1916 (18 page)

London IRB men like O’Hegarty and Collins (both of whom came from old Cork IRB families)
⁴⁹
would later claim that the Irish Volunteer movement was virtually the IRB’s invention.
⁵⁰
So it might have seemed to them from a distance. However, the volunteer movement was led by what might be best described as the ‘Gaelic League party’. Men like MacNeill, The O’Rahilly and Pearse were neither republicans nor revolutionaries, but Catholic intellectuals who, like the Catholic bishops, were sympathisers with both the Irish party and Sinn Féin. Like the former, they also felt aggrieved by the British government’s handling of the home rule crisis. At the time, the Irish party was accusing the British government of betraying its trust by allowing the formation of the Ulster Volunteers. Some Irish party supporters attempted to portray this as a ‘betrayal of democracy’ but the reality was that the Ulster and Irish parties were nothing more than marginal constituencies, representing collectively less than one tenth of the total electorate of the United Kingdom; democracy, thus, had nothing to do with the matter. The only ‘betrayal’ involved was the British government’s reneging on the unofficial, and far from democratic, concordat-like arrangement established in 1886, whereby the Irish party understood that they were to become
the
future mediators of the Union in Ireland.

Over the previous thirty years, establishing the political and educational basis of a Catholic governing class for the Union in Ireland was central to the Irish party’s purpose. However, if it and the Catholic church formerly had a strong common cause due to their mutual concern for providing for Catholic education, unlike the Irish party, the church’s primary concern with education had always been religious, not political, and stemmed not least from its desire for missionaries. Indeed, as Ireland had the only predominantly Catholic population in the English-speaking world, the Irish population was central to Roman Catholic missionary work in North America, Australia and all British territories. The church’s role in inspiring D.P. Moran’s generation to advocate a ‘philosophy of Irish-Ireland’, whereby Irish people were encouraged to view themselves as a special race destined to become a spiritual beacon for the rest of the world, and as morally superior to all secular or Protestant societies, was rooted in this same missionary concern. To some extent this concern had become even more acute with the passage of time because of the ever-growing secularisation of European and British society – a development from which the church was naturally determined to protect Irish society at all costs.

Within a few months, the Irish Volunteers acquired tens of thousands of members, generally through the AOH, the largest social organisation among Irish Catholics. Unlike the IRB, however, the Irish Volunteers was neither a revolutionary nor a republican movement. Rather it was a public body that identified with the mainstream of Irish Catholic society and, as such, was to receive support from some of the Catholic bishops.
⁵¹
Recognition of this fact is important to understand the role the IRB played in
the organisation of the 1916 Rising and events thereafter, as well as the history of the Irish Volunteer movement and the conflicting attitudes that emerged between various IRB and Volunteer (later ‘IRA’) figures. Meanwhile, it should not be forgotten that owing to their very status as volunteers, the members of the Irish Volunteers were not only almost entirely unarmed but also unsalaried. Consequently, a large proportion, having little opportunity to earn good money (or to bear arms), were prepared to enlist in the British army, via John Redmond’s ‘National’ Volunteers, once the call arose not long after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The ‘Gaelic League party’ generally opposed Redmond’s initiative, however. Their supporters included G.N. Plunkett, a papal count, and his son, Joseph Mary Plunkett, both of whom attempted to contact Rome and the German government after they realised that the outbreak of the First World War had brought about a completely new situation in Europe.
⁵²
The first instigators of the latter initiative, however, were two men who were formerly prominent British civil servants, namely Erskine Childers and Roger Casement. Both men opposed the British war effort (they had long foreseen a war with Germany) and supported the Irish Volunteers’ efforts to import arms. (They arranged the Howth gun-running in July 1914 once Whitehall renewed the special coercive arms acts for Ireland that it had dropped temporarily in 1912 to facilitate the formation of the Ulster Volunteers.)
⁵³

As Clan na Gael had begun raising funds for the Irish Volunteers that spring,
⁵⁴
and as the IRB hoped to use the Volunteers as a recruiting ground to revive its organisation, Clarke, MacDermott, John Daly and Devoy were very angry with Hobson for not using his influence in the Volunteers to prevent its members from enlisting in the British army.
⁵⁵
This decision on Hobson’s part was interpreted by them as a political surrender to Redmond’s party – an attitude that demonstrated the importance of the ‘generation-gap’ in Irish nationalist circles at this time. Hobson and many leaders of the Irish Volunteers did not consider Redmond’s success in persuading men to enlist in 1914 as being of great importance. This was because they knew perfectly well that the influence of the Irish Volunteers and Gaelic League, the movements upon which they intended to base their future careers in Irish public life, had not been significantly lessened as a consequence.

Meanwhile, Redmond’s only real political power since 1910 stemmed from his personal status as an accepted and senior figure of the British political establishment (like Carson, he was viewed by many as a potential cabinet member); the Irish party itself was moribund. Its unpopularity at
this time was reflected by the fact that numerous Catholic writers championed the Irish Volunteers and denounced the Irish party for supporting Britain’s war effort against the last great Catholic power in Europe, Austria-Hungary. ‘Sceilg’s’
Catholic Bulletin
, an enthusiastic supporter of the Irish Volunteers and fierce critic of the National Volunteers, likewise opposed the war by expressing fears regarding what effect it might have on the future of the papal states.
⁵⁶
Such concerns were shared by several devout Volunteer officers whom Hobson provided with Irish-American contact details during 1914. These included Pearse, who went to America to collect funds for his dying Irish language school, and Thomas Ashe (at that point considering entering a monastery), who went on a Gaelic League fund-raising tour.
⁵⁷

Veteran revolutionaries viewed the course of events in Ireland in a very different light. Being an old anti-clerical republican, Devoy was no more in favour of Ireland’s future being determined by a Catholic party than were the Ulster Presbyterians.
⁵⁸
Meanwhile, Clarke evidently entertained a hope that the Ulster and Irish Volunteers (he supported both) might join together in Ireland, since they were both seemingly opposed to Whitehall’s politics of home rule, as upheld by Redmond.
⁵⁹
To such men, as well as John Daly and even Griffith (whose basic politics were formed long before the arrival of the Irish-Ireland generation), the Irish party still appeared powerful because they had been fighting against its politics and machinations for decades. Indeed, nothing would make Devoy happier during the 1910s than to see all the old Irish party candidates defeated, given that he viewed them as having betrayed the Irish nationalist movement of the later nineteenth century.
⁶⁰
Veteran figures like Devoy, Daly and Clarke felt a very strong need for a revolutionary gesture to destroy the Irish party and desired to make the IRB the instrument for this. By contrast, individuals such as McCartan and Hobson, both of whom followed Casement’s lead, tended to view such old revolutionaries as ‘narrow partisans’ and desired instead to go with the general flow of opinion with the public Volunteer and Gaelic League movements.
⁶¹
Neither of these movements was in favour of revolution or rebellion in the country, but they were clearly in a very strong position to take over from the Irish party as the political leaders of the Irish Catholic community.

It was Roger Casement, not the IRB, who initiated diplomatic contacts with Germany during 1914. Casement offered to raise an Irish brigade to fight for Germany and represented himself as an official political representative of MacNeill, Hobson and the Irish Volunteer executive. Clarke
and the IRB did not like Casement’s involvement in revolutionary affairs and were wholly opposed to this idea of working with Germany. Devoy, the Clan’s secretary, did not like it either,
⁶²
but J.T. Keating, the Clan chairman, and McGarrity, its treasurer, supported Casement’s initiative, and so Devoy had to follow suit, meeting Casement and a German emissary in New York. From October 1914 until April 1915, the Clan’s funds were sent to Casement in Germany instead of the IRB in Ireland, though Casement accomplished, and generally did, nothing with this money.
⁶³

Following the outbreak of the First World War,
Irish Freedom
was suppressed under the new censorship regime and several members of the post-1912 Supreme Council simply resigned once Clarke argued that the IRB needed to use the war as an opportunity to launch a revolution. In turn, having been deprived of all Clan funding, the IRB was in no position to revive its organisation. Indeed, the IRB would probably have completely collapsed at this time were it not for the fact that, at the bidding of Clarke, John Daly funded MacDermott when he travelled the entire country during late 1914 and early 1915 in an attempt to swear several Irish Volunteer officers into the IRB, thereby nominally recreating a Supreme Council.
⁶⁴
In May 1915, however, MacDermott was arrested after making a seditious speech, thereby bringing this push to re-establish the IRB to a sudden halt.
⁶⁵
Clarke responded by appointing in his place as IRB secretary Diarmuid Lynch, a New York Gaelic Leaguer who had worked occasionally for Devoy as a Clan-IRB envoy since 1911, until such time as MacDermott was released from prison. Thereafter, in June 1915, Lynch invented a strange three man ‘Military Committee’, consisting of Pearse (the ‘director of organisation’ of the Irish Volunteers), Joseph Mary Plunkett and Éamonn Ceannt. This committee technically did not belong to the IRB and only Clarke and Lynch knew of its existence.
⁶⁶

Since 1913, Clarke’s Wolfe Tone clubs had some success in attracting volunteers to large Manchester martyr demonstrations in Dublin, alongside the Transport Workers Union, Irish Citizen Army and the ‘Old Guard Union’ (the IRB veterans’ association).
⁶⁷
Partly as a result, it was possible during July 1915 to bring the Irish Volunteers into concert with Devoy and Clarke’s plan to organise a large public funeral in Dublin for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831–1915), a man with a long, troubled career, who had been a bedridden invalid for the last five years of his life.
⁶⁸
Indeed, although the ‘O’Donovan Rossa Funeral Committee’ included a dozen retired (or semi-retired) veterans of the IRB organisation of the period 1878–95,
⁶⁹
as well as several Dublin Trades Council figures, the Rossa
funeral was primarily an Irish Volunteer demonstration (the
Catholic Bulletin
played a significant role in advertising it).
⁷⁰
In the souvenir booklet for the event, Rossa was made a symbol of all sorts of causes, although the only living people who had ever been politically associated with him were Devoy, Daly and Clarke. Recognising his great power as an orator, Clarke persuaded Pearse to deliver a graveside speech at the event on behalf of the Wolfe Tone clubs, of which Clarke himself was president, MacDermott vice president and James Stritch the treasurer. Fearing that, like MacDermott, he would be arrested Pearse initially declined, but Clarke persuaded him to go ahead with the plan. As a result, Pearse delivered a famous speech that concluded pointedly with lines that
seem
to have referred specifically to the defeats which the IRB had suffered during the mid-1880s and the very negative consequences which Clarke knew these had had for the organisation:

The defenders of this realm have worked well [against the IRB], in secret, and in the open … They think they have pacified half of us and intimidating the other half [into giving up]. They think that they have foreseen everything; they think 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.
⁷¹

The following month, upon his release from prison, MacDermott joined the ‘Military Committee’ all of whose members were then sworn into the IRB.
⁷²
This body then became known as the (semi-official) ‘Military Council’, although it was still technically subordinate to the IRB Supreme Council, of which McCullough, Clarke and MacDermott were the leaders. No revolutionary force yet existed in the country but fears were growing in the Irish Volunteers that their organisation might soon be suppressed because of its seditious, anti-war stance.

It was not until January 1916, at a secret meeting in Clontarf Town Hall, that the earliest plans for a rebellion were actually made. In early February, a Supreme Council cipher reached Devoy in New York, declaring that a rebellion would occur in April regardless of circumstances, and requesting that the Clan purchase and import arms for the IRB.
⁷³
In the
meantime, the Citizen Army leader James Connolly (who was very eager for a rebellion) was co-opted onto the Military Council by Clarke, while MacDermott played a significant role in persuading Pearse that a rebellion would be morally justifiable. Owing to American neutrality laws, the Clan
could not send arms from America. Taking advantage of names learned from Casement eighteen months earlier, however, Devoy contacted German officials himself, although he made clear to the Germans that no military assistance for Ireland was being requested, only an opportunity to purchase firearms.
⁷⁴
A shipment of arms was duly purchased by the Clan and was supposed to be sent to Limerick, although British intelligence succeeded in counteracting the plan, owing to its intelligence agents in the Clan treasury. Casement himself, upon learning that the Clan had attempted to purchase German arms on Devoy’s initiative, warned Mac-Neill that plans for rebellion must be afoot and ordered him not to countenance the idea under any circumstances.
⁷⁵
This helped to scotch whatever slight hope may have existed that the Irish Volunteers
en bloc
could be made to join an effort at rebellion, to assist in which plan MacDonagh had been co-opted onto the Military Council in early April.
⁷⁶
In the days before the planned date for a rebellion, MacDermott and Pearse were secretly ordered by Clarke to issue instructions to various volunteer units or IRB circles outside Dublin to be ready to rise. As no formal plans for insurrection existed, however, most figures outside Dublin had no idea why they had received such orders.