I grew up in a free country which was decolonised seven years before my birth. The reflexes of colonialism linger on for a time after the rulers have departed.
(page 14)
‘I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England.’
(Lady Gregory)
This is, in the old and best sense of the word, an amateur book. It is a highly personal perspective on the series of very famous events in Irish history. Ulick O’Connor had a long and successful life as a sportsman, lawyer, writer, poet, playwright, historian and biographer, summarised in his obituary:
As a sportsman he certainly excelled. As a lawyer I’ve no idea of his status. As a writer, apparently his biographies of Oliver St John Gogarty and Brendan Behan are still important. But he was definitely not a professional historian and it shows. This slim 180-page account of the leadup to and aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin is anecdotal and empassioned rather than detached and scholarly. It’s a handy enough introduction to the events, although there must be many far more rigorous and scholarly accounts.
And it seems to skip or gloss over complex details. Every time I looked up an aspect of the leadup to the rising on Wikipedia, I found it to be more complex and byzantine than O’Connor’s account. This appears to be a simplified and romanticised account.
What makes it stand out is O’Connor’s flashes of real anger against British imperial rule in Ireland and, in the later stages, the number of participants and eye-witnesses who O’Connor seems to have met and interviewed for this book and so quotes verbatim.
Introduction
Setting the personal tone of the book, it opens with O’Connor visiting the Public Records Office at Dublin Castle to see the file on his great-grandfather. This was Matthew Harris who fought in the Irish risings of 1848 and 1867 and became one of three members of the Supreme Council of the Fenians, who, even though he went on to be elected as an MP to Westminster, was in later life followed everywhere by detectives. O’Connor discovers his file is huge and could be compared to the Czarist authorities’ files on Lenin. So O’Connor is using his great-grandfather as an example of the huge amount of time and energy the British colonial system spent keeping tabs on anyone who spoke against it.
But the anecdote is also typical of O’Connor’s romanticising tendency: he is quick to say of his forebears, or of any notable Irishman he’s writing about, that tales were told of him round fireplaces and ballads sung in pubs. The heroes of his story are constantly being turned into tales and ballads sung wherever patriots assemble.
His name had passed into tradition so that as I grew up I heard him talked about with reverence. (p.8)
And it’s typical of O’Connor’s approach in a third way, in that he underpins it, not with scholarly documentary information or research, but with an anecdote told him by an eminent person. In this case it’s the novelist Liam O’Flaherty, who tells O’Connor that he remembered his father recalling Harris’s fiery speeches. And in another anecdote, a visitor to the West of Ireland tells O’Connor that the peasants still remembered his great-grandfather. This is how the book proceeds: by anecdotes about heroes.
And a fourth way in which the introduction sets the tone and approach is when O’Connor broadens out his theme to explain how the Irish patriots’ struggle for independence went on to inspire like-minded revolutionaries in Egypt, India and many other colonies of the British Empire, a point he repeats a number of times in the rest of the book.
Back to great-grandfather Harris: O’Connor tells us that in 1880 he was persuaded to moderate his beliefs enough to stand for Parliament. He was persuaded to do this by Charles Stewart Parnell whose strategy was to unite the three elements in Irish political life: the physical forcers, the Land league and the Parliamentary Party. It was Parnell’s great achievement to do this and make his parliamentary party into the deciding force in British politics.
1. Rise and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell
O’Connor steps back to give us the deep background: he says it was the Flight of the Earls in 1607 after defeat in battle which handed Ireland over to British control. His great-great-grandfather was alive at the time of the 1798 rebellion. His great-grandfather lived through the potato famine when up to a million died of starvation due to the incompetence of the British administration, and some 2 million emigrated, mostly to America.
In the four years after the famine, 58,000 families amounting to 316,000 people were evicted from their homes for non-payment of rent, saw their houses destroyed and were left destitute, living in caves or wooden huts or dying by the roadside.
In 1886, leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone introduced the first Home Rule Bill with a horrified description of the abject poverty found throughout rural Ireland.
At the turn of the century the British Empire was at its height. O’Connor quotes Louis Fischer, the biographer of Gandhi, as saying that imperialism is a sort of perpetual insult to the colonised and governed.
Charles Stewart Parnell was a Protestant, a member of the ‘Protestant ascendency’ born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family in County Wicklow in 1846. He was leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, and then of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1882 to 1891, by which time his party held the balance of power in the House of Commons.
In a typically family anecdote, O’Connor remembers his grandmother telling him how, as a small girl, she used to greet Parnell when he came to stay with her father in the west of Ireland. ‘She treasured the table on which he wrote his speeches as if it were the relic of one of her favourite saints’ (p.16).
She also taught O’Connor that it was incorrect to refer to the married woman Parnell had a ten-year affair with as ‘Kitty’ O’Shea, it should always be Mrs O’Shea. It is typical of the book that we see the whole Parnell tragedy through the eyes of an O’Connor family member.
What happened was when it looked likely the Liberals under Gladstone were going to win the 1892 general election and pass his Home Rule bill, some Tory leaders persuaded Captain O’Shea (who knew about his wife’s long-standing affair with Parnell) to divorce her, citing Parnell as the third party. As soon as this happened Gladstone, leading a party whose core was nonconformist, was forced to repudiate Parnell and withdraw his support for the Irish Party till it replaced its leader. Parnell refused to stand down and the furore split his party with the majority of its MPs, and all his senior colleagues, abandoning him to form a new party.
The following, much more recent, account suggests the train of events had more to do with Captain O’Shea’s greed than with scheming Tories. In this as everywhere else you can feel O’Connor’s 1) tendency to simplify the story and 2) burning animus against English rule.
The party split and Parnell went into exile in… England, dying the next year, 1891, of pneumonia, aged just 45. His body was brought back to Dublin. A crowd of some 200,000 watched the procession to Glasnevin Cemetery. Many people say a meteor (or shooting star as O’Connor puts it with characteristic romance) fall from the sky.
O’Connor quotes James Joyce’s famous quip about the Parnell ‘betrayal’ although, characteristically, he slightly misquotes him. Here’s the Joyce quote from his 1912 essay ‘The Shade of Parnell’:
In his final desperate appeal to his countrymen, he begged them not to throw him as a sop to the English wolves howling around them. It redounds to their honour that they did not fail this appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves.
Joyce’s essay was written 21 years after Parnell’s fall and indicates how long-lasting the sense of failure and loss was, as described in vivid fictional form in 1) his short story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ and 2) the famous Christmas dinner argument scene in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
Rather than attempt a full historical perspective, O’Connor characteristically quotes the opinions of famous writers: Joyce, Dennis Ireland, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Faolain, P.S. O’Hegarty, an old Sinn Fein writer who spoke to him. All the way through it’s these personal perspectives which O’Connor likes to give. And seeing as these writers or old-timers tend to romanticise and glamorise events, this contributes to the romanticising tendency of the whole book.
2. Celtic Revival
1884: foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association: hurling, Gaelic football.
1893: Douglas Hyde, another son of the Protestant Ascendency, decided to set up the Gaelic League, an organisation to promote the Gaelic language, fast dying out in the cities but preserved among the peasantry. By 1906, over 3,000 branches.
An early convert was Lady Augusta Gregory, Anglo-Irish daughter of landed gentry (1852 to 1932). She was home schooled then married off to Sir William Henry Gregory, a widower with an estate at Coole Park, near Gort, in 1880. Sir William was 36 years older than her and had just retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon. He had a large house and estate at Coole Park which she, in the coming decades, turned into a major venue for nationalist writers. He also had a town house in London where she held literary soirées for leading figures of the time.
Throughout, O’Connor refers to the military element of the occupying power by the general term ‘the Garrison’.
Novelists George Moore and Edward Martyn were attracted to the Celtic Revival but it was the conversion of young William Butler Yeats which transformed things. Up till then he’d been writing fey pre-Raphaelite poetry under the influence of William Morris.
O’Connor fast forwards to the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the renaissance of literary talent which constellated round it including J.M. Synge, James Stephens, George Russell A.E., Padraig Column, Katherine Tynan and more. O’Connor was to deal with the Celtic Revival separately in his 1984 group biography Celtic Dawn.
This all allows him to proceed by his favourite method which isn’t via documents or data, but by cherry-picking quotes from Famous Authors. On the upside, these are always chatty and anecdotal; on the downside, it’s the absence of any real historical context which gives the book its thin texture.
3. Portrait of turn-of-the-century Dublin
Parks, grand squares, the Season at the Castle, debutante balls. Population 400,000 with a small centre where it was easy to bump into people you knew (compare with London’s monstrous 6.5 million).
This leads him to Maud Gonne (1866 to 1953) ‘the most beautiful woman in Europe’ according to Wickham Stead, editor of the Times. Despite her claims she was of English descent on both sides but became a firebrand Irish revolutionary. Willie Yeats fell madly in love with her but she refused to become his lover.
In 1900, Gonne helped found Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland). Twenty-nine women attended the first meeting. They decided to ‘combat in every way English influence doing so much injury to the artistic taste and refinement of the Irish people’.
Lady Constance Gore-Booth (1868 to 1927) was an Irish revolutionary, nationalist, suffragist, and socialist, famous as the first woman elected to the UK Parliament (1918), though she did not take her seat. Born into Anglo-Irish aristocracy at Lissadell, she rejected her privileged background to fight for Irish independence, becoming a key figure in the 1916 Easter Rising. In 1900 she married Polish artist and playwright Casimir Dunin-Markievicz, and they styled themselves the Count and Countess = Constance Markievicz.
4. Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fein
Ireland was ruled by England from 1170. There was a short period of home rule from 1782 to 1800 which was put to an end by the 1800 Act of Union. Since 1800 nationalists had wanted to replace this foreign rule with home rule, some by constitutional means, some by violent uprising, as in 1848 and 1867.
In the early 1900s a journalist called Arthur Griffith came to prominence with a new strategy, passive resistance. In 1900 he founded the United Irishman which attracted top writers and became very influential.
Characteristically, O’Connor paints Griffith’s portrait by quoting other writers (Oliver St John Gogarty, James Joyce). Just as characteristically, he dwells on the way the short unprepossessing Griffith was madly in love with Gonne.
1903: Griffith starts publishing articles about how Hungary secured home rule within the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hungarian People’s Party led by Francis Deak. The next year he launched a political party to copy Deak’s strategy (the historical figure’s proper name appears to have been Ferenc Deák) – Sinn Fein, ‘Ourselves alone’.
Clause 14 of the Sinn Fein constitution: Non-recognition of the British Parliament. The plan was not just to abstain, but to set up a parallel Irish administration at all levels. However (in the book’s first mention of the Ulster problem) Griffith allowed for there to be a King of Ireland and a King of Britain.
Constance Markievicz joined Sinn Fein as did Maud Gonne.
Chapter 5. Roger Casement
Sir Roger Casement (1864 to 1916) worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat. He was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo Free State and knighted in 1911 for his investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru, sometimes credited as the ‘father of twentieth-century human rights investigations’.
Typically O’Connor conveys his importance by quoting writers – Joseph Conrad, who knew him in the Congo, and E.D. Morel who campaigned with Casement to end Belgium’s disgusting slave regime in the Belgian Congo (characteristically, the book incorrectly gives his initials as A.D.). See:
Resting in his native County Antrim, Casement heard about Griffith’s party and joined. He set out to learn Gaelic. He had seen imperialism at its most disgusting and had a shrewd feeling that Griffith’s strategy for freeing Ireland could work. He donated money to a school being run by a young Gaelic Leaguer called Eamon de Valera.
Chapter 6. The 1912 home rule bill
In 1910, though, the lead party was not Sinn Fein but the Irish Party led by Parnellite John Redmond. The Liberal Party returned to power in 1906 and, in order to pass its social legislation, needed the support of the Irish Party to pass its legislation neutering the House of Lords. In exchange its leader, Herbert Asquith, promised to sponsor another Irish Home Rule bill.
In March 1912, at a mass meeting in Dublin, Irish nationalists greeted the launch of an Irish Home Rule bill in Parliament but warned that if their hopes were dashed, Ireland would take arms.
Chapter 7. Ulster
A quarter of the population of Ireland was Protestant, over a million living in the counties of Ulster. Two weeks after the Dublin nationalist meeting, a mass meeting was held in Ulster, with 100,000 men marching past Sir Edward Carson.
O’Connor analyses the Ulster Protestant as a typical colon in that his link to the imperial power gave him superiority. Even the poorest Protestant was, in a sense, superior to the richest Catholic. He compares them to the poor whites in the American South, persuaded of their racial superiority by their exploiters who thus kept the working class divided.
Carson had been Solicitor General in the Conservative government which fell in 1906 election. Next to him on the stand was Andrew Bonar Law, the Canadian-born new leader of the Conservative Party. In subsequent speeches Carson made it quite clear he was prepared to break the law and disobey officers of the Crown if home rule were passed.
In 1912 he and others set up the Solemn League and Covenant which was signed by hundreds of thousands (echoing the Covenants signed in Scotland during the civil wars).
Echoing Griffith, the Ulstermen set up their own provisional government. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was set up under a British Army general. F.E. Smith was a leading figure, who later became Attorney General of Britain.
In Britain, a British League for Ulster was set up and 120 MPs and 100 Lords joined it.
It became obvious that these Ulster refuseniks were the key issue in the Irish Question. Carson and the rest were openly declaring treason. Warrants were made out for their arrest, in Dublin but not issued. Prime Minister Asquith hoped Ulster resistance would die down.
Chapter 8. The Irish Volunteers
Mirroring the foundation of the Ulster Volunteers, in the south the Irish Volunteers were founded. It was founded by professor of Irish history Eoin MacNeill. Characteristically, O’Connor’s grandfather knew him. His mother told stories of going with her parents and MacNeill to the Aran Isles for the summer to learn Gaelic and come back with Gaelic-speaking nannies.
It was following an article about the Ulster volunteers, that MacNeill was approached to spearhead its southern equivalent. A committee of 30 was set up, including men from Redmond’s party. Roger Casement (returned from Peru) was made secretary.
By January 1914 there were 10,000 volunteers, by September 180,000.
Chapter 9. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)
Clann na Gael based in New York, run by old Feinian John Devoy. In 1907 he sent Thomas Clarke to Dublin to recruit for the IRB. Willie Yeats joined. And working class Catholic Sean O’Casey. They looked up to intellect and culture.
The (underground) IRB carefully infiltrated its members into the (aboveground) Irish Volunteers.
Chapter 10. The Citizen Army
In chapter 3 O’Connor gave us a very brief sense of upper class life in Dublin. This chapter emphasises the poverty. Dublin had the highest death rate of any city in Europe. The Irish Times compared living conditions of the poor to Dante’s Inferno.
August to Christmas 1913 Dublin saw a massive general strike, led by Jim Larkin (orator and journalist) and James Connolly (brilliant analyst who applied Marxist theory to Ireland, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party). He left for the States, then returned to become General Secretary of Larkin’s Transport Union.
The outcome of the long bitter violent general strike wasn’t concessions from the employers, but the creation of a Citizen Army which proceeded to arm itself. It came into being in November 1913 with a constitution drawn up by Sean O’Casey, who became its secretary and later wrote its history.
The Army Commander was Captain Jack White who had distinguished himself in the Boer War. He received a telegram of praise from Roger Casement.
Chapter 11. Guns for the Ulster Volunteers
In March 1914 a huge consignment of arms and ammunition arrived at Ulster to be distributed to the Ulster Volunteers. O’Connor describes how hundreds of cars owned by the landed gentry were parked along the route at night to light the lorries away from the port. Reading this, I was impressed by the commitment and organisation of these people, always painted as the baddies. I went looking for books about the Ulster Volunteers and only found two. History is written by the winners.
Its arrival triggered similar thoughts in the Irish Volunteers who arranged for Roger Casement. In July a yacht left Hamburg carrying 10,000 rifles. They docked at Howth, were met by Irish Volunteers, who marched with them back into Dublin.
Chapter 12. The Curragh Mutiny, then war
In March 1914 General Sir Arthur Paget, commander of British forces in Ireland, ordering to send detachments to protect depots in the north from raids by the Ulster Volunteers, firing on them if necessary. 60 officers and the leader of the 3rd cavalry brigade refused. This was regarded as a mutiny and rocked the British Army.
What it seemed to show everyone was that the British government would back down when faced with the threat of force. This triggers amusingly emotional rhetoric in O’Connor: ‘sordid intrigue… devious charade… ‘
O’Connor is quick to say in this rebellion of part of the Establishment against another, this splinter was the crack that foreshadowed the end of empire in violent independence movements around the world.
The Home Rule bill passed through the Commons in May 1914 and was scheduled to become law in September 1914. But in August the Great War broke out and all domestic legislation was suspended.
When war broke out, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party which held the balance of power in the Commons, and with a force of some 180,000 trained men at his disposal, could have bargained with the Liberal government and witheld his support until the government absolutely promised to enact the bill. If an Irish government had been set up in Dublin, albeit with limited powers and still under ultimate British control, it is unlikely there would have been any Easter Rising.
But he didn’t. Without consulting his party he stood in the House of Commons and pledged the support of the entire nation of Ireland to the British in their time of need. This made the Irish immensely popular, even with the Conservative right, but at a stroke he handed over his trump card and had nothing left to bargain with.
The bill was placed on the statute book but only to come into force after the war. That was the rub. That was the cause.
Recruits flocked to volunteer. Some 300,000 Irish fought for the Empire, 40,000 of them were killed. But after the first flush of enthusiasm, many Irish found it difficult to win commissions in Irish regiments. The British Army establishment preferred Irish regiments to be officered by loyal British Protestant officers.
Chapter 13. Padraig Pearse and the military council
September 1914 the leadership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that a nationalist uprising would take place before the war ended and began making plans.
James Connolly opposed the war from a Marxist point of view, as empires fighting over resources and markets.
Snapshots of: Padraig Pearse, at this point teaching at St Enda’s school; Thomas MacDonagh, English lecturer at the National University; Joseph Plunkett, poet and editor of the Irish Review. All three are members of the military council of the IRB. They didn’t expect a rising to defeat the British. They expected it to create an independent republic long enough for its case to be made at the conferences which would end the war. More poetically, the felt that they would revive the soul of their nation.
In March 1916 Clann na Gael contacted him to say they would be sending 20,000 rifles and 10 million rounds.
Meanwhile James Connolly, the socialist trade unionist, independent of the IRB, had concluded that an armed uprising was necessary, using his citizen army. Fearful lest the plans clash, the military council invited Connolly to a meeting in January 1916. He was delighted to hear the news from Joseph Plunkett and both sides agreed the uprising would happen at Easter 1916.
Chapter 14. The Easter Rising
Eoin MacNeill interferes MacNeill was the commander-in-chief of the Irish Volunteers but he was deliberately kept out of the loop by the IRB military council. Only on Good Friday did he learn about plans for an uprising on Monday. He strongly disapproved and went to St Enda’s to see Pearse. Pearse persuaded him plans were too far advanced and also a shipment of arms was arriving from Germany so MacNeill acquiesced.
But late on Saturday morning, he learned the arms shipment had been intercepted. Feeling he’d been fooled, MacNeill took out an advert in the Sunday papers telling his volunteers their traditional Easter weekend training manoeuvres were cancelled. Many read this and stayed at home. When the news of the uprising spread on Monday they weren’t ready. Pearse’s response was to send out envoys to Volunteer groups around the country and tell them to carry on, but the damage was done. On the Monday, most Volunteer groups did not rise along with Dublin. If they had the British Army would have been spread very thin. Instead they were able to concentrate their firepower in Dublin and end the uprising after a week (p.84).
O’Connor tells us that his grandfather knew MacNeill and once told him he wasn’t a bad man. Hard to see how he doesn’t come out of this as the fall guy.
The uprising began at 12 noon on Monday 24 April 1916 and continued for 6 days. At 11 Pearse and Connolly marched their men from Liberty Hall over to the poorly defended Post Office and seized it. Pearse stood between the huge Greek columns and read out a declaration of independence. O’Connor gives a good enough account but I’m not sure it’s worth my summarising his summary. Instead here’s the Wikipedia article:
Chapter 15. The uprising continues
The British put Brigadier Lowe in charge of suppressing the uprising. He brought a gunboat up the river which bombarded Liberty Hall then the GPO. Houses on both sides were set on fire. Eight or so other buildings had been seized so sporadic sniping and shelling took place round those, too.
The weirdest thing about it was the way most Dubliners strolled around watching it take place. O’Connor quotes the usual suspects, Gogarty, James Stephens, George Moore, Sean O’Casey, strolling round the city, listening to the shellfire, observing other citizens going about their business.
Chapter 16. The uprising ends; the executions
On Friday 28 April 1916 General Maxwell arrived and began investing the key sites in a rigorous way. At 2.30pm the next day, Saturday 29 April, Pearse surrendered to General Lowe.
Four days later the executions began. Sixteen rebel leaders were shot:
Signatories of the Proclamation of Independence: Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, Sean Mac Diarmada, Éamonn Ceannt, and James Connolly.
Other leaders: Willie Pearse (brother of Patrick), Edward Daly, Michael O’Hanrahan, John MacBride, Seán Heuston, Con Colbert, and Michael Mallin.
MacBride was husband to Maud Gonne, the dazzling beauty who bewitched Willie Yeats.
Remember dashing Lady Constance Markievicz? She had been deputy of the troop which held Stephen’s Green then pulled back to the College of Surgeons. She was sentenced to death, too, which was commuted to life imprisonment as she was a woman. In fact she was released after less than a year when the British government offered a general amnesty.
About 1,350 people were killed or wounded, mostly civilians. The centre of Dublin had been gutted. The general population was furious with the rebels. Elsewhere life went on as normal with business carried out while the middle classes played golf and tennis.
Chapter 17. Poetic reactions
Characteristically, O’Connor summarises the aftermath by quoting the usual suspects: W.B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, Lady Gregory, Tom Kettle.
He has a romantic notion of poets, that they are the first to notice the changes in a nation’s soul, that these poets grasped the rising’s significance way before the silly politicians.
Chapter 18. Roger Casement
In the last few years before the war Casement developed a pathological hatred of Britain’s rule in Ireland. Just before the Great War broke out he went to New York to work with Clann na Gael. In December 1914 he persuaded its leader, John Devoy, to Germany, as an envoy from independent Ireland and to secure arms. In fact Casement spent two weary years getting nowhere, and eventually asked to be returned to Ireland (with no guns). The Germans laid on a submarine which took him to the south coast but due to a SNAFU in the arrangements he was put into a canvas boat with two others, while the U-boat departed. The canvas boat overturned in high seas and Casement barely made it ashore. he staggered to the nearest house where he was resting when he was arrested by the local bobby, sent to Dublin and then to the Tower of London.
Chapter 19. The trial of Roger Casement
O’Connor was a practicing lawyer and so gives a brief but vivid account of Casement’s trial. As usual, a trial had nothing to do with ‘justice’ but entirely practical wrangles and politicking. Casement’s defence lawyer, Serjeant Sullivan, had himself recruited in Ireland for the British Army i.e was on the opposite side of the political cause. (O’Connor remembers seeing the 90-something old lawyer still beetling around the Dublin Inns of Court when your man was just a young barrister.)
Not just that, but the prosecuting counsel was F.E. Smith who had been active in the setting up of the Ulster Volunteers back in 1912 i.e. was extremely anti-Casement’s independence position and also, as O’Connor emphasises, arguably more guilty of treason than Casement.
The case revolved round the accusation that casement tried to recruit Irish prisoners of war held in Germany to join the German Army and fight against Britain. The defence argued that the treason act only applied to activities here in England, and Casement’s activities had taken place abroad.
Throughout the trial the authorities made available to the police, lawyers and senior figures in the Establishment the so-called black diaries in which Casement appeared to describe his personal homosexual activities in great detail. For a long time these were thought to be fakes but in the 1990s were apparently confirmed as true.
Poor Casement, a hero of international human rights, a principled nationalist and patriot, he was found guilty and hanged on 3 August 1916. He made a condemned man’s speech from the dock. O’Connor points out that so many Irish patriots did this that it is virtually a literary genre in itself. He made the point that the creation of the Ulster Volunteers created the atmosphere of violence, and the Curragh Mutiny in effect condoned disobedience to the Crown (although all that was fine if you were on the Protestant side).
(True to his recurring attempts to portray the rising as the having international impacts on other freedom struggles of other imperial colonies, O’Connor claims that Casement’s speech had a profound impact on the young Pandit Nehru.)
The Trial of Sir Roger Casement by Sir John Lavery (1916)
With the end of the Casement trial we reach the en of the build-up to and events of, the Easter Rising, on page 114 of this 180-page book. The rest of O’Connor’s book describes events over the next 4 years, the rise of Sinn Fein, the success of Arthur Griffith’s abstentionist policy, the granting of home rule and then the bitter civil war of 1921 to ’22.
Chapter 20. Sinn Fein
Some 3,000 people were interned after the rising. Over the next 12 months they were released in batches. By June 1917 the public mood had changed to become more sympathetic to the rising leaders who were coming to be seen as martyrs. In by-elections that year, Sinn Fein candidates won but refused to take their seats in the London Parliament, a tradition which continues to this day.
Eamon de Valera was the only commander who wasn’t executed. Upon release he contested a by-election and defeated the Irish Party candidate. Sinn Fein was replacing Redmond’s party.
Thomas Ashe, president of the IRB, went on hunger strike in prison. When he died, Michael Collins, who’d been released from internment at Christmas 1916, decided to organise a vast funeral for him. Characteristically, O’Connor tells us Sean O’Casey wrote a ballad requiem for Ashe, and quotes a hymn by Ashe himself.
Chapter 21. Conscription and the Dail
Most Irish still favoured the constitutional party of John Redmond and expected the home rule bill, which was on the statute books, to be implemented as soon as the war ended.
Then in spring 1918 the British made the latest in a long line of blunders when the Army Chiefs of Staff prevailed on Lloyd George to pass an act compelling the conscription of all able-bodied men in Ireland into the British Army. Not only Sinn Fein and the Irish Party but the Catholic party opposed it, though O’Connor skips completely over its implementation. He quotes A.J.P. Taylor as saying it was the decisive moment in Ireland’s seceding from the Union.
In the December 1918 general election the Irish Party was obliterated by Sinn Fein, winning just 6 seats to the nationalists’ 73. John Redmond had died in March.
The Sinn Fein MPs promptly set up their own government in the Mansion House in Dublin and called it the Dail. No fewer than 36 of the 73 MPs were in British prisons. A Declaration of Independence was read out.
Three delegates were chosen to attend the Peace Conference in Versailles. In April 1919 a President was elected and a Cabinet chosen. Griffith stood down in favour of de Valera who was beginning to acquire charisma and status, although the latter was in prison in England. Republican courts of justice were set up in the counties of Ireland and slowly these began to replace the British institutions.
When physical force was used later, it was important that the Volunteers and others derived genuine legitimacy by acting as the Army of an elected government rather than a paramilitary force.
Michael Collins, who was becoming chief fixer, organised the escape of de Valera from Lincoln prison.
Chapter 22.
The British banned the Dail and set about arresting nationalists. The cabinet ministers went into hiding. Collins had been made Director of Intelligence. Now he turned out to be a spymaster and guerrilla organiser of genius. O’Connor makes his recurring point that the strategy Collins developed went on to be copied by independence movements around the globe.
Collins knew they couldn’t fight the British soldier for soldier. But imperial rule rested on a network of spies and he could kill these spies. He got his own men on the inside of Dublin Castle and access to government files. He drew up lists of informers, and then he created a cadre of cold-hearted killers who began a campaign of targets assassinations starting in July 1919.
I noted that O’Connor mentioned when he had personal connections with various figures in the story. Now these become more frequent. He appears to have interviewed quite a few of these informers and assassins (Bill Stapleton, Joe Dolan) who give him vivid descriptions of actual assassinations they took part in.
The squad operated out of a decorators’ shop in Abbey Street. It’s difficult to credit, hard to believe, that this gang of assassins operated just a few minutes’ walk from Dublin Castle, the centre of the British police effort. How?
Chapter 23. The IRA in the countryside
At some point the Irish Volunteers morphed into the Irish Republican Army although, apparently, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when. O’Connor describes the spread of volunteers through towns around Ireland. Often these were dominated by Big Houses and/or British Army barracks, along with schools, Protestant churches and so on.
As so often, the authorities found it difficult to deal with an enemy which was part of the local population, appeared suddenly to assassinate someone or blow something up, then melted back into the general population. Also they knew the country better than the occupier, and where to hide out.
The strategy of ambushing British Army troops, convoys and so on, sometimes throwing grenades, sometimes mining roads, followed by rifle fusillades. The Brits called it ‘ditch murder’, but in his internationalist mode. O’ Connor points out how it went on to be copied by Mao Tse Tung, Tito, General Guap, Che Guevara and many others (p.140).
These attacks continued through 1920, with sometimes large-scaled engagements leaving 10 to 20 British soldiers dead. It was a real guerrilla war On Easter Sunday 1920 these flying squads set fire to 100 Inland Revenue buildings and 350 empty police stations.
Inevitably the British retaliated with a heavy hand. If a police station was attacked, neighbouring houses were to be burned down. Hunger strikers were to be helped to die. This not only embittered local populations but led to widespread resignations by Irishmen from the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Chapter 24. The Black and Tans
Many servicemen demobilised after the Great War were still unemployed. The British government launched a recruitment drive and many signed up to go and serve in Ireland. There was a shortage of uniforms so they were given dark green tunics and khaki trousers. So the locals nicknamed the Black and Tans. The first arrived in Ireland in March 1920. A few months later they were joined by Auxiliaries, ex-Army officers paid £7 a week. They were given licence to embark on savage, undisciplined reprisals .
Every media outlet was soon condemning their activities which came to be described as a terror campaign. They arrived in force in a town, made all the inhabitants assemble in the street, humiliated and beat them, set some houses on fire, occasionally bayoneted or shot anyone who resisted, then drove off leaving generations of bitterness behind them. Stupid stupid stupid.
The worst burning was in Cork where the Black and Tans went berserk, burning down key buildings including the City Hall. For weeks after they suspended burned corks from their hats. Who authorised this? Whose bright idea was this?
O’Connor gives a particular anecdote. On 15 December 1920 Canon Magnar of Dunmanway County Cork was in the street talking to a man. A lorryload of Auxies drew up, some jumped out, and shot the man dead. When the Canon protested, he was shot dead too.
O’Connor notes how they often destroyed local dairies and creameries in an effort to destroy local economies, prompting a letter of protest from AE who had spent many years setting up dairy co-operatives precisely to support locals. O’Connor quotes Yeats’ poem Nineteen nineteen:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
Chapter 25. de Valera
Back in June 1919 de Valera was smuggled onto a ship to New York. Here he held press conferences as the spokesman of the new (not yet existent) republic. New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, he spread the word in a calm and dignified manner, boosting his own profile in the process. He took a financier with him and together they raised over a million dollars by the time he returned in January 1921.
Meanwhile the Dail continued to set up an alternative governance infrastructure with land courts, district courts etc, complete with lawyers and judges. People stopped using the British courts and used the nationalist ones. O’Connor quotes landowners and senior figures praising the new regime for its fairness and efficiency.
As usual, O’Connor internationalises it to say that just these tactics would be used in other colonies under the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ (p.152).
Chapter 26. Michael Collins
By the autumn of 1920 Dublin was under curfew. Lorries of soldiers patrolled the streets, with wire netting so grenades thrown at them bounced off. Houses were subject to random searches and maybe burning by the Black and Tans and citizens hauled off to prison. A police state. Officials and Auxies were assassinated in the streets. The press had uniformly turned against the government.
Meanwhile Michael Collins held four portfolios within the unofficial government and maintained an intricate network of spies, informers and assassination squads. He kept scrupulous records and accounts which O’Connor has perused.
The government put a bounty of £10,000 on his head but, incredibly, he remained not only at liberty but calmly cycled around central Dublin between his various offices. One of Collins’s key spies in Dublin Castle, Eamonn Broy, personally told O’Connor of some of his escapades with Collins.
O’Connor gives a brief impressionistic pen portrait, admiring Collins’s meticulous way with figures and accounting, his head rammed with facts and details which helped him make intelligence connections, his absolute cold-bloodedness when it came to assassinations, his courage in facing out numerous dicey situations and, alongside, what O’Connor sees as a typically Irish strain of romantic patriotism (he spends a page attributing the same thing to Casement, earlier).
Chapter 27. Martyrs
25 October 1920 Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died after a prolonged hunger strike in Brixton Prison. His lingering death was given international coverage, along with his claims for Irish freedom. He had actually written a play about a nationalist hunger striker but here, as elsewhere, O’Connor says the British authorities didn’t pay enough attention to Irish poetry, plays and literature. Here’s just one example of O’Connor’s personal and ripe prose style.
As with the death of Thomas Ashe, a shudder ran through the Nation’s being. (p.160)
If you wanted objective history, O’Connor is not your man. Facts yes, but also plenty of melodrama, passion, bitterness and romanticisation, along with quite a few personal confidences from eye witnesses, that’s what this brief book provides.
MacSweeney was afforded a magnificent funeral at Southwark cathedral in London. Sir John Lavery made this preparatory sketch for a large-scale painting.
Sketch for the Funeral of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, at Southwark cathedral by Sir John Lavery (1920)
On 1 November good looking, 18-year-old medical student Keven Barry was hanged for his involvement in an ambush in which a British soldier was killed. According to O’Connor his name became a symbol around the world, and:
There are few places in the English-speaking world where ‘Keven Barry’ is not sung. (p.162)
I’d never heard of it till I read this book. 1) Times change 2) it’s a typical example of O’Connor’s chauvinism, which I use to mean ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause or group’, which crops up throughout the book. I don’t really mean that in a bad sense – just to mean that he is very strongly biased indeed.
Yeats had been booked to debate at the Oxford Union and apparently walked up and down the central aisle railing against the British government’s stupidity and mismanagement. A.E. lobbied Lord Northcliffe to get his American newspapers to print opinion pieces decrying British atrocities in Ireland. What with this and de Valera and their own anti-British history, American opinion swung behind the nationalists. It played an important part in negotiations between Britain and Ireland as it was to do for the rest of the century.
O’Connor quotes a very effective letter from Yeats to the Times saying the British spent the entire Great War railing against Germany’s atrocities against civilians in Belgium and philistine burning of cultural centres and now they were doing exactly the same in Ireland.
Chapter 28. The Cairo gang
Set up by Sir Henry Wilson in autumn 1920 to identify and assassinate all key Sinn Fein and IRA personnel. In one night one of these death squads murdered the current and former Lord Mayor of Limerick. The latter was Alderman George Clancy who had been a close friend of James Joyce and appears in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ as Davin, the peasant nationalist.
Collins used his intelligence network to identify members of the Cairo gang. O’Connor spoke with General Richard Mulcahy, Chief of Staff of the IRA, who is forthright about the need to destroy the death squads. So after much planning, Collins launched Black Sunday, when his death squads assassinated their death squads. 9am on the morning of 21 November 1920. A total of 14 British spies were executed.
O’Connor gives several pages detailed descriptions of men kicking in doors, shooting unarmed men in the back, as they nipped out of windows, taking them to a cellar and shooting them in the side of the head, the British torturing captives.
Lieutenant Aimes and Bennet were pulled out of bed by a group of armed men, placed standing together, both were then shot.
Some of the men refused to come out and were shot in bed. Others came to the door and were shot as they opened it. Two agents were shot on the landing, the stairs were covered in blood.
Flanagan took four Englishmen down to the cellar and after asking their names, shot them in the side of the head.
[Ordered to track down an Irishman identified as a snitch, Bill Stapleton tells O’Connor] We found him in a pub, a big burly man. He blustered at first: then we took him out and shot him.
O’Connor and other nationalists see this as the price of freedom. I see it as the inevitable outcome of the ethnic nationalist way of thinking. Compare the similar accounts I’ve summarised of the civil wars in Yugoslavia or the chaos in Iraq: perfectly decent educated men convinced that in order to make a better world they have to torture and execute other unarmed men, sometimes women, and burn their houses down.
In retaliation for the Bloody Sunday assassinations, later the same day a detachment of Black and Tans drove to Croke Park Sports ground where a Gaelic football match was in progress. They set up a machine gun and started firing into the panic-stricken crowd. A drunk Black and Tan lined up both teams and was going to execute them all until a sober regular British Army officer intervened.
And there are people who still insist that humanity is a rational creature.
O’Connor suggests Bloody Sunday was the day British rule broke in Ireland, although I thought he said the same about the introduction of conscription in 1917. Maybe it broke repeatedly. As I’ve said, O’Connor links Ireland to the independence struggles of other British colonies.
Not only was Bloody Sunday to mark the end of Britain’s rule in the greater part of Ireland, it was to be the beginning of the break-up of British rule throughout the Empire.
In Kenya, in Cyprus, in Egypt, Palestine and Burma, for the next forty years, guerrilla leaders were to claim Collins as their prototype and adapt the strategy he had designed for evacuating the colonial power. (p.175)
What beggars belief is that Collins organised the funeral of his friend Dick McKee who the British had tortured to death to get information about Collins’s operation, and attended the funeral in person, even though the entire British operation in Ireland was obsessed with finding and arresting him. How was that possible?
Epilogue
The last four pages of O’Connor’s book give a very brisk account of the peace talks which led to the Treaty and then the intense civil war between pro and anti-treaty Irish forces which followed, in which Collins himself (pro-treaty) was killed by anti-treaty forces.
He jumps to January 1922 when the British flag was taken down over Dublin Castle and the last troops marched down to the quay to take ship back to England. Negotiations had taken place from September to December 1921 and a treaty signed with the Dail in January 1922. The 6 northern counties were excluded although everyone expected them to join the Irish Free State within a few years. Civil war broke out between pro and anti treaty nationalists and lasted till May 1922. Griffith died of a stroke. W.T. Cosgrave became the independent nation’s first president.
A Senate was formed which at Griffith’s suggestion reached out to specifically invite the Protestant landed gentry. The new nation had to include everyone. W.B. Yeats was nominated and given the job of designing the states new coinage.
1927: De Valera had been anti the treaty but in 1927 was persuaded to attend the Dail.
1932: Five years later the party he created, known as Fianna Fail, won the 1932 general election.
1937: De Valera set about removing the last vestiges of British rule, in 1937 passing a new constitution.
1938: De Valera persuaded the British government to evacuate its three treaty ports.
1939-45: Thus cleansed of British presence it was easy for the Irish Free State to maintain independence in the war against Nazi Germany. So many Irishmen had died defending the Empire which treated them so poorly in 1914-18.
1948: Fianna Fail lost the general election but the new coalition government promptly removed Ireland from the Commonwealth. Non serviam.
In a throwaway last page, he says the tragic legacy of Northern Ireland was a result of Carson and his ilk refusing to accept the home rule movement and being prepared to go to war to preserve their economic and social status. If only they had thrown in their lot with the nationalists, together they could have forced the British government to give independence 1) much earlier and 2) on more inclusive terms to include the Ulster Protestants. Instead they insisted on holing up in their ghetto which, at the time of O’Connor’s writing (1975) was in chaos.
Thoughts
England’s crimes
It goes without saying that it makes me ashamed to be English to read (yet again) the litany of exploitation, repression, spying, corruption and naked violence with which the English mismanaged Ireland for centuries. But a few other thoughts as well:
History is written by the winners
They say history is written by the victors. The irony here is that the victors were the Irish nationalists who won their free state, with the result that thousands of books, papers, presentations, school syllabuses, TV series and movies have been made about Ireland’s heroic struggle for independence, and not least the dramatic events surrounding the Easter Rising. Supported by latterday English progressives, in the same way that we English now retrospectively (and safely) root for the independence movements in India, Kenya and scores of other places, taking a masochistic pleasure in seeing our own men shot and blown up and our own government covered in ignominy.
What about the losers? With no motive except idle curiosity I went looking to see if there are any books about the Ulster Volunteers and discovered there appear to be just three in print: Carson’s Army, a boringly specialised one about the precise configuration, training etc of the UVF; Friends in High Places; and Ulster will Fight, a series of three books which are prohibitively expensive and aren’t stocked by my London library. Of accounts of the Easter Rising and the long centuries of struggle behind it, there will be no end, as a proud nation promotes itself and mythologisers line up to retell the romantic story. Of the much less glamorous but in its way just as important obstinacy of the Ulster Protestants, very little. They’ll always be the ugly sisters in the fairy tale.
(An impression confirmed by contemporary historian Charles Townshend in his recent book ‘The Partition’ (2021) where he mentions ‘the dearth of significant historical studies of Ulster, certainly in comparison with the plethora of nationalist histories of Ireland (p.265).)
Nationalism
As I’ve read my way across the history of the nineteenth century I’ve come to think of nationalism as a mental virus, like something out of a zombie movie. It spreads across entire nations converting everyone to the belief that they must be ‘free’, no matter how much pain is caused and blood is shed in the process. The problem is that forging a nationalist identity almost instantly requires identifying the enemies within, the protestants or Jews or Roma or Muslims who are tainting ‘the purity of the Nation’.
Nationalism gave birth to the utter catastrophes of the 20th century, to the Great War and the collapse of empires which followed it, and led to the rise of fascism and its turbo-charged mission to liquidate the enemies of the People, all of which led up to the catastrophic Second World War.
The fever of nationalism spread far and wide as scores of imperial colonies fought for their freedom and independence: Israel, the partition of India, the long struggles in Algeria or Malaya or Kenya or Vietnam to name obvious ones.
In the 1970s the struggle of self-defined communities to be free led to ruinous civil wars in Cyprus and Lebanon and countless African nations.
And then after the long freeze of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism led to disasters in Rwanda and the Yugoslav civil wars. Then in this century the rise of ISIS in post-war Iraq, the Arab Spring which led to the ruinous Syrian civil war, and now here we are in 2026 with bloody rebellion in Iran, Israel’s brutal suppression of Palestine, the triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the resurgence of ISIS in Syria. My barbers in south London are all Iraqi Kurds. For as long as I’ve been getting my hair cut there I’ve listened to them giving me the latest on their small nation’s struggle to be free.
Everywhere peoples conceiving of themselves as a nation which needs to be free, or needs to expel the enemy within (as in contemporary Myanmar needs to eliminate its Muslim Rohynga minority). There has been no end of young nationalist zealots who are prepared to die for the Fatherland and take quite a few people along with them.
Irish independence was no doubt a righteous cause, the repressive and incompetent rule of the pompous British needed to be overthrown, and the Irish patriots’ struggle for freedom is no doubt inspiring when viewed from the patriotic angle.
But read now, in 2026, after a century of any-level-of-violence-is-justified-to-free-my-people nationalism, and the hecatombs of atrocities it has inspired, a big part of my response to all of these stories is a shiver of horror at humanity’s utter inability to manage itself.
Now more than ever, Stephen Dedalus’s cry, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, rings true.
Credit
‘A Terrible Beauty is Born’ by Ulick O’Connor was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1975.
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