1916 (79 page)

1. O’Dwyer to O’Riordan, 4 May 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
   
2. Ibid
   ., 18 May 1916.
   
3. Morrissey,
   Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick, 1842–1917
   , p. 378.
   
4. O’Dwyer to O’Riordan, 31 May 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
   
5. Morrissey,
   Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick, 1842–1917
   , p. 379.
   
6. Roughneen to O’Riordan, 9 June 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
   
7. Ibid
   .
   
8. Ryan to O’Riordan, 23 June 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
   
9. Douglas Hyde (An Craoibhín) wrote a letter to O’Riordan on 7 August 1916, asking him to sign a petition, drawn up by Denis J. Coffey, the president of UCD, against the possibility of MacNeill’s execution. He said that Sir Bertram Windle, president of University College Cork, and Dr Bergin were among those who were willing to sign. Hyde’s note pointed out: 1) that MacNeill was a ‘scholar of eminence who has specially devoted his attention to certain very important fields of research which on account of their difficulty and obscurity have attracted but few workers’; 2) there was ‘at present no one qualified to fill his vacant place in this department of scholarship’; 3) ‘in the interest of learning we feel that Mr MacNeill should be placed in a position to continue the work for which he is best qualified, and in which he has already gained a distinguished name.’ Hyde wanted MacNeill to have the use of writing materials, and ‘at least a small selection of the books bearing on his studies’. O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
   
10. Martin (ed.), Tierney,
    Eoin MacNeill: scholar and man of action, 1867–1945
    , p. 225.
    
11. Ibid
    ., p. 241.
    
12. Irish Catholic Directory
    , 1917, p. 519.
    
13. Letter found in the archives of the Vatican by Jérôme aan de Wiel; copy in O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
14. Irish Catholic Directory
    , 1917, pp. 517–18.
    
15. Ibid
    .
    
16. Andrews, C.S.,
    Dublin made me: an autobiography
    , Mercier, Cork, 1979, pp.89–90.
    
17. Catholic Bulletin
    , vol. vi, no. 6, June 1916, pp. 249–53.
    
18. Catholic Bulletin
    , vol. vi, no. 7, July 1916, p. 337.
    
19. Curran to O’Riordan, 29 July 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
20. Ibid
    .
    
21. Curran to Hagan, 30 July 1916, John Hagan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
22. Ibid
    .
    
23. Statement by Fr Michael Curran, WS 687 (section 1), pp. 159–63, Bureau of Military History, Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin.
    
24. Ibid
    ., p. 159.
    
25. See
    Irish Catholic Directory
    , 1917, pp. 521–52.
    
26. Curran to O’Riordan, 30 August 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
27. O’Dwyer to O’Riordan, 31 August 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
28. Ibid
    ., 21 September 1916.
    
29. O’Flanagan to Hagan, 5 September 1916, Hagan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
30. Morrissey,
    Bishop Edward Thomas O’Dwyer of Limerick, 1842–1917
    , p. 385 ff.
    
31. Logue to O’Riordan, 20 August 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
32. No original copy of the ‘Red Book’ is to be found in the archives of the Irish College, which merely contains, in the O’Riordan papers, a photocopy of a Vatican Archive copy, deposited by Dr aan de Wiel.
    
33. The ‘Red Book’, pp. 20–22, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
34. Ibid
    ., pp. 26–33.
    
35. Ibid
    ., p. 38.
    
36. Ibid
    ., pp. 38, 43.
    
37. Cohalan to O’Riordan, 14 October 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
38. Logue to O’Riordan, 28 October 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
39. O’Dwyer to O’Riordan, 29 September 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
40. Ibid
    .
    
41. MacCaffrey to Hagan, 20 December 1916, John Hagan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
42. O’Donnell to O’Riordan, 6 November 1916, Michael O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome. I am grateful to Professor Matthew MacNamara for deciphering this letter.
    
43. Ibid
    .
    
44. Curran to Hagan, 15 October 1916, Hagan papers, Irish College Rome.
    
45. McKenna to O’Riordan, 24 November 1916, O’Riordan papers, Irish College Rome.
    

Bureau of Military History: testimony of Michael Curran

1. The editors are grateful to Noelle Dowling, archivist, Dublin Archdiocesan Archives, for the above information, which was taken from the
   Irish Catholic Directories
   1907–1961 and Sherry, Richard et al.,
   Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, Dublin, 1859–1959: College history and centenary
   , Irish printers, Dublin, 1962.
   

Easter ethics

1. Dudley Edwards, Ruth,
   Patrick Pearse: the triumph of failure
   , Taplinger edition, New York, 1977, pp. 284–85.
   
2. Cited at the Irish government website on 1916,
   www.taoiseach.ie
   (downloaded 11 April 2006).
   
3. To pick one contextual factor at random: consider the extreme reaction of the Conservative party to the removal of the Lords’ veto in 1911 and the home rule bill of 1912. Its relevance to ethical analysis (as distinct from historical explanation) of the Easter Rising is not about whether it excuses the Rising, but about the degree to which the leaders of the Rising properly grasped its political significance and acted accordingly.
   
4. De Valera noted as much, fifty years later; see Coogan, Tim Pat,
   De Valera: long fellow, long shadow
   , Hutchinson, London, 1993, p. 680.
   
5. Nor can we minimise this by pointing to a lack of insight into democracy. Foster, R.F.,
   Modern Ireland 1600–1972
   , Allen Lane, London, 1988 cites the following (pp. 510–11): ‘when Kevin O’Higgins declared that a man who killed without a constitutional mandate from the people was a murderer, Liam Mellowes, reasonably enough, interjected: “Easter week?” The ghosts of Pearse’s rhetoric were hard to lay.’
   
6. See Foster,
   Modern Ireland 1600–1972
   , p. 506. The issue is arguable, and has been vigorously argued. However, the mere fact that the issue is arguable suffices here: it is not obvious that the IRB’s war of 1916–21 got more than Redmond’s party got in 1914. They certainly didn’t get more on the north, and may well have got less than a Redmondite Dublin government might have got. Given the Cumann na nGaedheal government’s achievement in transforming the relationship between the British parliament and other dominion parliaments leading to the significant Statute of Westminster 1931, de Valera’s use of the 1936 abdication crisis to be rid of the monarchy, and his managing to negotiate the ports out of British hands in 1938, it is hard to believe that armed force had ever been needed.
   
7. Pearse remarked in November 1913: ‘I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much less ridiculous figure than the nationalist without a rifle.’ Eoin Mac-Neill’s ‘The North Began’ published some months earlier was a de facto call to arms to prevent the Ulster unionists from opting out of a ‘home rule’ Ireland. That the author recognised that it could reasonably be taken to be such is reflected in the ‘they started the fight’ title, along with the much less credible (but indirectly very revealing) assertion that the Irish Volunteers, founded in response to the unionists’ arming themselves, were not meant to coerce the unionists. See Lee, J.J.,
   Ireland 1912–1985: politics and society
   , CUP, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 18–19.
   
8. To say that there was no such thing as Irish democracy in 1916 because there wasn’t an Irish parliament in Dublin is to identify democracy narrowly with the location of parliament, ignoring on-the-ground democratic culture and practice, of which there was quite a lot in nineteenth century Ireland.
   
9. The following story is illustrative: ‘An incident during the Convention [summoned by Lloyd George in 1917 to try to get agreement between Irish political parties on the island’s future governance, but boycotted by Sinn Féin] showed how the political tide had turned against Redmond. One day while walking along Westmoreland Street, after leaving the convention, Redmond was confronted by a group of young Sinn Féin members, including Todd Andrews, and physically attacked. Only for the intervention of passers-by who escorted him into the front office of the
   Irish Times
   he could have been badly injured.’ Collins, Stephen, ‘Returning home to hostility’, the
   Irish Times
   supplement ‘The Somme’, 27 June, 2006.
   
10. Politicians claiming the mantle of 1916 for constitutional republicanism are rarely taken to be serious. Once in a while they are answered. At the 1984 annual Béal na mBláth commemoration of Michael Collins, the then Minister for Justice, Michael Noonan, claimed that Collins’ methods in fighting the War of Independence were different from, and morally far superior to, those of the IRA’s campaign in the 1970s and 1980s. In a letter published in the
    Irish Times
    , 17 September 1984, Kevin Burke, then editor of
    An Phoblacht
    , refuted the minister’s claim point by point, in devastating detail. The minister made no public rebuttal of Burke’s argument that I know of.
    
11. See, for instance, Hart, Peter,
    The IRA and its enemies: violence and community in Cork 1916–1923
    , OUP, Oxford, 1998.
    
12. Compare Germany, September 1916 until the end of the war, when the generals, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, overrode successive chancellors and cabinets as regards political decisions. In the Dáil, the military’s influence was more overt and direct, than in the Reichstag. Note too that political instability does not make ‘rule by the soldiers’ inevitable: in the contemporary Russian civil war, the civilian Bolsheviks kept tight control of the Red Army.
    
13. See Greenfield, Liah,
    Nationalism: five roads to modernity
    , HUP, Boston, 1992, for an interesting study of the variants in nationalism among five of the bigger European nations, and the ways in which its values are often incompatible with those of contemporary liberal democracy.
    
14. See reference in note 11. On 10 April 1919, de Valera’s Dáil motion to ostracise RIC members was seconded by Eoin MacNeill, using what Coogan terms ‘inflammatory’ language (‘The police in Ireland are a force of traitors’); Coogan,
    De Valera
    , pp. 132–33. The motion was carried unanimously. Given that the killing of RIC men had already started the previous January, MacNeill must have known well what feeling and consequent action he and the Dáil were inciting. The murders of southern Protestants in 1920–22 are also relevant, as is the reluctance to stop them at the time and refusal in later years to acknowledge them.
    
15. Bowman, John,
    De Valera and the Ulster question 1917–1973
    , Clarendon, Oxford, 1982, pp. 330–31, citing Frank Gallagher’s draft biography of de Valera. Coogan
    De Valera
    , p. 351 has interesting comments on the story.
    
16. Fintan O’Toole, article in the
    Irish Times
    , 23 May 2006. The same article drew the rather unwelcome conclusion that commemorating the politically significant dead is a zero-sum game. Who is commemorated tells you who will not be commemorated. Commemorating Wolfe Tone requires ignoring Edmund Burke and minimising Daniel O’Connell; if Pearse is a model to follow, then Redmond is not. (O’Toole also noted that, at the time of writing, when there was much fanfare over the ninetieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the Michael Davitt Memorial Association in Straide, Co. Mayo was having great difficulty in getting any public funding to celebrate the centenary of Davitt’s death.)
    
17. Cited in Bowman,
    de Valera and the Ulster question 1917–1973
    , p. 3.
    
18. See Lee,
    Ireland 1912–1985
    , pp. 86–87 on the mass politicisation of the Irish public (which happened rather earlier in Ireland when compared to other European countries) and which, fairly quickly, developed along party lines, beginning under O’Connell in the early nineteenth century. Lee remarks (referring to a phrase that appeared in the
    Freeman’s Journal
    17 September 1881): ‘There was some truth, even as early as 1881, in the claim that “If ever a country passed through a parliamentary apprenticeship of the fullest term, Ireland is that country.”’
    
19. It is revealing that the involvement of individual Fenians (e.g. Davitt) in such social issues as the tenant–farmers struggle against the landlords was frowned on by the Fenian leadership as a distraction from the transcendent goal of an Irish republic. Their strange idea of a republic was that it transcended crude economic issues and the ‘all-politics-is-local’ aspect of democracy.
    
20. Given the uproar over the oath recognising King George V in the Treaty debates, it is curious that some of the 1916 leaders were apparently prepared to contemplate a Hohenzollern monarch for Ireland, as a result of a successful rising and the war being won by Germany, the ‘gallant ally’ of the Proclamation.
    
21. For an interesting account of the ethical and political foundations of the concept, see Riordan, Pat,
    A politics of the common good
    , IPA, Dublin, 1996.
    
22. It’s informative to consider the phrase in the IRB oath, where the oath-taker recognises that the Irish republic is ‘virtually established’. The sense is of it established in the hearts of people like a secret, or established like a Hegelian Geist transcending politics. See Foster,
    Modern Ireland 1600– 1972
    , p. 391 for some pithy remarks on the IRB mindset.