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| | Chapter 1 |
| | A VICTORY BALL, ‘A REGULAR LITTLE ARSENAL’ AND A MIDNIGHT VISIT TO DETECTIVE HEADQUARTERS |
A Victory Ball at Dublin Castle ushered in the new year for 1919 with a fanfare by the trumpeters of King Edward’s Horse Regiment. ‘Such a scene has not been enjoyed since 1914,’ the Weekly Irish Times enthused. Nearly 1,200 guests attended the subscription dance for the British Red Cross, which was presided over by Isabelle Shortt, wife of the Chief Secretary for Ireland. While the main event was held in St Patrick’s Hall, ‘the more discriminating dancers’ preferred the less crowded facilities of the Throne Room or the billiard room of the Red Cross hospital, which still occupied most of the State Apartments. Patients had decorated the rooms for the guests, and eight soldiers recovering from their wounds watched ‘some distance away from the joys they were unable to share.’
Among the social luminaries to survive the trauma of the war years was the perennial Lady Fingall, who organised the ‘state lancers’ quadrilles for the older set. For the younger set there were foxtrots and the popular one-step and two-step tunes that occupied most of the programme, as well as numerous waltzes. After the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to the accompaniment of the combined military bands there was ‘spirited cheering’ and ‘the taking of many flashlight photographs,’ which ‘set everyone laughing and chattering on their way to supper.’ Subsequently the dancing was renewed ‘with fresh vigour’ and continued into the early hours.
The Irish Times paid its usual attention to the gowns of the ladies. Most of the women, such as Lady Emily Campbell, wife of the Lord Chancellor and former unionist MP for Dublin University (essentially Trinity College), wore black in memory of close relatives killed in the war. An exception was Mrs Shortt, ‘to whose executive ability the success of the ball was largely due.’ She wore ‘a gown of mauve crepe de chine,’ although she had lost her only son in the defence of the British Empire. One of many constant reminders of the toll exacted from ascendancy families was the seemingly endless ‘Roll of Honour’ column in the Irish Times each morning, listing those who had died of their wounds or who had been listed as missing in action and were now confirmed dead.
The other notable difference between the Victory Ball and similar social functions from the pre-war years was that there was no longer any flamboyant display of Irish fashions. If Irish gowns and accessories were worn at all, they were not flaunted.1
In the dark, wintry Dublin of January 1919 there was not even the pretence of a shared future or identity of interest between the celebrants in Dublin Castle and the hostile citizens outside, who, a fortnight earlier, had voted overwhelmingly for Sinn Féin and independence. Two days after the Victory Ball, Dublin Corporation (as the city council was then called) held a special meeting requisitioned by fifty-eight members to offer the honorary freedom of the city to the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. They called on him ‘to use your mighty influence in urging the Peace Congress to give a just judgement of Ireland’s cause and to arrive at a just settlement of her claim.’
The following Sunday there were rallies in Dublin and Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) and throughout the country to protest against the continued detention of almost two-thirds of the new Sinn Féin MPs in various Irish and British prisons. In Dublin’s own Mountjoy Prison, Sinn Féin and Irish Volunteer prisoners embarked on a hunger strike over being kept in the same appalling conditions as ‘ordinary criminals’.
On 2 January 1919 Dublin Corporation met to strike the rate (local property tax) for the new year; but the debate consisted primarily of attacks on the composition of the government’s new advisory committee for rebuilding the Irish economy. The councillors argued, with some justification, that the committee was dominated by members of the Kildare Street Club and leading lights of the unionist establishment, such as the Marquis of Londonderry, the Earl of Granard, Lord Dunraven, Sir Henry Robinson (vice-president of the Local Government Board) and Eddie Saunderson, son of a former leader of the Unionist Party, now private secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Field-Marshal Sir John French.
The proposed rate was a record 18s in the pound, to meet the soaring costs of running the city. War inflation still drove the economy, with wages chasing prices. The earnings of white-collar workers had increased between July 1914 and January 1919 by 60 per cent, those of skilled workers by between 120 and 140 per cent and those of labourers by as much as 210 per cent. Unfortunately, retail prices had risen by 240 per cent. The corporation had no control over prices, and the business community felt strongly that further pay demands by city employees should be firmly resisted, including a novel claim for a shorter working week without any cut in wages.
When traditional champions of the business community, such as Alderman David Quaid and the Sheriff, John McAvin, protested that the corporation ‘was going from bad to worse’ they were told by nationalist colleagues that ‘it was better to give the workers money for services rendered than endure a strike that would deprive the city of power and light.’ The increase was provisionally agreed, by 33 votes to 10.
The threat to power supplies did not arise only from industrial militancy. For the first quarter of 1919 Dublin Corporation often had less than two weeks’ reserves of coal. The January sales suffered from shops having to close early to conserve fuel and observe government restrictions on indoor lighting. The illusion that peacetime plenty was returning helped boost seasonal sales but was belied by shorter opening hours. Fanciful sketches of attractive women on the front pages of the newspapers, displaying fur coats with generous discounts of 25 per cent, could not hide the fact that the furs themselves were of seal and moleskin. On the other hand, in a salute to better times ahead, flexible corsets previously advertised as ‘suitable for war work’ were now promoted as ‘suitable for dancing.’
On Tuesday 6 January thirty Sinn Féin MPs still at liberty met under the chairmanship of George Noble Plunkett (generally referred to as Count Plunkett after being made a Papal count in 1877), father of the executed 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett, in the Mansion House, Dublin, to demand the release of their colleagues. They agreed in principle to convene Dáil Éireann, the first national assembly in almost 120 years, and to invite all elected representatives of the Irish people to attend.
That evening there was a debate in the Abbey Theatre on the issue of ‘Irish Federalism versus an Irish Republic’ between Captain Stephen Gwynn, former Irish Party MP for Galway, and P. S. O’Hegarty, a leading propagandist of advanced nationalism and member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
Hopes were high that a still-embattled empire would have to concede independence quickly. Dublin Corporation’s quandary over how to contain wage demands without provoking a strike was as nothing compared with the dilemmas facing the British government. That same week more than seven thousand soldiers left their camp in Shoreham, Kent, and marched to Brighton to protest at delays in demobilisation, and members of the Army Service Corps drove lorries up and down Whitehall in London to demand a speedy return to civilian life. Further protests followed on Tuesday in London, Aldershot and Bristol.
The government and military authorities held firm, not least because the armistice of 11 November 1918 would run out within the month if permanent peace terms could not be reached. The only consolation was that British soldiers were driving more or less peacefully through the capital rather than trading political differences with machine-gun bullets, as was now a regular occurrence in Berlin.2
Irish separatists taking comfort from Britain’s difficulties failed to realise that the urgent need to address serious unrest on its doorstep meant that the government in London had little time to attend to their problems.
A Cabinet reshuffle the following week saw yet another Liberal home-rule lawyer, Ian Macpherson, replace Edward Shortt as Chief Secretary for Ireland, while Field-Marshal Lord French remained ensconced in the Viceregal Lodge. But the most fateful event of the month came on 21 January, when Dáil Éireann, or the ‘Sinn Fein National Assembly’, as the Irish Times preferred to call it, convened in the Mansion House. The Irish Volunteers provided stewards for controlling access to the event, admission to which was by ticket only. Well before the doors opened at 3 p.m. the queue stretched down Dawson Street and around the corner into Molesworth Street. The presence of large numbers of young Catholic priests was noted by the Chief Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Walter Edgeworth Johnstone, and the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Sir James Byrne. Unlike the estimated hundred journalists admitted to record the proceedings, the police officials had to settle for watching the crowd discreetly from an upstairs window of the Royal Irish Automobile Club across the street.
As Sinn Féin activists waited patiently to enter the Mansion House they were treated to the spectacle of nearly four hundred members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers marching behind the band of the Royal Hibernian Military School to attend a concert at the Theatre Royal in Hawkins Street. The men had just finished a welcome-home dinner in the Pillar Room, organised by the regiment’s Prisoners of War Committee. The committee had shrunk over the years into an appendage of the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club, out of whose premises it operated, but it made up in commitment for its dwindling numbers. The dining tables had been draped in the Allied colours, and cigarettes were supplied by courtesy of Sir James Gallagher, the tobacco magnate and former Lord Mayor of Dublin. The Countess of Mayo, Lady Arnott and Mrs Gaisford St Lawrence, who had carried the burden of fund-raising in the war years, were among the dignitaries present. The soldiers, some of whom had spent more than four years in captivity, as their 1914 Mons badges testified, marched down Dawson Street past a bemused crowd of Sinn Féin supporters on one side and welcoming family and friends on the other. The contrast was so bizarre that ‘the situation became humorous rather than serious,’ as one newspaper reported. A city trader broke the ice when he declared: ‘No city in Europe can beat Dublin after all.’ Some harmless banter followed as the soldiers reached the safer environs of Grafton Street, ablaze with bunting; but no reporter appears to have asked the men themselves what they thought of their city, changed as it was since the heady days of their send-off.
At the Theatre Royal the former prisoners of war were joined by four hundred wounded soldiers from Dublin’s hospitals and nursing homes to enjoy the entertainment. Father Crotty, who had been Catholic chaplain to the Limburg and Giessen prisoner-of-war camps, asked the men to lead the good lives they had promised to live when they returned home. ‘I know that you have been what Irishmen and Irish Catholics should be: proud of and true to your faith and your country.’3
But a few streets away, the Sinn Féin MPs gathering in the Mansion House just vacated by the Fusiliers were redefining what being true to their country meant. That the business was mainly conducted in Irish did not add to its clarity or inclusiveness. The minority of thirty Sinn Féin MPs at liberty4 adopted a Declaration of Independence that gave democratic ratification to the establishment of the Irish Republic, proclaimed in arms in the same city on 24 April 1916. They issued an Appeal to the Free Nations of the World to recognise Ireland’s right to choose its own form of government and adopted a Provisional Constitution and a Democratic Programme.
The idea of the Democratic Programme, outlining the social and economic aspirations of the infant republic, had first been mooted by the Dublin Trades Council. The invitation to draft it came from the Sinn Féin leadership, in recognition of Labour’s decision not to contest the general election. This helped ensure a Sinn Féin victory in at least three Dublin constituencies,5 which Irish Party or unionist candidates might otherwise have won. The main author of the programme was Thomas Johnson, secretary of the Labour Party, assisted by William O’Brien, president of the Irish Trades Union Congress, and Cathal O’Shannon of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. It was amended by Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh, one of the new MPs who had served for many years on Dublin Corporation as a Sinn Féin councillor alongside Labour colleagues. He did so to meet objections from Michael Collins and other senior IRB men, who wanted the removal of explicit affirmations of socialist principles. Despite his concerns, Collins did not bother attending the discussions with the Labour men, leaving it to Harry Boland and Ó Ceallaigh to dilute the programme’s social radicalism. The IRB most objected to such clauses as the right of the country ‘to resume possession’ of the nation’s wealth ‘whenever the trust is abused or the trustee fails to give faithful service.’ Another excision was the clause encouraging ‘the organisation of people into trade unions and co-operative societies.’ Worst of all was the last clause of the Labour draft, effectually calling for the abolition of capitalism:
Finally, the Republic will aim at the elimination of the class in society which lives upon the wealth produced by the workers of the nation but gives no useful service in return, and in the process of accomplishment will give freedom to all who have hitherto been caught in the toils of economic servitude.6
Nevertheless, the final draft reasserted the claim in the 1916 Proclamation that national sovereignty ‘extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation.’ It further reaffirmed ‘that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.’
‘In return for willing service’ every citizen had the right to ‘an adequate share of the produce of the Nation’s labour.’ Furthermore:
It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.
For many on the left the programme, read into the Dáil record by the man known as ‘the Alderman’, Tom Kelly MP, was a promissory note that the Republic would see working people come into their own.7
Some elements of the Democratic Programme were still considered too ‘communistic’ by senior figures in Sinn Féin, such as Piaras Béaslaí and Kevin O’Higgins. Yet Collins and Cosgrave, who had been among those most insistent on changes, were not averse to state involvement in the economy per se. Collins was a firm advocate of developing Ireland’s natural resources and its manufacturing base by whatever means necessary, while Cosgrave advocated a state monopoly in the insurance industry. There was widespread acceptance of the co-operative ideal for promoting such enterprises as banking, farming, fisheries, and retailing. Éamon de Valera would espouse it during his forthcoming trip to America, and Arthur Griffith would write a pamphlet commissioned by the new Dáil cabinet extolling co-operatives.
General economic thinking was somewhat woolly. Collins, for instance, argued that county councils ‘and other Public Bodies’ should take over the exploitation of valuable mineral deposits, while the Department of Local Government should take the initiative in ensuring that ‘in any negotiations with firms Labour should be consulted, as they [Dáil Éireann] could not support any firm which “sweated” its employees.’ These initiatives contained within them the seeds of the future statist approach of successive Irish governments to economic and social development.8
The dilution of the Democratic Programme failed to impress the leader-writer of the Irish Times, who condemned the ‘astonishing vagueness’ with which it permitted the Dáil ‘to be associated with any one of a hundred brands of modern Socialism, or with them all.’ The writer drew attention to the fact that, a few hours before the Sinn Féin MPs invoked ‘God’s blessing’ on their labours,
two Irish policemen were murdered foully in the fulfilment of their duty ... It should compel the nominal leaders of the Republican Party to ask themselves a serious question. Can they control the developments of the movement which they profess to guide—a movement that is based on hatred of constituted authority in Ireland? ...
There are two sets of Republicans in Ireland today. One set filled the public eye on Tuesday with its theatrical protests against British rule. It consists of a body of idealists who nurture themselves quite honestly on visions of an independent, but peaceful and pious Ireland. The other set has a very different ideal—the ideal which has submerged unhappy Russia in shame and ruin.9
It was a valid point. Earlier that Tuesday morning a group of Volunteers had ambushed and killed Constable James McDonnell and Constable Patrick O’Connell as they escorted a consignment of gelignite from the military magazine in Tipperary to Solloghodbeg quarry. They were certainly not acting on the orders of Dáil Éireann, which would not convene for several more hours. The Chief of Staff of their own organisation, Richard Mulcahy, condemned the Solloghodbeg killi...
