1916 (11 page)

The other major Irish party newspaper in the five counties was the
Sligo Champion
, mouthpiece for the shopkeepers, merchants and professional men who led nationalist politics in Sligo town, Co. Sligo and north Leitrim. The
Champion
produced no leading article on 29 April, but on 6 May the paper extensively quoted the opinions of an ‘imperial contemporary’ and was able to blame just about everybody except the rebels for the
Rising. Both the government and those classes who represented ‘the government of Ireland by England’ were culpable. The seeds of rebellion were sown by Carson, the UVF and unionism, and were bearing bitter fruit. The government had withheld the benefits of the home rule Act from Ireland. The war office had given no help to Redmond’s efforts to retain the Volunteers as a constitutional force. Would the government now settle old scores against ‘those fellow Irishmen who had apparently been led into a tragic cul-de-sac’? It was a tragedy that Irishmen had raised their hands in anger against other Irishmen.
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The tone of both of these prominent, establishment papers was not one of lambasting Sinn Féiners and pro-Germans. It was very much in tune with the Dublin
Freeman’s Journal
which, when it re-appeared after the Rising, immediately blamed Carson, cited the South African precedent for leniency, and called for mercy. Its tone was one of sorrow for the misguided actions of fellow-Irishmen and anger at the malice and/or folly of those who were really to blame for the Rising – whether Carson, Larkin, Kitchener, Asquith, unionists, the UVF, the government or all of them. Such views effectively pre-dated the bulk of the official repression that followed the Rising. By 6 May (and the provincial papers went to print the day before that) only the first few executions of the Rising’s leaders had taken place. Arrests outside Dublin were still limited. The papers’ comments, therefore, reflected pre-Rising sentiments as much as post-Rising repression. When officials and the military embarked on an almost panicky coercion after the Rising, they were pouring petrol on the flames.

Military repression, and the nationalist response to it, now took hold. For weeks, the press would catalogue the workings of martial law (censorship, the ban on public meetings – initially including sports meetings – disarmament, house searches) and long lists of executions, prison sentences, arrests and deportations. As the inspector general of the RIC dryly put it in his monthly report for May 1916:

As time passed, however, a reaction of feeling became noticeable. Resentment was aroused by the number of persons punished by courts martial and by the great number of those arrested and deported. It is reported that, as a result of the arrests in counties which remained quiet a belief is springing up in some quarters it is sought to brand the Sinn Féin rebellion as a Catholic and nationalist Rising.
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In the five counties, the impact of coercion was dramatic and brought
home to small provincial towns the realities of the Rising. Under martial law powers, flying columns of soldiers and police toured the counties, formally disarming the Volunteers but also rounding up suspected rebel supporters using police lists of local, pre-Rising Sinn Féiners. In towns that had not had a military presence for some years, the effect of this military visitation was more marked and the scale of the official over-reaction even more apparent. On 7 May, Roscommon town (population in the 1911 census 1,858) saw no less than 700 soldiers arrive and take over the market square, post office, Harrison Hall and courthouse. The town was sealed off, pickets posted and houses and shops searched. All vehicles were stopped and inspected, including a hearse on its way to a funeral. Twenty seven men were then arrested in a town which had seen no incidents in the Rising, other than the hoisting of the tricolour over the old castle (for one day – it was taken down by boy scouts on Easter Monday).
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The arrested men were detained and interviewed over two days and twenty were then released. The remaining seven were marched under military escort to the railway station. On their way they were given chocolates and cigarettes by local ladies.
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Similar events unfolded in Longford, Athlone, Boyle, Strokestown, Cliffoney, Carrick-on-Shannon and Manorhamilton (but not in Mullingar or Sligo town, where, presumably, the local police did not generate lists of suspects). In Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, an armoured car and 150 mounted soldiers arrested just one man; a teacher who was ‘quite a juvenile’.
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In Longford, the town was sealed off on 5 May and arrests took place on the following day. Parties of soldiers then fanned out from the town to make arrests elsewhere. On 14 May 400 soldiers arrived back in Longford escorting seven Leitrim prisoners from Manorhamilton. The prisoners were surrounded by troops with fixed bayonets as they were marched through the town.
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In total 133 men were interned and deported from the five counties, not counting a significant number picked up in the first few days but released before deportation.
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Many of the arrested men were undoubtedly Sinn Féiners, but in every town the immediate response was not to take pleasure at the discomfort of the Irish party’s ‘pro-German’ enemies, but to protest at the arbitrary arrest of innocent men. J.P. Farrell denounced ‘peripatetic bands of military … intensifying the bitterness’ and sending ‘misled young men’ to England, ‘many of them young men wholly innocent of any evil intent whatsoever’. Thomas Scanlan, MP for Sligo North, designated the Cliffoney deportees ‘prisoners of war’ and the
Sligo Nationalist
noted that ‘they were merely members of the Volunteer force and had not seen any prohibition regarding arms.’ They were aged from fifteen to twenty three years and their leader was only nineteen years old. Some, the paper reported, were the only support for their widowed mothers. Writing on the Athlone arrests, the
Westmeath Independent’
s leading article was entitled ‘Our twelve’. It wrote that they were Irish Volunteers ‘openly and above board’, had complied with the law and were just as legal as Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. Their arrest risked creating feelings of disgust and repugnance. They were ‘almost all young men, all upright, of respectable character, sober, and the making of good citizens in any well-governed country in the world’.
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The immediate release of all the internees was added to the growing list of nationalist demands – the end of martial law, no more executions, political status for the convicted men. Unlicensed protest meetings having been banned under martial law, a wave of council resolutions, parliamentary questions and appeals for funds duly followed.

It was in this environment, in which ‘an extraordinary revulsion of feeling has taken place’, that John Dillon’s parliamentary condemnation of British stupidity, on 11 May, had such an impact in Ireland.
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As noted above, Dillon freely admitted that the rebels had been ‘our bitterest enemies’, but he emphasised that ‘the executions, house-searching throughout the country, wholesale arrests … have exasperated feeling to a terrible extent.’ The elements of his speech which had the greatest impact were his defiance of Britain and his praise for the conduct and character of the rebels. British MPs were told that they were ‘washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood’, and were informed by Dillon that: ‘It is the insurgents who have fought a clean fight, a brave fight, however misguided, and it would have been a damned good thing if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin.’
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The local nationalist press without exception reported Dillon’s speech. It was described as ‘great’, ‘a sensation’ and ‘thrilling’. Interestingly, the speech was immediately contrasted with the more restrained utterances of the party’s leader, Redmond. The veteran factionist Jasper Tully (who for the last thirteen years had been an incessant critic of Dillon) now ironically praised Dillon more than Redmond: ‘While we are all thankful to Mr Redmond for what he has done, there is hardly a man who has read Mr Dillon’s speech who is not proud of it.’
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As the
Sligo Champion
put it in a leading article,
until Dillon spoke the response of the Irish party to the rebellion seemed mild and half-hearted.
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Local party rhetoric from the time of the arrests and Dillon’s speech hardened appreciably. For example, the north Roscommon executive
of the UIL met on 4 June under T.J Devine, who at the end of 1916 would be the Irish party’s candidate in the Roscommon North by-election. Its demands were clearly expressed, and showed just how much local party sentiment towards the Rising had developed in just five weeks. It demanded:

From early June onwards, almost every town in the five counties witnessed the launch of appeal funds; typically for the Irish National Aid Association (INAA), but sometimes for the more radical Volunteer Dependants’ Fund (VDF). The former, ostensibly a relief fund for all who had suffered in the Rising, was undoubtedly more popular than the latter, which was specifically for the dependants of those who had actually taken part. Across Ireland up to 30 June, the INAA collected over £4,480 outside Dublin: the VDF some £1,131.
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Irish party MPs, council leaders and town bosses initially maintained their political distinctiveness from Sinn Féiners by acting as prominent organisers and collectors for the INAA rather than the VDF. However, the merger of the two funds in August, which, according to the police, placed both under Sinn Féin control, made little or no difference to levels of activity, nor to the local participation of Irish party figures.
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Sometimes the sympathy of Irish party figures for the rebels was clear from the outset of the relief effort. One such figure was John Jinks, the mayor of Sligo. Jinks was by far the most prominent Irish party supporter in Sligo town and had a son serving in the army. At the beginning of June, he chaired the meeting held to launch the INAA in the town. He did state, like so many contemporaries, that the rebellion had been ‘disastrous’, but went on to say that there was a clear need to relieve the appalling distress of the rebels’ dependants. He continued:

We, as Irishmen, are taking a great part in fighting the common enemy [i.e. Germany] at the present time, and treatment of this kind [the executions], in my humble opinion, is not at all justifiable, and the court martial proceedings in Dublin have taken away some of the best blood that Irishmen could produce (loud applause).

Jinks stated that he had known these men, and had heard them ‘voice the cause of Ireland’. They were ‘as true to Ireland as any man can be’. He called on his audience to show their appreciation for the rebels and their dependants by backing the fund, for ‘these dear and tried friends of Ireland’. When a letter was read out at the meeting from one of the town’s leading Protestants, Alexander Lyons, asking whether the fund would also support the families of soldiers and policemen ‘murdered’ in Dublin, the question was denounced by a Sligo corporation member, Charles Connolly, as ‘diabolical and impertinent’.
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The resolutions and speeches of men like Devine in Boyle and Jinks in Sligo are highly significant. Both men were party ‘bosses’, who fitted the caricature of bourgeois party hacks with limited political horizons and an instinctive drive to control their party machines. Both stayed loyal to the Irish party during its subsequent collapse. Both, by the beginning of June, associated the rebellion not with the party’s enemies but with the ‘recent struggle for Ireland’s freedom’ and ‘the cause of Ireland’. Their remarks were matched by numerous other party loyalists. For the party organiser John Keaveny in June, ‘whatever the Sinn Féiners might or might not have been, one thing is certain – they were not satisfied with Dublin Castle and they sacrificed their lives for a cause which they believed to be right.’ For John ‘Foxy Jack’ Fitzgibbon in May, ‘these men were prompted by the purest motives and according to their lights they thought they were serving their country.’ A few days later Fitzgibbon noted that ‘the vast majority of them are admitted to be as fine a type of young fellows as any country ever produced.’
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The party leadership’s great political fear, that the rebellion would come to be seen as a general, nationalist, Irish uprising against Britain, alienating British opinion and damning home rule, was being realised. The new conventional wisdom was expressed with startling over-simplicity by the
Sligo Champion
in August:

The Act that received the King’s signature was indefinitely set aside. The Irish became impatient. The insurrection followed. Then came the heartless executions and an indefinite period of martial law.
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