabble ended with O’Casey’s own resignation, a real and pointless loss.⁴⁷

In early 1914, as the ICA struggled to rebuild itself in the grim aftermath of the Dublin lockout, the wider Irish political crisis intensified. The atmosphere was thickening. Patrick Pearse, in the USA on a fund-raising tour in February and March (extended because the St Enda’s College Fund had failed to reach $1,000 by 21 March), was moving to a new level of military rhetoric. His exposure to the semi-hysterical Irish-American republican culture was a ‘heady experience’, and its effects were measurable. Impressed by the hardbitten old-style Fenians such as John Devoy and ‘their romantic lust for violent resolution’,⁴⁸ he found like many separatist visitors before him that the fiercer his rhetoric, the more ecstatic (and generous) was his reception. Haranguing an Emmet commemoration meeting in New York, he proclaimed:

Today Ireland is once more organising, once more learning the noble trade of arms … There is again in Ireland the murmur of marching, and talk of guns and tactics. The existence on Irish soil of an Irish army is the most portentous fact that has appeared in Ireland for over a hundred years: a fact which marks definitely the beginning of the second stage of the Revolution which commenced when the Gaelic League was founded.⁴⁹

In March, moreover, the crisis in the British state was suddenly ratcheted up another notch. Events at the main military base at the Curragh turned into something entirely outside British experience, at least since the time of Cromwell – a crisis of civil–military relations. Though it is sometimes called the Curragh ‘mutiny’, it was not quite that – no orders were actually disobeyed.50 But the government got into a dangerous fix by attempting to ensure that, if it did order the army to act in Ulster, the order would be obeyed. That there should be any question of this was itself a sign of how serious the situation had become. The Home Rule Bill was set to become law as soon as the two-year suspensory veto of the House of Lords expired, and since no political resolution of the Ulster issue had been reached, the threat of armed resistance seemed a real possibility. The government ordered troop reinforcements to be sent north as a precautionary measure, but the army was acutely aware that many of its officers were openly hostile to Home Rule. In a particularly ham-fisted manoeuvre, the War Office decided to offer Ulster-domiciled army officers exemption from action in Ulster (they were to be allowed to ‘disappear’ for the duration), while threatening that any others who refused to go there would not be allowed to resign but be ‘cashiered’. When the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Ireland put this option to the officers of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, he found that most of them would rather lose their careers than risk having to oppose the Ulster rebels.⁵¹ In the end, the government had to provide a guarantee that the army would not be used to enforce Home Rule in Ulster – a major political humiliation, which had an electrifying effect on nationalist opinion in Ireland. Even moderates began to wonder whether republicans were not right about British intentions. The viability of Home Rule looked more fragile than ever.

This shift of opinion hardened in the next month when the UVF ran nearly 50,000 rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition into the Ulster ports of Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee. Quite apart from the military significance of the weapons, this carefully organized nighttime operation was a striking demonstration of the expertise of the UVF general staff. The quality of the guns was perhaps debatable – many were old Italian rifles, barely serviceable – but from a nationalist viewpoint the size of the gun-running threatened to eliminate the possibility of any compromise solution to the Ulster crisis. And the inactivity of the police during the operation reinforced their suspicions of governmental partiality. For many nationalists this was the last straw. Recruitment into the Irish Volunteers, then going rather sluggishly, began to accelerate from its total of nearly 27,000 in April to over 130,000 by the end of May, reaching 180,000 in the summer.52 This period even saw the appearance of some IV ‘cavalry corps’, reflecting the adhesion of wealthier farmers and even gentry. But burgeoning recruitment had its negative side, too. It increased the strain on the structure and logic of the inexperienced militia. The shortage of arms looked all the more obvious as bigger public parades with dummy rifles took place, so pressure to emulate the UVF increased: a tall order for the still penurious IV.

Moreover, ‘the two Johns and Joe’ suddenly took notice of what was going on in the national movement they were accustomed to directing. On 9 June, when Redmond issued a statement declaring that the parliamentary party now supported the Volunteer movement, it faced its first internal political crisis. Redmond’s ‘support’ took the form of an assertion that the Volunteer executive committee was not fully representative, and should be enlarged to allow it (for which read – force it) to represent the party. This first clash between Redmond and the Volunteer founders, though less openly dramatic than the final split three months later, none the less clearly demonstrated the widening gulf between the old nationalist movement and the new. It was not only the republicans who bridled at Redmond’s demand for effective control of the Volunteers; the independents led by MacNeill and O’Rahilly, in asserting that the Volunteers should remain uncommitted to any political party, demonstrated the same suspicion of ‘politics’ and the fear of a sell-out. Sir Roger Casement insisted that ‘the Volunteers are the beginning of an Irish army, and every man must feel he is entitled as an Irishman to step into the ranks without being questioned as to his political opinions any more than as to his religious views’.⁵³ MacNeill, who had been fencing with the parliamentary leadership for three months on the issue (at one point, in mid-May, he told Gwynn ‘my interview with the Party was like being examined before a Royal Commission’), consistently protested his commitment to Home Rule, but insisted on the need for the Volunteers to be seen to be independent. In the process he reiterated his own view of the reasons for establishing the IV – to ‘show the Tories that the alternative to Home Rule was a policy of repression and coercion beyond any they had yet experience of’, and ‘show the Ulster minority that Nationalist Ireland could not be treated with contempt’. (‘Their whole strength’, he said, ‘lies in the contempt inspired in them.’) He himself had ‘no personal ambition, no idea of doing other than support the Party’.54

O’Rahilly’s own account bristles with anger at Redmond’s aim of ‘emasculating the movement’, and his tactic of threatening to establish a rival volunteer organization. But as he pointed out, the Volunteer executive was in a bind that could not be known to its rank and file. The threat of splitting the movement was a very real one, and it came at a crucial juncture – ‘the Provisional Committee had on the high seas at that very period their secret shipments of arms, and were already arranging those elaborate schemes for landing them which afterwards materialised at Howth and Kilcool’.⁵⁵ The executive offered Redmond a national election to form a new committee, but he insisted on the immediate addition of twenty-five of his own nominees. The IRB men on the committee stood firm against concession, with the exception of Hobson, for whom the overriding aims of bringing in the arms shipment and avoiding ‘a disastrous, and indeed a fatal split’ outweighed the obnoxious act of surrender to the parliamentarians. Hobson had expected this showdown for some time; he told McGarrity in May that the AOH and UIL were ‘whipping up their members and getting them all to join. They will probably try to get control. And they can get it if they try – but not just yet.’⁵⁶ He argued that the concession would make little difference in practice, because Redmond’s nominees could be kept away from real control of the Volunteers. His view swung the Executive vote in favour of compromise, but the crunch was painful. O’Rahilly told Béaslaí that after ‘the surrender, I felt so utterly disgusted with myself that I wrote my resignation for the Committee and gave it to Padraig Pearse, who advised me not to send it’.⁵⁷ The tussle brought out the bitter unreconstructed Fenian in Tom Clarke, who had almost adopted Hobson as a son over the previous four years. He asked him, ‘What did the Castle pay you?’ – a terrible and dismal accusation. The two men never spoke informally again. Hobson resigned from the IRB Supreme Council and was even sacked by John Devoy as a contributor to the Gaelic American, his main source of income. Though Pearse urged McGarrity to reverse this, it was the beginning of the end of Hobson’s career as a leading activist.

His greatest triumph, however, was still to come: little more than a month after the acceptance of Redmond’s formal control of the IV, he organized the reception of the arms shipment – 1,500 rifles and 49,000 rounds of ammunition, bought in Germany. This was truly a decisive moment for the Volunteers, and not simply because of the sudden expansion of their limited armoury. In fact the rifles themselves, which O’Rahilly had purchased, were not hugely impressive; first-generation single-shot Mausers from the 1870s, they were in strictly military terms obsolete (like the UVF’s, though unlike the UVF’s they were in good condition). And, thanks to the desperate shortage of IV funds, there were few enough of them. Volunteer funds themselves would hardly have bought a dozen, and the Irish-American Fenians, traditionally eager (verbally at least) to raise money for guns in Ireland, remained suspicious of this newfangled open organization even before the compromise with Redmond. Although Devoy eventually sent $5,000, it did not arrive until late June, and the money that made the gun-running possible was subscribed by two sympathizers, Mary Spring Rice and Sir Roger Casement – both Anglo-Irish Protestants, like the two men who went to Hamburg to collect the guns, Darrell Figgis and Erskine Childers. Childers, and yet another sympathizer from outside the IV, Conor O’Brien, furnished the two small sailboats in which they were brought to Ireland.

In light of Childers’ brilliant 1903 story The Riddle of the Sands, perhaps the first true modern spy novel, this extraordinary expedition was a striking example of reality imitating fiction. That book remains one of the most vivid of all celebrations of the art of coastal sailing, and Childers’ own voyage likewise depended on a remarkable mixture of skill, nerve and luck. His little boat Asgard (a name drawn from the Norse mythic tradition that Tolkien would also tap into) was loaded with 900 rifles and 29,000 rounds of ammunition from a German tug hired by Darrell Figgis, off the Scheldt estuary on the night of 12 July. When Figgis announced that O’Brien had already taken the smaller half of the consignment (600 rifles and 20,000 rounds), Childers and his crew ‘looked at each other. Could we ever take them?’ Well they might wonder. But ‘fortunately, it was a warm, calm summer’s night. For hours on end, in a lather of sweat, they loaded the big canvas bales, each done up in straw … until the Asgard’s saloon, cabin, passage and companion way were stacked high.’58 Then the heavily laden boat had to be navigated through hundreds of miles of coastal waters regularly patrolled by the navy, often sailing close to big warships and once being nearly rammed by a destroyer in the dark. Astonishingly, the timing of Childers’ arrival at Howth was perfect; the white yacht, with his wife Molly on deck wearing a bright red skirt as a recognition signal, came into view just as the first column of Irish Volunteers marched into the little port on Sunday 26 July.

This justified Hobson’s calculated risk of arranging the landing so close to Dublin in daylight – making the unloading of the arms easier, but risking a challenging confrontation with the authorities. ‘If we could bring them in in a sufficiently spectacular manner we should probably solve our financial problem and the problem of arming the Volunteers as well.’⁵⁹ He sent a section of Fianna (‘the only body on whose discipline I could count’) with a cartload of specially made wooden batons to form a defensive cordon. Although he may have expected that the police would turn a blind eye as they had at Larne, if they took action they would provide useful propaganda by confirming nationalist allegations of official bias.

Had the matter been one for the RIC, in fact, it seems likely that they would indeed have confined themselves to observation. But Dublin had its own police force, whose heads took the view that (in the words of the Commissioner of the DMP) ‘a body of more than 1,000 men armed with rifles marching on Dublin, the seat of the Irish Government, constitute an unlawful assembly of a peculiarly audacious character’.⁶⁰ His deputy, Assistant Commissioner Harrel, took up Hobson’s challenge, summoned military aid, and headed out towards Howth. He ran into the Volunteer column on the Malahide road, but his attempt to disarm it turned into a fiasco. The Volunteers dispersed across the fields and through the north Dublin suburbs, often hiding the guns with sympathetic householders, while Harrel was kept talking by Hobson, Darrell Figgis and Thomas MacDonagh. There was a brief melée when the police (disregarding Harrel’s order to halt) charged, and ‘some of our men fired revolvers and automatic pistols’, slightly wounding two of the nearby troops. Hobson tried to stop this shooting, ‘as at any moment it might provoke a volley from the soldiers’, who were not more than thirty yards away from the dense column.61 The policemen, tussling with the front of the Volunteer column, got hold of nineteen rifles – ‘all of which were broken in the struggle’ – but Maurice Moore, the IV Inspector-General, coolly went up to the Castle the next day and had the remnants returned to him.⁶²

This tense, exhilarating confrontation was hailed as a second ‘battle of Clontarf’ by Volunteer propaganda, echoing the most famous of all Irish victories, the defeat of the Danes (and their Leinster Irish allies) by the Munster king Brian Boru in 1014. It gave a tremendous boost to the movement; for many Volunteers and Fianna boys the Howth landing was a defining moment in their lives. ‘We cheered and cheered and cheered and waved anything we had and cheered again’, recorded one of the Cumann na mBan there. ‘To see and hear that was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.’⁶³ The ‘Howth Mausers’, as they became known (though over a third of the whole shipment was run in by O’Brien to Kilcoole, about ten miles south of Dublin on the Wicklow coast, in a much lower-profile operation the following week) were big, heavy, and used large-calibre (11mm) ammunition. Their distinctive thump was to be one of the defining sounds of the 1916 rebellion. Certainly they pleased their new owners at first. Jack Plunkett, who paid fifteen shillings for his 1871 Mauser, plus another ten shillings for fifty rounds of ammunition, thought his rifle ‘delightful’; ‘the bore of the barrel was good, and when I saw repeated cleanings improve its polish I felt very proud’. He added a bayonet, making the whole thing about seven feet long. Even the ammunition was a work of art: ‘it was in the original cardboard cases dated variously up to 1874. There was very little verdigris and when the beautifully made cartridges were all spotless and lodged in an enormous ammunition pouch I felt fit to meet an elephant – as, in fact, I was.’ A company of men armed with these long weapons was, Plunkett thought, an impressive sight, and their length had one big virtue – they were very accurate. But still, for all their special German charms, many Volunteers tried to replace them with handier, more modern magazine rifles as soon as they could. Seamus Daly of the 2nd Battalion maintained that ‘the boys never liked them’, and opinions of their value in the rebellion were always to be divided.64

The bravado of the Howth operation was immediately rewarded with a public sensation. When the troops (of the 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers) Harrel had requisitioned returned along the Liffey quays to their barracks, they were followed by a jeering and abusive crowd. ‘The men were very excited after all they had been through’, one of the junior officers said, ‘and were difficult to keep in hand.’ As they marched along Bachelors Walk, they were pelted with stones – something they seem to have been quite unprepared for. They halted to face down the mob; shots were fired, and three people killed (a fourth died later of injuries). An official inquiry, conducted by three senior judges, concluded that, although no order to fire had been given, the soldiers believed that one had. Major Haig had, however, ordered troops under his command to prepare to fire; he had just joined the column from the Dublin direction and was unaware that their guns were loaded. (The inquiry found this ‘regrettable’.)⁶⁵ It has been suggested that he believed that they were loaded with blank, rather than live, ammunition (though this seems unlikely, as it would have flown in the face of well-understood military rules about ‘aid to the civil power’). In any case, the result was a public relations disaster, aggravated when the commission of inquiry publicly rejected the reasoning of the Dublin police chiefs. It suggested somewhat airily that ‘the possession of rifles may possibly have laid the Volunteers open to suitable proceedings taken under the Customs Acts’. But their armed assembly ‘was not characterised by violence, crime, riot, disturbance, or the likelihood of any of these things’. The commissioners found it ‘difficult to follow’ the Assistant Commissioner’s thinking, ‘in view of his knowledge and long experience’.⁶⁶ This was a deadly condemnation: Harrel’s police career was effectively ended, and his Commissioner, Sir John Ross of Bladensburg (a man of vast law enforcement experience stretching back to the land war) also resigned in protest.

The abortive attempt to prevent the Howth gun-running was seen by many nationalists as further confirmation of the authorities’ bias towards the Ulster rebels: after all, no attempt, however feeble, had been made to stop the Larne operation, and the subsequent police investigation had been perfunctory. But the government’s hasty disavowal of its over-zealous DMP minion showed that the real motive in both cases was a deep-set apprehension of any potentially provocative action. Nationalists might have seen things differently if they had been able to read an army paper drawn up at the end of March, even before the UVF gun-running. Here Irish Command launched an astonishingly direct attack on ‘the failure of the Government to appreciate the true state of feeling in the North of Ireland, and its ignorance of the plans of the Ulster leaders’. The government’s tolerance of illegal drilling, and its failure to establish any functional intelligence system, the army declared, had created a really dangerous situation. The RIC was undermanned, and its grasp of the Ulster threat was hamstrung by its ‘political sympathies’ – both the Unionism of its higher ranks and the Nationalism of its rank and file led to misreading the situation. The DMP was equally useless: ‘the Police Intelligence in Dublin itself was poor, and it would appear that little trouble had been taken to gauge the situation in the city’. The RIC had no real ‘secret service’ capacity, in the military view – they had not tried to employ any intelligence specialists from England, or any women – and ‘the civilian officials did not know what was going on’. The verdict was crushing. ‘Although an extraordinary state of affairs has been in existence in the North for nearly two years, nothing out of the normal has apparently taken place in the routine of the Irish Executive.’67

The Under-Secretary, belatedly realizing how little information the government had, had asked Irish Command to set up an intelligence department on 20 March. The army warned, however, that this was perilously late to be trying to build such a delicate organization. Moreover – still raw from the Curragh incident – it pointed out that if it was itself too closely involved there was a risk that it might be ‘brought again before the public’, and the impression given ‘that a system of military espionage has been set up by the soldiers’. Yet something had to be done, and quickly. It was vital that the police should be able (i) to prevent all further importation of arms into Ireland, and (ii) ‘to honeycomb the various political organizations in Ireland with police agents’. There needed to be some system of co-ordination between the police and agencies such as the Coastguards and the Custom House, and ‘no effort should be spared to attract a better class of men’ to enlist in an Irish secret service. This should be done ‘at once’.⁶⁸

There is no sign that the Irish Executive took any steps to respond to this no-punches-pulled assessment. Its routine remained undisturbed; such military urgings no doubt appeared politically inept. At least one change took place over the next few months, however. The IV gun-running alerted the Inspector-General of the RIC to the transformation of the danger he faced. In mid-June he issued a sombre warning that ‘the drilling and training to arms of a great part of the male population is a new departure which is bound in the not distant future to alter all the existing conditions of life’. He observed that ‘in times of passion or excitement the law has only been maintained by force’, and this had been possible because of the lack of organization of the opponents of the police. The future would be different. ‘Each county will soon have a trained army far outnumbering the police, and those who control the volunteers will be in a position to dictate to what extent the law of the land may be carried into effect.’69 This was a truly revolutionary situation; the limits of the possible had been broken.

Its implications became clear to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff too. He told Asquith in early July that there was no military plan to deal with the situation that would arise if the 200,000 men, ‘systematically raised, trained and equipped on a military basis’ in two opposing forces, should ‘unfortunately come into conflict’. No plan could be prepared, he added pointedly, until the army was ‘informed what policy the government proposes to adopt’ in that eventuality. But what was certain was that ‘in the event of a conflagration, the whole of the Expeditionary Force may be required to restore order’. This would ‘probably involve general mobilization, placing Special Reserves troops in the ports, and assembling the Local and Central Forces now composed of Territorial troops’. The bottom line was that, in that case, ‘we shall be unable to meet any of our obligations abroad’.⁷⁰ Beyond doubt, this had been noticed in Berlin as well, where it must have encouraged the German General Staff in the course it had already adopted, of forcing a showdown with the Entente powers. By the time the troops opened fire in Bachelors Walk, the German army was assembling on the Belgian frontier. The Irish crisis was about to be engulfed in a crisis of global scale.