Unlikely Rebels (9 page)

Young journalist ‘John Brennan' became a part of what was, effectively, a propaganda machine for the early enthusiasts of the movement. Words being traditionally mightier than swords, the plethora of nationalist written and oral matter worked its formative qualities on the minds of some of those not yet converted.

In 1891, the first bilingual Irish–English weekly paper had been launched by the Gaelic League, but there had been, for more than 100 years, pro-Irish literature in English. The 1848 rebellion of the Young Irelanders, while sparse on physical confrontation, had been rich in words – in prose, poems and ballads – many of which were being recalled in Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century. People were beginning to feel, indeed, ‘A Nation Once Again', in Thomas Davis' famous words. After the aborted rising of Robert Emmet in 1803, his speech from the dock had been quickly circulated. It was now reprinted. The Ascendancy literary awakening, led by Hyde, Gregory, Yeats and Synge, was also subtly and unconsciously feeding Irish nationalist aspirations. In America, the septuagenarian Fenian, John Devoy, in
The Gaelic American
, and Patrick Ford, in his
Irish World
, were proposing new directions for Irish politics. At home there were old reliables such as the pro-Redmond
Freeman's Journal
and saucy newcomers such as the magazine
Bean na hÉireann
(
Woman
of Ireland
), familiarly called
The Bean
(pronounced
ban
) and published by Inghínidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) under the editorship of Helena Molony, lifelong friend of ‘John' Gifford. It was a monthly magazine that circulated freely in Ireland and in the USA, and discussed matters of social and national interest. It was called ‘the women's magazine which men read' and attracted contributions from Stephens, Æ, Griffith, Markievicz, Colum, Plunkett, Sir Roger Casement, Katharine Tynan and Maud Gonne (all unpaid, like its staff). ‘John' Gifford was an enthusiastic contributor, as well as a member of the editorial staff.

Katharine Tynan submitted a serial in which an English officer was to marry the girlfriend of his foe – a gallant United Irishman who had been fatally wounded in the fight for Irish freedom – but the editor of
Bean na hÉireann
rewrote the ending, reviving the dying United Irishman and whisking him off, pale but alive, to claim his bride from the English enemy.
[1]
In the 1908 Christmas number, Susan Mitchell's anti-conscription ballad about the Irish boy in Carrick workhouse who was conscripted into Her Majesty's army, ‘for the glory of the Empire', appeared. In the same issue, Padraic Colum's anti-English play
The Saxon Shilling
was also published, and, nurturing the same enlistment antipathy, in a later issue of November 1910 Arthur Griffith also argued against conscription:

The strength of England lies in her armed forces. Guns and battleships are useless to a nation which cannot procure men of courage and intelligence to work them … Without a large Irish contingent in the British army that army would be of no more use in serious warfare than an armed police.

The Boer War had erupted in 1899, and the Irish republican media vociferously supported the Boers and rejected any conscription in Ireland to fight these farmers who, like themselves, wanted a republic. On the one hand, there was this anti-
conscription propaganda in the Irish Ireland press, but on the other there was also
The
Irish Times
, 
the
Irish Independent
and the evening papers lauding the Irish Parliamentary Party of John Redmond, the aims of the British Empire and its need to conscript in Ireland.

Even a short list of further Irish Ireland publications gives some idea of the flood of anti-English propaganda:

The Leader
(editor D. P. Moran)
The Gaelic Athlete
The Irish Felon
The Irish Penny Journal
The Nation
The Irish Review (editors Professor Heuston and Joseph Plunkett [suppressed])
An Claidheamh Soluis
(editor Pádraig Pearse)

A secret detective report from Dublin Castle on another republican paper,
The Spark
, named as its owner and editor respectively Máire Perolz of 10 North Great Georges Street and Countess Markievicz of 49B Leinster Road, Rathmines (both friends of the Giffords). The Irish Ireland press was being watched.

A whole hive of weekly publications, however, was ready and willing to sting, like wasps, the imperial lion:
Nationality
,
Republic
,
Honesty
,
Volunteer
,
Hibernian.
Their proprietor was J. J. Walsh of 26 Blessington Street, and their printer was the Gaelic Press, Upper Liffey Street, which was raided and destroyed some years later, on 24 March 1916. The editor of
The Spark
, Ed Dalton, in a scathing editorial of 2 April 1916, described as an atrocity the raiding of the Gaelic Press by ‘an armed deputation of forty Defenders of the Rights of Small Nationalities'. Having hurled this piece of irony (the alleged reason for Britain's entering the First World War), Dalton pointed out that the raid concerned yet another nationalist paper,
The Gael
– not one of J. J. Walsh's but one also printed by the Gaelic Press. Dalton argued that if anyone should be arrested then it should be the editor: the printer had been merely doing his job.
[2]
In the same issue, a letter from J. J. Walsh appeared in which he described how the printing machinery had been destroyed by ‘the military tyrants' from Dublin Castle and both type and print matter confiscated, including some issues of
The Spark
. Walsh set up a fund to help the Gaelic Press, then almost ruined.
[3]

The advertisements in
The Spark
make typical Irish Ireland reading. A céilí is advertised for Óglaigh na hÉireann (Dublin Brigade) at 25 Parnell Square; Domhnall Ua Buachalla advertises bilingually his Luciana bicycles; Gleeson's of O'Connell Street are ‘the pioneer Irish goods only store'; the Hon. Secretary of the Sinn Féin Bank, Alderman T. Kelly, seeks subscriptions; Whelan & Son of Ormond Quay offer green, white and orange badges at one penny each.
The Spark
itself cost a halfpenny.
[4]

It was Griffith's newspapers,
The United Irishman
and
Sinn Féin
(before he modified his republican stance), which, more than any other publication, swung opinion in Ireland towards national freedom. Griffith was in full, unmodified republican flight when these words of his appeared in his issue of 13 July 1908: ‘Let us renounce the disastrous policy of making the parliament House of England the arena of the Irish struggle. Let us make the dissolution of the British Empire our immediate object.'

Catering for the other extreme, the Ascendancy elite, were two publications. One was
Irish Society and Social Review
(price one penny), founded in 1887 and covering, to use its own phraseology, ‘Balls, Parties, At Homes, etc.'. It also covered society weddings where minute details included not only the people, the church, the residence, clothing and flowers, but also the gifts (some in the luxury class) given to the several bridesmaids.
The Irish Figaro
, owned and edited by Ramsay Colles, concentrated more on Dublin Castle, vice-regal personalities and general Anglo-Irish ‘hangers-on'. However, it was not above taking a snipe at republicans. In fact, its chief claim to fame, in a résumé of Irish Ireland propaganda and counter-propaganda, is an incident that followed a derogatory reference in one of its editorials to Maud Gonne (who had herself been a one-time habitué of Anglo-Irish social gatherings): Arthur Griffith went into the newspaper office and vigorously whipped the editor. It was a most uncharacteristic act of violence from the mild-mannered founder of Sinn Féin and earned him ten days in jail, because he would not pay the fine imposed by law.

Other nationalist publications included James Connolly's
Irish Worker
and (after its suppression) the resurrected
Workers' Republic.
James Connolly used editorial manipulation in his
Workers' Republic
to extract wage rises, to recruit for his Irish Citizen Army, to extend greetings to workers in all nations and to keep alive the spirit of Irish nationalism. An editorial of the suppressed
Irish Worker
flung the following challenge to Westminster:

If you leave us at liberty we will kill your recruiting, save our poor boys from your slaughterhouses, and blast your hopes of Empire. If you strike at, imprison or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you and mayhap rise a force that will destroy you.

The Irish Ireland periodicals, newspapers, news-sheets and pamphlets had much in common: an almost complete lack of funding, plenty of material from unpaid journalists – ranging from mediocre to excellent – and an enormous drive to say their republican or separatist piece in defiance of the ruling power; one might say that they were daring the British authorities to close them down – a matter in which they sometimes obliged.
The Irish People
, mouthpiece of the Fenians, suffered a punitive raid of its premises and destruction of its plant in Parliament Street, Dublin.

‘John Brennan' established her name firmly as a republican writer during these years, not only in
Bean na hÉireann,
but also in Seán Mac Diarmada's
Irish Freedom
and in Griffith's
Sinn Féin.
The quality of her work is obvious, especially in the engaging and informative
The Years Flew By
, but the remarkable aspect of it was that she was a young woman leaving the unionist island of Rathmines and swimming fearlessly in the turbulent waters of Irish republicanism. She was unable to share the happiness of her success with her parents, who were not pleased with what they could grasp of any of their daughters' involvement with this new movement, and the more explicit republicanism expressed by ‘John' would have appalled them.

The Gifford daughters were also attracted to the Irish Ireland stage. They had behind them their childhood experiences of the early dramas of Ada and Gabriel and of Gabriel's home-made toy theatres. Now they became involved not merely as onlookers but as prompters, bit-part actors and providers of ‘things' (props) in a few of the many amateur and semi-professional performances in Dublin City. Dublin was awash, you might say, with such entertainments, though there was nothing amateurish about the last-formed of these pre-Rising companies – at least as far as its well-equipped little theatre in Hardwicke Street was concerned. This group, which called itself the Irish Theatre, was set up in 1914 by Joseph Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh, Edward Martyn and Jack MacDonagh. The theatre, which included dressing rooms, was provided by Joseph's mother, Countess Plunkett, and, in the typical, multi-faceted Irish Ireland fashion, on the floor beneath the theatre the sisters of W. B. Yeats, Lily and Lolly, were producing exquisite, miscellaneous items of Celtic-embroidered linen.

The Irish Theatre's aims were the production of Irish plays other than peasant plays, plays in the Irish language and foreign masterpieces. Grace Gifford had no acting ability, but she helped out with the scenery. ‘
John' was a devotee and supporter of the Irish Theatre productions and assisted with the props. Nellie got ‘bit' parts in the company's plays. She has left us a glimpse of her future brother-in-law, Joseph Plunkett, playing the part of a wandering poet and being excellent in it. His melodious voice, she said, spoke the opening lines of the play – ‘How beautiful the Volga looks tonight' – but, when not on stage, he sat quietly looking on and saying little; during that period he was far from well and his lungs were causing him trouble.
[5]

Nellie also described a first night at which she was confronted with a typewriter for the first time in her life. She was supposed to clackety-clack on the keyboard to appear to be recording the words of an actor. That was all right until she came to the end of the carriage. Not knowing what to do, she sat there, consumed with embarrassment, and had to let the actor continue his dialogue unaccompanied.
[6]

It was undoubtedly their love of Irish that inspired the tutor Thomas MacDonagh and his pupil Joseph Plunkett to go out on a limb to produce Gaelic-speaking plays. Plunkett amicably disagreed with the other directors of the Irish Theatre when they chose Swedish writer August Strindberg's
Easter
for production and so he resigned from the group. Despite the execution of Thomas MacDonagh after the 1916 Rising, the Irish Theatre continued on under John MacDonagh, Thomas
'
brother, and Edward Martyn.

At the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, during a production by Count Markievicz of George Bernard Shaw's
The Devil's Disciple,
it was considered a ‘fun' thing to get a walk-on part. So ‘John' Gifford and her friend
Máire
Perolz got themselves two minor roles. The play being about the American War of Independence, the Count had the bright idea of casting his pro-English ‘Castle' acquaintances as the English soldiers while Constance supplied actors for the rebels from her republican cronies. One theatre critic said that the scuffles on stage were very realistic.
[7]

Concerts must also be included in any Irish Ireland survey. Moore's melodies, the poetic rhetoric of Thomas Davis and the Young Irelanders, harps, fiddles and bagpipes were featured, and young heroes such as Teddy O'Neill were enshrined in melodic verse. They were all part of the musical agenda. Dancers obliged with jigs, reels and hornpipes. Often a
tableau vivant
would feature Dark Rosaleen or Éire and Her Four Daughters (the four provinces). The participants' gowns were Gaelicised with Celtic embroidery. In one, Countess Markievicz featured, in full armour, as Joan of Arc. The Gifford girls also took part. Muriel's long red hair was suitably dramatic for her to be Queen Maeve, and ‘
John' became Robert Emmet's housekeeper, Anne Devlin. Less elitist than drama, these concerts were very often the soul food of those whose families had clung on to life through famine and evictions and uprisings. The stuff of these concerts reflected and nurtured the affective, emotional nature of their political thinking and prepared them for the 1916 Rising. What they saw, heard and felt was deeply rooted in truth. No one needed to spell out for them what had happened to their forebears. They had heard it all in their
béal oideas
and in their songs and ballads.