A History of Ireland - 4. Suppression & Starvation

Part 4 of A History of Ireland

Catholic Suppression.

Anti-Catholic Penal Laws

Whilst these events were taking place in Ulster, the rest of Ireland was far from quiet. Ulster-style plantations had been established in other areas and primarily English Protestants were moved in there too. The Reformation had delivered the churches to them but the majority population remained resolutely Catholic.  William III enacted a draconian series of penal laws. These, whilst not actually outlawing the Catholic Church services and the ministry of priests, excluded Bishops, Archbishops and friars of Catholic orders, notably Dominicans and Augustinians, from Ireland on pain of deportation or even death.

Mass Under the Penal Laws, St Mullins, Co. Carlow

In theory, it should have been impossible for new priests to be ordained. The intention being to allow the Catholic Church to wither away. Other penal laws excluded all Catholics from holding any office of state, from standing for election to parliament, from voting, from practicing at the bar, and from joining the army or navy. Perhaps most importantly, Catholics were prohibited from buying land or holding land on a lease longer than thirty years, and from bequeathing land to their heirs. On his death, a Catholic’s land had to be divided equally between his children, unless one of them had converted to Protestantism. If so, he inherited the lot. By the 1760s only five percent of the land in Ireland belonged to Catholics.

In fact, the penal laws as they related to the clergy, were widely flouted. Priests continued to be ordained by friars who stayed in Ireland. Local officials turned a blind eye, or were bribed to ignore them. It was simply impracticable to enforce the law in a country so overwhelmingly Catholic, so the church continued. Masses were said in the open or in ruined churches over makeshift altars. Being excluded from just about every other institution Catholics turned increasingly to the Church for identity and to secret societies such as he Whiteboys, an agrarian movement.

Early Nationalism.

Today, Irish Nationalism and Roman Catholicism seem inextricably interwoven. Generally speaking, Catholics are Republican and Nationalist and Protestants are Royalist and Unionist. Of course this is something of an over-simplification and many communities can be found, and may examples of people from both communities who are neither one nor the other. None-the-less, the association is strong. Certainly, no one would seriously doubt that Irish Nationalism is strongly Catholic.

Jonathan Swift

It was not always so.

Irish Nationalism had its beginnings, not amongst the downtrodden, dispossessed and desperately poor Gaelic Irish, but amongst the emergent, affluent, and mostly Protestant, Irish middle class. It was predominantly inspired by the same sentiments that motivated the descendants of the original colonist of America to seek independence from the old country. It was the belief that they had come of age and were ready to determine their own destiny; to become a nation state in their own right.  These new Irish rebels were the product of a society that had prospered and built the splendid buildings of Dublin and had produced a unique culture as expressed in the literature of Swift, Sherridan, Goldsmith and Burke. They were the new Irishmen.

So it was, that early in the eighteenth century, the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift, had urged his fellow Irishmen to burn everything English except English coal. The theory was developing that in fact the English parliament had no legal right to legislate on Irish affairs; that the was the prerogative of an Irish parliament.

Henry Grattan (towards the left in red) addressing the Irish Parliament

When, in the 1770s, the American colonists rebelled, this not only provided inspiration to the Irish nationalists, but it also provided them with the opportunity to advance their cause. Under the pretext of defending the Irish coast they raised an army of ‘volunteers’. This armed force gave Henry Grattan, the leader of the ‘Patriot Party’ the leverage he needed to extract a Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1782. In theory at least, Ireland had won the right to legislate on Irish affairs and Westminster had lost that right. There were to be two independent nations linked only through the Crown. There was little enthusiasm in the newly-independent Irish parliament for full Catholic emancipation, however. The Irish Protestants viewed the Gaels much as the Americans viewed the Native Americans. They were a lesser people; not part of the world of the cultured and civilised. The Protestant Ascendancy was to remain.

Then, in 1789, the French Revolution shook Europe. The Idea that the will of the people could shape nations made the established order tremble and the ordinary man to sit up and take note. It found fertile ground in Ireland, particularly in the anti-establishment minds of Ulster Presbyterians. In what was at first sight seems a remarkable paradox when seen against today’s circumstances, a group of Belfast Presbyterians formed the Society of United Irishmen to promote the twin goals of parliamentary reform and unification of the Catholic and Protestant nations into one. Such was the impact of the ‘New Order’ in France. New times, new direction. The time for the common man to come together in brotherhood. The Dublin-born Protestant, Wofe Tone, adopted the idea with enthusiasm.

United Irishmen

The United Irishmen had little success with the government however and, by 1796, they had become a secret revolutionary movement. They plotted with revolutionary France and on 21 December 1796, a Fench invasion fleet anchored in Bantry Bay in south-west Ireland intending to help United Irishmen bring about a Republic by force of arms. The entire operation failed due to a great gale which drove the French out to sea, but the event brought home to the government the extreme danger they faced and they acted with, by now, customary savagery. In 1797, the United Irishmen in Ulster were virtually destroyed. Instrumental in this was the reversion to sectarianism under the leadership of the newly formed Orange Society. Ulster had re-polarised.

In the rest of Ireland however, the United Irishmen were still organised and beginning to make links with the Catholic secret society, the Defenders, which was beginning to develop nationalist political thinking. Before long though, informants in high positions devastated the movement. Almost the entire leadership was arrested in one swoop in March 1798. The government again acted with characteristic brutality. In order to extract information the army used flogging as a torture. The standard punishment for a soldier was between 500 and 999 lashes and for civilians it was even worse. It mattered not whether the victim was guilty. If he had information, or only if he might have had information, the method was the same. He was tied to a wooden triangle and publicly flogged until he told what he knew. One eyewitness account says:

There was no ceremony used in choosing victims, the first to hand done well enough. ... They were stripped naked, tied to a triangle and their flesh cut through without mercy. And though some stood the torture to the last gasp sooner than become informers, others did not and one single informer in the town was enough to destroy all the United Irishmen in it.

Half Hanging

Other torture included ‘pitch-capping’. A paper bag of pitch was jammed on the head and, after it had partly set, it was set alight. The burning pitch fell into the victim’s eyes and he burned his hands trying to rip it off. The only way he could do so was by pulling off his hair and scalp as well. It also included half-hanging. The rope would be slackened every time the victim lost consciousness, only to be tightened again as he recovered.

It was against this backdrop of a systematic campaign of torture, and probably as a panicky reaction to it, that the first Catholic uprising occurred in support of the United Irismen’s cause at Wexford in 1798. Wexford had not been an especially troublesome area and had been lightly garrisoned, but the government got wind of an expected French landing and sent reinforcements with orders to search for arms. They set about the task with zeal and began flogging the Catholics with relish. What began as a localised resistance grew into a rebellion, but it was a rebellion that lacked direction, strategy, and leadership and which soon degenerated into atrocities. It culminated in the slaughter of 200 Protestant men, women and children prisoners who had been held in a barn at a farm known as Scullabogue. The barn was set on fire and those not burned to death were shot or piked to death. Finally, less than a month after the rebellion broke out the rebels were driven out of their main encampment at Vinager Hill.

Vinegar Hill Massacre

In the vicious slaughter which followed the scattered rebels were hunted down and killed. An estimated 50,000 rebels were put to death. The United Irishmen movement virtually died with them, their cause having degenerated into an orgy of bloodletting. In a final gasp, Wolfe Tone, attempting to land with a French force in the north, was captured when the French were defeated at sea. Tone was taken to Dublin for trial and committed suicide in prison. The noble aspirations of a united Irish people had foundered on the rocks of confusion and prejudice.

Last Meeting of the Irish Parliament.

Most of the penal anti-Catholic laws had been repealed and in 1793, Catholics ad been given the vote (though they could still not stand for election or hold public office) but the rebellion had shown that Ireland was still two nations. Protestants had received such a fright that they turned their backs on independence and saw union with Britain as their best hope of remaining in the ascendancy. In 1800, the Protestant Irish parliament acceded to the Act of Union, uniting Ireland again with Britain ‘for ever’ and the Irish parliament was abolished in 1801.

Famine.

One event that perhaps stands out more than any other in the long tale of the Irish Gaelic suffering and humiliation, was the Great Famine of 1845-9. It has had a lasting influence on Irish Catholic psychology. Its impact has been likened to that of the Holocaust on the Jews. It is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a form of genocide perpetrated by the English on the Irish. The important thing, as with the 1642 massacre of Protestants at Porterdown Bridge, is not what actually happened, but what is believed to have happened.

Potato Famine

Why the poor Irish peasantry had become so dependent on the potato as sometimes the only food is complex. Most of Ireland was remote and poorly served by roads. Most Catholic families lived miserably poor lives subsisting on land for which they paid an extortionately high rent. Few of them owned any land at all. The only way they could feed themselves was to pay the rent in order to keep enough land on which to grow food. Any cereal crops they grew just about paid the rent and so they concentrated their efforts into growing the only plant that could provide enough on the small patch they had left. The potato was the only plant that could provide anything like enough, so it became the staple, and for many families, the only food.

Coupled with this was a huge population increase, almost doubling from four and a half million in 1800 to eight million by 1841. Population pressure resulted in more and more people living on smaller and smaller patches of land and concentrating more and more on the potato. The poorest had to hire out their labour, not for wages but for a small plot of land. With hindsight, disaster was inevitable should the potato crop fail. In fact, it did not need hindsight. The government was aware of the consequences, there having been a famine with thousands dead in 1817.

In 1845, it happened. On 20 August 1845, the Freeman’s Journal reported:

DISEASE IN THE POTATO CROP

We regret to have to state that we have had communications from more than one well-informed correspondent announcing the fact of what is called ‘cholera’ in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the North. In one instance the party has been digging potatoes – the finest he had ever seen – from a particular field, and a particular ridge of that field up to Monday last; and on digging in the same field on Tuesday he found the tubers all blasted, and unfit for the use of man or beast.

Potato blight had struck.

By the middle of October, there were extensive reports of potato crop failures and they were most widespread in the west. By February 1846, three quarters of the potato crop had been lost, there were outbreaks of typhus in Cork and Kilkenny and, by March, it had been recorded in twenty-five of the thirty-two counties.

An eviction during the Great Famine

The story of the potato famine is a story of a third religion; the religion of supply and demand economics. Almost unshakeable economic beliefs were held by the political classes of the day including a belief that the law of supply and demand was God-given and inviolate. Interference with market forces would endanger the flow of trade and would bring economic ruin. Foremost amongst the disciples of this creed was a Treasury civil servant by the name of Charles Trevelyan, Permanent Head of the Treasury. He was considered the best person to go to Ireland to manage the situation and the solution, naturally, was to be rigorously enforced supply and demand economics.

Food had to be paid for at the market rate.  This, of course, completely failed to take account of the fact that the poor Irish could not afford to buy food, which is why they depended almost wholly on the potato in the first place. It would have mattered not how low the price was since they had no money. For very many Catholics, rural Ireland was a cashless economy.

The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, instigated a three-point plan:

1. Repeal of the Corn Law, which was an essentially protectionist measure to keep the price of imported corn high, so reducing the price of bread.
2. Introduce a system of public works to provide employment.
3. Import supplies of maize (Indian corn).

The first of these measures, though, for Walpole the most imaginative and politically difficult, was almost completely irrelevant to the starving Irish since they could not afford to buy bread no matter how cheap it became.

The second had some success but, because of bureaucratic obstacles, was slow.  It was usually too little and too late. Many people who found work building roads were simply too weakened by hunger to work and very many died on the job. Additionally, the money was so slow in being released that many people went unpaid, often for several weeks. One such was Jeremiah Hegarty, whose body had been found on the road outside Skibbereen. The coroner’s jury found that death was due to ‘want of sufficient sustenance for many days previous to his decease, and that this want of sustenance was occasioned by his not having been paid his wages on the public works... for eight days prior to the time of his death.

The third, though perhaps, at first sight a humanitarian measure, was in fact nothing more than a limited and timid attempt to influence the market for food. There had not been a market at all for maize, or Indian corn, as it was then known in Ireland, so it was considered safe to allow it to be sent there since there was no sacred market to damage. However, the plan was not simply to give it to the starving Irish. It was to be stored in the Government depot in Cork to be used judiciously as an economic lever when the general price of food rose too high. The first shipment of Indian corn in January 1846 but was not released until April that year. Then a near riot broke out.

Almost unbelievably, Ireland was not short of food. It was exporting vast quantities. Crops of other food were excellent; they were just not available to the starving poor. People were starving in the midst of plenty. In the autumn of 1848, just as news that the potato crop had failed again, the export of food from Cork on a single day, 14 November 1848 was:

147 bales of bacon 120 casks and 135 barrels of pork 5 casks of hams 149 casks miscellaneous provisions 1,996 sacks, and 950 barrels of oats 300 bags of flour 300 head of cattle 239 sheep 9398 firkins of butter 542 boxes of eggs

Trevelyan’s chief concern was that the market forces were being interfered with. People in Ireland normally suffered distress at this time of the year. It was natural and part of the economic cycle. He wrote:

Indiscriminate sales have brought the whole country on the depots, and, without denying the existence of real and extensive distress, the number are beyond the power of the depots to cope with. They must therefore be closed down as soon as possible.

Population Change During the Great Famine

The Government always maintained that dealing with the problem should be the moral responsibility of the landlords. In some areas, indeed, some landlords did a great deal for their tenants. In many other the story was very different. Some landlords took the view that those who could not pay their rents were vermin, to be driven from their homes. A correspondent for the Freeman’s Journal recorded:

It was the most appalling sight I ever witnessed: women, young and old, running to and fro with small portions of their property to save it from the wreck – the screaming of the children, and wild wailings of the mothers driven from home and shelter... In the first instance the roofs and portions of the wall only were thrown down. But that Friday night the wretched creatures pitched a few poles slant-wise against the walls covering them with thatch in order to produce shelter for the night. When this was perceived the next day the bailiffs were dispatched with orders to pull down all the walls and root up the foundations in order to prevent the poor people from daring to take shelter amid the ruins”.

So the famine dragged on. A Catholic priest wrote:

Potato Famine Memorial

... funerals passing and re-passing in every direction, the congregation on Sunday reduced by half, the churchyard like fields lately tilled, without a green spot, constantly visited by processions of a few gaunt figures, carrying with difficulty the remains of some more fortunate relative or friend... From the sad effects of the calamity all classes have suffered severely, but most of all those on the public works, and especially the old and decrepit of both sexes who were exposed without food or clothing to the piercing cold of winter. Indeed, almost all of these are dead. Being secretary to the relief committee of the district I have had a good opportunity of witnessing the dreadful effects of the system... on these poor creatures and could at this moment refer to many casesof persons who attended the committee for weeks before they could be admitted on the books, and, when admitted a few days later, had scarcely time to earn themselves the price of a coffin.

The population of Ireland in 1841 had been 8,175,124. At normal rates of increase, it would have been 9,018,799 by 1851 but a census in that year shows it to have been 6,552,285. Given that about 1,500,000 emigrated between 1845 and 1849 this still leaves about 1,000,000 unaccounted for. Modern Irish historians put the actual death from famine at about 800,000. They died in a nation that had plenty, the victims of official indifference and doctrinaire free-market economics. They were just as much the victims of religious zealotry as the victims at Porterdown Bridge and Drogheda, though on a vastly larger scale.

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A History of Ireland - 7. Birth of a Nation

Part 7 of A History of Ireland

The Easter Rising.

During the war, the authorities had allowed the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army to parade in uniform through the streets of Dublin, preferring to treat them as a joke, rather than moving against them. Until about twelve o’clock on Easter Monday, 1916 this is how most people – even the people of Dublin – saw them. During the war, Irish nationalists had flocked to the British cause and had fought and been slaughtered on the battlefields of Europe side by side with Ulster Unionists. The first Irishmen to win the VC had been welcomed home as heroes to cheering crowds and a tumultuous welcome. Far more Irishmen died in that conflict than in all the fighting over Irish independence put together. However, militant Irish Nationalism was not dead.

Patrick Pearse

A small group, including Patrick Pearse, who had led the Irish Volunteer breakaway, had been meeting in the tobacconist shop in Dublin owned by that old Fenian, Tom Clarke. They were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood which, moribund though it had become, was being revived by, amongst others, Sean MacDermott, from Belfast. The Transport Union’s Irish Citizen’s Army, under Connolly, had also kept the independence tradition alive and it was tension between the IRB and the ICA which finally decided the breakaway Volunteers to act and to rise in arms in Easter 1916.

The general plan was for a small group to take over strategic buildings which commanded views of routes into the city or overlooked barracks, and for the main group to occupy the General Post Office building in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) to be used as a headquarters.  The Rising was to take place under cover of one of the regular manoeuvres.  It would then be extended to other parts of the country, and, to this end, a shipment of 20,000 rifles from Germany had been organised by Casement.

Casement, travelling in a German submarine, landed at Banna Strand in County Kerry and was immediately arrested. The British, having cracked the German naval code, also intercepted the arms ship, which was scuttled by her crew. The arrest of Casement and the loss of these arms, and the realisation that the British had wind of the planned rising, led Eoin MacNeill, leader of the Volunteers, to try to stop the Rising by placing advertisements in the Sunday Independent announcing the postponement of the planned ‘manoeuvres’. This, though leading to confusion amongst the conspirators, ultimately worked in their favour. The British, having become alarmed at the prospect of an armed insurrection by groups they had come to regard as something of a joke, had decided on the previous Thursday to disarm the Volunteers and the ICA, and to arrest the leaders. It was the news that Casement had been captured and that the planned manoeuvres had been cancelled that led them to conclude that such a rising would be impossible anyway and the move against the armed groups never took place. It would take place on Easter Monday.

The initial take-over of the strategic buildings was easy. The authorities were caught off their guard, and in fact many of them, and the troops, were at the Fairyhouse racecourse for the Bank Holiday races. One group of fifty, led by George Plunkett, went by tram – and paid full fares, though they directed the driver to go to Dublin at gun-point. Another man, Michael O’Rahilly, drove in his De Dion Boutin motor car. Having occupied the GPO building, Patrick Pearse read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic:

In the name of God and the dead of generations from which she receives her tradition of nationhood Ireland through us summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

A group of about 1000 armed men (far less that initially planned) now occupied strategic positions in Dublin, including the GPO and Dublin Castle, and anarchy quickly broke out. Crowds of poor people ransacked Clearys, a shop in central Dublin, and looted it. Of the 2,500 troops garrisoning Dublin, only 400 were immediately available. Clearly, an immediate assault was out of the question and reinforcements had to be brought from the mainland. The plan was to establish a cordon round Dublin and then to move in through the suburbs to the centre. At that stage, the British had no real idea how many armed men they were dealing with. It did not all go according to plan.

Seventeen men in houses at Mount Street Bridge held out for 6 hours and killed or wounded 350 men of the Sherwood Foresters. Troops had to pass through streets where snipers were lurking and to get past makeshift barriers erected by the populace. In one incident, the South Staffs Regiment killed twelve civilians in North King Street. No rebels were killed in the GPO during the entire week of the Rising, only when evacuating it in the final withdrawal. At the end of the Rising, 300 civilians, 60 rebels and 130 British troops were dead. The rebel leadership was either dead or interred in Britain.

Sackville Street, Dublin
After the Easter Rising

The Rising had not been popular in Dublin. The rebels had actually been booed and jeered at by crowds as they were led to the quay and interment in Britain, but the actions of the British over then next few days turned the leaders into Irish heroes and martyrs to Irish Freedom. Seven of the leaders (even some who had played only an insignificant part in it) were shot within a few days. These were Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Thomas McDonagh, Willie Pearse (apparently for being Patrick’s brother), Joseph Plunkett, Edward Daly and Michael O’Hanrahan. On 8 May, Cornelius Colbert, Michael Mallin, Eamon Ceannt and Sean Huston were also shot, as was Thomas Kent a day later. Sean MacDermott and James Connolly were the last to be executed on 12 May. These executions did more to win Irish people to the rebel cause than had the Rising itself.

Patrick Pearse had earlier predicted that Ireland needed a blood sacrifice to purify it and even drew the analogy with Christ. It is probably no coincidence that the Rising was planned for Easter. Ireland now had that blood sacrifice, provided courtesy of the British.

Michael Collins

Michael Collins had taken part in the Easter Rising of 1916 and had been interred, along with the rest of the rebels, in Frongoch, Wales. There he organised the members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, built up contacts from all over Ireland, and obtained information about sympathetic members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Meanwhile the members of the Volunteers who had remained at large had developed a network through branches of the Gaelic League. When, as a goodwill gesture at Christmas 1916, Britain released those interred without trial, Collins had a ready-made network of undercover activists waiting for him.

The charismatic Collins, together with non-militant republicans such as Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein, put up a candidate at the by-election at Roscommon in February 1917. The candidate was the father of the executed Joseph Plunkett, and he won with an astonishingly large majority, winning more than twice as many votes as Redmond’s Parliamentary Party candidate. In May that year, they put up a candidate who was still in prison, in the Longford by-election, and again won against the Parliamentary Party. These victories swayed Irish opinion still further behind the cause so that, on the release of the rest of the internees in July 1917, Dubliners greeted them with a hero’s welcome. Amongst those released was Eamon de Valera.

Eamon de Valera

De Valera stood in the third by-election that year in East Clare and returned more than double the number of votes of the Parliamentary Party candidate. The new movement was banded together under the name of Sinn Fein under de Valera’s leadership. Sinn Fein had a rather vague set of aims that included an independent sovereign republic but lacked any real idea of how this would be achieved. Some hoped for American support, especially from the International Peace Conference which was to follow the Great War. Others hoped American public opinion would bring pressure to bear on the British government. Michael Collins favoured armed rebellion.

In the General Election which followed the Great War in 1919, the first in eight years in the United Kingdom, Sinn Fein won three quarters of the Irish seats, virtually annihilating the old Parliamentary Party. Amongst those elected was Constance Markiewicz, the first woman to be elected in a United Kingdom election. Those elected boycotted the Westminster parliament and instead met at Dail Eireann in Dublin and declared a sovereign independent Irish Republic. To the British, this was a meaningless gesture to be ignored.

Black and Tans

Collins then began to organise armed resistance to British rule and Britain responded by fighting back. The Royal Irish Constabulary was hurriedly reinforced with English recruits who, through a lack of suitable uniforms wore a mixture of army and police uniforms, earning them the name ‘Black and Tans’. These, together with special auxiliary police, quickly achieved what Collins had hoped for. They acted like an occupation force and alienated moderate Irish opinion still further with their tactics. By contrast, Collins’ forces, which had now adopted the name Irish Republican Army, were increasingly seen as a liberation army, fighting the occupiers.

Gaelic Footballs at Croke Park,
21 November 1922

By late 1920, Sinn Fein’s campaign had become a guerrilla was between two opposing groups of equally ruthless men. The ‘Tans’ which had become the joint name of the Black and Tans and the auxiliaries, used tactics which included burning houses of suspects and sympathisers, burning co-operative dairies to hit at people through their jobs, and shooting IRA men in reprisal for their own losses, were acting quite outside the law. The eye of the British was seemingly looking the other way. In one incident a platoon of twenty-five Tans attacked and burned Cork City centre and looted shops and bars. They even attacked the fire-fighters who attempted to put out the fires. On Sunday 21 November, ‘Bloody Sunday’ as it was to become known, the Tans opened fire with machine guns on the crowd and players at a football match between Dublin and Tipperary in Croke Park, Dublin, killing twelve. The same day, two IRA members and a Sinn Fein supporter were murdered by Tans in the guardroom of Dublin Castle, where they were being held. Events such as this were proving to be an embarrassment to Britain and Liberal opinion began looking for a way out.

Customs House, Dublin
25 May 1921

Then, late in May 1921, the IRA launched its most daring attack on the Custom House in Dublin. The Custom House was an important administrative centre for Britain and the IRA attack was a disaster. The force of 120 men became surrounded and surrendered. The Dublin Brigade was now seriously depleted. The IRA was also quickly running out of ammunition. The time had come tor talking. On 9 July 1921, de Valera and other Sinn Fein representatives met British representatives. A truce was signed two days later. In London, on 6 December 1921, the ‘Anglo-Irish Treaty’ was signed and the Irish Free State came into being. The Free State was to have the same Dominion status as Canada. It was to remain in the Commonwealth and its armed forces and elected Members of the Irish Parliament would swear an oath of loyalty to the King. In all other respects, Ireland was an independent nation. British rule in 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties had effectively ended after 750 years.

Civil War

The Anglo-Irish Treaty left the question of Ulster unresolved. The talks that led to it were certainly talks between the representatives of Britain and the representatives of Ireland. There had been no explicit or implicit exclusion of Ulster, though no Ulster representatives as such had attended. Additionally, the delegates had been specifically invited to London to define how best the ‘national aspirations of Ireland’ could be achieved. The Treaty gave sovereign powers over the whole island to the signatories and these powers were suspended for one month in the six counties of Londonderry, Antrim, Down, Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh. Since they could be so suspended, they must have existed in the first instance. The six counties could, at the end of the month, opt out of the Irish Free State if they so wished but the Treaty had accepted Irish nationalist claims for Ireland to be one country.

The question of acceptance of the provisions of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, with its obligation of an oath of loyalty to the King of the United Kingdom and to remain inside the Commonwealth, as well as the unresolved issue of whether the Treaty covered all 32 counties, divided the nationalist movement in the south. Some members of the IRA had joined the new Free State army, while others had refused to recognise a treaty what they saw as a sell-out and a negation of all they has worked for. They had remains aloof, armed and organised. They were also given a political respectability by de Valera’s opposition to the treaty.

De Valera had sent the negotiators to London as his plenipotentiaries with powers to negotiate on his behalf but he has also instructed them not to sign a final settlement without his agreement. Lloyd George had managed to give the final night of negotiations an atmosphere of urgency and, because telephone communications were not a straightforward matter in those days, the delegation, including Collins, allowed themselves to be rushed into signing the final agreement without de Valera’s say so. De Valera was thus able to dissociate himself from the treaty, and Collins, who had signed it, felt obliged to defend it.

Events came to a head when the British government threatened to abrogate the Treaty unless Collins moved against the anti-Treaty factions whom they had held responsible for the assassination of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, in London on 22 June 1922. Wilson was security advisor to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, and was a die-hard Unionist. Collins gave a group of anti-Treaty IRA men occupying the Four Courts building just 20 minutes to surrender or he would move against them. They refused and other anti-Treaty men came into the two-day siege and occupied buildings in O’Connell Street.

Civil War Had Begun.

A week later part of O’Connell Street was in ruins and the Civil War had begun. Michael Collins had been the mastermind behind the IRA who had fought the hated Tans, the revolutionary and darling of the Nationalists and the man for whom many would gladly have laid down their life. He was now seen by many as the man who was willing to move against the republicans of Cork and Dublin but who let the Unionists of Belfast alone; a traitor to the Irish Republican cause. At about 8 p.m. on 22 August 1922, he was shot through the head and killed in an ambush at Bealnamblath between Macroom and Bandon near Cork, his home town, just a week after the death from a heart attack of Arthur Griffith.

Robert Erskine Childers

The anit-Treaty Republicans moved the civil war to a guerrilla campaign and the new leadership of the Free State, under William Cosgrave, invoked an Emergency Powers Bill which declared that any Republican taken in arms would be shot. Amongst the seventy-seven men so shot was Erskine Childers. The IRA retaliated by declaring that any member of the Dail who had voted for the Emergency Powers Act, would also be shot on sight. De Valera, after the death by firing squad of the seventy-seventh IRA member issued an order to ‘dump arms’. The ‘official’ IRA resistance to the Free State had effectively ended and the Civil War was over. De Valera declared that ‘other means must be sought to safeguard the nation’s right’. He was to devote the rest of his life to the cause of democracy and the political process.

From Free State to Republic

The legacy of the Civil War was to last for a generation or more. The IRA had fought for a republic and a united Ireland. They got neither. The politicians had taken over and the Irish people, tired of war and killing, were offered an alternative method of achieving these goals in the person of Eamon de Valera. The majority of the people had accepted the Free State and the IRA’s principle enemy became its own irrelevance. Republicans divided into two groups, at first closely linked but eventually to become enemies.

The IRA struggled to find a new relevance but resisted attempts to convert it to a more socially relevant organisation as a distraction from its real aim; the creation of a united Irish republic. De Valera’s group had more success however. He continued with the time-honoured method of standing for the Dail but refusing to take the oath of loyalty to King George V. In 1926, de Valera had reorganised his group, formerly known as Sin Fein, into the Fianna Fail (Warriors of Ireland) party. In 1927, Fianna Fail won forty-one seats against the government party’s forty-seven. His supporters attended to Dail but again refused to take the oath and were locked out of the chamber.

Following the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs, by IRA men acting on their own initiative, the Cosgrave government introduced an Electoral Amendment Bill which required candidates to swear beforehand to take the loyalty oath if elected. De Valera and his supporters again went to the Dail and again refused to take the oath. But this time, after removing the Bible from alongside the book in which those taking the oath had to write their name, and loudly declaring that he would not take the Oath of Loyalty, he wrote his name anyway. The Clerk decided that the correct formalities had been carried out, and he and his supporters took their seats. Some supporters later admitted that they had carried arms, being fearful that they might have to fight for their right to take their seats. The side which had lost the Civil War had won the peace.

Paradoxically, this gave the IRA a new significance as the extra-parliamentary wing of an ‘only just constitutional’ opposition to a government that was losing popularity. Both the IRA and Fianna Fail had the same objective after all; the only difference being the strategy they employed. Both still pursued the Holy Grail of a united Irish republic and the overthrow of the Free State Constitution.

The General Election of February 1932 saw Fianna Fail and the IRA work in close co-operation and Fianna Fail secured a narrow victory. In 1933, they were returned with even more seats and a comfortable majority with the support of the Labour party.  Fianna Fail remains in power for a further sixteen years during which the Constitution of the Free State was done away with and Ireland became a republic in all but name. The transfer of power had been surprisingly peaceful as the losers in the Civil War replaced the victors. Ireland had become a parliamentary democracy in the modern sense of the word. IRA men were offered commissions in the army and those who had fought in the Civil War were awarded pensions. Other IRA men were formed into an auxiliary police force specifically to counter the threat to public order of a pro-Mussolini party formed by a former Commander of the Civil Guard, Eoin Duffy. The threat petered out within a few years, however.

With Fianna Fail in government, the IRA began again to assert its independence and continued parading and drilling with arms in public. In response to a request from de Valera for them to disarm they refused and instead demanded an assurance from him that he would turn the Free State into a republic within five years. In June 1936, the IRA was declared an illegal organisation following the murder of three civilians. The movement then fragmented into diverging groups. A radical left group left it over its lack of social policies and the militants divided into factions which favoured an attack on the North and attacks on England. The latter group was responsible for a series of bomb attacks in England, killing five people in Coventry in 1939. This group also collaborated with Nazi Germany.

In 1937, de Valera introduced a new Constitution, changing the name of the state to Eire and claiming sovereignty over the whole island. It also recognised the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church as the religion of ‘the great majority’ of the population. In fact, this Article was de Valera’s response to insistence by the Church that it be established as the official church of the state; something he opposed.

This new constitution made Eire a republic in all but name. The only reason for not including the term ‘Republic’ in the name was that it was adjudged that to do so would make an eventual resolution of the Northern Ireland problem that much harder. This new constitution was one element in de Valera’s attempt to give Ireland a distinct identity; the other was to be neutrality in WWII.

The extent to which he achieved this can be seen in the response he gave to Churchill and the reception this got in Eire afterwards. Churchill had gone on radio and said:

...had it not been for loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have come to – we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish for ever from this earth. However with restraint and poise with which I say history will find few parallels His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural. And we left Mr de Valera’s government to frolic with German and later the Japanese representatives to their hearts content

De Valera’s reply was swift and measured. He said:

I know the kind of answer I am expected to make. I know the answer that first springs to the lips of every man of Irish blood who first heard or read that speech... I know the reply I would have given a quarter of a century ago. But I have deliberately decided that this is not the reply I shall make tonight...

He then went on to excuse Churchill’s remarks as being in the full flush of victory.

... No such excuse could be made for me in the quieter atmosphere... It seems strange to me that Mr Churchill does not see that this, if it be accepted, would mean that when Britain’s necessity becomes sufficiently great, other people’s rights were not to count. It is quite true that the other great powers believe in the same code... That is precisely why we have the disastrous succession of wars... Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or for two years, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliation, was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning to consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul.

So de Valera summed up Irish history and voiced the aspirations of free peoples everywhere. He was given a rapturous greeting as he came from the radio studio and received a standing ovation in the Dail the following afternoon. It was the applause of people who understood what it really was to be a citizen of an independent Ireland.

A History of Ireland - 8. The Northern State

Part 8 of a History of Ireland

Ulster Volunteers

Northern Ireland and Statehood.

By 1911, Ulster Protestants had recognised that they could not continue to oppose Home Rule for the rest of Ireland but this realisation made them all the more determined to defend Ulster against inclusion in a Catholic-dominated independent state.

The Ulster Defence Force was formed and armed specifically to fight this, to Protestants, unthinkable prospect. If Ulster Protestants had anything to be proud of it was their history in defending the faith against Catholicism and defending their way of life.

A History of Ireland - 6. Orange Orders & Opposition

Part 5 of A History of Ireland

The Orange Orders and Protestant Opposition.

Flag of the Orange Order

The Orange Society had been founded along masonic lines in 1795 from a secret society called the Peep O’Day Boys.  This society has used terror tactics to drive Catholics from their homes.  The usual method involved pasting notices to their doors with the simple message ‘To Hell – or Connaught’, and knee-capping any who failed to obey the instruction.  The authority’s attitude towards them had been ambivalent, to say the least.  Alarmed at the Presbyterian-led United Irishmen movement, with its objective of rebellion and de-secularisation of Irish people, the British authorities had quickly seen the advantages of an Ireland divided along sectarian lines, especially with a Protestant population far more broadly sympathetic to, and even dependent on, British rule of Ireland.

This ambivalent attitude continued for most of the nineteenth century.  The Orange Society had officially been banned inn1830 when it was implicated in a plot to replace William IV with the Duke of Cambridge.  It was re-established under the respectable leadership of the Earl of Enniskillen in the 1840s, in response to O’Connell’s campaign for repeal of the Act of Union.  A Royal Commission, investigating sectarian riots in Belfast, in which the Orange Orders has played a leading role, commented:

“... the uneducated and unrefined, who act from feeling and impulse, and not from reflection, cannot be expected to restrain the passions excited by the lessons of their own dominancy and superiority over their fellow subjects whom they look upon as conquered foes”.

Any threat to the Protestant Supremacy in Ulster was greeted with belligerent defiance.  In response to the disestablishment of the Protestant Church in 1868, one Presbyterian minster said:

“We will fight as men alone can fight with the Bible in one had and the sword in the other ... and this will be our dying cry, echoed and re-echoed from Earth to Heaven and from one end of Ulster to the other; ‘No Popery, no Surrender!’”.

Clearly, the spirit of the Seige of Londonderry in 1688 still lived on in Ulster’s Protestant community, 180 years later.

Lord Randolph Churchill

Before the Home Rule Bill of 1886 there has been threats of civil war from Ulster Protestants with the formation of a ‘Loyal and Patriotic Union’ and newspaper advertisements asking for rifles and men. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, declared Lord Randolph Churchill in  an extraordinary abandonment of the principle of Law and Order within a supposedly democratic parliamentary party.  Support for treason and rebellion became  Tory Party policy; the will of the government would be resisted, with force of arms if necessary.  When the Home Rule Bill was defeated in the Commons, there were celebratory riots in Belfast in which people were killed.

With the return of a Liberal Government in 1892 with a large enough majority to carry a Home Rule Bill, preparations for the fight became more intense and thorough.  A convention in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast attracted 12,000 delegates and here, to an audience of tenant farmers and businessmen, the Chairman, the Duke of Abercorn, declared “We Will Not Have Home Rule!”  In parliament, the Duke of Londonderry said Ulster Protestants would be justified in shedding blood to resist the Catholic yoke.

Meanwhile, politics of Irish nationalism was in the doldrums.  The Irish National Party of Parnell had degenerated into squabbling factions while waiting for the time when it would again hold the balance of power – it would never be strong enough to command a majority in the Commons.  Nationalists, disillusioned with progress on the political front, looked for other outlets of nationalist sentiment.  They found this in the fast-dying Irish language and with it, Gaelic folklore and legends.  A ‘Gaelic League was formed in 1893.

Gaelic League Advertisement
Gaelic Journal 1894

The Gaelic League specifically dissociated itself from politics.  Everything uniquely Irish was encourages to distinguish Irishness from Englishness to resist ‘this awful idea of complete Anglicisation’.  A Gaelic Athletic Association was meanwhile promoting Irish games.  In a move that pre-empted the Black Consciousness movement of America in thw 1960s, Irish Consciousness was deliberately promoted.  Its middle and lower middle-class supporters found a new identity in being Irish and proud of it.  It was, however, despite its official stance of being non-political, heavily influenced by a small group of political radicals who well understood the political potential of such a movement.

A new breed of politically conscious Irish was developing with a proud tradition of Irish Gaelic culture and a nationalism born of Gaelic history.  The Irish Republican Brotherhood was resurrected, inspired, in part, by old Fenians like Tome Clarke, who, after seventeen years in British prisons, ran a tobacconist shop in Dublin.

Another attempt to capture the political impetus of the new nationalism was made by a journalist, Arthur Griffith through two newspapers, The United Irishman and Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone).  Inspired by Hungarian nationalist who had withdrawn from the Viennese Parliament, he suggested Irish people should vote for MPs who would refuse to take their seats in Westminster but who would instead sit in an Irish Parliament in Dublin.  Sinn  Fein was unable to garner enough support to seriously challenge the Irish National Party in the only by-election it ever contested.  The National Party still maintained its hold on power because parliament in fact had been enacting further land reforms, following Gladstone’s Land Act.  Land Purchase Acts were enabling Irish Tenants to buy, with low-interest mortgages, the land they farmed.  In 1920, eleven million acres of land had changed hands and the purchase of a further two million acres was being negotiated, this time backed by compulsory purchase orders.  This was by far the greater part of the island of Ireland.

1913 Transport Union Strike, Dublin

Political discontent now moved to the Dublin proletariat who lived in some of the worst slums in Europe.  A major strike, the first of its kind in Ireland, occurred in Dublin in 1913.  It became a test of strength between the employer, Walters J. Murphy, and the Irish Transport Union.  The strike lasted for six months and resulted in a return to work without gain.  However, the Union had not been broken.  The Irish urban proletariat was becoming politicised.  They identified with the new nationalism rather than the Parliamentary Nationalist Party because most of the slum owners were in fact orthodox supporters of that party and Murphy himself was a stalwart of the Home Rule movement.  Clearly, the Parliamentary Nationalist party was not representing the interests of working people.  Larkin and Connolly, the founders of the Irish Transport Union, also formed the armed and uniformed workers’ Irish Citizen Army for self-defence.

The two 1910 elections had almost identical results.  The Irish Nationalists had 82 seats and again held the balance of power between the Liberals and the Conservatives, who had been playing the Orange card for all it was worth, yet they showed willingness to compromise that alienated the new nationalists.  The elections of 1910 had been fought on the issue of the House of Lord’s veto on Commons bills and this had bee promptly abolished by the Parliament Act of 1911, so there was now no real reason why the Commons should not pass a Home Rule Bill.  It was this very strength of the Home Rule movement that meant that Ulster Protestant Opposition to Home Rule would be more determined than ever.

Sir Edward Carson

Ulster’s Protestants had been preparing for this since 1905, when they had formed the Ulster Unionist Council.  It Had a formidable leader in the person of Sir Edward Carson, MP for Dublin University.  At a rally of 50,000 Orangemen at Craigavon, near Belfast, he said that, if the Home Rule Bill were to be passed they must prepare to become the government of the Protestant province of Ulster. 

Two days before the Bill’s introduction in the Commons, 100,000 Orangemen and Unionists marched past a saluting platform on which stood the English Conservative Party leader, Bonar Law, who told them, “There will not be wanting help from across the Channel when the hour of battle comes”.  He said later, in 1912, at a rally at Blenheim in England, “There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities ... I can imagine no strength of resistance to which Ulster will go, in which I shall not support them”.  Conservative Party support for armed insurrection by Ulster Protestants against a democratically elected government was to be total and unconditional. Churchill’s Orange card was to prove to be the trump card in the pack.  The Conservative Party was to use Protestant Supremacy and Catholic repression, wrapped up in jingoistic English nationalism and back if necessary by force of arms as the route to the political power they felt was their birth-right.

The third Home Rule Bill was intended to set up an all-Ireland parliament responsible for Irish domestic matters but excluded from anything to do with the Crown, war, the armed forces, international relations, most taxation and even, for six years, the Royal Irish Constabulary.  Never the less, on the bill passing its final stage in January 1913, there was a great deal of rejoicing in Ireland and it was hailed as a great national victory.

Signing the 'Solemn League and Covenant'.

In Ulster, it was greeted differently.  On 28 September 1913, a quarter of a million Ulstermen signed a ‘Solemn League and Covenant’, and a quarter of a million women signed a similar document, pledging to resist Home Rule.  Carson demanded in the Commons that the six counties of Derry, Antrim, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armargh be excluded from the Home Rule Bill’s provisions.  In the face of increased Unionist militancy, including the setting up of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which was organised through the Orange Lodges, Asquith’s nerve began to go.  He began to discuss the exclusion of at least some of the six counties from the Bill in secret talks with Bonar Law.  Meanwhile the UVF had appointed a retired Indian Army officer with close links to the Conservative Party, to command it.  The Irish Nationalist Party started to become alarmed.  Suddenly their hold on power as holders of the balance between the Liberals and the Conservatives was disappearing as these two parties prepared to compromise over the exclusion of the six  counties.

Nationalists in the south began to organise in response to the UVF in the north.  On the initiative of the former Irish Republican Brotherhood members, they formed the Irish Volunteers.  Never the less, the UVF had stolen a march on the Irish Volunteers, and they were heavily armed.  They had successfully smuggled in 24,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition and had distributed it across Ulster, so that they now had 40,000 men at arms.  They also had formed the ‘Ulster Provisional Government’ ready to take over at a moment’s notice.  The government also knew it could not rely on the loyalty of the army if called on to enforce the Home Rule Bill in Ulster.  In one instance, when asked outright if they would be prepared to move against the UVF, 60 officers, including their commander, at the Curragh Camp replied that they would rather be dismissed.  The Chief of the Imperial Staff even provided a written assurance that troops under his command could be relied on not to move against the UVF.  A mutiny in the army, going right to the top, would be the most likely outcome of such an attempt.

Sir Roger Casement

Meanwhile the Irish Volunteers had also been arming themselves.  Aide by Sir Roger Casement and Erskine Childers who organised the purchase of rifles from Germany, which was then preparing for WWI, and had them landed at Howth near Dublin.  The reaction of the authorities to this landing was in stark contrast  to their reaction to the Ulster landing.  An unsuccessful attempt to intercept them was made by a detachment of the King’s Own Scottish Borderer’s Regiment.  Later the same day the same regiment fired on a crowd at Batchelor’s Walk on the Liffey, killing three and wounding a further thirty-eight.

Redmont, then leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, has been ready, with the reluctant support of his followers, to compromise over Ulster, allowing counties to be excluded indefinitely from the Home Rule Bill’s provisions.  The killings ay Batchelor’s Walk made that compromise untenable, but another event in Europe was to intervene.  Germany attacked France and the Great War has begun.  Carson and Bonar Law agreed not to press for an amendment to the Bill and confined their opposition to the gesture of walking out of the House.  Asquith and Redmont agreed to a suspension of the Home Rule Bill for twelve months or until the conflict in Europe was over.  An Amending Bill, dealing with Ulster, would then be introduced.  Since the war was universally expected to be over with quickly, Redmont was, in effect, agreeing to a twelve-month postponement of the Home Rule Bill.  Two weeks after the start if the war, he King signed the Home Rule Bill, to be introduced at the end of hostilities.  It lay on the statute books, but was never enacted.

Redmont calculating that by so doing he would earn the right to have the Home Rule Bill passed without amendment, offered the Irish Volunteers to the British Army.  This split the movement and led to the secession of 13,000 volunteers who continued to call themselves the Irish Volunteers, while the remaining 167,000 became the National Volunteers.  This gesture did nothing to change the determination of the Ulster Unionists however, and in May 1915, Carson joined Asquith’s Cabinet.

A History of Ireland - 5. Fenians, Parnell & Home Rule

Part 5 of A History of Ireland

William Smith O'Brien

Fenians.

The origin of the Fenian movement, like the United Irishmen before it, seems unlikely today. One of its leading founders was again an Ulster Presbyterian, by the name of John Mitchell. He founded a newspaper, The United Irishman, in which he advocated a common nationality for all Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic, and openly preached republicanism and rebellion. On his arrest, the leadership of the movement was taken up by an upper-class Protestant, William Smith O’Brien who had been a Westminster MP for many years. In many ways, O’Brien was the archetypal Irish Englishman. He spoke with an English upper-class accent and had been educated at Harrow, yet he, like Hugh O’Neill, was conscious of the fact that he could trace his origins back to the ancient High Kings of Ireland. O’Brien was a descendent of Brian Boru.

In 1848, the worst year of the famine, O’Brien had a warrant out for his arrest. An attempt to execute it by a party of the Irish constabulary at Ballingary, was met with barricades and some forty people, some armed. The police retreated to a nearby house to consider their options and were followed there by the crowd. The owner, a widow named MacCormack, was out at the time but her five children were in. The police entered the house and smashed up the furniture to use as makeshift barricades and a state of siege ensued. The police fired a volley and the besiegers took cover behind walls. During the siege, more shots were fired. Two of the besiegers were killer and several more were wounded. The siege was eventually lifted, some two hours later by the arrival of more police. This was the so-called Rising of 1848. It is also known as ‘the battle of the Widow MacCormack’s cabbage garden’.

James Setephens

One of O’Brien’s lieutenants at Ballingary was James Stephens, an egotistical Kilkenny Protestant. He escaped and went to France where his contacts with the radical left gave him new ideas for solving the problem of Ireland – a people’s revolution. On St. Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1858, he and a few others swore an oath:

... in the presence of God, to renounce all allegiance to the Queen of England, and to take up arms and fight at a moment’s warning to make Ireland an Independent Democratic Republic, and to yield implicit obedience to the commanders and superiors of this secret society...

This society was to become the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Soon after its formation, Stephens visited America where, together with John O’Mahony, he helped found the Fenian Brotherhood, named after a band of mythological Gaelic warriors. It was to be an American counterpart of the IRB, with the intention of securing material support for the IRB from embittered émigré Irish population; the 1,500,000 who had recently fled the Potato Famine. Stephens’ relationship with the Fenian Brotherhood was far from warm however, and he showed frustration at the lack of real material support in the quantities he had hoped for, with the words:

Irish tinsel patriots [with their] speeches of bayonets, gala days and jolly nights, banners and sashes, bunkum and filibustering, responding in glowing language to glowing toasts on Irish Independence over beakers of fizzing champagne

For all Stepehns’ efforts, his arrest and romantically daring escape from Richmond Jail, aided by two warders who were members of the brotherhood, the Fenian Rising was a failure. He was deposed in 1866 to be replaced by the American Civil War veteran ‘Colonel’ Kelly, with effective military command under the control of the French soldier of fortune, Cluseret. One Rising, planned for 11 February 1867, was called off at the last minute when the English authorities were ready for an attack on Chester Castle, where it was hoped a large number of arms were stored. A new Rising, planned for 5 March 1867 was averted when a self-appointed ‘General’ Massey, another American civil war veteran, was arrested the day before at Limmerick Junction, as he got off a train. He turned Queen’s evidence, and Cluseret promptly packed his bags and left for France.

The 'Manchester Martyrs'
Allen, Larkin and O'Brien

Almost as an afterthought of history, the Fenian movement gave Irish nationalism its symbolic martyrs. Kelly, and a Captain Deasy from Cork, were arrested in Manchester almost by chance, on a charge of loitering. During their transfer from Bell Vue prison the polce van was stopped and surrounded by about thirty Fenians who tried to batter the doors open. Inside the van was Police Sargent Brett. A shot was fired at the grill in the door. Whether this was deliberately to shoot Sargent Brett or an attempt to open the door is not known, as the perpetrator was never caught. Sargent Brett, however, was fatally wounded and three of those present, Allen, Larkin and O’Brien were later arrested and hanged though none of them had fired the shot. They were convicted because they were present and had ‘common purpose’. They have entered Irish mythology as the Manchester Martyrs.

Parnell.

Charles Stewart Parnell

Charles Stewart Parnell dominated British parliamentary life in the 1880a. It was Parnell, and Irish Protestant landlord, who brought about one of the great British social reforms – the relationship between landlord and tenant in Ireland. He also gave the demand for Irish national independence under the Crown an effectiveness never before achieved.  His rise to prominence by the age of forty, in just over ten years of active politics, had been meteoric. His fall was even faster. He was brought down overnight by sexual scandal. He had one central theme to his politics. He had asked, in his maiden speech in 1875:

Why should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragments of England...? Ireland is not a geographical fragment but a nation

In 1879 it began to become clear the Ireland was on the edge of another great famine on the scale of 1844-49. American wheat was flooding the European markets and farm prices were dropping, making it difficult for the small tenant farmers to pay rents. Additionally, disastrous weather between 1877 and 1879 had caused the potato crop to fail again. In those same years the number of evictions had quadrupled. In fact, famine was only averted by massive charitable distribution of food on a scale far larger than during the 1840s. It was this that had brought a Fenian named Michael Davitt to the realisation that what the Irish needed, in addition to political theory and nationalism, was practical help in surviving. A good year in Ireland was one in which you got through the winter without too much suffering. Davitt recruited the young MP, Parnell, to the cause of land reform. At a meeting of tenant farmers in Westport in 1879, Parnell said:

A fair rent is a rent the tenant can reasonably afford to pay according to the times, but in bad times a tenant cannot be expected to pay as much as he did in good times ... Now, what must we do in order to induce the landlord to see the position? You must show them that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed as your fathers were dispossessed in 1847 ... I hope that on those properties where the rents are out of all proportion to the times a reduction may be made and that immediately. If not, you must help yourselves, and public opinion of the world will stand by you, and support you in your struggle to defend your homesteads.




Parnell's Birthplace, Avondale House, Wicklow

These sentiments and Parnell’s campaign seem, at first sight, at odds with his background. He was the son of Irish Protestants who owned a 5,000 acre estate in County Wicklow. His social circle included other local prosperous Protestants, many of whom he was related to. However, two major political philosophies had converged on Parnell.

• His father’s family was from the older generation of Nationalist tradition of Irish Independence, represented by the United Irishmen, which had opposed the Union. His great grandfather has been one of the Union’s strongest opponents and Parnell’s country home displayed the colours of one of the Volunteer regiments.
• His mother was American, and Americans were then closer to their own war of independence and anti-English sentiments were still strong. Her grandfather had been a famous American admiral who has taken part in the war of 1812.

So, as a rebel, with strong traditions of Republican Nationalism, and an inherited antipathy to the English, Parnell entered the Westminster parliament.

The Land League, with Parnell as its president, and with its top officials all former Fenians, now had representation at Westminster in the form of an articulate and radical MP who had no truck with the political establishment, and who, it appears, delighted in taunting the Government  at Question Time. It had brought the secret agrarian societies into mainstream politics in a way that neither the United Irishmen nor the Fenians had previously managed. Davitt has identified their major political concern and had shown them a way to address it. The tenant farmer and landless agricultural labourers of Ireland, the descendants of the disposed Gaels had entered politics.

The Land League became increasingly violent as it enforced its rules no only on landlords, but on tenants too. Though the parliamentary Party officially denounced violence, this was often done ambiguously. Joseph Biggar, MP for Cavan, for instance, condemned the shooting of landlords because ‘the assailant frequently missed and hit someone else’. Parnell was scrupulous in dissociating himself from violence in the ‘Land War’ as it became known, and he was always careful to deprecate violence. Possibly as an alternative to violence, Parnell introduced alternative methods of intimidation, which was to become known as ‘boycott’ after the land agent against whom it was first used. At an outdoor meeting at Ennis in 1880, he asked:

What do you do with a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted?  Now I think I heard somebody say “Shoot him” – but I wish to point out a very much better way, a more Christian and charitable way ... You must show what you think of him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the street of the town, you must show him at the shop counter ... even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of mortal Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.

Parnell thus brought the question of land in Ireland to the forefront of the English political scene. Prime Minister Gladstone, though broadly sympathetic to the Irish, was determined that law and order should be restored as a precondition of any reforms and introduced the Coercion Bill to bring this about. The Coercion Bill gave the police and the military special powers and suspended some civil liberties and was fought by Parnell and his followers in the House. At one point, they forced the House into a 41-Hour continuous sitting which had to be suspended by the Speaker. Parnell and thirty-five of his MPs were suspended and escorted from the House by the sergeant-at-arms.


Gladstone

Though Gladstone introduced land reform which gave the Land League much of what they had campaigned for, Parnell was by then a hostage to the extremists within the movement. The reforms gave tenants security provided they paid their rents and made it legal for them to sell their tenancies, together with any improvements. It also set up Land Courts and rent tribunals. The Land League’s objectives however was a complete abolition of landlords and the transfer of land to the tenants, so the reforms, welcome thought they were, did not go nearly far enough. Parnell knew he could not afford to compromise and so antagonise his Fenian supporters, especially those American Fenians upon whom the League depended for finance and who had ultimately nationalist aims. Though he later denied it, he is reputed to have said:

When we have undermined English misgovernment we have paved the way for Ireland to take her place amongst the nations of the earth. And let is not forget that this is the ultimate goal at which all we Irishmen aim... None of us, whether we are in America or Ireland, or wherever we may be, will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.

Matters were rapidly coming to a head between Parnell and Gladstone when Gladstone attacked Parnell with the following:

If there is still to be fought in Ireland a final conflict between law on the one side and sheer lawlessness on the other then I say, gentlemen, without hesitation, the resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted.

To which Parnell replied:

It is a good thing that this masquerading knight-errant, this pretending champion of the rights of every other nation except those of the Irish nation, should be obliged to throw off the mask today, and to stand revealed as the man who, by his own utterances, is prepared to carry fire and sword into your homesteads, unless you humbly abase yourselves before him and before the landlords of the country.

Recreation Time for the Land League
in Kilmainham Jail

Gladstone then committed what might be seen as a major folly. He had Parnell arrested and confined in some comfort in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin. It made a martyr of Parnell and, at the same time, absolved him of blame for the increasing violence of the Land League. The Land Act was actually working rather well and the League was becoming out of touch with the mood of their supporters amongst the tenant farmers whom they professed to support. Parnell how began to turn his mind to the question of a Dublin parliament in an Ireland united to England only through the Crown. However, personal matters were to intervene which would bring about a crisis in the Home Rule Party. Parnell had earlier become embroiled in a sexual entanglement with a Mrs. Katherine O’Shea, the wife of the MP for County Clare, Captain William O’Shea, late of the Eighteenth Hussars.

The Land League was beginning to lose the support of the tenant farmers whom they had been trying to persuade to pay no rent at all. Parnell thus had good political and private reasons to be free from prison.  He agreed to the ‘Treaty of Kilmainham’, an unwritten agreement with Gladstone to look sympathetically at the remaining problems of the tenants in return for Parnell agreeing to cool things in Ireland. I particular, Gladstone agreed to look at the question of Irish national aspirations. Parnell was released and all looks well for a new age of co-operation between the Home Rule Party and Glandstone’s Liberals.

Lord Frederick Cavendish, MP

However, events were to intervene. William Foster, Chief Secretary for Ireland had resigned because he disagrees with Parnell’s release and had been replaced by Gladstone’s nephew, Lord Frederick Cavendish. On the day of his arrival in Dublin, together with his under-secretary, Thomas Burke, both men were set upon and were murdered as they walked across Phoenix Park by four members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. There was evidence of connivance by at least one high official of the Land League, which had close links with Parnell’s Home Rule Party. This event effectively ended any possibility of co-operation with the Liberals on the Home Rule question.

In the 1885 General Election, which had been fought on a wider franchise that included agricultural labourers, the Home Rule Party won eighty-six seats and held the balance between the Liberals and the Conservatives who had tied for seats. Gladstone’s response was to propose a form of internal self-government for Ireland, under which a Dublin parliament would have powers to legislate only on Irish internal matters but subject to a sovereign Westminster parliament.

Whilst Parnell supported the Bill, realising that it was probably the best on offer under the circumstances, it split the Liberals asunder. A significant faction of Gladstone’s party voted with the Conservatives who were, in Lord Randolph Churchill’s phrase, ‘playing the Orange card’. The Bill also brought the Ulster Protestants into play in opposition to it. The link between the British Conservatives and the Irish Unionists had been established. Surprisingly, it was Gladstone who was least compromising to Ulster Protestants and Parnell who sought to placate them. Parnell said:

We cannot give up a single Irishman... The class of protestants will form a most valuable element in the Irish legislature of the future, constituting, as they will, a strong minority, and exercising a moderating influence in making laws. ... The best system of government should be the resultant of whatever forces are in that country... We want all creeds and classes in Ireland.

The Ulster Protestants however continued to drill and to prepare to fight.

The Home Rule Bill was lost, due to Liberal defections, in 1886. Though this was a setback, it was not seen as more than that. The cause of Home Rule has been raised in the British parliament and a British party now has is as a cause. Parnell’s stature was greatly enhanced and was enhanced still further when two letters published by The Times in 1882, which appeared to implicate Parnell with the Phoenix Park murders of Cavendish and Burke, were proved to have been forgeries written by a Richard Piggott for money. Parnell had actually received a standing ovation when he next entered the House of Commons.

William O’Shea has been playing a waiting game. At first, he had even encouraged the liaison between his wife and Parnell, but when Katherine’s rich aunt eventually dies and left her a considerable fortune, he sued for divorce – and his share of the fortune. He had realised that, had Katherine’s aunt got a whiff of sexual scandal, she would have changed her will to exclude her. The effect of the ensuing scandal on Catholic Ireland, and on non-conformist England (the power-base of the Liberal Party) was immediate. Parnell the adulterer became the butt of music-hall jokes and the laughing-stock of the Press.

In December 1890, in Committee Room 15 at the House of Commons, Parnell was replaced as party leader by 45 votes to 29. The party split into Parnellite and anti-Parnell factions and the Home Rule question became subordinate to the question of whether an adulterer could be allowed to lead the Irish nation’s party. Parnell tried to cling to power and succeeded only in alienating the Church and the people. He lost three by-elections in a row, just a year after he had been uncrowned King of Ireland. His health deteriorated and he died on 6 October 1891. Maybe the hope of a peaceful transition to Home Rule and Irish independence died with him.

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