Another View of the Rising
Another view of the Easter Rising, 1916
Lecture at Annual General Meeting of the Irish Labour History Society, April 23rd, 2016
I would like to thank the Irish Labour History Society for inviting me to give another view of the Easter Rising on this the centenary of the day on which it was supposed to take place.
It has been borne in on me, as I am sure it has on you this year that commemoration is not history, nor is it about honouring all traditions equally, or unequally for that matter. It is about presenting history as we wish it to be; it is about self-identity and it is about seeking inspiration based on a reaffirmation of established identities, be they on the left, right or centre. Or it can be about rejecting a perceived past if it conflicts with what the dominant consensus within a commemorative group thinks it should be. This approach to commemoration covers both the general, for instance identifying the state with the Rising, and the particular, such as the Rotunda Hospital celebrating its commitment to delivering babies throughout Easter Week 1916. Hence the inevitable title of its exhibition, ‘Birth of A Nation’. Unlike history, commemoration does not need to be accurate but it must strike the right note. The current controversy over the Glasnevin ‘remembrance wall’ is a case in point. It should perhaps be rechristened the ‘wall of death’. On the other hand Joe Duffy’s ‘Children of the Rising’ has been a runaway success and well deserved.
A serious difficulty with commemoration is that facts become malleable. The Irish Citizen Army plaque unveiled by President Michael D Higgins on March 29th at Liberty Hall to commemorate members who fought and died in 1916 is a case in point. The front lists the ICA members who died in the Rising. We have since discovered an omission, Edward Cosgrave, who was killed on Easter Tuesday. It is an honest error that will be rectified. The reverse side has a ‘Roll of Honour’ with 400 names, although it is generally accepted that less than 230 men, women and children connected with the ICA fought in the Rising. The reason for the discrepancy is that the Roll of Honour is actually a Muster Roll listing almost everyone who had joined the Citizen Army by 1916 and liable for call up. But a muster roll does not have the same ring to it as a Roll of Honour so the misleading title remains. I suspect that many other ‘Rolls of Honour’ being unveiled this year would stand up to even less scrutiny.
While we have had complaints about omissions from the plaque, no one has yet asked for a name to be removed. If therefore commemoration cannot be seen as history it can certainly be regarded as a form of ancestor worship. It is perfectly understandable that descendants of those out in 1916 want to honour them, even if they might disagree with some, or all of their aims and methods. But that may not always be the case. In a couple of weeks’ time the Dublin Metropolitan Police Prisoners Books for the years 1905 to 1907 and 1911 to 1918 will be put online by SIPTU and UCD. I am sure most people will not mind too much if their ancestors were convicted of rioting in 1913, looting in 1916, stealing an army donkey or even murder, but I am not so sure about those unfortunate enough to have a relative convicted of rape, unlawful carnal knowledge, neglect, cruelty or indecent exposure. There are limits to ancestor worship. Not all pasts are ones we wish to recall, let alone commemorate and identify with.
Which brings me back to my own view of the Rising. Like most of you I have constantly revised my opinions of that event, from more or less uncritically embracing it as a teenage member of the republican movement over 50 years ago to experiencing mounting reservations leaning towards rejection in old age. Well, approaching old age. I won’t be 70 for another few weeks.
What tilted me definitively away from what might be called the socialist republican tradition, was not Provisional IRA car bombs or the general prostitution of the dead on all sides to serve immediate political ends but researching the 1913 Lockout during the late 1990s. For me certain elements of the Lockout story embedded in tradition as fact, such as the notion that Dublin workers were defeated as a result of a ‘stab in the back’ by the British TUC, did not withstand scrutiny. Rather, without TUC support, there would have been no five month battle of epic proportions for workers’ rights, just an unsuccessful tram dispute. Yet the events of 1913 were subsumed into a nationalist narrative with the enthusiastic assistance of James Connolly, Jim Larkin and their fellow leaders of the Dublin labour movement.
So I engaged in a little ancestor worship of my own, looking at events from the perspective, not of socialist or republican ideologues but the urban working poor, the class I came from and the people whom the greatest socialist republican of them all, James Connolly, purported to champion. In doing so I was reminded that the origins of the Irish revolution did not lie in the 1913 Lockout, or the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, or the Ulster Unionist reaction to it, but in the class conflict that shook the capitalist system in Britain in the preceding years. In 1908 David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced old age pensions; the first in a series of measures that laid the foundations for the British welfare state. He did so to assuage mounting working class unrest and stave off the challenge that the Liberal government faced from the British Labour Party. Unemployment and health benefits followed. To pay for these ambitious social initiatives, not to mention an expensive naval race with Germany, Lloyd George introduced the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, which not only proposed higher taxes on the ‘old reliables’ of drink and tobacco, but heavier death duties, land tax, capital acquisitions tax and higher income tax, including a ‘super’ levy on incomes over £3,000 a year, that infuriated the upper classes and saw the House of Lords veto a Finance Bill for the first time in 200 years.
A constitutional crisis ensued that was ultimately resolved by curtailing the Lords’ powers of veto. It also saw the Liberals lose their overall majority in the House of Commons. The loss of the Lords veto made Home Rule a legislative possibility and the Liberals’ dependency on John Redmond and the Irish Party made it a political imperative. In fact the Irish Party threatened to join the Conservatives in voting down the Budget, as they were far from happy with its welfare provisions, not to mention heavier taxes on drink and the propertied classes, unless there was a Liberal commitment to Home Rule. Although it liked to pose as a party of labour, the Irish Party had no intention of having its supporters saddled with Britain’s extravagant social welfare measures in a Home Rule Parliament. The introduction of old age pensions alone had turned Ireland from a net contributor to a net recipient of Exchequer funds. The fiscal implications were highlighted by the fact that twenty-seven per cent of all old age pensions were paid to Irish people, although they only comprised nine per cent of the United Kingdom’s population.
While the Home Rule Bill came too late to do anything about old age pensions, at least until the new Free State government cut them in 1924, one of the most malign victories for the nationalist cause came in 1913 with the defeat of Lloyd George’s efforts to extend new health benefits to Ireland’s working classes. It was a victory for the Irish Party, the employers, the medical profession, the Catholic Church and its religious orders, that laid the basis for a divergence in health care provision on these islands which ultimately resulted in Britain having the NHS and us having the HSE, supplemented by a plethora of private health insurance companies. Yet, this important issue with a direct bearing on the quality of life here today, has been written out of most of our histories of all political hues.
In fairness the Irish Worker and Jim Larkin were amongst the leading advocates of the British health scheme model, as was the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was of course a benefits society. However Irish workers, particularly the unskilled and semi-skilled who filled the ranks of the ITGWU would pay a high price for the failure of the ITUC’s leadership to anticipate the consequences of Home Rule for their class. In 1913, with 100,000 members in affiliated unions, the ITUC represented just 2.5 per cent of the Irish population. Even if we include all workers who were potential members, and their dependents, organised labour could not hope to represent more than 15 per cent of the total population, including Protestant and Unionist oriented workers who rejected the nationalist project.
As we know, the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 changed everything yet again, including the arithmetic in the House of Commons. Leading members of the Liberal Party, including Lloyd George, could now use Conservative support for the war effort to pare back on those provisions of the Home Rule Bill they were unhappy with, above all the coercion of Ulster. Meanwhile Redmond’s own commitment to the war effort rendered him, and his party, redundant at Westminster and, eventually, at home
The consequences of the Great War obviously stretched far beyond our shores. The most significant short term result was the Russian Revolution, which many of us on the left saw as its great redeeming phenomenon, emerging from the conflict as a dramatic resolution of the problems posed by European capitalism’s internal contradictions. It was this perspective that facilitated Connolly’s second coming as the Irish Lenin in the approach to the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising in 1966, primarily thanks to Desmond Greaves’s ground breaking ‘Life and Times of James Connolly’. This biography allowed the Irish revolution, or at least the Easter Rising, to be seen as a Bolshevik style grab for power on behalf of the country’s workers and small farmers. It also allowed part of the labour tradition to be subsumed in what might be called social republicanism, rejuvenating this failed militarist variant of nationalism by re-grafting on a social conscience that influenced the development of bothy the Official IRA and Provisional IRA in the following decades.
At the same time it allowed the mainstream labour movement to reinforce its’ self-identity as a radical voice within the new state of which it had become part of the political furniture. In short, it made Connolly relevant to the politics of the day, and did so at a time when anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements were still viewed uncritically in Ireland and by the European left in general. Many of us saw violence as a natural extension to politics, and even as desirable in many circumstances, conditioned not alone by Ireland’s struggle for independence but by two world wars, the anti-fascist struggles of the interwar years, wartime resistance movements and newer liberation struggles post-1945. Above all the Soviet Union still existed and that validated the insurrectionary road to power for the working class, and those purporting to represent it.
In 1914 these developments were all in their infancy. Of more immediate import was the collapse of the Second International in the face of war. The general staffs of the Great Powers had their mobilisation plans but the socialist movement did not even have a general staff, let alone a war plan. Attempts to agree a plan had failed at successive conferences in 1907, 1910 and 1912. Instead the majority leaderships in the mainstream labour movements in relatively homogenous states such as Britain and Germany supported their national war efforts, whereas in the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia many socialists began to realign with local nationalists. This was understandable as these ramshackle empires had comparatively little legitimacy and buckled early under the demands of total war, so that the prospect of change became more viable on a national rather than an international or transnational level. Like Britain, Germany had only one significant national minority, in its case the Poles. For such minority nationalities London, Vienna, Berlin and Petrograd replaced the local capitalist class not so much as the main enemy but as the most vulnerable enemy. Such a development also made socialists who regarded themselves as patriots, such as James Connolly or Poland’s Josef Pilsudski willing conscripts to the fight for national freedom. It is no accident that Connolly published the programme of Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist Federation in the penultimate edition of the Workers Republic on April 15th, 1916. It declared that:
- ‘We believe the liberation of Poland from the yoke of her invaders is a necessary and unavoidable step to the victorious march of the Polish proletariat toward the new forms of life and Socialism.
- ‘That to remain longer in slavery and to renounce the struggle for political liberty of the nation, and for the throwing off of the foreign yoke, would mean for the Polish proletariat as much as to deny civilisation as well as Socialism, and to condemn it to moral decay and impotence, which lead necessarily to eternal servitude under the yoke of capitalism.
- ‘The Polish Federation therefore does its socialistic and nationalist duty when it supports morally and actively the Polish legions which are fighting under the command of Comrade Pilsudski, who through his long exile in Siberia and his confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd gave sufficient proof of his faithfulness to the Socialist idea’.[1]
Poland did indeed regain its independence, thanks to the collapse of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany in the closing stages of the Great War. It is, I think, interesting that the position adopted by Lenin and Stalin, the latter soon to become Commissar for Nationalities in the Soviet government was not dissimilar to that of Connolly and Pilsudski ideologically because there were so many national minorities in areas contiguous to the Russian heartland. Lenin’s main criticism of the Irish insurrectionists was that they rose too soon.[2]
The important issue here is not the theoretical rationalisation of a rapidly evolving political situation by revolutionary socialists but whether what they advocated was in the interests of the working classes they purported to champion? Poland and Russia shared some similarities with Ireland. All three countries had an emerging working class but were peasant based societies dominated by powerful reactionary forces, including the Catholic Church in two of them. It would be wrong to draw too strong parallels between them but the fate of the left in each is instructive. Once in power, necessity forced the Bolsheviks to substitute themselves for the working class and the left in general. Everyone else had to join them or face liquidation. Despite Pilsudski’s emergence as Poland’s strong man in the 1920s and 1930s, his own party did not gain power. Instead elements of it were subsumed in his new creation, the Non-Party Bloc, which was primarily built on the paramilitary forces he created to achieve independence. In some ways he can be seen as a Polish Michael Collins, or James Connolly. It is possible to imagine that, if Connolly or Collins had survived, elements of Republican Labour in the War of Independence and National Labour in the 1940s might well have been co-opted into a similar power bloc in a new Irish state.
However the crucial difference distinguishing Ireland’s situation from Poland and Russia was the survival of the British Empire. Although seriously weakened by the Great War, it remained very much in business for another half century. Its resilience prevented Connolly, his militant nationalist allies and their successors from achieving the type of independence they strived for. As it happened, it was still the working poor who paid the highest price for the limited degree of freedom that was achieved here in 1921. It is especially ironic given that the emergence of the Free State ensured Irish employers, landowners, farmers, shopkeepers and the higher professions were spared the financial shackles of a welfare state, despite the commitments to social solidarity implicit in the 1916 Proclamation and explicit in the Democratic Programme of the First Dail.
So, from my perspective of ancestor worship, what did the Rising do for Dublin’s working poor? It may be facetious to say it killed well over 200 of them and injured another 2,000, but that is nevertheless true. Fortunately British artillery did relatively little damage to housing stock as most of the premises destroyed were commercial properties in the city centre owned by leading businessmen, figures such as William Martin Murphy, Sir Thomas Robinson, Sir William Cotton, Sir John Arnott and Sir Joseph Downes. They recouped their losses relatively quickly, as the rich usually do, with the assistance of the tax payer. Large property owners in the city collected £2.5 million in compensation from the British state and insurers, even though Dublin’s Chief Fire Officer estimated their real losses at around £1 million. They also received the bonus of having proposed planning restrictions on redevelopment waived. By contrast the Prince of Wales Fund provided £8,000 in relief for civilians, most of which went unspent, whereas Tom Clarke left his widow Kathleen £3,000 to provide for dependents of the insurgents, soon to be supplemented by thousands more in public subscriptions raised in Ireland and America. That any provision at all was made for civilian casualties of the Rising under the compensation legislation was down to Edward Carson, one of the two Unionist MPs for Trinity College. There were only 450 personal injury claims as opposed to 820 from property owners, and just over 60 personal injury awards were successful.
As these payments were based on the Workmen’s Compensation Act the amounts were small. For instance, Sir Joseph Downes and vintner Philip Meagher received over £33,000 each for damage to their properties in North Earl Street, while Christina Caffrey around the corner in Corporation Street was given £5 for the loss of her two year old son, with an additional £5 in funeral expenses that were never claimed. Willliam Holmes, who ran a tea room in Railway Street, suffered from ‘drop foot’ after being shot in the leg and had his claim for £500 reduced to £150 by the Dublin Victims Committee, and then to £17 5s by the Irish Treasury. A rare reprieve was given to a Mrs Dorgan, who had compensation for the death of her husband initially denied on the basis that she had four sons in the British Army to support her, although two were married with families of their own. She later received £150 based on her husband’s earnings, after the Victims’ committee expressed concern at how the public might see such a case in the changing political climate and it asked that the case be reviewed in recognition of the fact that ‘her four sons at the front would be reason for generous treatment by Their Lordships’ at the Treasury.[3]
Of course there were some working class beneficiaries of the Rising, the looters. They were of all ages and both sexes and came out of the streets, laneways and courts nearest the city centre stores to engage in ‘the sole gorge of their lives’ as James Stephens phrased it.[4] Very few looters were arrested apart from a group who were foolish enough to walk past College Street police station on the first day of the Rising and were promptly arrested by detectives of the ‘G’ Division, most of whom, contrary to popular belief, were not political police. The DMP were confined to barracks during the Rising, not surprisingly given the fate of Constables O’Brien and Lahiff at the hands of the ICA. However the constabulary returned to the streets with a vengeance once order was restored.
They systematically raided the usual suspects. As a result, and uniquely in the history of Dublin, more women were convicted of criminal offences in May 1916 than men. They constituted almost 58 per cent of convictions, the majority of them married women and widows.[5] Newspaper reports provide a flavour of the items looted.
Mary E Bernard, a 30 year old married woman of 10 Lower Dominick Street was fined 40s after the police found two boy’s suits, an overcoat, two trousers, a jacket, a piece of tweed, a large enamel kettle and two enamel jugs worth £5 in the basement. Her neighbour, 40 year old Mary Mullen, was fined £1 for having two boy’s coats and ‘a pair of pants’. Another 40 year old woman, Mary Green of 4 Lower Dominick Street, was charged along with her 18 year old stepson Michael with illegal possession of two overcoats, two coats, a pair of trousers, a pair of boots, a looking glass, a small glass, a bag of sugar, and three quarters of a box of tea, worth £5. They were fined 40s and 20s respectively. Her stepson said he had found the items in the street and brought them home.
Mary, Christina and Francis Lane of 23 Lower Bridge Street, were charged with illegal possession of two silver plated cruet stands, three pairs of ladies’ patent leather boots, three pairs of ladies’ stockings, six pairs of men’s socks, two odd tan boots with the name Manfield on the tag, one pair of men’s black leather boots, one pair of lady’s black spats, four lbs of jam, five boxes of orange peel, five jelly squares, one box of cocoa, three soap shaving sticks and three bars of toilet soap. The 48 year old mother said she bought most of the items on Tuesday, April 25th from a woman she did not know and 22 year old Christina, a tailoress, said she bought the boots and shoes from a boy for 2d. The court was also told that Francis had seen service at the front and had been incapacitated. However he was listed as an absentee and was in military custody before the day was over. Mrs Lane received two months with hard labour and the daughter was fined 40s. [6]
Margaret Costello and Mary Dunne, both 22 years old from 19 Old Camden Street, and described by the newspapers as ‘well dressed’ in court, were both given two months for illegal possession of one pair of lady’s shoes, one pair of gentlemen’s shoes, two pairs of children’s shoes, lady’s and gentlemen’s underclothing, three pounds of tea, twelve boxes of sweet herbs, one bottle of ‘Vim’, two boxes of White’s jellies, some lemonade and cornflour. When Mr Swifte asked the arresting officer Constable 121B, ‘What was the Excuse?’ the policeman said they replied, ‘We were looting like the rest’.
Yet women arrested were generally treated better than men with relatively few receiving prison sentences. For instance, James Kenna, a 27 year old labourer from 35 Francis Street was sentenced to one month for possession of ‘a cartload of loot’ while Mary Jane Egan, a 26 year old married woman from 36 The Coombe, arrested with him was fined 20s.
Altogether 49 women out of 443 charged with illegal possession received prison sentences (11%), compared with 35 out of 179 men (19.5%).[7] Men also tended to receive heavier sentences with three of them receiving six months and a 17 year old labourer three years in Borstal. The heaviest sentence given to any woman was two months with hard labour. Recipients included a prostitute and a lady housekeeper, displaying a fine indifference to social rank by the Police Magistrates. The heavier sentences for men sometimes reflected aggravating factors such as larceny and warehouse or shop breaking, as opposed to the relatively passive charges of illegal possession and receiving.
A look at the occupations of those charged with looting shows much diversity. After married women and widows, who comprised 51% of all offenders, the next largest group comprised those listed as having no occupation at 14%. Two thirds of these ‘vagrants’ were women and many of them had no address so that they were literally the human flotsam and jetsam of the city.
The greatest looting splurge of all took place away from the city centre at the British and Irish Steam Packet Company warehouse on the North Wall. David Barry, the manager, told the Chief Police Magistrate, E G Swifte that he left the warehouse intact on April 25th, but when he saw it again on May 2nd, it was ‘in a state of terrible confusion. £5,000 of stock had been taken away or destroyed: pianos were broken into matchwood, and the weighbridges, telephones, electric fittings, and doors were broken. Four hundred sacks of flour, four hundred cases of tea and a quantity of sugar had been carried off. Of 35 cargo trucks all except two were gone’.[8]
Many articles were later found in Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Gloucester (now Sean MacDermott) Street. Toys, tennis rackets, cricket bats, rocking horses, cameras, jewellery, clocks, watches, rings, brooches, bracelets, mats, clothes and even stolen prayer books were concealed there. A large marble clock was found in St Andrew’s church on Westland Row, and among the items in St Michael and St John’s church were a perambulator and clothes. Reports that the tabernacle of the Pro-Cathedral was used to conceal goods were denied in the press.[9]
The Rising was of course a unique event and temporarily disrupted the normal wartime crime patterns of the capital. One of the most striking features in Dublin during the war was the decline in policing, as evidenced by the DMP Records. Between 1912 and 1919 the number of arrests dropped from 13,338 a year to 4,394.[10]
In the four months leading up to the Rising just 12 people were arrested for firearms offences. Most cases were dealt with by fines or short terms of imprisonment not exceeding six months. In the eight months following the Rising there were only two arrests when two men attempting to buy arms were fined £5 each. Only three Dubliners were arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act before the Rising of whom at least two were pacifists who put up anti-recruitment posters. Only one was given a prison sentence, the writer Geoffrey Dunlop, a recidivist pacifist who received six months. There were just four convictions under DORA in the eight months after the Rising, all for printing subversive literature and all dealt with by fines.
Seven young men and three teenage girls were arrested after a demonstration in support of the Rising in June 1916 which ended in a fracas. All were dealt with under the public order acts rather than DORA. Eight were fined, an unemployed chauffeur with no fixed abode received six weeks and a 16 year old news boy fourteen days. While serious enough for those concerned, including a DMP constable struck with the destination sign from a tram and another hit by a Volunteer Dependents Fund collection box used as a missile, this does not quite reflect the image of a city groaning under martial law, rather the makeshift response of an imperial administration that had panicked and executed the 1916 leaders, the first political executions in Ireland since 1803, and was now seeking to placate the mounting anger of the populace at the savagery of their actions, not to mention the growing unpopularity of the war.
Speaking of which, the largest persistent group of offenders in Dublin in 1916 were not rebels or looters but British army absentees and deserters. The lowest number of arrests occurred during the Rising and its aftermath. In May 1916 deserters and absentees accounted for just 16 per cent of arrests, compared with a monthly average of 27 per cent for the year and over 40 per cent in January. There are no known defections to the rebels. Many arrests were as a result of deserters engaging in anti-social behaviour such as assault, malicious damage and threatening behaviour. The numbers are much higher than in peacetime suggesting they were at least in part due to war trauma. Only one soldier was arrested after being found sleeping rough and another while begging. So these men, 835 of them, equivalent to an infantry battalion or a fifth of the year’s recruitment intake in the city, were being looked after by their own, despite severe penalties for harbouring military fugitives.
As we know Labour in Dublin paid a high price for its involvement in the Easter Rising in terms of its leadership. James Connolly, Michael Mallin, Richard O’Carroll, Peadar Macken and William Partridge died as a result. Many more members were interned, but, even during the Rising, only Connolly played a significant role on a par with militant nationalists.[11]
In the post-Rising situation many Irish workers benefitted from the British war economy which provided employment for groups as varied as shipyard workers, female munitions, transport and textile workers, agricultural labourers and of course separation women, whose War Office remittances were the second largest source of income after labourers’ wages in the Dublin tenements.[12] The railways were not nationalised but they were brought under state control, facilitating better pay and conditions. Thanks to the Munitions Act de facto trade union recognition was achieved in many industries, most notably through the Agricultural Wages Boards, which facilitated the recruitment of 100,000 workers to the ITGWU, which now rebounded after a near death experience under Connolly’s stewardship. Between 1913 and 1919 Irish trade union membership rose from 100,000 to 270,000, mirroring the British experience where it rose from four to eight million and saw the birth of a powerful shop stewards movement whose confidence and militancy were built on the facilitation of trade union recognition. A similar movement was not possible on a sustained basis in Ireland due to the small scale and fragmented nature of the labour movement here, but important victories were won in the engineering strikes of 1917 and 1919, the general strike against conscription in 1918 and the securing of important sectoral advances up to mid-1921 when the post-war boom ended and the employers’ began their counter offensive. The munitions strike by transport workers in the second half of 1920 seriously hampered British military operations and allowed the IRA to develop guerrilla warfare in many parts of the country. It was so effective that it had to be called off in December because it was bringing the whole country to a standstill. The British labour movement also played an important role in highlighting atrocities by British forces and supporting Irish self-determination.
For all their rhetoric the radical elements within the republican movement and particularly those who took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, such as Liam Mellowes and Peadar O’Donnell had no feasible strategy for defending, let alone advancing workers’ interests. Connolly may have provided an example of indomitable courage for radical republicans and socialists but he bequeathed them no practical strategy. Rather he was a Moses-like figure pointing the way to the political wilderness. The only man to arm the workers in the Civil War was Joe McGrath, a former finance officer of the ITGWU who became Minister for Labour, Industry and Commerce in the Free State government, as well as director of the notorious department of Military Intelligence. He inducted railwaymen into the National Army to fight the anti-Treaty forces in order to defend their jobs, protect the transport network and save the country from collapse.
As we now know, the Irish Free State did not meet the declared aspirations of the 1916 signatories, least of all James Connolly’s. The new state limped in tandem behind the United Kingdom with lower wage rates, poorer working and housing conditions, and little by way of social protection. People voted with their feet and the population fell by over ten per cent between 1911 and 1961. Emigration rates was particularly high in Dublin city, as well as many parts of the west and border regions, and among young women. In 1947 the Catholic hierarchy told the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera of their ‘great alarm [at] the continuous drain on the womanhood and future motherhood of the country as a result of the present wave of emigration’. They demanded the government stop ‘foreign agents’ from entering ‘the country to lure girls abroad with promises of lucrative employment’ in careers such as nursing and teaching.[13]
None of the bishops appeared to reflect on why these ‘girls’ were leaving the country. They certainly did not refer to the effect that the exemption of women from jury service had on their rights as citizens in 1924, the bar on them applying for promotional posts in the civil service in 1925, the ban on divorce in the same year and contraception in 1934, the introduction of the Conditions of Employment Act in 1936, supported by most trade unions and of course Article 41.2 of the 1937 Constitution, which recognised the special position of women in the home, obviating the need for them to have any place at all in society outside of it.
One wonders would Connolly, an ardent women’s rights campaigner, have led the charge in 1916 if he could have seen the future? I suspect he might. A strong nationalist with a tendency to romanticise the Gaelic and Fenian past, he would probably still have found the opportunity to strike a blow for national freedom while Britain was locked in a life and death struggle with Imperial Germany irresistible, and hoped that the working class would, by force of argument and example, escape Houdine-like from class oppression into a Workers’ Republic in the course of the struggle. It was an early example of the illusory power millenarian Marxism would exercise on several generations of revolutionaries in the twentieth century.
As we now know, the long term prospects for women and other marginalised groups in Irish society did not begin to improve until we joined the then-EEC in 1973 and surrendered some of the sovereignty that the men and women of 1916 had fought for. It was, for instance, EEC membership that required us to implement equal pay legislation. Our accession to the EEC also reduced drastically our dependence on the United Kingdom and better positioned us to avail of CAP, regional and structural funds. But that was not something the leaders of the Easter Rising could have foreseen, or probably desired, whereas it should have been abundantly clear to Connolly and other labour leaders what the fate of working men and women would be in an independent state in the future that was forseeable.
It could be argued that the Bolsheviks’ tragedy was that, once they secured power they did not practise what they preached, but a democratic putsch is a contradiction in terms even if circumstances had been more propitious. Connolly also failed to practise what he preached, allowing his rage against injustice to overwhelm his judgement. I am not arguing that British imperialism or the Union were good things, but I am suggesting that if they were the problem, 1916 was not the answer. The Irish working class was too small and too divided to lead a nationalist insurrection, or direct it once ignited. Whatever chance there was of enhancing its influence on Irish or British politics had to be based on building a stronger trade union base and finding an accommodation with loyalist workers to organise opposition to the war on a class basis. These were tasks Connolly was not equipped to do. His whole life, ideological trajectory and temperament did however make him an ideal candidate for martyrdom. It may be that some of his ideas are more relevant today than in 1916 and he can certainly provide an inspirational model for those on the left in this Centenary year, but, as I said, commemoration is not history.
Padraig Yeates
[1] Workers Republic, April 15th, 1916
[2] ‘The Irish Rebellion of 1916’, in Lenin on Ireland, Communist Party of Ireland, Undated. Page 34
[3] CSORP 25183-25271, National Archives, Ireland, Yeates, P A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-1918, Chapter Nine, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 2011
[4] Stephens, J. The Insurrection in Dublin, Leinster Leader, Kildare, 199, Page 30
[5] DMP Prisoners’ Books http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:43945
[6] Irish Times and Irish Independent, May 11th, 1916, DMP Book 1916-1918, Page 35. The Irish Times reports the daughter, Winnie O’Beirne as receiving two months but the Irish Independent and the DMP Prisoners Book both record the mother as receiving the sentence. Where there are conflicts of evidence I tend to opt for the police record as the more likely to be accurate.
[7] The figures are rounded to nearest decimal point. See table ‘DMP Arrests by age and gender for 1916’ for exact percentages
[8] Irish Times, May 10th and 11th, 1916
[9] Irish Times May 10th and 11th, 1916, Irish Independent and Freeman’s Journal, May 11th, 1916, DMP Book 1916-1918, Page 35
[10] DMP Statistical Returns, EPPI
[11] By the way there is no evidence that he wrote the Proclamation, which was work of Patrick H Pearse, no doubt in consultation with Connolly and his co-signatories.
[12] Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, No 18
[13] Ó Gráda, C A rocky road: The Irish economy since the 1920s, Manchester University Press, 1997, Page 212