Dorney Peace after the Final Battle

The Story of the Irish Revolution, 1912-1924
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84840-273-7
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

As we close out the decade of centenaries, and approach a re-appraisal of the Civil War our nation has never truly confronted, John Dorney's engaging history of those years - now in paperback for the first time - is a must read. Within the space of just a dozen years, Ireland was completely transformed. From being a superficially loyal part of the British Empire, it emerged as a self-governing state. How and why did Ireland go from welcoming royalty in 1912 to independence in 1922? In this exciting new updated edition, drawing on new research and the most recent material in this field, John Dorney, historian and editor of The Irish Story website, examines the roots of the revolution, using the experiences of the men and women of the time.

John Dorney is an independent historian and chief editor of The Irish Story website. He is the author of Griffith College Dublin: A History of its Campus (2013) and The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922-1924 (2017).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dorney, John

Leseproben

Chapter 2: Revolutionaries In 1905, a 16-year-old County Down Protestant named Ernest Blythe came to Dublin to work as a clerk in the Irish civil service. The young man was shy and no doubt lonely in the new city. By chance, loafing around the Gaelic League bookshop, he heard three people speaking Irish and was intrigued. Although he feared at first that ‘if it were discovered that I was a Protestant, I would be put out’, he ended up joining the Gaelic League to learn the language. Being a voracious reader and encouraged by his classmates, he soon also started to read United Irishman, a newspaper started by a separatist political party, Sinn Féin. Not too long afterwards, Blythe was taking the tram home from hurling practice with fellow sportsman, Gaelic League activist, Dublin Protestant and future playwright Seán O’Casey (though they ‘were both very bad hurlers’, Blythe recalled, they ‘practiced zealously’) when they fell into conversation about nationalist politics. O’Casey brought up the Fenians of the 1860s and how it was a great shame their organisation no longer existed. Blythe agreed, whereupon O’Casey told him that the Fenian, or Irish Republican Brotherhood indeed still existed and that he was a member. Several months later, Blythe was sworn in.46 About four years afterwards another Ulsterman also arrived in Dublin looking for work, this one a 19-year-old Catholic farmer’s son from Cavan, Paul Galligan. His older brother stood to inherit the family farm near Ballinagh, meaning that Paul had to look elsewhere to make something of himself. The young country boy was devoutly religious and did not drink or smoke, but was a keen footballer. Shortly after coming to Dublin, he joined Kickham’s Gaelic Football Club, whose president, James ‘Buller’ Ryan, was an IRB ‘centre’, or cell leader. Galligan came from a nationalist family – his mother had been the secretary of the Land League in Carrigallen – and was probably outspoken on issues of Irish independence. ‘Buller’ Ryan kept his eye on young Galligan for some time before, in 1910 or 1911 – Galligan could not remember the exact date – he proposed that Galligan join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Galligan duly joined the Henry Joy McCracken Circle, of which Ryan was ‘centre’, at 41 Parnell Square, a five-minute walk from his workplace in a warehouse on Henry Street.47 In Craughwell, County Galway, in about 1916, a man named Thomas Kenny swore another 19-year-old, Gilbert Morrissey, into the Brotherhood, as he had his two older brothers before him. Here in rural east Galway, it was not so much cultural nationalism as the old fights on the land that brought in recruits. Morrissey recalled, ‘I think Kenny’s main concern was to keep the spark of nationality alive in us until the opportunity came. This was not so difficult in County Galway because, in a sense, arms were never put away. If the people were not fighting against the British forces proper, they were making a fair stand against its henchmen, the tyrant landlord class, their agents and bailiffs, who were backed up and protected by the Royal Irish Constabulary’.48 All three of them swore the following oath: In the presence of God, I, ______, do solemnly swear that I will do my utmost to establish the independence of Ireland, and that I will bear true allegiance to the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Government of the Irish Republic and implicitly obey the constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and all my superior officers and that I will preserve inviolable the secrets of the organisation. Ernest Blythe went on to become a leading separatist activist, the first Minister for Trade and Commerce in the revolutionary government of 1919–21, and later, Minister for Finance in the first Free State Government in 1922. Galligan was to lead an insurrection in County Wexford in 1916, before doing several stints of solitary confinement in prisons, getting himself elected as MP for Cavan in the interim. Morrissey, like Galligan, was a rural insurgent in 1916 and became a full-time guerrilla fighter in 1920 and 1921. In or around the same time, and in similar circumstances, other future leaders of the Irish revolution were entering militant separatist politics. A young Corkman called Michael Collins was sworn into the IRB in London, having been introduced to it by fellow Corkman Sam Maguire. In Ireland, such figures as Thomas Ashe, Richard Mulcahy and others were being sworn in. If revolutions are mass, popular affairs by definition, they are nevertheless often brought into being by small, determined and organised minorities. So it was in Ireland. Blythe, Galligan and Morrissey, and men and women like them, were relatively few in number in Ireland before the First World War, but their ideas and actions would do much to shape the future of the country. ‘Extreme National Views’: the Irish Republican Brotherhood The common thread that linked these three men, and most other dedicated nationalist revolutionaries, was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or IRB. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the IRB or Fenians had built up a substantial underground organisation with up to 40-50,000 members, mostly among the Catholic labouring class, dedicated to open insurrection to topple British rule.49 By 1916, though, it had only 1,300 members in Ireland. The IRB also had a powerful presence in America through its sister organisation, Clan na Gael. The Clan was a valuable source of funds and arms, and valuable too as a place of refuge if Ireland became too uncomfortable. In 1867 the IRB had their first shot at rebellion, but it collapsed through poor organisation and government infiltration. The 1867 insurgents were influenced by French and American Republicanism and demanded universal suffrage, ‘which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour’, and the ‘absolute liberty of conscience and the separation of Church and State’. With a nod to English democratic radicalism, they declared that ‘we intend no war against the people of England’, and with reference to the agrarian struggle in Ireland, stated, ‘our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields’. The Brotherhood marched several thousand men out to Tallaght Hill near Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic to be in existence.50 It lasted less than a day. Ideological Republicanism was more in evidence in the late nineteenth-century Brotherhood than in its early twentieth-century incarnation, whose members were as likely to call themselves ‘separatists’ as ‘Republicans’. However, it is probably a mistake to think that the Fenian who marched out to Tallaght Hill in 1867 was more politically sophisticated than his counterpart who manned the rebel barricades in Dublin in 1916. Irish Freedom, the IRB newspaper founded in 1910, complained that ‘our Republican principles’ (‘a free and independent republic on a broad and democratic basis’) were not widely understood among separatists, either in the past or at that date. The editorial was ‘amazed to find so many nationalists with a leaning towards monarchical ideas’ ... ‘The absence of deeper Republican thought was the reason for the “fading away” after 1867’, they complained. ‘Fenian propagandist work in the 1860s was entirely separatist with no reference to Republicanism’. The modern IRB man had to be ‘a disciplined soldier for Ireland’ but also ‘a true and staunch Republican’, which meant subscribing to ‘personal liberty, equality of all men in the eyes of the state and denial of rights unless they are accompanied by an acceptance of duties’.51 This entailed a somewhat complex relationship with democracy. The IRB envisaged a democratic Irish republic and all of the most radical nationalist organisations supported universal suffrage as a demand, but they also regarded themselves as an elite vanguard who may have to push the passive majority in the right directions. According to Irish Freedom, ‘He is called to a brave charge who is called to resist the majority, but resist he will knowing that he will lead them to a dearer dream than they have ever known’.52 While the ideology sketched above did in some ways underpin early twentieth-century Irish Republicanism, it is most unlikely that the average IRB member, let alone the tens of thousands who later passed through the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Army, attained this level of ideological sophistication. More generally, what the IRB represented was an uncompromising attitude towards Irish independence and a willingness to use force to get it. ‘The issue’, the first edition of Irish Freedom (November 1910) told its readers, ‘is Irish Independence’. ‘We have been told to forget history, to become practical people like the Scots and the Welsh’. The compromises of the constitutional nationalists in the Irish Parliamentary Party, aimed at securing Home Rule within the United Kingdom, were ‘rotten and immoral’. ‘The Irish attitude to England is war yesterday, war today, war tomorrow. Peace after the final battle’.53 In practice, therefore, Irish Republicanism meant not necessarily a commitment to a particular political philosophy, but to extreme methods. In Wexford there was a strong IRB presence (100...