The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (39 page)

It was in this context of both national and international danger that the government invoked the authority of King George V and convened a summit on Ireland at Buckingham Palace. Here, for four days in the middle of July 1914 – a few days before the Howth gun-running operation – the two sides thrashed about in stalemate. In his opening address, the monarch sought the middle ground: ‘Today the cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people…to me, it is unthinkable that we should be brought to the brink of fratricidal strife upon issues so capable of adjustment – if handled in a spirit of generous compromise.’
¹²
The last word was of course key – but it did not at first appear as if any form of compromise could be achieved; certainly, the issue of Ulster’s possible exclusion from Home Rule represented a vast divide between the two sides. Eventually, Redmond implied that he would not see Home Rule forced on to any county in Ireland against the will of its population: a sign, perhaps, that the divide could after all be bridged; and while the Home Rule bill did indeed become law in September, it was immediately suspended.

For World War I had now begun in Europe, and the constitutional affairs of Ireland would as a result have to wait. Redmond consented to such a suspension in the expectation that a united Irish effort against Germany and Austria–Hungary would lead in turn to a measure of national reconciliation in Ireland itself – and to a form of postwar Home Rule that would prove acceptable to all. He could not know that his plans would be wholly outstripped by events.

Chapter Eleven

Revolution

For the moment, Redmond and his constitutional approach remained ostensibly in the ascendant in nationalist Ireland. In Ulster, Sir Edward Carson had offered the Ulster Volunteers for service in the British armed forces; and in a speech at Woodenbridge in County Wicklow in September 1914 Redmond matched the Unionist offer, with the result that a surge of Volunteers signed on to fight; in the first two years of war alone, it is estimated that a hundred thousand Irishmen enlisted in the services. Redmond was operating on the understanding that this would be a short, sharp European war that would be concluded victoriously by Christmas – a fatal miscalculation that would eat into his support in the months and years of war to come. But the prospect of the sacrifice of Irish lives in the course of any British war – irrespective of its duration – was wholly unacceptable to some: at the same time as Redmond was making his Woodenbridge speech, a meeting of the IRB in Dublin had rejected both his suppositions and his leadership of the nationalist cause, seeing the war in Europe as a potential opportunity for Ireland to throw off British rule once and for all.

The result was a split in the Volunteer movement: the great majority followed Redmond and became the National Volunteers; and it can be fairly estimated that in the war years some 260,000 Irish served the Crown in one capacity or another. Their reasons for enlisting were many and varied. Doubtless some now did so out of a sense of duty and conviction, but it is equally evident that many, as in years past, enlisted for simple economic and social reasons: in order to draw a wage, to have a job, to be fed and clothed. The experiences of these Irish soldiers both signify the tangled and shifting loyalties of these years and illuminate the harsh material reality of life for many Irish communities.
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Meanwhile, a small minority – ten thousand or thereabouts – refused to participate in the war effort and continued to march under the banner of the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers were headed by Eoin MacNeill, but unbeknownst to him, the movement was being subtly infiltrated by the IRB, with the latter’s leadership occupying positions of authority within the Volunteer organization: among these leaders was Pearse, who held the title of director of military organization. The Irish Volunteers were supported by a substantial body of anti-war sentiment in Ireland, stemming from principles of pacifism as well as of nationalist and anti-British feeling; in addition, Pearse and others could see positive virtues in the creation of a relatively small but tightly knit fighting force. Equally, the Volunteer movement was nothing if not diverse: MacNeill’s measured pragmatism did not, for example, suit the more passionate politics of Pearse, Plunkett and MacDonagh.

The formation in 1914 of Cumann na mBan, the female association affiliated to the Irish Volunteers, added to this sense of breadth. Its composition was equally varied in background and outlook: while it was not a feminist organization
per se
, for example, it existed and operated against a backdrop of fierce cultural debate as to the role of women in wider society. In the small world of radical nationalist politics, moreover, overlap was inevitable: figures such as the Anglo–Irish aristocrat-turned-political agitator Constance Markiewicz, for example, had close connections to both the suffrage and the labour movements, and had been active during the lock-out. Cumann na mBan brought distinctive sensibilities to the debate – even if its membership was frequently marginalized and ignored.

Soon, the rising death toll on the western front impacted upon public opinion, and the popularity of Redmond’s party began to dwindle. Yet for radical nationalism these remained unpromising times, for the majority of the population was inclined firmly away from insurrection. The ongoing conflict in Europe and the demands of the war effort were leading to a gradual rise in agricultural prices and thus to a measure of prosperity for many; in addition, army pay was adding to the modest incomes of families up and down the land; and for some, Ireland’s future was simply and indissolubly bound up with Britain and the empire. Yeats, meanwhile, could look icily on a Catholic commercial middle class that, content to ‘fumble in a greasy till / And add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer’, was much too busy making money to throw in its lot with a rebel of any complexion.
¹

World War I was almost two years old before trouble erupted in Ireland. The potential revolutionaries remained far from united: Connolly, for example, still maintained a separate militia in the form of the small Irish Citizen Army – although figures such as Markiewicz moved easily between it and the Irish Volunteers. Connolly’s interests and those of elements within the IRB would not mesh definitively until January 1916, when the former was brought to a secret meeting of the IRB leadership and formally involved in the slowly developing plans for an uprising of the Irish Volunteers that Easter. The revolutionaries’ plans, moreover, were muddled by divergences of views within their ranks: even the small core of IRB leaders was at cross purposes as to the merits of a rising. Initial proposals for a revolt against British rule had envisaged a national uprising, abetted by German military landings on the west coast. This plan had then been gradually altered, with the final scheme – as with Emmet a century before – anticipating a rising in Dublin that would then fan general unrest across the country; and a second theatre of operations in the west triggered by the arrival of German arms shipments on the Atlantic seaboard.

Ironically, this evident lack of clarity also hampered the response of the British authorities to the developing situation. While it was clear that trouble was brewing in Ireland, it was also true that military drills and parades were a familiar sight on the streets of Dublin. In October 1915, for example, Connolly and Markiewicz had led the ICA militia in a mock assault on Dublin Castle. It was therefore no easy matter in these times to distinguish a mere drill from something more dangerous. The chief secretary, Augustine Birrell, mourned that ‘the misery of the situation is this – you had armed bodies of Volunteers all over the place’.
²
At the same time, British calculations tended naturally to discount the perils of home-grown insurrection in favour of time-honoured fears: in this case, the possibility of an invasion of Ireland by Germany, as a back-door means of attacking Britain itself. So, even though the authorities were in receipt of a good deal of intelligence, when trouble did flare in central Dublin on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, they were still caught unprepared.

For the rebels, Easter approached in a miasma of confusion and ill fortune. Early in April, Pearse had flatly denied to MacNeill that any rising was planned for the Easter weekend; several days later, Pearse again met his commander – but now to tell him that a rising was indeed imminent and that the Volunteer movement had in fact long been secretly controlled by the IRB. On 20 April, Volunteers in County Kerry failed to make contact as planned with the German vessel
Libau
, which, following negotiations by Casement, had been dispatched to Ireland with twenty thousand guns and a million rounds of ammunition on board.
^*
When news of this reverse reached Dublin, the administration in the Castle relaxed still further – if trouble had in fact been planned, it would surely not now go ahead – and began looking forward to the upcoming horse-racing festival at nearby Fairyhouse.

At the same time, MacNeill stood down the Volunteers – and it was now that the fragmentation and competing agendas of the leaders of the rising came starkly to the surface. On Easter Sunday, the IRB leadership voted to ignore MacNeill’s instructions and to summon the Volunteers on to the streets; but on the following day, the abiding confusion meant that a mere fifteen hundred Volunteers – including some two hundred women – turned out, supported by a handful of members of the ICA who took up their positions on St Stephen’s Green. Their intention was to occupy and hold a medley of buildings and positions in Dublin, the general idea being to control both the city centre and, eventually, communications across the country. And indeed, the General Post Office was taken by Connolly and Pearse as planned, the latter reading the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the front of the building. But the strategic importance of some of the other targets was questionable; and to make matters worse, the lines of communication between the various positions could not be secured.

The rebels failed to capture the castle, even though it was occupied that holiday Monday by only a skeleton staff. A constable at the gates of the compound was shot dead, after which the gates were hastily shut and the rebels forced to retreat into the adjoining City Hall. This failure was repeated across the city: in taking up their positions, the rebels were hampered consistently by a lack of numbers and a sense of confusion, and many other strongpoints thus remained unoccupied. Beggar’s Bush Barracks to the southeast of the city centre lay essentially undefended and might have been smoothly taken by the Third Battalion under Éamon de Valera: no attempt, however, was made to occupy the compound. The rebels also made no attempt to occupy the easily defensible grounds of Trinity College, in the heart of the city; and, fatally, the railway stations at Amiens Street and Kingsbridge continued to function. Some of the rebels, meanwhile, displayed a glaring lack of understanding of the nature of urban warfare: those members of the ICA who had occupied St Stephen’s Green, for example, busied themselves with the digging of trenches across the park, evidently heedless of the ranges of tall buildings overlooking the area. Before long, sniper fire from the roof of the Shelbourne Hotel forced them to take refuge inside the College of Surgeons building on the west side of the square.

By the end of that first day, order was breaking down across the city centre: public transport had stopped running and shops were being looted. By the following morning, government forces were pouring into the city by train and ship and were beginning to tighten the noose around the rebel positions. Trinity College had become both a barracks – with some four thousand soldiers and their horses stationed in its quadrangles – and a field hospital catering to ever larger numbers of military and civilian casualties. Food began to run short, and over the next few days the various rebel battalions across the city surrendered one by one. By Friday night, much of central Dublin had been devastated: Pearse and Connolly were forced to abandon a GPO in flames; and on Saturday, 29 April the final, formal surrender was announced. Some 450 people had died in the course of the week: of these, one hundred or so were British military personnel and 64 were rebels. The rest were civilians.

The Easter Rising was always doomed to failure. The mood in the country, buoyed by the modest prosperity of wartime, was not in its favour; and in practical terms, the numbers and resources at its leaders’ disposal were nowhere near sufficient to ensure a victory against the power of the state. For some of those leaders, of course, the rising’s failure was beside the point: for Pearse, for example, the sacrifice of a short-term defeat contained the promise of a larger and more substantial victory in the longer term, even if he would not live to see it. For others less moved by such emotion, a good and sturdy battle was an end in itself and might succeed in lighting a fire of resistance among the people; and Connolly, at any rate, must have carried with him the bitter knowledge that the strategy for holding Dublin city centre, flawed though it was, might have worked a little better had sufficient numbers cut through the fog of order and counter-order and turned out in support.

Women had been present in all theatres of activity, with the exception of the Third Battalion: de Valera refused to have females in his ranks. Although the Proclamation read by Pearse claimed ‘the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman’, the substantial female part in the rising was downplayed in subsequent histories of the period. Later events, as we will see, had a crucial role to play in this; in addition, the death of men such as Connolly, for example, removed from the scene important proponents of egalitarian policies. This airbrushing is best – indeed, literally – encapsulated in the fate of Elizabeth O’Farrell, a member of Cumann na mBan and one of three women among the last group of rebels to leave the GPO. Farrell was later given surrender orders to be distributed across the city, and was with Pearse when he was photographed formally surrendering on 29 April. Later, however, her image was excised from the photographic record, albeit in a most clumsy manner: her disembodied feet remain in evidence behind Pearse.