Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909–23

Scouting for rebels

Marnie Hay

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780719096839
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526127761
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a scholarly yet accessible account of the Irish nationalist youth organisation Na Fianna Éireann and its contribution to the Irish Revolution in the period 1909–23. Countess Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson established Na Fianna Éireann, or the Irish National Boy Scouts, as an Irish nationalist antidote to Robert Baden-Powell's scouting movement founded in 1908. Between their establishment in 1909 and near decimation during the Irish Civil War of 1922–23, Na Fianna Éireann recruited, trained and nurtured a cadre of young nationalist activists who made an essential contribution to the struggle for Irish independence. This book will be of interest to historians and students specialising in the history of the Irish Revolution, youth culture, paramilitarism and twentieth-century Ireland. It will also appeal to the general reader with an interest in the history of the Irish Revolution.

1 Na Fianna Éireann in context

Small boys are natural radicals, and the boys, given a uniform and some semblance of a military organisation, needed no encouragement to declare themselves openly as revolutionaries who looked forward to the day when they might strike a blow in another fight for freedom. Of course, adults smiled tolerantly at this, not realising that the boy will soon be a man, and that the sentiments imbibed in his formative years are likely to remain with him in after life, to fructify as deeds when opportunity offers.¹

That was how one Irish nationalist activist, Colonel Joseph V. Lawless, remembered the revolutionary boys of Na Fianna Éireann, or the Irish National Boy Scouts. The Fianna’s founders, Countess Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson, had two main aims when they established this youth organisation in Dublin in 1909. They wanted to provide an Irish nationalist alternative to British uniformed youth groups operating in Ireland and to prepare Irish boys for their future role in the Irish struggle for independence from Great Britain. They succeeded in both aims.

Irish historians have increasingly referred to a series of events that took place during the period c. 1913–23 as the ‘Irish Revolution’, though this term and the exact time frame involved remain contentious.² These events include the 1913 Dublin Lockout, the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence (or Anglo-Irish War, 1919–21) and the Irish Civil War (1922–23). Serving and former members of the Fianna participated in all of these events. By the end of the Irish Revolution, Ireland had been partitioned into two distinct political entities: the effectively independent twenty-six-county Irish Free State and the devolved government of six-county Northern Ireland, which remained in political union with Britain within the United Kingdom.

Na Fianna Éireann became the military trailblazers of the Irish nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. In 1914, Patrick Pearse proclaimed that ‘if the Fianna had not been founded in 1909, the [Irish] Volunteers of 1913 would never have arisen’.³ The Fianna were probably the first Irish nationalist group to begin military training in the twentieth century. This training enabled senior Fianna officers to serve as instructors when the Irish Volunteers were formed in November 1913. This adult paramilitary organisation, or citizens’ militia, was established as a nationalist counterblast to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which had been founded in January 1913 to assert Ulster unionist opposition to home rule for Ireland.

Pearse’s proclamation can be taken one step further. Without the foundation of the Fianna and the Irish Volunteers, the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent War of Independence would not have occurred, military personnel with the requisite training and militant mindset being essential for the execution of rebellions and guerrilla wars. The Fianna and the Irish Volunteers were designed to prepare Irish boys and men physically and mentally to engage in combat against British government forces in Ireland as part of the struggle for Irish independence. The Irish Volunteers may have been formed as a response to the UVF, but the Fianna began their military training four years prior to the establishment of both adult volunteer forces. Thus, the purpose of this book is to examine how what started as an Irish nationalist scouting organisation served not only as a conduit for the involvement of youth in the Irish Revolution but also as the military vanguard of this period of nationalist insurgency in Ireland.

Na Fianna Éireann in Irish historiography

Until recently, Na Fianna Éireann tended to be mentioned only in passing, if at all, in studies of the Irish Revolution. It is only in the past decade or so that the history of the Fianna has been the subject of popular and scholarly studies. The exception is a doctoral thesis submitted in 1981, the year in which ten republican hunger strikers died in prison in Northern Ireland. John R. Watts’s unpublished PhD thesis examined the Fianna as a case study of a political youth organisation, covering the group’s history from its inception in 1909 up to 1981.⁴ More recent publications began with J. Anthony Gaughan’s 2006 study Scouting in Ireland, which considers the history of three Irish scouting movements: the Baden-Powell Boy Scouts, the Fianna and the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland.⁵ To mark the 2009 centenary of the Fianna’s foundation, Damien Lawlor published a narrative history entitled Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909 to 1923.⁶ In 2014, Eamon Murphy began to document online the history of the Fianna in the period 1909–23 through illustrated blog entries on topics such as individual Fianna members, various troops and specific historical events.⁷ I started to publish a series of scholarly articles on aspects of the Fianna’s history in academic journals and edited collections from 2008 onwards, an undertaking that grew out of my doctoral research on Fianna co-founder Bulmer Hobson and has culminated in the present monograph.⁸

The recent growth in historiography on the Fianna has been fuelled by the greater availability of primary source material, beginning with the opening of the Bureau of Military History (BMH) collection in 2003, as well as public interest generated by the current decade of centenaries commemorating the events of Ireland’s revolutionary era.⁹ Increasing academic research into the history of Irish children and childhood has also played a role.¹⁰ All three of these factors are evident in the Fianna’s heightened profile in relation to the 1916 Rising. For instance, Fearghal McGarry included a chapter on the Fianna in Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising, a book of edited extracts from BMH witness statements.¹¹ Two young men associated with the Fianna, Con Colbert and Sean Heuston, have been the subjects of biographies as part of the O’Brien Press’s ongoing 16 Lives series to commemorate the lives of the sixteen men who were executed for their roles in relation to the Easter Rising.¹² Furthermore, RTÉ broadcaster Joe Duffy excavated the lives and deaths of three Fianna members, Sean Healy, James Fox and James Kelly, in Children of the Rising, a study of the forty children aged sixteen and under who died during the 1916 rebellion. Children of the Rising has emerged as one of the most popular books published so far during the decade of centenaries.¹³

The present monograph on Na Fianna Éireann aims to provide a scholarly yet accessible account of the nationalist youth organisation’s early history and contribution to the Irish Revolution during the period 1909–23, situating it within the wider international context of uniformed youth groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book not only builds upon the research of the authors noted previously but also revises and extends my own previously published articles on the subject. The remainder of this chapter and the ones that follow take a thematic approach to the Fianna’s history during the revolutionary era by exploring in turn the organisation’s broader international and national contexts, inception, development, membership, range of activities, print propaganda and military contribution to the Irish Revolution. It is my hope that this monograph will encourage other scholars to delve into the history of the Fianna to produce, for example, regional studies of the youth group or research on the organisation post 1923.

The advent of uniformed youth groups

Na Fianna Éireann were an Irish nationalist manifestation of the ‘pseudo-military’ youth groups that arose in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These organisations were part of the cult of discipline, training and manliness that grew out of the increasing anticipation of the coming war in Europe.¹⁴ For instance, during the First World War, about 30,000 Galician men served in the Polish Legions or their Ukrainian counterpart, the United Sich Riflemen, both of which had grown out of scouting, sporting or paramilitary groups that had been formed in the previous decade.¹⁵ Uniformed youth groups were also a reaction to a widely perceived fin-de-siècle ‘decadence’.¹⁶ In the early years of the twentieth century, many Germans worried that ‘middle-class boys were effeminate’ and ‘the country lacked virile soldiers’.¹⁷ Similarly, the British army’s poor performance against a force of South African farmers during the Boer War (1899–1902) had provoked concern that Britain was in a state of decline. Fearing that they were losing their competitive edge in industrial and military affairs and that their populations were deteriorating both physically and morally, Western countries like Germany and Britain began to concern themselves with the health, education and moral welfare of the new generation.¹⁸ Uniformed youth groups were one way of addressing this concern.

The best known of these youth groups was the international Boy Scout movement founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1908. A British army officer who specialised in reconnaissance and scouting, Baden-Powell started this movement in response to the interest that boys had shown in his 1899 army training manual, Aids to Scouting. He was also inspired by the model of the Boys’ Brigade, which was launched by William Alexander Smith in 1883 in Glasgow.¹⁹ Smith was a businessman and an officer in the Volunteers, a British part-time military force that was later replaced by the Territorial Army.²⁰ He used military drill and discipline as a way of providing guidance to the boys who attended his Scottish Free Church Sunday School.²¹ Smith’s example also inspired the formation of the Church Lads’ Brigade for Anglicans, the Jewish Lads’ Brigade and the Catholic Boys’ Brigade.²² Baden-Powell, in contrast, put less overt emphasis on militarism. Instead, he focused on outdoor activities and personal development in order not only to train boys to be better citizens but to counter what he saw as the moral and physical decline of the upcoming generation.²³

The impetus for t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Na Fianna Éireann in context
• 2 The countess and the Quaker
• 3 A handful of boys against the British Empire, 1909–16
• 4 Expansion and contraction, 1916–23
• 5 Who joined the Fianna?
• 6 The Fianna experience
• 7 Moulding minds and marketing martyrdom
• 8 Youth in arms
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index