The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (9 page)

One hundred and eighty-seven of the most senior rebels were courtmartialled in secret, under the provisions of martial law imposed during the Rising, including Markievicz, the only woman tried at the highest level. Only 11 were acquitted and 88 were initially sentenced to death by firing squad, although most of these were subsequently commuted to periods of penal servitude. The 15 subsequently executed were charged with taking ‘part in an armed rebellion and in the waging of war against his Majesty, the King’. With the exception of Patrick Pearse's younger brother, Willie, all the accused pleaded not guilty. The prosecution and subsequent execution of Willie Pearse, in spite of his limited role in the Rising, has been seen as a reaction to his brother's rather than his own involvement. The courts martial relied heavily on the evidence of soldiers involved in the fighting or captured by the rebels, much of which was ‘entirely circumstantial, misleading and inaccurate’. Although the proclamation was not relied upon heavily during the trials, it was a significant factor in the decision of Sir John Maxwell, effectively the military governor of Ireland, to confirm the death sentences of the seven men who had signed it (Barton, 2002: 28–40).

The executions took place in Kilmainham Jail between 3 and 12 May. In addition to the seven signatories of the proclamation and Willie Pearse, the Dublin commanders executed included Michael Mallin of the ICA, and from the Volunteers Edward Daly, Michael O’Hanrahan, John MacBride, Seán Heuston and Con Colbert. One execution took place outside Dublin, that of Thomas Kent, a Cork Volunteer who was charged with the ‘wilful murder’ of a policeman following a stand-off with the police at the Kents’ farm in Castlelyons, near Fermoy, the week after the surrender during which Kent's brother, Richard, was also killed (Townshend, 2005: 279–80).

The final death toll from judicial executions reached the iconic figure of 16, when Roger Casement was hanged for high treason in London on 3 August. Efforts to seek clemency on his behalf were damaged by a smear campaign highlighting his homosexual activities, including the alleged use of rent boys. Two high-profile commutations took place in the cases of Markievicz, because of her sex, and de Valera, possibly as a result of his American birth but also because his trial and court martial took place later than those of the other commanders and by that time public and political outrage and the
ensuing political fall-out had forced their cessation; de Valera himself was adamant that the latter reason was the true explanation for his reprieve (Ferriter, 2007: 28–9).

By the time the last executions took place, the severity of the British response to the Rising was beginning to have an effect on turning public opinion towards sympathy with the rebels. In the House of Commons on 11 May John Dillon delivered a scathing attack on the British actions. Although no supporter of the rebels, he commended the actions of ‘three thousand men’ in facing ‘twenty thousand with machine guns and artillery’ and contrasting their bravery with that of the British Army at the front: ‘it would be a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did those men in Dublin’
[Doc. 7]
. Dillon realised the effect that these repressive measures would have in generating support for republicanism at the expense of constitutional nationalism.

By late May and early June it was clear that the tide of public opinion had turned in favour of the rebels. Memorabilia commemorating the executed leaders were on sale in Dublin and masses were held to pray for them (Wills, 2009: 105–8). The details of some of the executions added to the sense of martyrdom and romance surrounding the rebels, such as the badly injured James Connolly having to be propped up in a siting position to face the firing squad and the marriage of Joseph Plunkett to his fiancée, Grace Gifford, on the eve of his execution.

By early 1917 the tragedy of the Rising was becoming established in Irish literature, with the composition of W. B. Yeats's elegiac poem
Easter 1916
(not published widely until 1920). The resonant conclusion that all had ‘changed, changed utterly’ and a ‘terrible beauty’ had been born, has become an iconic statement of how Irish public opinion was transformed by the British response to the Rising. While the Rising inspired many other literary celebrations and commemorations, it has also been criticised in literature, most notably in Seán O’Casey's
The Plough and the Stars
. As a former member of the ICA, O’Casey's plays focused on how the political events of the decade impacted on the mundane lives of Dublin city's poorest class of tenement dwellers. In
The Plough and the Stars
, the juxtaposition of prostitution, poverty and drunkenness with the Rising, the illustration of its detrimental impact on local tenement dwellers and the clearly satirical commentary on the ideals of its leaders provoked nationalist fury leading to angry protests during its first run in the Abbey Theatre in 1926 (Wills, 2009: 146–51).

The British Government tried to moderate the adverse impact of its harsh repression of the Rising by introducing home rule in the summer of 1916. The task was delegated to David Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions. John Redmond secured the agreement of the majority of his supporters to the deal, which would have excluded the six Ulster counties with the largest
Protestant populations. However, the talks failed due to Lloyd George’s duplicity in giving contradictory promises to each side as to whether or not the exclusion of the Ulster counties would be permanent and because of the opposition of southern unionists ( Jackson, 2003: 166–72). This episode is important for representing the point at which the Irish Party committed itself to accepting a partitionist solution and represented the last genuine chance of implementing home rule in Ireland before the aims of Irish nationalism morphed into the demand for greater sovereignty as an independent republic and the willingness to take up arms to achieve such an end.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

The best documentary sources for the Easter Rising are the oral history statements of participants in the Bureau of Military History (BMH), now freely available online
www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie
. Extracts from those relating to the Rising with a contextual commentary can be found in Fearghal McGarry's,
Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising
(Penguin, 2011) and Annie Ryan's,
Witness: Inside the Easter Rising
(Liberties Press, 2005). Liam de Paor's,
On the Easter Proclamation and Other Declarations
(Four Courts Press, 1997) provides an excellent textual analysis of the most important document relating to the Rising. The British files relating to the court martials of the executed leaders were released between 1999 and 2001 and were published by Brian Barton in
From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising
(Blackstaff, 2002) and republished as
The Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising
(History Press, 2008).

The three best narrative accounts of the Rising are Michael Foy and Brian Barton's,
The Easter Rising
(Sutton, 1999), Charles Townshend's,
Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion
(Penguin, 2005) and Fearghal McGarry's,
The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916
(Oxford University Press, 2010). Clair Wills's,
Dublin, 1916: The Siege of the GPO
(Profile, 2009) recreates the experience of those inside the GPO in Easter Week.

The best biographical accounts of the Rising's leaders are Ruth Dudley Edwards's,
Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure
(Victor Gollancz, 1977), Joost Augusteijn's more recent,
Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary
(Palgrave, 2010) and Donal Nevin's,
James Connolly: A Full Life
(Gill and Macmillan, 2005). Accounts of the life of Constance Markievicz can be found in Anne Marreco,
The Rebel Countess: The Life and Times of Constance Markievicz
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), Anne Haverty,
Constance Markievicz: Irish Revolutionary
(Harper Collins, 1988) and Diana Norman,
Terrible Beauty: A Life of Constance Markievicz, 1868–1927
(Hodder and Stoughton, 1987), all of which are now quite dated.

The best accounts of women's participation in the Rising are Ruth Taillon's,
When History Was Made: The Women of 1916
(Beyond The Pale, 1996), Margaret Ward's,
Unmanageable Revolutionaries
(Pluto Press, 1995), Cal McCarthy's,
Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution
(Collins Press, 2007) and Ann Matthews's,
Renegades: Irish Republican Women, 1900–1922
(Mercier, 2010).

3 The Republican Resurgence, 1917–19

I
n the two years that followed the Rising a sea change occurred in Irish nationalist politics, with the emergence of Sinn Féin to supplant the IPP as the largest political party in the country. The demands of Irish nationalism also changed; the decisive victory for the republican Sinn Féin Party in the 1918 general election indicated that home rule within the union was no longer acceptable to an electorate which had voiced its support for an independent state governed as a republic.

THE 1917 AND 1918 BY-ELECTIONS

The harsh British response to the Rising, and the inaccurate attribution of it to Sinn Féin, catapulted that party from relative obscurity before Easter 1916 to being the organisation around which republicans coalesced from 1917 in pursuit of Irish independence. The revival of Sinn Féin became noticeable in the latter half of 1916. In addition to gaining more support as a reaction to the harsh suppression of the Rising, it attracted constitutional nationalists dissatisfied with the leadership of John Redmond. The failure to have home rule implemented after the Rising was a serious defeat for Redmond. During these negotiations he had made a significant concession on partition that alienated many Ulster nationalists, who formed the breakaway Irish Nation League, that would eventually merge with Sinn Féin. Thus, as 1917 opened, Redmond had failed in his best chance yet of achieving Irish home rule, and in the process lost an important sector of his party's supporters.

Nevertheless, the IPP remained the largest representative of nationalist Ireland. The postponement due to the war of the 1915 general election, extended the IPP's political life for three further years. Only a general election would measure the extent to which nationalist political sentiment had swung between the IPP and Sinn Féin and this was not to take place until the war was over. However, the prolongation of the 1910 Parliament also
meant that some elderly members of the Irish Party, who would most likely have retired in 1915, passed away before the next election, occasioning an unusually high number of by-elections in Ireland during 1917 and 1918. These electoral contests provided the arena for the emergent Sinn Féin to challenge the hegemony of the IPP in the crucial two-and-a-half-year period between the Rising and the 1918 general election.

The first of these vacancies arose in February 1917 in the western constituency of Roscommon North following the death of the old Fenian, J. J. O’Kelly, who had been first elected to Parliament for Roscommon as a Land League candidate in 1880. George Noble, Count Plunkett, father of the executed 1916 rebel, Joseph Plunkett, was put forward to contest the by-election and he enjoyed a comfortable victory over the IPP's T. J. Devine, polling 3,022 votes to the latter's 1,708. The extent of Plunkett's victory owed much to his status as the father of an executed rebel and the particular circumstances of County Roscommon, where there had been a large number of arrests after the Rising and a strong Sinn Féin organisation had been put in place there by Father Michael O’Flanagan. By contrast, the home rule organisation was weak and riven by internal conflict; the cantankerous editor of the
Roscommon Herald
newspaper, Jasper Tully, contested the by-election as an independent nationalist but only polled 600 votes. Plunkett's winning margin was still greater than the combined nationalist and independent nationalist vote (Laffan, 1999: 77–85).

Internal divisions in the home rule movement also contributed significantly to the IPP's defeat in the next by-election, which took place three months later in May 1917 in the neighbouring constituency of Longford South, where the contest arose from the death of another elderly nationalist MP, John Phillips. John Redmond was forced to intervene and select the party's candidate after three nationalists initially contested the nomination, and many of the supporters of the two unsuccessful candidates refused to back Redmond's choice, Patrick McKenna. Buoyed by their success in Roscommon, Sinn Féin supporters approached Joseph McGuinness, who had lived in the county previously, and was at the time serving a three-year prison sentence in Lewes Prison for his involvement in the Rising. Opinion was divided among McGuinness's fellow prisoners about whether or not he should allow his name to go forward, but his candidacy proceeded eventually and he won the seat by a slim margin of 37 votes after a tense recount. The intervention of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, in support of him on the eve of the poll was the decisive factor in his success (Coleman, 2003: 45–67).

The death of John Redmond's brother, Willie, from wounds suffered while fighting with the army in Belgium in June 1917 soon led to another parliamentary vacancy in Clare East. The contest which took place in July
was significantly different from the two previous ones because it took place after the release of the remaining 1916 prisoners in June and the most prominent of these, Eamon de Valera, won the election for Sinn Féin, gaining over 70 per cent of the votes cast. The loss of the seat, which had been held by John Redmond's brother since 1892, to the new leader of nationalist Ireland was a significant symbolic defeat for the IPP. Sinn Féin completed its successful electoral sweep in 1917 when W. T. Cosgrave won the Kilkenny City by-election in August. In line with stated Sinn Féin policy, all of the MPs elected in 1917 abstained from the Westminster Parliament (Laffan, 1999: 106–13).