4

Ireland’s Opportunity

If the German offensive timed for May comes off, the English will be so much occupied that it is possible we could hold out one way or another for anything up to three months. At the end of that time the English would have to make peace.

Joseph Plunkett

The outbreak of war found the advocates of insurrection in a difficult position. After a success unparalleled since the early days of Fenianism, they faced losing control of the militia which had been almost in their grasp. In mid-July 1914 Patrick Pearse gloomily explained to Joe McGarrity in America how serious the Redmondite takeover of the Volunteers was becoming for the IRB. They had feared that Redmond would paralyse the arming of the Volunteers; now it was clear that he wanted to arm them, but for the wrong reasons – ‘not against England, but against the Orangemen’. The Volunteers risked being turned into a sectarian militia. The Redmond nominees on the committee were urging that ‘those of us in the south and west who have guns should send them north for use by the Catholics there to defend themselves when the “massacre” breaks out. The whole tone of the movement has changed.’ The Unionists were armed, the Redmondites were arming, but the Nationalists (‘Sinn Feiners and Separatists’) remained unarmed. As Pearse wryly remarked, ‘it will be the irony of ironies if this movement comes and goes and leaves us – the physical force men! – the only unarmed group in the country’. What he wanted was guns: ‘at least 1,000 to start with’.1

A month later the situation had become critical, he believed. Public enthusiasm for the war was dismayingly visible; in a sharply poignant betrayal, troops were even being played to the railway stations by Irish Volunteer bands, some of them bearing the name of Emmet himself.2 Pearse still believed that the Volunteers ‘are sound, especially in Dublin. We could at any moment rally the best of them to our support by a coup d’état; and rally the whole country if the coup d’état were successful. But a coup d’état while the men are still unarmed is unthinkable.’ The guns they had got at Howth and Kilcool had mostly been ‘stolen’ by the Redmondites, he told McGarrity; only 400–500 were left in IV hands. But in any case they were little use – single-shot Mausers of ‘a rather antiquated pattern’ and large calibre – ‘much inferior to the British service rifle and even to those which Carson’s men have’. (The last assertion was debatable, but was well calculated to rile McGarrity.) Worse still, the ammunition O’Rahilly had bought had turned out to be ‘useless’ – explosive bullets ‘which are against the rules of civilised war’. Once more he called on the Americans to send modern weapons, Springfield or 7mm Mauser rifles, ‘at once and on a large scale’. He dangled before McGarrity the ultimate Fenian dream: ‘a supreme moment for Ireland may be at hand’.³

Pearse’s concern with technical military questions was a clear indication of the direction he was now taking. For him, an IRB man of less than a year’s standing, and with no previous military experience or interest, it was the first year of world war that made him a ‘physical-force man’. It pitched him to a position of pre-eminence in the command structure of the Irish Volunteers, and in the Supreme Council of the IRB. Most remarkably, it was to be Pearse, rather than the Fenian veteran Tom Clarke, who became President of the Irish Republic declared in April 1916.⁴ In the process he also, incidentally, faced personal and professional disaster as St Enda’s went to the verge of bankruptcy. The school, and Pearse’s reputation, was saved by McGarrity and the Irish-American Fenians. But they still needed some convincing that Pearse had truly embraced separatism.

When he was demanding guns in August 1914, it was still for essentially defensive, reactive purposes. In October, after the split, he argued that the pared-down IV was ‘infinitely more valuable’ than the previous ‘unwieldy, loosely-held-together mixum-gatherum force’. With some 150 companies, a ‘small, compact, perfectly-disciplined, determinedly separatist force’ would be ‘ready to act with tremendous effect if the war brings us the moment’ – and if only America would supply the guns. ‘The spirit of our Dublin men is wonderful. They would rise tomorrow if we gave the word.’ Five things, he said, could precipitate a crisis – ‘the crisis’: a German invasion, the imposition of a Militia Ballot or conscription, a food shortage, an attempt to disarm the IV, or an attempt to arrest their leaders. ‘If the chance comes and goes, it will in all probability have gone forever, certainly for our lifetime.’5

As his sense of urgency intensified, his language grew more heated. In November, at a Thomas Davis commemoration meeting (held outside rather than inside Trinity College because the Provost had banned it on the grounds that the speakers included ‘a man called Pearse’ – as well as W. B. Yeats) a new note appeared: Pearse exalted John Mitchel above Davis. The point, as Yeats noted, was that whereas Davis preached love of Ireland, Mitchel preached hatred of England.⁶ The most violent – verbally – of the Young Irelanders in the 1840s, Mitchel had foreshadowed one of Pearse’s key phrases when he wrote that there were ‘far worse things going on than bloodshed’. Pearse went on to give some substance to his rhetorical flourish about ‘rising tomorrow’. He drew up a plan, echoing Hobson’s Defensive Warfare (in fact Hobson was probably its instigator) for a sequence of resistance activities building up into guerrilla warfare. In December this literary effort – and some determined personal lobbying – secured him the job of Director of Military Organization in the newly constructed IV ‘headquarters staff’. This placed him alongside MacNeill as Chief of Staff, Hobson as Quartermaster General, O’Rahilly as Director of Arms, Joseph Plunkett as Director of Military Operations, and Thomas MacDonagh as Director of Training. (Eamonn Ceannt was added in late 1915 as Director of Communications, and Ginger O’Connell as Chief of Inspection).⁷ His qualifications for the post were slender enough, but he had acquired a pivotal role, enabling him to place IRB men in key positions throughout the Volunteer organization. It also greatly increased his appeal to the American Fenians, and later in the summer of 1915 he used this appeal to save himself and his school from bankruptcy.⁸

The scheme of organization that he produced was modelled, like his own title, on British military practice, with one nominal difference that would serve to express Irish distinctness: the rank of colonel was replaced by the Teutonic-sounding ‘commandant’.9 Although the formal military organization was possibly less appropriate to the slender IV forces than it had been to the original Volunteer movement, in Dublin the notion of a brigade was not entirely absurd. The four Dublin city battalions, and the fifth in northern county Dublin, were substantial and reliable. Training and parades were well attended. The 1st was commanded by Edward Daly, Tom Clarke’s brother-in-law, the 2nd by Thomas MacDonagh. The 3rd was given to Eamon de Valera, surprisingly perhaps, since he was not in the IRB. (He seems not to have joined until MacDonagh later appointed him Brigade Adjutant.) But Pearse took the precaution of subjecting him to a terse interview, to establish de Valera’s readiness to obey orders without question. Eamonn Ceannt took over the 4th Battalion. Pearse himself, Plunkett, O’Rahilly and Hobson became ‘commandants on the headquarters staff’. Pearse immediately assembled the four battalion commanders to discuss the feasibility of an insurrection the following September, on the basis of a plan prepared by an Advisory Committee. Finally, he put MacDonagh in overall command of the Brigade.

Pearse’s determination to stage an insurrection during the war was already fixed. He believed, or persuaded himself, that the new Volunteer force was ready to join him in it. Whether he was right in this became an issue to be debated long into the future, but he was certainly not alone. On 9 September a rather odd meeting of separatists called by Tom Clarke, including some who were not in the IRB or the Volunteers, resolved to expand the IV, ICA, Fianna and Cumann na mBan, to assist a German invasion if it were launched in support of Irish independence, and to resist any attempt to disarm the Volunteers. More controversially, it reportedly decided to stage a rebellion before the end of the war, with the object of securing Ireland’s right to a place at the peace conference. (This notion was quite widely accepted, and there were of course many small European national groups with the same aspiration. None of the others, though, had one of the leading Allied powers to block their way.)¹⁰ This stratagem was only likely to work if Britain was defeated in the war.

But the majority of the Volunteer Executive remained explicitly opposed to armed action except in self-defence. MacNeill himself, Hobson and O’Rahilly had made their positions clear. Hobson grounded his argument on the IRB’s own constitution, as revised after the 1866–7 setback, which required that insurrection should have popular support. He maintained that all those he had sworn into the organization since 1906 had known this. Still, even Hobson’s energetic efforts could not eliminate the appeal of the old republican nostrum, ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. (Indeed, even Hobson himself veered once in 1915 into advocacy of insurrection, at least according to police reporters.) Immediately after the outbreak of war, the Supreme Council held one of its rare meetings and resolved in general terms to mount a rebellion, but the enthusiasts for insurrection – pre-eminently Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott – were faced with the same problem as Pearse. They needed to keep their plans secret from their own colleagues, even those on the smaller IRB Executive (the Supreme Council’s standing body) who, like Denis McCullough, accepted Hobson’s interpretation of the Brotherhood’s constitution. In early May 1915, MacDermott met one of the Supreme Council’s representatives for England, P. S. O’Hegarty, in Liverpool, and told him that a military plan for a rising in Dublin had been drawn up. Shortly afterwards, MacDermott was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act at Tuam, Co. Galway, where he was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment with hard labour. It seems to have been Diarmuid Lynch, who stood in for him as secretary of the Executive, who proposed the establishment of a small planning committee to elaborate the plan. He felt that the ‘Advisory Committee’ which had drawn up the Dublin plan was too large for security. (And too big for IRB control – Le Roux’s well-informed biography of Tom Clarke calls it a committee of the Volunteers rather than the IRB.) At the end of May a much smaller IRB ‘military committee’ was established: just three men to start with – Pearse, Plunkett and Eamonn Ceannt.11

This little group kept, or at any rate left, no written records. It did not really function as a committee, since the plan it drew up was never shown to the Supreme Council. (Lynch himself never saw either the Advisory Committee’s plan, or the later version, though battalion commanders were clearly briefed on their part of it at an early stage.) We have only a hazy idea of how frequently it met. In September, however, it was enlarged to include Tom Clarke and the newly released MacDermott. In January 1916 Connolly joined it, and finally in April MacDonagh was co-opted, bringing its membership to seven. (At some stage it came to be called the ‘military council’ – this may have happened retrospectively, when the IRB constitution was revised yet again in 1917 to include a military council.) Its planning procedure seems to have been simply to adopt a plan which Plunkett had worked out some time before. Whether, and how, the underlying logic of that plan was discussed, only its members knew. How far the plan extended beyond the original Dublin version to incorporate countrywide action has, ever since, been a matter for speculation. According to its penultimate recruit, James Connolly, only three copies of the final insurrection plan were made, and none of them survived. Tantalizingly, the Wexford RIC captured during Easter Week an ‘old passbook’ which they said contained a pencil copy of the plan.12 It was produced at a local court-martial, but has never subsequently reappeared. Could it indeed have been one of the three copies, or did it indicate that there were more? This is one of the ways in which the decision to plan in secrecy produced problems, not just for the historian, but for the prospect of a successful rising.

Although we have no idea why Plunkett’s ideas were so readily accepted, we can be fairly sure that they were dominant. Where did they come from? Plunkett had so far been even less in the public eye than Pearse and the other ‘Sinn Feiners’. The son of a papal count, descendant of the Irish saint Oliver Plunkett, he was a Catholic poet of a deep dye; and an eccentric of the kind that the best families generate. His own creative work was suffused with his fascination with St John of the Cross and St Catherine of Siena, but he also played a more secular role as editor of the sixpenny literary monthly Irish Review between 1911 and 1914 – another of the journals snuffed out by the war. Its contributors included James Connolly, Arthur Griffith, W. B. Yeats, and Sir Roger Casement, as well as Thomas MacDonagh (Plunkett’s tutor in the Irish language) and Plunkett himself, who wrote on ‘obscurity in poetry’. Politically, he started out (like MacDonagh) as a Home Ruler – an adherent of the Young Ireland Branch of the Parliamentary Party, the ginger group centred around Thomas Kettle. All this changed at the end of 1913. Volunteering became the transformative experience of Plunkett’s life. He gradually turned the Irish Review into the unofficial IV organ (a more interesting read than the Irish Volunteer itself), and when it sank he noted in his final editorial that ‘our entire staff has for some time past been working full time and overtime (if such a thing is possible) in the Irish Volunteer organisation’. When Mrs Sidney Czira (the sister of his fiancée Grace Gifford, who wrote as ‘John Brennan’, and was secretary of the New York Cumann na mBan) met him in New York in 1915 she thought that this once ‘taciturn, reserved’ man now seemed outgoing and happy. He told her ‘I am a different man since joining the Irish Volunteers.’13

When did Plunkett start planning the seizure of Dublin? And why? The answer to this seems to lie in a fusion of historical and theoretical thinking. As we have seen, Pearse, O’Rahilly and others drew from their persistent, indeed obsessive study of Emmet’s abortive rising the belief that the capital city must be the epicentre of any future armed action. As the Volunteer movement grew in mid-1914, the idea of large-scale open fighting began to seem possible. But was it feasible to seize such a city with the shrunken forces of the post-split Volunteers? Here military theorists, in particular the high priest of modern military thought, Clausewitz, provided real encouragement. Despite his admiration for the strategic boldness of Napoleon, Clausewitz demonstrated at length that, in tactical terms, the defender was in a significantly stronger posture than the attacker. The development of rifled weapons since his time had only – as the Boer War, among others, had dramatically demonstrated – increased this defensive advantage. The defensive posture also offered a better chance of keeping the inexperienced Volunteers under control, and possibly also the moral advantage of forcing the enemy to fire the first shots (assuming that the defensive positions could be seized without violence).¹⁴ Plunkett’s plan also followed the Clausewitzian orthodoxy of the decisive battle as the hinge of all strategy. This was vital, because some of the Volunteer headquarters staff were convinced that the optimum strategy for a rising would be very different – not a sudden stand-up street fight but a dispersed, protracted guerrilla campaign.

When the Dublin Brigade went for a field day (at Stepaside) at Easter 1915, the divergence between the two approaches was obvious. The opposing sides in the manoeuvres were commanded by MacDonagh and Pearse. The results were unimpressive, certainly to Ginger O’Connell – a student of both Clausewitz and the elder Moltke. Pearse’s orders, O’Connell recorded, ‘ran over four closely-typed pages of foolscap and prescribed the most minute details for the conduct of the attack, including the formations of attacking units at definite geographical points and the precise hour at which the assault was to be delivered’. None of these prescriptions, inevitably, ‘were even approximated to’.15 The fundamental problem, in O’Connell’s view, was not so much the leaders’ incompetence as their ‘preconceived idea of an Insurrection’ which imposed a strategic straitjacket on the Volunteers, instead of allowing them to adapt to the nature of the country and the people. Organizationally, this distorted the overall shape of the Volunteers, leading to the expenditure of disproportionate, and wasted, energy in the attempt to organize areas deemed strategically valuable, such as Kildare. O’Connell accepted ‘that the most easily organisable districts might be remote from anywhere – “of no strategic importance” in fact. But he thought that the mere fact of having their men trained and armed would at once render them “of strategic importance”.’ They could operate in areas where the enemy would find it harder to exert his strength.

O’Connell was a man who worried at length about the real prospects for effective military use of the Volunteers. He thought, for instance, that it was pointless to look for examples to the French army, since they had ‘thrown us over completely’ (the implication is that some bid for support had been made, though if so the timing would seem to have been absurd). On the other hand, ‘German discipline and general military spirit’ were ‘so rigid as not to be well suited to the Irish character – especially in a short service force like the Irish Volunteers’. In mid-1914, therefore, he told McGarrity, he was studying the Italian army as a possible model; later he looked to the example of the ‘improvised militia’ of Bulgaria in its war with Serbia in 1885. He also treated McGarrity to extensive discussions of technical military issues such as ‘the improvisation of supply trains’, since the most difficult problem facing an insurrectionary army was the securing of supplies. (This was something that, as we shall see, the military committee seems to have been rather relaxed about.) From O’Connell’s standpoint, Pearse and Plunkett were merely playing soldiers.¹⁶

Did Plunkett’s plan contain a theoretical argument for the defensive strategy, alongside its concrete proposals for defensive tactics? Some strategic discussion must have taken place, at least enough to convince the hard-headed James Connolly, who had some – albeit distant and low-level – military experience, that Plunkett was ‘a brilliant military man’. Yet the judgement of one eminent historian, that Plunkett’s plan ‘could not be other than an amateur’s effort, and that not of a gifted military amateur’, if severe, is judicious.17 Connolly did not join the military committee until January 1916, and some of his own military ideas were demonstrably wrongheaded. It may be from Connolly (who lectured widely to the Volunteers on the topic of street fighting throughout 1915) that the belief that the British army would not use artillery in Dublin emanated. This belief became a shared assumption among the planners. The sceptical Desmond FitzGerald was breezily assured by MacDonagh, for instance, that ‘the British would not shell the city, as by doing so they would be injuring their own supporters’.¹⁸

MacDonagh also made clear to those in his confidence that O’Connell’s cherished scheme of training camps was tolerated – ‘on the grounds that they would do no harm, rather than that they would serve any useful purpose’. The Chief of Inspection’s ‘mind runs on country fighting, taking cover behind hedges and so forth’, MacDonagh said. ‘But all that means nothing. It would really be much more useful to be getting such things as the keys of buildings in Dublin, or instruction in street fighting.’ It was Hobson, in the view of the Kerry organizer Alf Cotton, who was basically responsible for ‘that trend in training which was evident from articles by O’Connell and O’Duffy appearing in the Irish Volunteer’. Hobson told Cotton that he and Pearse had ‘hot arguments about the matter’, Hobson arguing ‘that gambling everything on one throw was not good tactics, and the adoption of guerrilla tactics would enable us to make a more sustained effort with better prospects of success’. Pearse had (so Hobson claimed) admitted the soundness of this argument, but said ‘we must have a sacrifice’.¹⁹ What was in dispute here was the concept of success itself. Pearse had put the issue squarely in one of his American talks in 1914. ‘No failure, judged as the world judges these things, was ever more complete, more pathetic, than Emmet’s. And yet he has left us a prouder memory than the memory of Brian victorious at Clontarf or Owen Roe victorious at Benburb.’ Even, or especially, in death, Emmet had ‘redeemed Ireland from acquiescence in the Union’.20 For Pearse, gesture was all; the only question was how to make the gesture sufficiently striking.

Towards the end of 1915, the ‘hedge-fighting’ group seem to have believed that they were winning the argument. The umpire’s report on the Dublin Brigade field day at Coolock in November noted how ‘units became broken up in the close country’, and suggested that ‘this had impressed on all the need for special training in hedge-fighting’. It had also, encouragingly, made sure that ‘the hopeless position of cavalry or guns in such country was manifest to everyone’. O’Connell’s protégé Eimar O’Duffy triumphantly concluded (in an essay entitled ‘Carnage at Coolock’) that ‘the most hopeful sign in these operations was the practical disappearance of thinking in army groups’. He thought that ‘all would agree that in these sudden encounters at the turn of a road, a shot gun will be as good as a rifle, if not better’. To bolster this dose of pragmatism, O’Connell quickly published a series of articles on ‘Hedge fighting for small units’ in the Irish Volunteer.²¹ But it is clear enough that these meticulous essays on fieldcraft were entirely irrelevant to Pearse, Connolly and Plunkett.²²

Maybe the closest we can get to Plunkett’s thinking is through the testimony of his sister Geraldine, who claimed to have heard, or been told of, many discussions within the military committee. Because ‘the position was so desperate’, she thought, ‘it was very little use making plans for all Ireland until the measure of success of the Dublin plans could be ascertained’. Plunkett’s objection to a rural campaign was partly based on his belief that this was what ‘the English army’ expected: rebellion would always ‘take the form of marching out of Dublin to take to the hills’. Even ‘high officers in the Volunteers had the same view’, and ‘Joe had a job with some of them to argue them out of it’. They ‘were afraid of being caught like rats in a trap amongst the streets’, and ‘had a fantastic idea of the accuracy of big guns and of machine guns. They thought that they mowed you down.’ According to her, Plunkett, backed by Connolly, eventually succeeded in overcoming these (all too accurate) objections.²³ How much his comrades grasped of the fighting in Flanders and Gallipoli cannot be known. Geraldine saw no contradiction between her brother’s determination on a stand-up fight in Dublin, and his hope that, if the Germans were putting enough pressure on the Western Front – and he evidently believed that a major offensive was due in May – ‘we could hold out one way or another for anything up to three months’.

The minds of the little committee were plainly mesmerized by the physical and symbolic weight of their city. Their discussions must have concentrated mainly on the selection and assessment of individual buildings for seizure and defence, and perhaps – though the final selection does not do much to bear this out – on the possibility of mutual communication and reinforcement. It is a remarkable fact that we know nothing of the reasoning applied to this selection process. We can, however, be fairly sure that the broad outlines were established right at the start, and very few changes made as a result of later discussion or reassessment. Piaras Béaslaí records that the dispositions for the 1st Battalion (occupying the area between Broadstone Station, the North Dublin Union and the Four Courts) ‘were in our hands early in 1915 and were substantially the same as those we tried to carry out in 1916’.24 If so, the plan contained several puzzling choices and omissions that have never been fully explained. Most obviously, why was the rebel headquarters placed in the General Post Office? We have no idea what appeal the GPO possessed, apart from its visually impressive location opposite Nelson’s pillar on Lower Sackville Street, Dublin’s widest thoroughfare. It was, as one military analyst says, ‘a strong position but did not provide very suitable fields of fire’.²⁵ It was awkwardly placed in relation to the other positions and, as the event proved, unable to maintain communication with them or provide support. The committee’s apparent decision not to attempt to occupy Dublin Castle was fateful. In retrospect, the knowledge of how lightly the Castle was garrisoned, together with its obvious symbolic significance as the historic centre of British power – it had been Robert Emmet’s objective – make the decision appear surprising. There is some evidence that no such decision was, in fact, made. According to Michael Staines, the Dublin Brigade quartermaster, Pearse fully expected to set up his headquarters in the Castle: ‘he never intended to remain in the GPO’, and on Easter Monday the news that the Castle had not been taken ‘caused consternation’.²⁶

Another notable omission from the plan was Trinity College, whose sheer size has been offered as a reason for not attempting to occupy it. The strength of the Dublin Brigade makes this argument less than wholly convincing, at least as far as the original plan went. Militarily, there was no disputing that it was ‘a natural fortress in the heart of the city’, and it was to play a key role in the suppression of the rebellion.27 Maybe its symbolic status as a bastion of the Protestant Ascendancy paradoxically suggested that it might be seen as a sectarian target. Another aspect is hinted at by one of Trinity’s defenders: serious damage to the college would have been a ‘national catastrophe’. (MacDonagh is said to have given a similar explanation for the refusal to occupy the Bank of Ireland, which had housed Ireland’s last parliament.)²⁸ But most likely the planners thought that neither of these formidable structures could be seized without violence, and the same view may have been taken of the Shelbourne Hotel – a big, food-rich building which was to be spurned in favour of a militarily hopeless position in the open on St Stephen’s Green. The point about all these speculations is that no reliable evidence of such assessments has survived.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of the planners’ approach to explain is their apparent unconcern with some of their city’s most striking topographical features. Dublin’s key feature, militarily as well as scenically, is the fact that it is crossed by a fair-sized river, into whose notoriously polluted waters Connolly had consigned a coffin labelled ‘British Empire’ during the 1903 royal visit. The Liffey, which was navigable by seagoing ships up to the Custom House in 1916, and still busy with barge traffic (most famously the steam barges from Guinness’s brewery), bisected the rough circle of planned rebel strongholds. It would have made communication and movement between them difficult, if this had been intended. If intercommunication was not intended, it might have made more sense to concentrate all the rebel forces on one side or the other: presumably the north side, where both the GPO and the Four Courts lie. It is hard to see that any of the three major positions taken on the south side had as much symbolic value as these. Though the Liffey was crossed by too many substantial bridges to be a really formidable military obstacle, because it was tidal its quay walls were very high. And even the immensely wide O’Connell Bridge (whose name was then being colloquially extended to Sackville Street itself) would have been a logical focal point for defence, commanded by a very wide field of fire.29 The river would have maximized the rebels’ limited firepower. Central Dublin is also ringed by two canals, but again the planners do not seem to have considered using them as defensive lines, though all four of the major rebel posts in the southern part of the city were either on or close to the Grand Canal. The canals are punctuated by squat, thick bridges, often as wide as they are long, which could not have been demolished with the munitions then available, but which would still have limited and channelled any military countermoves. It was to be at one of these, in fact, that the most stunning rebel military success of the Dublin battle would come.

The precise form of the occupation of Dublin relates directly to what has been perhaps the most vexed question about the military committee’s plan: whether it assumed that significant military action would be confined to the capital, or saw the Dublin action as an integral part of a countrywide rising. One of the most knowledgeable writers on the period, Florence O’Donoghue, has implied that these were mutually exclusive alternatives: ‘a choice had to be made between the traditional pattern of a rising in the country, and the more daring and dramatic seizure and holding of the heart of the capital as a first blow’.³⁰ This seems like special pleading. There was no necessity for this choice, since the provincial units could not be brought to Dublin, and would have to fight ‘in the country’ if they were to fight at all. The two forms of action were not mutually exclusive, except perhaps in the minds of the military committee. Most of those who claimed to have seen the plan said that it did not extend outside Dublin (this was true also of the mysterious passbook captured by the Wexford police).³¹ The most plausible explanation for this, though, is simply the persistent, indeed widening, discrepancy between the IV organization in the capital and in the provinces. Careful historical analysis of this issue suggests that there is very little evidence of ‘any supervision or initiation of plans by headquarters staff for most areas in the country’, and that though the planners did provide advisers to certain areas, ‘no overall plan is discernible’. When all the provincial organizers were arrested or displaced in 1915, even this limited system broke down. The planners might have liked the idea of a national rising, but in practice they dealt with the forces they knew and trusted.

There was one, potentially dramatic, exception to this, and it lay outside Ireland. In April 1915, Joseph Plunkett set out for Germany, taking a route through neutral territories – Spain, Italy and Switzerland. After a twenty-three-hour train journey to Berlin, he was possibly fortunate (since his command of German was limited to a phrasebook he bought in Italy, which unsurprisingly did not contain the phrase ‘foreign ministry’) to reach the foreign ministry without being arrested as a spy, and thence meet up with Sir Roger Casement. Their object was to persuade the Germans that Ireland offered them a strategic opportunity big enough to justify sending an expeditionary force to support the Volunteer rebellion.

Casement’s mission to Germany was one of the most exotic Irish nationalist responses to the war, and Casement’s own exoticism – his Protestant Ascendancy origins, his homosexuality and manic-depressive personality, his international career, and above all its sensational denouement in a treason trial, have guaranteed him the repeated interest of biographers. His contribution to the Volunteer movement was, in the end, a marginal one. But for some time, his significance seemed much greater. Ireland was in a sense his last enthusiasm, at the end of a lifetime spent abroad in the British consular service, during which he became a liberal hero for his campaigns against the exploitation of the Putumayo and against Belgian atrocities in the Congo. He also acquired a knighthood, which may ultimately have become his death warrant when he was tried for treason in 1916. He returned to Ireland in search of a cause, and at first found mainly a cause for gloom. As he wrote to Maurice Moore from Galway in December 1913:

It is pathetic to see the fine strong handsome boys all burning to do something for Ireland, and to feel powerless to do more than talk. Galway appals me – its ruin and decay and the transatlantic mind of the people. Looking at Galway one feels Carson and Ulster must win!32

But the launching of the Volunteer movement rapidly lifted him from deep gloom to feverish elation. As we have seen, his modest financial contribution was vital, and he himself became, at Moore’s invitation, a tireless stump speaker at IV recruitment meetings. He exchanged lengthy letters with MacNeill about the movement’s direction and purpose. His prestige peaked in mid-1914 when MacNeill sent him as ‘accredited representative of the arms sub-committee’ on a fundraising trip to the USA. Like MacNeill, he believed that the Volunteers could take no action unless they could get guns on a mass scale. He was lionized by the Irish-Americans (who, as he wryly noted, were ‘mad for a Protestant leader’) and a Philadelphia group christened him ‘Robert Emmet’. More significantly still, he was taken seriously by the flintiest of the old Fenians, the Clan na Gael chief John Devoy.

At some stage, Devoy decided to back Casement in an attempt to get Irish prisoners of war in Germany to enrol in an ‘Irish Brigade’. This project carried echoes of Devoy’s own methods in the 1860s, when the Fenians set out to infiltrate the Irish regiments of the British army. The aim was to turn whole companies or even battalions into ready-made instruments for a Fenian seizure of power. The potential appeared dramatic, and although it was certainly not easy to suborn enlisted men who had taken an oath of allegiance to the British sovereign (and who were possibly the opposite of separatists), the failure of ‘military Fenianism’ was primarily due to the ruthless methods adopted by the army command to suppress it. It is perhaps surprising that the IRB never tried to repeat the exercise. Devoy, indeed, seems to have been particularly unenthusiastic about it, though he was keen on securing German political and military aid, and thought Casement might do some good as an ambassador.

Casement’s mission depended on three vital assumptions: first, that the Germans would help Irish separatists to establish an Irish Brigade; second, that they would not simply exploit them; and third, that prisoners of war would join such a force in substantial numbers. There was some evidence for the first, in that the German government was clearly aware of the Irish republican movement, and, as soon as it became clear that Britain would enter the war, interested in the possibility that it could embarrass or weaken the British position. But from the very start there were ominous misunderstandings about what the potential Irish rebels wanted, and indeed about the nature of Irish politics. Casement might have been worried to know, for instance, that the German military attaché in Washington billed him as ‘the leader of all Irish associations in America’, and thought that he was ‘ready to land arms for fifty thousand in Ireland with own means’.33 But his optimism would probably have led him to discount such evidence that the Germans were no more adept on Irish issues than the British. He strongly believed at that point that a German victory would be good for Ireland and for the world.

Casement was not unaware of the likely difficulties in enlisting prisoners of war. Because ‘the Irish soldier has a sense of honour and loyalty that is innate and must be reckoned with, he will not transfer his allegiance merely to better his condition, or to escape from imprisonment in Germany’. But he believed that most recruits had enlisted because of poverty and unemployment; at heart they were Irish nationalists and ‘not proud to be fighting England’s battles’. He saw his task, once he arrived in Berlin on 31 October, as simply one of opening their eyes to reality, and telling the Germans where to send military aid. At first, all seemed to go ‘splendidly’; the Germans ‘will help in every way’, he wrote on 2 November. Soon, though, it became evident that there were problems with his cherished idea of a German declaration of support for Irish independence, and also with the idea of raising an Irish legion. Von Jagow, the Foreign Minister, cautiously noted on the seventh that ‘the military results would be small, possibly even negative, and it would be said that we had violated international law’.³⁴

Eventually, on 20 November, Germany did issue a statement that, should it invade Ireland, it would do so with ‘good will towards a people to which Germany wished only national welfare and national liberty’. This was far from the direct recognition the Fenians hoped for. The military authorities who had to make the arrangements for Casement to address Irish prisoners, and release those who volunteered to join him, were even less enthusiastic. In the event, very few – embarrassingly few – did so. Casement blamed this on ham-fisted German arrangements, beginning a long and dismal falling-out with his hosts. The German military insistence that Casement address the Irish prisoners en masse rather than meeting them individually looks so wrongheaded that it may have been intended – for whatever reason – to sabotage the project. When it became clear to Casement that there was no possibility of any German invasion, he began to recognize Germany’s motives as utterly selfish. Ultimately, in 1916, he would ask ‘Why did I ever trust in such a Govt as this – They have no sense of honour, chivalry, generosity … They are Cads … That is why they are hated by the world and England will surely beat them.’35

It was in the midst of this process that Plunkett arrived. He had no more success than Casement in drumming up recruits for the Irish Brigade, but together they prepared an extended (thirty-two-page) strategic appreciation of the military possibilities for a German intervention in Ireland. The Volunteer Headquarters Staff, they said, recognized that ‘it would be impossible to bring any considerable military operation to a successful issue without help from an external source’. But they contended that the British forces in Ireland were far less formidable than their numbers – totalling 37,000 at that stage – might suggest. These forces, they said, consisted of many small, scattered garrisons and a few large training camps, ‘not equipped for the occupation of the country, much less to resist invasion’. Plunkett and Casement proposed a German invasion on the western coast, at the Shannon mouth, which would support a mass rising of western Volunteers at the same time as Dublin was seized according to the military committee’s plan. They suggested that 12,000 German troops, bringing 40,000 rifles for the local Volunteers, would be enough to turn Limerick into an ‘impregnable’ base and begin the process of unravelling British control.

Their essay deployed some perfectly plausible strategic thinking; such as their argument that the combination of wide river and a mass of straggling lakes made the Shannon area – ‘the line Limerick–Athlone’ – especially easy to defend by a relatively small force. But in its search for supporting evidence it drifted, inevitably perhaps, into an extended account of the French invasion of 1798. While it celebrated the achievement of Humbert’s tiny force, it wisely downplayed the performance of the local Irish levies who joined him, and completely ignored the experience of the much larger expedition under Hoche which had failed to get ashore two years earlier. This history lesson, so obviously persuasive to Irish nationalists, was probably less so to the Germans. They were more likely to ponder the stupendous danger of an attempt to land and support an entire division after a 2,000-mile voyage through seas controlled by the British navy, and to ask how rapidly the weak British forces in Ireland could be reinforced. These issues did not figure in the appreciation. And the bottom line, that the task of overcoming the Irish–German force ‘would tax the military and moral resources of Great Britain to the utmost’, stopped short of promising outright victory.

Does the Casement–Plunkett ‘Strategical Plan’ provide, as has been argued, ‘a unique insight into the attitudes, intentions and aspirations of the Military Council’?36 Given the document’s intended purpose, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it contained a fair amount of window-dressing. It was designed to put the rosiest colouring on what were in many cases very remote possibilities. In some important respects it could be said to be misleading, as when it stated that the military committee had made plans for the destruction of British transport facilities at railway bridges, canals and viaducts. As we shall see, if any such plans existed they were sketchy in the extreme. And when, noting that ‘the country is eminently suited to a kind of guerrilla or irregular war’ (something that was, in fact, far from attractive to the German army), it declared that ‘the training of the Volunteers was directed to that end’, it was frankly disingenuous. We may wonder, too, whether its insistence on the need for German troops, not merely guns, reflected Casement’s views rather than Plunkett’s. This was a point on which Casement plainly diverged from the military committee’s final plan; when he eventually returned to Ireland, it was in a despairing attempt to stop the rising because the Germans had refused to send troops. It would seem that Plunkett, on the other hand, like his fellow planners, was prepared to go ahead without them.

Were they prepared to go ahead without the guns either? This has always been a key question about the planners’ ‘attitudes, intentions and aspirations’. Was the rising expected to end British rule, or was it a ‘bloody protest’? Without the guns there was no hope of the former outcome. The Casement–Plunkett document has been said to ‘reveal the Military Council’s plans as optimistic, and directed to achieving a military victory by overwhelming the British forces in Ireland’.³⁷ This may well be true. Pearse himself gave repeated evidence during Easter Week of his hope that the Germans would arrive in spite of everything, and his last letter to his mother confirmed this. It is hardly possible that Pearse lied to his mother, though he may have wished to reassure her that he had not, in effect, committed suicide (and brought hundreds of his subordinates out to risk their lives) in a hopeless enterprise. But Seán MacDermott was also heard, in Richmond Barracks after the surrender, to say of the Germans ‘we were sure they would be here’.38

If the guns were indeed vital to the IRB planners, we might expect to find them making careful practical arrangements to deal with the formidable problem of landing and distributing them in the face of an alert British garrison. The military committee consistently called for the arms landing to be timed for the evening of the outbreak of the rebellion. Their reasoning (as with everything else, we can only guess) may have been that in order to mobilize sufficient Volunteer forces to cope with the arms landing they would have to forgo the element of surprise, and begin mobilization several hours ahead. In principle, the Casement–Plunkett document indicated that it might be possible to overwhelm or neutralize the weak British forces in the landing zone for long enough to get the guns ashore. Thus we might assume that the Cork, Kerry and Limerick Volunteers, at the very least, would have clear orders for this operation. Plunkett, after the surrender, maintained that ‘everything was foreseen, everything was calculated, nothing was forgotten’. This makes it particularly surprising that no evidence of any such orders has survived, except in very vague terms which would be likely to – and in fact did – produce confusion and paralysis rather than rapid and decisive action.

An unusually careful attempt to assemble the evidence for a general plan was later made by Liam O Briain for the Bureau of Military History, on the basis of conversations with leaders before and after the rising, in Richmond Barracks, Wandsworth gaol and Frongoch internment camp. O Briain was certain that there was such a plan, though the information he picked up – from the planners themselves – was patchy. On the key issue of the arms landing, he heard two stories. On Easter Monday morning, Seán Fitzgibbon told him of the ‘big job imposed on the Limerick battallion [sic] of engaging the British garrison there while the arms were transported across the river, and then sent forward in a seized train through Clare to Athenry’. But, while Fitzgibbon had been sent officially from Volunteer Headquarters on this mission, ‘secretly orders had been sent to the IRB men there to keep Fitzgibbon (branded ‘a talker’ by MacDonagh) moving around, to let him think he was in charge, but when the decisive moment came to take things out of his hands’. O Briain thought that, as a result, Fitzgibbon’s negative report to MacNeill on the unpreparedness of the Limerick area may have been ‘a little too black’ (albeit ‘true in general’). Later, when the landing place was changed to Fenit, the same responsibility fell on the Kerry Volunteers. (The Kerry commandant, P. J. Cahill, told him in Frongoch that some 700 men assembled near Tralee on Easter Sunday for this operation.)39

Thirty years on, O Briain struggled to remember whether it was from Seán T. O’Kelly, Michael Staines, or possibly ‘the Galway men, Larry Lardner or someone else like him’ that he first heard talk of Athenry as the ‘all-Ireland base’. Exactly what this term signified is hard to deduce. In Galway itself, ‘the leaders seemed to have no plan but to assemble a large number of men at one point and stay there’. In Cork, Terence MacSwiney explained to him at length, the plan was to assemble the brigade in the western hills to receive their portion of the arms shipment – ‘I assume in the neighbourhood of Ballyvourney or Ballingeary.’ (In fact it was to be Carriganimma – or Beeing; as we shall see, MacCurtain and MacSwiney were extremely sparing in the information they supplied to their own units about this plan.) This suggested that not all the arms were to be sent to Athenry, though there is no indication of how the division was to be made. The orders for midland and Leinster areas were ‘to move generally westwards across the Shannon’, while Ulster would be abandoned – its forces would ‘move to North Connacht and try to hold the northern end of the Shannon’.⁴⁰

On Dublin’s part in the general plan, O Briain heard some illuminating comments. When Michael Mallin, the Citizen Army commander, was shown the plan, his reaction was akin to Ginger O’Connell’s: ‘I said immediately, “Where is the alternative plan for use when this one breaks down? This plan is far too clockwork and there should be an alternative plan.” But they had none.’ Mallin found the requirement for ‘every movement of every group of our forces to dovetail into the movement of some other group’ completely unrealistic. There might, O Briain thought, have been a trace of class hostility in the ICA man’s assessment of the Volunteer leadership, but it is clear from his comments that the planning for Dublin was at a different level of detail than for the provinces. And it seems that it did ‘break down’. O Briain ‘always understood that it was never the plan to allow the Dublin brigade to be cooped up in the city, surrounded and forced to surrender’. Interestingly enough, he was convinced that Emmet’s plan was to be followed quite precisely (he recalled Seán MacDermott insisting that ‘it was no childish dream’), in that Dublin Castle was the keypoint of the strategy. The idea was that government would be ‘paralysed by the seizure (and perhaps destruction) of Dublin castle’, and the country aroused ‘by this startling event, as nothing else could do it’. Then, ‘After a few days the Dublin Brigade, if forced to do so, were to leave the city and beat a fighting retreat westwards – all the way to Athenry, if driven to it.’ O Briain believed that ‘it will be found that the companies and battallions [sic] of the Dublin Brigade had particular areas outside the city with which they were to familiarise themselves’. The 1st Battalion, for instance, operated in northern Co. Dublin, with O Briain’s own unit, F Company, at Finglas.41

If there was indeed such a plan, it would have borne out O’Connell’s criticism of the planners’ inexperience – indeed irresponsibility – since the attempt by a force like the Volunteers to carry out the most difficult of all military operations, a fighting retreat, would have been more disastrous than what eventually occurred in 1916. So, while his testimony that the planners did not intend to be ‘cooped up’ in Dublin is important (and is corroborated by Frank Henderson’s memory of a 2nd Battalion briefing by MacDonagh in February 1916),⁴² direct evidence of a coherent plan is still missing. Were measures to be taken to obstruct the movement of British reinforcements into Dublin, for instance? O Briain thought that the Wexford Volunteers intended to ‘prevent reinforcements passing through [Enniscorthy] to Dublin from Rosslare’. But this seems to have been a last-minute idea of Connolly’s rather than a plan laid down by the military committee. It remains inexplicable that no instructions seem to have been issued to interfere with the landing or movement of troops at Kingstown. Various individuals testified to receiving orders to damage bridges and railway tracks leading into Dublin, but as we shall see few practical preparations for such action appear to have been made, and many of these instructions were to be changed or abandoned at the last minute. On the whole, the knowledgeable judgement made in the 1960s that ‘on the evidence at present available, it would seem that the insurgents had no intelligible, or militarily speaking intelligent, blue print for an all-Ireland rising’ still seems sound.43

The same could certainly be said of the Irish Citizen Army contingent, if only for the reason that it remained a tightly concentrated Dublin force. But in late 1915 (around the time the military committee was enlarged), this small element began to exert a heightened influence on the situation. It had always been explicitly revolutionary in a way that the Volunteers had not, but this was mainly a reflection of James Connolly’s direct engagement, which was intermittent in the Citizen Army’s first year of life. Though he had played a major part in its creation, Connolly took surprisingly little interest in its development, leaving the elaboration of uniforms, banners and military paraphernalia to Larkin and Markievicz. He spent most of the next year in Belfast, and only returned to Dublin when Larkin left for America in October 1914. Even then, his interest in the technicalities of military organization seems to have remained limited. In sharp contrast to most of the Volunteer leaders who were enthusiastic uniform wearers (MacNeill and Hobson were exceptions), he did not put on a uniform in public until Palm Sunday 1916.⁴⁴ He does not seem to have pressed for systematic enlargement of his tiny ‘army’, which never grew beyond 200–300 (from a low of 80, according to police estimates, in April 1915). He left the business of organization and training to Michael Mallin, a practical former soldier.

Connolly may well have preferred to keep the Citizen Army small, as a revolutionary vanguard. Its crucial quality, for him, was its commitment, and its readiness to take action at short notice. Though his talks on street fighting were always popular, Connolly’s central contribution was his philosophical activism. The onset of war was a watershed moment for him; as one of his biographers puts it, he ‘became a revolutionary nationalist’. The creed of international socialism was disastrously undermined by the patriotic reaction of the masses to the outbreak of war. ‘What then becomes of all our resolutions?’ Connolly agonized; ‘all our protests of fraternity, all our threats of general strikes, all our carefully built machinery of internationalism. Were they all as sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ Out of this wreckage, all that could be salvaged was the historic opposition of Ireland and the British empire. ‘If you are itching for a rifle, itching to fight, have a country of your own’, he urged against Redmond’s support for the war. ‘Better to fight for your own country than for the robber empire.’ National liberation became the only feasible path to socialism. In the first issue of the Irish Worker after the outbreak of war he wrote that ‘Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord.’45

The problem was that even the extreme nationalists were all middle-class; their revolutionary ideas were, in Connolly’s view, either vacuous romanticism, or a mindless commitment to ‘physical force’ without social content. War might be a grim necessity, ‘forced upon a subject race or subject class to put an end to subjection of race or class or sex’. But it could not, he insisted in January 1915, be welcomed, much less glorified. ‘When so waged it must be waged thoroughly and relentlessly, but with no delusions as to its elevating nature’; there was ‘no such thing as humane or civilised war!’⁴⁶ Pearse’s febrile exaltation of blood sacrifice, and his pious wedding of nationalism to Catholicism, were equally repellent to Connolly. But despite this, he moved closer to Pearse and his small coterie, for two reasons. Pearse’s increasingly explicit talk of rebellion seems to have convinced him that some of the Volunteers were prepared to go beyond empty gestures and romantic rhetoric. Also, despite his bourgeois background, his legal training and his deference to the Church, Pearse had been genuinely shocked by the experience of the 1913 Dublin labour dispute, and the immiseration of the working class that it revealed. After this he showed an inclination towards a cautious socialism, which – however naïve – gave Connolly an inkling of hope that the Irish revolution might be more than simply a change of capitalists.

Connolly’s concept of ‘insurrectionary warfare’ was spelled out in his last journal, the Workers’ Republic, which he set up in Dublin with an abandoned printing-press in April 1915. Using – like the Volunteers – a series of historical case studies, starting – unlike them – with the Moscow rising of 1905 and ending with the Paris insurrection of 1848, he held that regular armies were ‘badly handicapped’ in urban fighting, and that ‘really determined civilian revolutionists’ could be victorious. ‘Every difficulty that exists for the operation of regular troops in mountains is multiplied a hundredfold in a city’, which he likened to ‘a huge maze of passes or glens formed by streets or lanes’. Arguing that a street was a defile just like a mountain pass, he ignored the most obvious difference – that mountain passes are few and far between, while streets are multiple. To call them a ‘maze’, with the implication that there was only a single way through, could be dangerously misleading. Undismayed by the fact that the Russian and French workers had been mercilessly crushed, he maintained that an irregular force like the ICA could achieve military success through ‘the active defence of positions whose location threatens the supremacy or existence of the enemy’.⁴⁷ He adopted the implicit assumption of the old Fenian adage, that the British state (‘England’ to all nationalists) would be weaker during a major war. Evidence that the reverse was the case – not just the vast expansion of the armed forces, but also the unprecedented DORA internal security regime – was set aside. (Michael Mallin reportedly believed that England would only have 1,000 men in Ireland ‘fit to fight’, a figure hardly credible from any viewpoint.)⁴⁸ In November Connolly alleged that whereas the old adage had once been heard on a thousand platforms, ‘since England got into difficulties, the phrase has never been heard or mentioned’. In a style arrestingly close to Pearse’s, he insisted that ‘if Ireland did not act now the name of this generation should in mercy to itself be expunged from the records of Irish history’. And when Maeve Cavanagh, ‘the poetess of the revolution’ and Citizen Army stalwart, piously told him ‘Righteous men will make us a nation once again’, Connolly brusquely retorted ‘Get anyone, anyone who will fight.’⁴⁹

Connolly’s well-publicized impatience seems to have instilled a new urgency into the military committee’s preparations. Pearse’s increasing public belligerence has often been attributed to his inner turmoil, or to the IRB’s need to prepare the public mind. But it seems likely that the need to forestall unilateral action by the ICA became steadily more pressing in late 1915. Pearse deployed his formidable verbal skills both to legitimize the idea of insurrection and to persuade his audience that it was a real possibility. His reaction to the European war was suffused with that sacral view of patriotic death which Connolly found so cretinous. Even the little affray on the Dublin quays after the Howth gun-running provoked the exultant cry that ‘the whole movement, the whole country has been re-baptised by blood shed for Ireland’. Contemplation of the Flanders battlefields and their dizzying casualty lists brought forth a more elaborate philosophy of violence. In December Pearse wrote (anonymously) in The Spark of the ‘homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country’ as ‘the most august homage ever offered to God’. It was ‘good for the world that such things should be done’. His most febrile phrase, ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefields’, suggested to one of his biographers ‘a deranged view of the world’. And Connolly – to Pearse’s dismay – contemptuously dismissed this article as the thinking of ‘a blithering idiot’; ‘We are sick of such teaching, and the world is sick of such teaching.’ Yet it was not essentially different from Pearse’s most successful piece of oratory, his speech at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa in August, which Connolly had approved.

Many commentators suggest that Pearse was now beginning to look actively for a sacrificial death; one has proposed that his ‘ritualistic courting of death and violence borders on the psychopathic’. He ‘suffered severe psychological conflict which made the prospect of going out to die on Easter Monday 1916 seem attractive, even compelling’.50 Even without invoking this pathological dimension, the 1916 rebellion has been commonly portrayed as a ‘bloody protest’ (in Pearse’s own phrase) or even ‘blood sacrifice’. Pearse certainly seems to have announced his intentions, through ‘The Mother’, who does not ‘grudge / My two strong sons that I have seen go out / To break their strength and die, they and a few / In bloody protest for a glorious thing.’ There was a Fenian model for Pearse’s rhetoric, at least as presented in a late novel by Canon Sheehan, The Graves at Kilmorna, published in 1914. ‘As the blood of martyrs was the seed of saints, so the blood of the patriot is the seed from which alone can spring fresh life, into a nation that is drifting into the putrescence of decay.’⁵¹ The model Pearse first chose to hold up to his St Enda’s acolytes, of course, was the hero Cuchulainn’s careless embrace of death in battle; though after the move from Cullenswood House to the Hermitage he veered towards Emmet ‘and the heroes of the last stand’. (He wondered whether it was ‘symptomatic of some development within me’.)52 ‘Pearse and those who followed him to certain destruction, came to believe that their actions appropriated the transcendent power of the myth.’⁵³

Yet we may wonder whether many, if any, of his co-conspirators shared this view. It is not at all evident that many saw themselves as risking ‘certain destruction’. Though there were certainly others who, like Terence MacSwiney, called anxiously on God to ‘teach us how to die’, the event would prove that even such febrile rhetoric did not translate automatically into action.⁵⁴ The hope that one would ‘not from danger swerve, in the sacred cause we serve,’ was after all a convention of patriotic commitment. Readiness to die is not quite the same thing as the ‘vertigo of self-sacrifice’ that, as W. B. Yeats felt, made Pearse uniquely dangerous.⁵⁵ Even Plunkett, who was thought to be terminally ill, showed little sign of this sort of death-wish; he was about to get married, for one thing, and, as we have seen, entertained military fantasies of holding out for three months.

Pearse’s oratorical gift was potent, and widely recognized. Patrick McCartan’s experience of his passionate invocation of Emmet has already been quoted. Pearse delivered this kind of inspirational address at countless meetings across the country throughout the first year of the war. His words sounded rhetorical, but conveyed to many of his listeners a very definite message. At St Enda’s, as one of his senior pupils put it, ‘in his talks to his students, he always stressed that every generation of Irishmen should have a rising in arms. He stressed it in such a way that you felt impelled to believe that he did actually believe that there should be some attempt.’⁵⁶ The culmination of this was his astonishing performance at the Rossa funeral. In this he reaffirmed the apostolic succession of separatist nationalism to buttress his definition of freedom: ‘it is Tone’s definition, it is Mitchel’s definition, it is Rossa’s definition’. Ireland must be ‘not free merely, but Gaelic as well’ (an insistence that would certainly have puzzled Tone). Most crucially, just before his celebrated peroration, he declared that ‘Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.’ His peroration directly confronted ‘the Defenders of this Realm’ who thought they had

pacified half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools! the fools! the fools! – they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

The tremendous impact of the funeral, and especially of this oration, has been amply attested. Richard Walsh in Mayo ‘heard it recited on railway journeys to football and hurling matches’.57 It was shortly after this that the military committee took the definite decision to launch a rebellion in the following six months. The extremism of the Spark article surely reflected this heightening tempo.

The decision to rise intensified the problem caused by the committee’s determination to keep its preparations secret, not just from the authorities but also from the IV leadership. Its preparations fell into three broad categories. First, negotiations between the IRB and the Germans, via the Clan na Gael, for the shipment of arms from Germany to Ireland. Second, the briefing of selected local IV officers with the general outlines of the insurrection plan. Third, devising a way of mobilizing the Volunteers without alerting the authorities.

The first process went on for several months, starting from Plunkett’s visit to Berlin. Casement’s attempt to enrol an Irish brigade had stalled at the derisory total of fifty-six, and the motivation of even this weak company was dubious. In October Captain Robert Monteith, one of the few properly qualified IV military instructors, who had been working in Kerry, was sent to join Casement and try to give the force some military credibility. In the maw of the great German military machine, however, Monteith’s own credentials became considerably less impressive than they seemed in Kerry. Casement was dismayed by the contempt shown towards Monteith, and the growing realization that the Germans had abandoned (if they had ever entertained) any idea of invasion. They would only send a consignment of second-rate rifles, with little interest in what became of them. Though Monteith made real improvements in the ‘Brigade’, it was plainly an embarrassment to the Germans. Casement, increasingly convinced that a rising without German participation would be a catastrophe, shifted to the idea that the Brigade should be sent to join the Turkish army trying to ‘liberate’ Egypt. This proposal was put to the men on 3 December, but only thirty-eight consented to it.

Casement himself was marginal to the arms negotiations that went on between the military committee and the Germans, by way of Devoy and McGarrity. On 1 March 1916, Monteith was summoned to Department IIIb of the German General Staff to be told that Devoy had sent a message announcing the date of the rebellion. The German Admiralty proposed that ‘between April 20 and 23 in the evening two or three fishing trawlers could land about 20,000 rifles and 10 machine guns with ammunition and explosives at Fenit Pier in Tralee Bay’. They noted that ‘unloading has to be effected in two or three hours’, and asked for confirmation that the necessary steps could be arranged.58 Shortly afterwards, Monteith found that a single vessel would be sent – the ship that would be known to history as the Aud.

Although the evidence is imprecise, it seems clear that the second process, of briefing selected local officers, had also been going on for several months before the eventual rising. In September 1915, while reviewing a Volunteer parade in Limerick, Eoin MacNeill accidentally heard of instructions issued by Pearse to some commandants to make certain ‘definite military dispositions in event of war in Ireland’.⁵⁹ He was disturbed by this, but, unfortunately for the historian and for his own reputation, he did not make any sustained effort to uncover the secret network he had stumbled on. More surprisingly, neither did Hobson, who was certainly more aware of the insurrectionist element in the IRB and better placed to investigate it. (According to some, Hobson’s view of the feasibility of rebellion at this time was more ambivalent than his later writing claimed.) When MacNeill was in Limerick in September, the military committee was still following Plunkett’s proposal to land the German arms there. Shortly afterwards, though, Pearse sent Diarmuid Lynch to assess the landing arrangements, with the idea of shifting them to Ventry in county Kerry. Lynch made an extended tour of the IV units along the west coast, and found the Kerry Volunteers under Austin Stack to be strongly in favour of Fenit, which had a deep-water quay and a light railway line to Tralee (originally built to import Indian corn). As we have seen, the Germans accepted this alteration happily enough.⁶⁰ Why the IRB did so is harder to say, since it committed the fate of the venture to a local chief whom the Supreme Council had ‘many times mooted’ removing from office before the war for laziness. According to P. S. O’Hegarty, neither Michael Crowe nor his successor as Munster Divisional Representative, Lynch himself, ‘could get him to do anything’; ‘but there was nobody else on offer’.61

The third issue, the method of mobilizing the Volunteers for action, seems to have been resolved at a very early stage. According to Diarmuid Lynch,

the Military Council was faced with the problem – how, without disclosing either its own existence or its purpose to the IV Executive, could the numerous Battalions of the countrywide Volunteer organisation be successfully launched into action – each at a time and place to suit the insurrectionary plans?

He thought that the 1915 Easter manoeuvres ‘furnished the basis for a solution’.⁶² The basis was probably laid earlier still. Shortly after the September 1914 separatist meeting, it appears that a full mobilization of the Dublin brigade and the ICA was planned with the intention of occupying the Mansion House and defending it by force if necessary, to prevent a recruiting meeting to be addressed by both Redmond and Asquith on 24 September.⁶³ The plan was abandoned, but its underlying idea re-emerged. When the military committee decided to use the Easter 1916 manoeuvres as the means of getting the Volunteers ‘out’, it set up the final crisis of its shadowy game with MacNeill and Volunteer headquarters.

In Diarmuid Lynch’s account, the ‘Secret Instructions for I.V. Comdts. (IRB Men)’ were only given to him in early January 1916 by Pearse at St Enda’s. Nothing was written down; he was to convey them orally to the Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Galway commandants. Pearse ‘outlined the positions which these Brigades were to occupy’ in the Easter weekend manoeuvres, ‘viz: Cork to hold the County to the south of the Boggeragh mountains – left flank contacting the Kerry Brigade which was to extend eastwards from Tralee; Limerick was to contact the Kerry men on the south and those of Limerick–Clare–Galway to the north’. Whether these instructions modified or merely confirmed those which MacNeill had accidentally discovered three months earlier, and how the ‘secret instructions’ differed from the formal orders for the manoeuvres, Lynch does not say. In the event, he was confined to Dublin by an ‘Enemy Alien’ order (Defence Regulation 14B), and his mission was cancelled. But things were moving. That month the Supreme Council held what turned out to be its last meeting before the rebellion, to approve Seán MacDermott’s motion that ‘we fight at the earliest date possible’. (The President, Denis McCullough, remained in the dark about the precise planning process.) At the same time MacNeill was at last preparing to make a stand against the insurrectionists on his headquarters staff.

In response to the warlike urgings of the Workers’ Republic, the Volunteers’ Chief of Staff invited Connolly to a meeting in January, at which Connolly frankly stated that he intended to mount a rising soon. While MacNeill contented himself with writing a letter to Pearse, warning against premature action, Pearse and the military committee took more direct steps. Connolly’s famous ‘disappearance’ has often been portrayed as a kidnapping, during which he was persuaded to fall in line with the IRB plans. It seems more likely, as Connolly’s ITGWU colleague William O’Brien suggested, that the conversation was consensual. Connolly was not the kind of man who would take kindly to kidnapping, though when he reappeared after his brief disappearance he resolutely refused to speak about what had happened.64 Desmond Ryan, who was close to Pearse, noted that he also ‘said nothing about a kidnapping or anything like that’. It had been an intense encounter, clearly: Pearse told him ‘there seemed to be a terrible mental struggle going on in Connolly’, until at last ‘with tears in his eyes he grasped Pearse’s hand and said “God grant, Pearse, that you are right.”’ Pearse soberly reflected, ‘Perhaps Connolly is right. He is a very great man.’⁶⁵

At Volunteer headquarters, Pearse managed to stifle MacNeill’s challenge by reading his letter out at a meeting in the Chief of Staff’s absence. MacNeill then called a special meeting for which he drew up a more substantial memorandum, a closely argued analysis of the arguments for and against insurrection. This sombre document, which lay forgotten from the day of that meeting until the 1960s, showed that MacNeill was – unsurprisingly – well aware of the impulse to rebellion, and that he was also a better historian than his fellow nationalists who drew so heavily on Irish history for their inspiration. For MacNeill, the insurrectionists were people who took refuge in ‘ready-made arguments’ and ‘a priori maxims’ because they ‘did not find themselves able to think out anything better’. He highlighted three such ‘formulas’: ‘it is essential that Ireland should take action during the present war’, ‘Ireland has always struck her blow too late’, and ‘the military advantage lies with the side that takes the initiative’. The first was unprovable, the second historically wrong (Irish failures had been primarily due to inadequate preparation) and in any case irrelevant, and the third was ‘a sort of magic spell’ which disguised the fact that the real initiative would ultimately lie with the overwhelmingly powerful British forces. Why were these formulas so attractive?

To my mind, those who feel impelled towards military action on any of [these] grounds are really impelled by a sense of feebleness or despondency or fatalism, or by an instinct of satisfying their own emotions or escaping from a difficult and complex situation.

This was a shrewd thrust, and MacNeill followed it by insisting on the need for patience, for both moral and practical reasons. The Volunteers might be a military force but they were ‘not a militarist force’. The ‘reproach of the former Volunteers’ (of 1782), he added, ‘is not that they did not fight but that they did not maintain their organisation till their objects had been secured’. He stressed, too, that the situation was better than it might look. The new Volunteer movement had effectively transformed it; ‘England’ could no longer rule Ireland ‘normally by what are called peaceful means’. The government was afraid to suppress the Volunteers, because it was ‘convinced that it would lose more than it could gain by moving its military forces against us’. Only a failed insurrection would ‘create a special opportunity for it’ to do so. And he insisted that anyone who thought an insurrection could succeed had simply failed to grasp the huge discrepancy between the Dublin and provincial Volunteers. He urged the activists to deal with the real world, not fantasy. They must get the people on their side first, and not indulge in ‘the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong’ – even in purely military terms it was ‘a factor of the highest importance to be able to fight in a friendly country’.

We have to remember that what we call our country is not a poetical abstraction, as some of us, perhaps all of us, in the exercise of our highly developed capacity for figurative thought, are sometimes apt to imagine … What we call our country is the Irish nation, a concrete and visible reality.66

This dose of professorial wisdom would certainly have been as unwelcome for its patronizing tone (MacNeill spoke of ‘childish illusions’, and ponderously insisted that ‘there is no such person as Caitlin ni Ullachain or Roisin Dubh or Sean-bhean Bhocht, who is calling us to serve her’) as for its minatory message. In the event, the insurrectionists never saw or heard it. At the meeting, Pearse immediately ‘denied in the most explicit terms having any intention to land the Volunteers in an insurrection, and reproached the rest of us for our suspicious natures’, Hobson recorded. MacNeill backed off, and slipped his memorandum into a drawer. Pearse’s victory carried a price; the Chief of Staff’s opposition to an insurrection would, two months later, express itself in a vastly more dramatic and disruptive manner.