The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 43, 15 October 1924, Page 7

The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

(By William O’Beien.)

CHAPTER. XV.—(Continued.) His Party, nevertheless, proved themselves equally perverse in cheering his denunciation of the prostrate rebels. They cheered again when the Prim© Minister announced that the “National” (i.e., Board of Erin) Volunteers in Drogheda had proffered their services to the police against the insurgents, and cheered, more loudly still when the Prime Minister delivered an eulogium of the least reputable of all their colleagues who boasted that he had stolen the rifles of the insurgents on the night of the meditated rising in the County Limerick and then made his escape to the House of Commons to enjoy his blushing honors. They were to give a still more striking proof of theiralienation from honest Irish sentiment. Mr. Birrell had just returned from Dublin and handed in his resignation. This time distressingly serious and with irrepressible tears in his eyes, he made a moving description of his feelings as he “stood amongst the smoking ruins of Dublin and surrounded with my own ruins in mind and thought” and had the sympathy of a House melted by his eloquence and by his fate. He by ill chance proceeded to give a now reminder of his irremediable incapacity to understand Irish feeling by hazarding a remarkable prediction: “'The unanimity of Ireland has as I say even yet been preserved. This is no Irish rebellion. I hope that, although put down, as it is being put down, as it must be put down, with such success and with such courage and yet at the same time humanity toward the dupes, the rank and file, led astray by their leaders, that this insurrection in Ireland will never, even in the minds and memories of. that people, be associated with their past rebellions or become an historical landmark in their history.” A coarse chorus of assent; boomed from the Hibernian benches. , They could not have given more offence to Ireland’s most sacred traditions if they had cursed the memory of Robert Emmet, the hero of a curiously similar insurrection outside the walls of Dublin Castle. If ' it be true that Success is the goddess of an Englishman, Failure, in the patriotic sphere, is no less truly an object of Irish worship. Our history for ages is the history of heroic failure, pitted for ever against odds to which it. was no shame to succumb, and condemned fatally to terminate in the prison or on the scaffold, in broken hearts and calmn-, mated names. If Ireland has no other reward to offer, she has at least a lavish love in which to enshrine her beaten soldiers, and if her young conscripts of Easter Week had done nothing more memorable than, to give up their lives in what the Prime Minister of England was among the most generous to acknowledge to be a clean and gallant fight for a fine ideal, the more hopeless was their fight, the less willingly Ireland would forgive any aspersion on their memory. But as a matter of fact the Easter Week Insurrection, was something more than an obscure deed of desperation.. It was, .even if it stood by itself, an amazing military success. , A body of enthusiasts having according to the official calculation only 825 rifles at their command succeeded in taking possession of the seat of Government within a. single hour and holding possession of it for five

days against .a trained .army of 20,000 men at .the least, while, the fairest quarter of Dublin was being tumbled about their ears in a bombardment whose every shell shock (in -the 'words of Mr. Healy who witnessed it) "sounded like the thud .of clay falling upon his father's coffin." The one flaw in their plans was the unaccountable failure to capture Dublin Castle. It might have been the easiest part of their enterprise. We have already seen that the Castle was only defended by a ''corporal's guard" and tcr.at, according to the evidence of the Lord Lieutenant, as soon as the small party of rebels shot the policeman at the ,gate of the Lower Castle Yard, "there was nothing to -prevent them from going right in, of course." This view is shared entirely by Major Price, the Director of Military Intelligence, who "was talking to Sir Mathew Nathan in his office not 25 yards from the gate when tho firing commenced." When asked "why they did not go on?" his reply is: "They could have done it as easily as possible. Twenty-five determined men could have done it." The evidence seems to be that, not even twenty-five, but only "half a dozen Volunteers in green coats" were available, probably owing to the poverty of men as well as riflesstill more likely because great as was the contempt of the insurgent leaders for the ruling powers, they refused to give credence to the unimaginable state of unpreparedness now disclosed in evidence. But it is certain that if half the number of men detailed to seize the Post Office or the Four Courts or to entrench themselves in Stephen's Green had been devoted to the supreme enterprise of capturing the citadel of English power, Dublin Castle and the Viceregal Lodge, with the Lord Lieutenant and the Under Secretary, must have fallen an easy prey to their arms and a victory so resounding must have been followed by an uprising in the country of which nobody could measure the extent or the duration. Verily it was only an ingenuous Mr. Birrell and an Irish Party in the last stages of decadence who could have fallen into the mistake of taking it for granted that their sneers at the beaten rebels would be re-echoed by the Irish nation. Any Irish schoolboy could have taught them that an adventure so glowing with romantic daring, and crowned with the halo of so many unflinching deaths in front of the firing-plat-oons of England, would be remembered with pride and tenderness as one of the most inspiring episodes of our history. They believed they were dealing with a trumpery Dublin commotion and were confident they had heard the last of it once the abscess was lanced by Sir John Maxwell. Both as to.the facts and as to the prophecy, they were ludicrously astray. The insurrection was planned on the calculation that Reserve Lieutenant Von Spindler, the German Commander of the And, would succeed in landing his cargo of 30,000 rifles and field guns on the coast of Kerry. He did pass safely through the lines of a great British fleet on the north coast of Scotland and arrived in Tralee Bay on the appointed day, and but for the absurd accident by which the motor-car conveying those who were to signal to him fell into the sea in the darkness, he would doubtless have put his guns successfully on shore. Had he done so, it is now known there was an abundance of men in every county of the South ready and panting to take them up, and an insurrection must have followed which it would have taken England many months to cope with, could she even have mustered the great army that would be required for the purpose in the crisis of her fate in Flanders. It is not so generally known that even the capture of Casement and the voluntary sinking of the shipful of German rifles would not have prevented an insurrection upon a vaster scale than the Dublin one, had not Professor Eoin Mac Neill, the Commander of the V clunkers, countermanded the order before the news could penetrate anywhere outside the neighborhood of Dublin, that his order had been in turn set aside (only, it is believed, by a single vote) by the Dublin Executive. Information not to be doubted came into my own possession 1 that on the appointed night many thousands of insurgents from every part of Cork City and County converged upon the different mountain passes for the march into Kerry, and were only dispersed after, scenes of angry remonstrance on the arrival of a messenger , from Dublin, who

urged in vain that the loss of the German armaments had put an end to all possibility of success. For many months the abject failure of the Parliamentary politicians had been, preparing hundreds of thousands of young Irishmen of high spirit for any chance, however desperate, of retrieving the honor of their nation in the fair ranks of war, and the evidence before the Hardinge Commission leaves no room for doubt that by a natural reaction, the young men seduced by the intrigues of the Board of Erin into Air. Redmond's "National" Volunteers were going over in thousands, with their arms, to the side of the genuine fighters. One of 'the favorite excuses of "the Party" for the country turning to the side of the rebels was that they were horrified by the barbarities with which Sir John Maxwell put the Rising down. It was a misappreeiation of Irish feeling as false as the rest. "The country" were, indeed, horrified by the twenty-one shootings in cold blood in Kilmainham Prison, but it was not so much that they pitied the young idealists as they admired and envied them, and they attributed their fate, not so much to the English militarists, as to the laches and incompetence of "the Party" and its leaders. For the young Republicans of the Original Volunteers, of course, Parliamentarianism in any shape was the enemy. But they knew themselves to be and would have remained a minority of no great dimensions, had not the mind of the country far and near been, seething long with distrust of the Parliamentary politicians, and that not, as "the Party" fatuously tried to persuade themselves because the War Office had been uncivil in their dealings with Irish recruits, or even because of the Kilmainham fusillades, but for very much deeper reasons. Even the older men —"the sane and moderate elements," as they came to be nicknamedalthough, until, the astounding revelations that were to come later of the possibilities of guerilla warfare, they still believed armed rebellion to be stark madness, were already filled with disaffection to a Parliamentary Party steeped to the.lips in a partly corrupt and wholly disgraceful bargain for Partition, and felt their pulses throb at the gallantry and unselfishness of the insurrection which, according to Mr. Hi Troll and his Hibernians, was only to be remembered with execration by the Irish Nation. The wise men in Westminster persisted in their faith that the whole affair was a Dublin bubble and that the bubble, was burst. For a moment they were disillusioned by the arrival of Mr. Dillon-from Dublin, where he had been besieged in his house in North George's Street under the "protection of a party of military. He burst into the .House of Commons in a state of intense febrile excitement, and under the scandalised eye of Mr. Redmond, delivered a panegyric of the Dublin insurgents even more extravagant than had been his abuse and ridicule before the Rising. As we have seen, there had been "strong differences of opinion" between him and his titular leader, when there was question of "gingering Nathan," and when even the gentle Nathan asked: "What is Redmond up to, after what Dillon wrote to him over a month ago in the enclosed" (still unpublished) " c Confidential ' letter to him?" The "strong differences" this time took an exactly opposite turn. While Mr. Redmond thought the occasion demanded "on behalf of all my colleagues" an expression of his and their "detestation and horror" of the rebellion, his nominal lieutenant, fresh from Dublin, broke into a passionate psean to the glory of the rebels which, it may truly be said, did more to wound the feelings of the British House of Commons than all the frank hostility of the insurrection. Nor were his denunciations in high falsetto of the military altogether deprived of their sting by the absurd anti-climax at which he arrived when he complained that his son had been insulted by some subordinate officer who did not express himself in terms of proper respect for the name of Dillon, and with arm upraised registered the vow:. "No son of mine shall ever enter the English Army." This, however, was but an excited moment of panic on the part of a man who had to do something to make Dublin habitable for.him ever again. He, like the rest of "the Party," soon - fell back into Mr. Birrell's comfortable infatuation that the "unanimity of Ireland has even yet been preserved"andreserved, of course, in support of the Board of Erin. Before long they had every Corpora-

and County Council filled with Hibernian nominees passing "unanimous" resolutions expressing the country's "detestation and horror" of the wicked —resolutions which, before many months were over, the Boards that passed them, wiped out from their books with penitential tears in the hope of absolution from their electorate. The rebels were being courtmartialled or deported in their thousands, the last of their newspapers were extinguished; and the country-laid prostrate in a silence that seemed to be the brother of death. The reign of the Board of Erin was apparently so completely re-established that we had the farseeing Mr. Dillon assuring any Republicans who still ventured to show their heads that "the War Office paid no more attention to their antics than to the hopping • of as many fleas." CHAPTER XVI—"AN IRISH PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT. Mr. Asquith met the Easter Week crisis with a "gesture" which, had he persisted, might, even at the half-past eleventh hour, have saved Home Rule and himself. He went across to Ireland in person, visited the rebels in their prisons—it was even made a high crime that he shook hands with some of themlearned things that were not likely to be divulged in evidence before Lord Hardinge's Commission and returned with the conviction that England was not dealing with a gang of criminals, but with the best youth of a nationthat it was not Dublin Castle or Sir John Maxwell's firing-platoons that had won the day—that, on the contrary, it was "Dublin Castle" that was doomed by God and man to disappear, and it was militarist terrorism that must disarm before the more unconquerable spirit of Liberty. Hearts the most lacerated by recent events could not be impervious to the soothing influence of the pilgrimage of an English Prime Minister who came to Ireland not to insult the. memory of Pearse and his brother martyrs, or to traduce their motives, but to do justice to their romantic adventure, to confess that their fight had been "a clean one," and to solicit advice by what great measures of conciliation he could best prove that they had not died in vain. Furthermore, on the morrow. of an abortive insurrection savagely put down, and with the knowledge of the futility of expecting any further military aid from Germany,* the great mass of the population might, nobody then doubted, be still weaned from counsels of violence by some practical demonstration that Parliamentary methods were not wholly, vain nor English promises always perfidious. A deputation from the All-for-Ireland League who waited on Mr. Asquith in —headed by Captain Sheehan, M.P., whose credentials were his own services in the Minister Fusiliers, and the lives of two of his gallant sons buried' on the fields of Flanders—gave the Prime Minister in a sentence the programme which even at that dark hour might have spelled salvation for the two countries. It was" Any price for a United Ireland, but Partition —never under any possible circumstances!" A statesman of the Gladstone stature, returning to London, with such convictions, would not have rested a day nor relaxed a muscle before giving them practical effect. Mr. Asquith's incurable defect was not want of courage or of constructive capacity, but a genial indolence which was growing upon him as his unexpected passion for human companionship expanded. There is no evidence that he personally went a step further upon the road he had opened up in Ireland. He made the gran rifiuto and handed over his Irish task and with it his own future to the ready hands of Mr. Lloyd George. Weighed though the latter was with a thousand feverish cares as Minister for Munitions, his dauntless spirit did not hesitate to ' accept the inheritance bequeathed to him by his unsuspecting chief. His ignorance of Irish affairs was fathomless as the ocean —so fathomless that, as will be seen in a moment, he was unaware that Mr. Redmond had ever said: "There is no longer an Ulster Difficulty," and had never heard that Mr. Devlin's 8.0. E. Hibernians were an exclusively Catholic Order. His genius lay in first making *Sir Roger Casement was bitter in his complaints of the neglect and contempt which met him on every hand in Berlin. Compare Mr. Ronald McNeill's account of the sympathetic experiences of the emissary of the Ulster Covenanters, Mr. Crawford, in Hamburg and in the Kiel Canal.

daring imaginative proposals and afterwards thinking out how the facts might fit in with them, or might be brutally ignored if they did not. That is not to say that he was consciously heartless or unscrupulous. I think he was always cloudily sensible of the beauty of the Irish cause, both for ethnic reasons, which enabled him to see Celtic visions beyond the Irish seas as well as amidst his own haunted Welsh mountains, and also because Ireland in the House of Commons had shown him the pattern of glorious hardihood which he was himself to copy and improve upon for the upliftment of his Welsh brethren in the House of Commons, up to his day an ineffectual bilingual folk. Even his ignorance might have had its advantages, since it saved him from any inveterate prejudices in affairs so surcharged with prejudice as those of Ireland. It will always be debatable whether if he had accepted the Chief Secretaryship and devoted to it the prodigious energies— matchless dynamic power of "push and go" —which enabled him to turn the munitionless debacle of Mons into the breaking of the Hindenburg line, he might not have succeeded, where Mr. Asquith with his majority of 98 and a sterilised House of Lords had failed through loss of nerve or a too easy temper. (To be continued.)