1916 (51 page)

The topsy-turvy world of Irish politics in the wake of the Rising was perhaps best captured in a letter, dated 5 September, from the radical nationalist Fr Michael O’Flanagan to John Hagan. In it he remarked:

I suppose you have an idea of how the world would look from this camera obscura – everything would end upsidedown, but we are hoping against hope that they will right themselves somehow. As far as the intellectual side of Ireland is concerned, things are better than ever, and I suppose that is the germ out of which everything grows in the long-run.
¹¹⁴

Bishop O’Dwyer, by now the toast of Limerick and a celebrity in the international Irish Catholic world of the United States, Australia and New Zealand, was to be honoured by his native city. To that end, a decision was taken to make him a Freeman of Limerick. On 14 September a special meeting of the corporation was called. Members of the public were in attendance. O’Dwyer’s speech recalled the earlier days of his episcopacy when he had been regarded in a critical light for his condemnation of violent methods used in land agitation. Aware of the fickle nature of public opinion, he said he would remind himself that ‘the weather may change at any moment, and the wind blow from another quarter’. Drawn again into public controversy with General Maxwell, O’Dwyer stated Maxwell had had ‘the effrontery to give me directions for the government of my diocese but I hardly think he will repeat the experiment’. Maxwell did not ‘know much about Irish ecclesiastics, who have a proud tradition and who have shown by our predecessors to stand up to English brutality’. Even if the Rising was not justified theologically, he asked whether he was to join in the condemnation of Pearse, MacDonagh and Colbert, who ‘were shot without trial, and of the men and women who, without trial, were deported from this country in thousands’. His speech then became a virtual justification of the actions of the men who rose in 1916. He questioned whether
Prime Minister Asquith, were he an Irishman, would have the patience to accept the ‘tantalising perfidy’ of the British who put home rule on the statute book, then hung it up and later announced that before it could be put into practice it would have to be amended. He concluded, to rapturous applause: ‘Ireland will never be content as a province, God made her a nation, and while grass grows and water runs there will be men in Ireland to dare and die for her.’
¹¹⁵
Despite censorship, the speech was widely circulated and met with enthusiastic approval.

T
HE
I
RISH
C
OLLEGE AND THE
'R
ED
B
OOK
'

There must have been rumours of a papal peace initiative in late summer 1916, for on 20 August the rector of the Irish College received a letter from Cardinal Logue, which stated: ‘As far as I know there is not a word of truth in the report that the pope has sent any message, directly or indirectly, to the Irish bishops. Had any message been sent, it would likely be sent through me.’
¹¹⁶

The rector and vice rector had worked throughout the summer compiling an authoritative account in Italian of the events surrounding the Rising. Aware that many Irish clergy and religious in Rome were still supportive of the Irish party and hostile to radical change at home, the two men sought to produce a clear factual account of the events in Dublin and elsewhere. This became known as the ‘Red Book’.
¹¹⁷

Entitled
La recente insurrezione in Irlanda
,
it was forty three pages in length. It was dated on the final page, 1 September. The text was heavily footnoted. It spoke of the 1916 leaders as being university professors, lawyers and some members of families of elevated rank: ‘All were practising Catholics. There was one exception [ James Connolly]. The person who was the exception was born in Great Britain of Irish parents and was a type of socialist; he came to Dublin three years ago, and was not a member of the Volunteers at the time of the insurrection.’ The book quoted from the letters sent by three of the condemned men, to a mother, a sister and a wife. It spoke of Pearse seeking reconciliation with God and preparing for his death like a good Catholic. It recorded that Countess Markiewicz, who was a Protestant, had asked to be received into the Catholic church. Roger Casement, also a Protestant, had sought to be recognised as a Catholic while in Pentonville, according to the testimony
of the Catholic chaplain there. The account also noted that the insurgents had recited the rosary in the various buildings they occupied during the Rising, and that, despite being surrounded by British forces, mass had been celebrated therein.
¹¹⁸

The work unfavourably compared the disciplined behaviour of the insurgents with unruly and brutal actions by the British forces. Under the heading, ‘
il clero e il moviemento insurrezional
’, the writer spoke about the denunciation by the bishop of Kerry, issued before the Rising, of the practice of opening mail going to convents in his diocese. It instanced two episodes of sacrilege and violation of the eucharist. In the diocese of Clogher a priest who lived a good distance from the church kept the sacred host in a tabernacle in a private oratory in his house. A British military raiding party was ordered by the officer commanding to break into the tabernacle in search of arms. There was another act of desecration at a convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Kinvara, Co. Galway. The book went on to reproduce the correspondence between General Maxwell and Edward O’Dwyer.
¹¹⁹

The work concluded that the British government, working through its representatives and civil servants in Ireland, never forgave the Irish bishops and clergy, for three reasons: 1) they had managed to keep the Irish people faithful to the Catholic church, despite generations of injustice; 2) they still had the complete trust of the Irish people; 3) in spite of pressure from the civil authorities to take on the role of civil servants or of policemen, they had persisted in acting independently and as priests. The section ended: ‘For similar reasons the government has never forgiven the Catholics of Ireland:
Primum humani ingenii est odiesse quem laeseris
.
’
¹²⁰

The final section of the book set out a simple thesis. The British government had passed home rule into law. The Irish party had accepted this but the government then broke the agreement. This was not the first time, according to the book, that the British had concluded an agreement and then failed to honour it. The last line in the text was a strong indictment of British rule in Ireland: ‘
Ad ogni modo il ‘pezzo di carta’ e stato lacerate e la slealtà rimane un fatto
.
’ [‘In any case, the piece of paper has been torn up and the perfidiousness remains a fact.’]
¹²¹

O’Riordan took a copy of the document to the Holy See sometime after 1 September. It is not clear to whom he gave it. It is probable that he gave a copy directly to Pope Benedict. He most probably also gave it to the cardinal secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri. No evidence has yet come to light as to how the document was received. But the argument running
throughout the text implicitly warned the Holy See against intervention. It had presented the idea of a Protestant British government seeking unsuccessfully to drive a wedge between the Catholic church and her people. The manner in which the bishops and clergy had acted in the wake of the Rising had ensured that would not happen, just as their actions in the past centuries had prevented such an eventuality.

News of the existence of the book began to circulate in Ireland in early October 1916. The Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, wrote to O’Riordan on 14 October: ‘I got your red pamphlet. It is a great blessing that we have one at Rome so able, and so watchful about the interests of Ireland.’
¹²²
Cardinal Logue wrote to O’Riordan on 28 October: ‘I have read the “Red Book” with interest. It is cleverly written, but there are some minor mistakes. The Bank of Ireland was never in the possession of the insurgents.’
¹²³
Bishop O’Dwyer wrote to O’Riordan on 29 September, thanking him for the presentation of ‘my case’ before the pope. (A defence of O’Dwyer’s statements and actions figured very prominently in the pages of the book.) The bishop continued: ‘If you were within my mind you could not do it better. I fear, however, that when complaints are formulated against my speech on getting the “freedom” [of Limerick] you will have to supplement my apologia.’
¹²⁴
O’Dwyer explained that the ‘military censored the speech, and I know that many of a certain class resent it, but I spoke, honestly,
ex abundantia cordis
’. He then made his views on the Rising crystal clear:

The Irish Volunteers were wrong, and I have said so explicitly but while my judgment condemns them, all my sympathy is with them, as strongly as I condemn the government, and despise the party. It is the old story. Time wears away all the circumstances of our rebels, except the fact which survives in the heart of the country, that they died for Ireland.
¹²⁵

O’Dwyer thus summed up the ambivalence of many, clerical and lay, towards the Rising.

While the existence of the Red Book was quite widely known about in Irish episcopal circles, it was not widely circulated in Ireland and may have been sent to only a select few of the bishops given the sensitivity of its contents. It is probable that the text was also sent to carefully chosen and wholly reliable bishops in the USA and in Australia and New Zealand. The book had been compiled to inform the decision-makers in the Holy See. The Irish College sought to counter British influence at the Vatican. Neither the rector nor the vice rector wanted Pope Benedict XV to issue
a condemnation of the Rising. The real danger had passed. Such a statement might have been issued in May or June. But the policy of executions, the mass arrests, and the hanging of Roger Casement had enflamed Irish public opinion at home and abroad, particularly in the strongholds of the Irish diaspora.

Although the Red Book was submitted in the name of Michael O’Riordan and he was widely acknowledged as being its author, there is little doubt that the Italian text was also the work of John Hagan. It has a directness which is associated with his writing style. The volume of work required to produce it, particularly the amount of translation, indicates that both men were involved, together with a native Italian speaker. Irrespective of who wrote the book, however, its intention was to dispel any idea put about by those who sought to advance British interests at the Holy See that the 1916 Rising was a secular, laic, anti-clerical insurrection. Dr J. MacCaffrey, the vice president of Maynooth, articulated that salient point in a letter to Hagan on 20 December:

Yesterday I got a copy of
La recente insurrezione in Irlanda
,
kindly lent me by one of the bishops, and I am perusing it with great interest. It will certainly show Their Eminences that those ‘out’ in Easter week, whatever else they might have been, were not
Carbonari
.
¹²⁶

In other words, what had happened in Ireland during Easter week 1916 was very distinct in every aspect from the ideas which motivated the revolutionaries of the Risorgimento and of the new Italian state. The Irish men and women who went out in 1916 were driven by Catholic values and ideals. Those who were executed died as Catholics with the last rites of their church. The Red Book argued that thesis very strongly.

The Irish College, already known as a stronghold of Irish nationalism in British circles in Rome, was a source of even deeper suspicion following the Rising. Both Hagan and O’Riordan were seen as highly politicised prelates and advanced nationalists. Count de Salis, a Limerick man, was sent to take up residence in Rome and represent British government interest at the Holy See. What role had the Irish College played in the general reaction of the Irish Catholic church to the Rising and its aftermath? The visit of Count Plunkett to Pope Benedict XV to forewarn him about the pending uprising on Easter Sunday remains an episode yet to be explained satisfactorily. The College may have only played a passive role in that initiative. The British government and its lay and clerical supporters
in Rome may have repeatedly exaggerated the radicalism of the rector and vice rector. Their unlearned lesson was that moderates such as O’Riordan and Hagan were being radicalised by draconian tactics of Crown forces in Ireland. The centre had shifted leftwards.

Both Hagan and O’Riordan had been the recipients of very valuable and revealing correspondence which chronicled the shifting emotions and ideas of clergy and hierarchy to events at home. Because both men were stationed in Italy the clerical and episcopal correspondence – despite British censorship – was very forthright and confrontational. The standing of the two men is revealed in the frankness of the correspondence from a variety of Irish clerical sources. The conservation of those records in the archives of the Irish College has helped reveal a side to episcopal and clerical engagement in politics which would have been virtually impossible to find elsewhere. The reaction to 1916 did not end with the issuing of the initial public statements. The clergy and bishops were forced to respond to the changing situation in the country. They were obliged to shift positions as the executions, mass arrests and deportations engaged a much wider circle of people than the Rising itself had encompassed. Thousands of families were politicised by the transporting of their loved ones to camps in Britain. The British government were the architects of their own destruction in Ireland in the wake of 1916.