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THE IRISH TIMES, SATURDAY, MAY 12, 1956
A group of members of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (1896-1904), photographed in the Phænix Park, Dublin, in May, 1901. In front, from left: John Arnall, E. W. Stewart, Thomas Brady, James Connolly, John J. Lyng*, William O'Brien* and John Carolan*. At back, from left: W. J. Bradshaw, John Brannigan, J. Goff, Mark Deering, Murtha J. Lyng, Daniel O'Brien, Thomas J. Lyng and James Bishop. To-day is the 40th anniversary of James Connolly's execution.
*Survivors.

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Mainly Meandering ...
by Robert Brennan
EASTER WEEK IN WEXFORD
LATE at night on the Thursday following Easter Sunday, 1916, I sat in the Billiard Room in Enniscorthy pretending an exuberance I did not feel.
The billiard table at which I sat was heaped with a various assortment of small arms and ammunition, the result of our call that all arms should be surrendered or of the raids by our men on the houses of those who were too lazy to bring them in or who were unwilling to give them up. There were couriers coming in and out and orders were being issued and obeyed with a military precision that would have done credit to a seasoned army.
It was clear from all the reports that had come in during the day that if the Republican forces did not command all of North Wexford from the sea to Mount Leinster and from the Wicklow border to Ferrycarrig on the Slaney, neither did the British.
There was a British military force in Wexford Barracks, well armed and trained. The Royal Irish Constabulary which was really an auxiliary force for the military, had however hastily vacated all the posts, to the number of fourteen or fifteen, which they had held in the area. These posts, which were located in various towns and villages, were well placed and strongly built and, as subsequent events proved, could have been held for a long time before even a prolonged assault with forces not supported by artillery.
To fight in arms
The reason for the evacuation was that we had posted on the doors of the Athenaeum the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and holsted the Tricolour over the Athenaeum and the adjoining Castle.
The beginnings had been marked by an atmosphere of terrible doubt and indecision. For years we had been looking forward to the day when we would prove to the world and ourselves our sincerity in our stated determination to fight in arms for the freedom of the country. For some of us who had been a long time in the movement the promise seemed impossible of realisation until the Great War started in 1914. A whole year before Easter 1916 Thomas MacDonagh had said to me:
"I was beginning to fear we would never get a chance in our time. Now I know we will get our chance."
As God had it to be, the Irish Volunteers had come into existence before the war so that we were not as unprepared as we otherwise would have been.
It is an old story now about how differences of opinion at the top prevented the Rising from becoming nationwide. Because of those differences the members of the Wexford town battalion, to which I was attached, had been mobilised twice and heartbrokenly sent home again.
Bicycle to Dublin
Tony Mulvey, later M.P. for Tyrone-Fermanagh, a fellow-reporter, brought me the news that two thousand troops were expected to arrive at Rosslare en route for Dublin to reinforce the British surrounding the city, within which the rebels were now fighting with their backs to the wall.
I hurried to Enniscorthy with this news and found that everyone there was in favour of going out. Paul Galligan, the brigade Commandant, had gone to Dublin to see how the land lay and he was expected back at any moment. We had a meeting in Seumas Rafter's house and, besides Seumas, there were present Seumas Doyle and Sean Etchingham, whom Seumas Doyle had earlier restrained from setting out on a bicycle for Dublin to get into the fight.
We decided that the least we could do was to make sure that no British reinforcements would get to Dublin by the only direct railway line they could use and we sent two men out to take up the rails a few miles south of Enniscorthy. One of the men was John Thomkins and the other was either Tom Doyle or Dick Donoghue.
Later that night I was asleep in Rafter's house—the first real sleep I had had in a whole week—when Seumas Doyle roused me to tell me that the two men we had sent out had been captured by the R.I.C. from Oylegate after an exchange of shots. We decided at once that we should mobilise the local battalion and take over the town as a preliminary to rousing, as we hoped, all of Wexford and possibly the adjoining counties of Waterford, Killkenny, Carlow and Wicklow.
The mobilisation was still proceeding when Comdt. Paul Galligan arrived from Dublin and he at once confirmed our decision. He had succeeded
in making his way into the G.P.O. where he saw James Connolly, who told him that we should make sure that no British reinforcements should pass through our territory. The mobilisation was a great success. There were a few defections but in the dim light before dawn there were nearly three hundred men on parade and it was grand to see Pat Keegan, Matt Holbrook, the brothers Tobin, Jack Lacey, Sean Murphy and Jim Clery handing out the arms which had been carefully hidden.
The sun had not yet risen when Commandant Galligan gave the order to march and through the silent streets we tramped to the Athenaeum.
Couriers were sent out and in a surprisingly short time we were receiving heartening messages from Ferns, Camolin, Gorey, Carnew, Marshalstown and many other Wexford hamlets and villages whose names dorned the stirring ballads written about 1798.
And now you will ask why it was I was so down in the mouth on the night of Easter Thursday, 1916. My reply is that it had nothing whatever to do with what was happening in Enniscorthy. It was due entirely to a copy of an English newspaper—the London "Daily Mail"—which someone had brought in and laid on the billiard table.
Defeat and disaster
In ribbon headlines it told of the Irish rebellion and said that the Dublin rebels were completely surrounded. Heavy field-guns had been brought into action and the outlying posts had been taken. In only a matter of hours, the report said, the headquarters of the rebels in the G.P.O. would be subdued.
That was bad enough, but the correspondent of the "Daily Mail" reported that the rest of the country was quiet and, to support this claim, he quoted dispatches from the West, the Midlands and the South.
In other words, the Rising had failed. The high hopes we had had were now laid low. Again, as often before, it was defeat and disaster for the Irish and victory and triumph for the ancient enemy. It would be always like this. I thought of the men of '98 and '48 and '67 who had died heartbroken in defeat.
I was still looking at the newspaper when I became aware that Etchingham was reading it
over my shoulder. When I looked at him I found that the old, gay, mocking smile was not there any more. His face was very grave and very sad.
"It's bad, Bob," he said, his hand on my shoulder. "But never mind, we'll make the best of it."
He was making for the door, when he came back and said: "I've an idea we have forgotten something. It's coming back to me and I will tell you about it later."
Wonderful chance
There was a little dressing-room at the back of the stage where I had seen him writing. He was a born journalist and he was never without a wad of copy paper on which he was always making notes. When I entered this room a few minutes later I pretended not to notice that Sean, who was never a pious character, was getting up off his knees. The sad look had gone from his face and his eyes were shining.
"I remember what it was we had forgotten," he said, with a trace of the old raillery in his voice. "How often have we complained that the Supreme Council was wrong in not setting a date for the Rising and not keep us guessing from day to day whether we would be too old or maybe dead, when the call came. Now Pearse has given us this wonderful chance. We can't see into the future,

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EAMONN CEANNT signed the Proclamation of Independence and was gallant in battle. He also loved the homely things of life—the music and the countryside and the song of the lark. Life ended for him before a firing squad in 1916 . . .
THE REBEL PIPER AT THE VATICAN
EAMONN CEANNT is somewhat overshadowed by some of the other signatories to the Proclamation of Easter Week, and is, therefore, sometimes less remembered. He was a fine soldier and a great leader, and played as big a part as any of the others.
He was born in Co. Galway on September 21, 1881, and was only ten when the family came to live in Dublin. He went to school to the Christian Street, and in the annals of O'Connell Schools he is referred to as one of the most brilliant pupils ever to pass through there.
From O'Connell's he went to the National University, and from there secured a post in the Rates Department afterwards promoted to the City Treasurer's Office, and was assistant to the City Treasurer, with a very lucrative salary, until the Rising.
EAMONN CEANNT from an early league was attracted to the Gaelic League. Although he worked hard in the City Treasurer's Office, he found time at night to acquire an extensive knowledge of the Irish language, and of its literature.
He also had a keen interest in Irish music. During the Jubilee Celebrations he lived in Rome in 1908 in honour of His Holiness Pope Pius X. Eamonn Ceannt accompanied a group of Irish athletes to the Eternal City. They were to compete in the athletic competitions, organised in connection with the Jubilee Celebrations.
During the journey to Rome he spoke not a word of English, but french, Latin, and broken Italian all the time rather than be taken on the Continent as an Englishman.
Ceannt was an accomplished Irish piper. When the Irish team came into the Roman arena, the six-footed Irishman led them round the foot.
Irish costume of the 11th century period with an Irish kilt.
His soldiery appearance as he walked in front of the Irish athletes, his magnificent figure, and the skirl of the pipes made a big impression.
The peoples of Rome cheered him and his followers to the echo.
HIS HOLINESS THE POPE heard of the impression created by the Irishmen at the Rome stadium, and summoned the young piper to appear before him and to play for him.
Two days later His Holiness waited at the Vatican, surrounded by a long of old Irish priests who had a group of exiles from Ireland. The skirl of the pipes was heard again, this time in the Vatican chambers, and soon Eamonn Ceannt marched up to the feet of the Holy Green, "knelling" down, and kissed the Pope's ring.
The Pontiff smiled sympathetically, although it is said he was surprised that the old Irish music of the pipes moved the wild Irish priests to such a state of emotion that many of them burst into tears.
After the performance the Pope bestowed his Apostolic Blessing on the piper, and on the members of the Irish athletic team.
FIVE years later, in November of 1913, Eamonn Ceannt became an Irish Volunteer. He joined at the great meeting in the Rotunda, Dublin, where the Volunteer movement was launched.
Although he joined as a private he soon rose to the rank of Captain, and was, from the beginning, a member of the Provisional Committee. When the Volunteers surrendered the sunday afternoon,
decided to import arms Eamonn Ceannt, then O.C. of the 4th Dublin Battallion, led his men to Howth for the famous gun to round maneuvre.
He was also present the week later when the Volunteers landed a second consignment of guns at Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow.
WHEN the Rising took place on Easter Monday, 1916, Eamonn Ceannt was in charge of the Republican Garrison in the South Dublin Union. His second-incoming cathal Brugha, and the lies of his Battallion were scattered about in the distillery building, along Watling Street, and in the Mendicity Institution on the Quays.
On the Saturday of Easter Week on the post commanded by Cathal Brugha. Bombs tore gaps in the roof, but the Volunteers clumped accurately to their positions.
After some hours of desperate fighting, a mistaken order to retreat passed along the lines. At this stage Cathal Brugha was badly wounded, and somehow he was overlooked in the excitement. The retreating Volunteers reported to the Commandant that Cathal Brugha was dead.
He was far from dead. Although lying there alone, and scarcely able to move from loss of blood, he challenged the enemy to advance, keeping up a continuous rain of revolver fire.
Farther down the line, the Volunteers suddenly heard the voice of the Vice-Commandant singing "God Save Ireland."
THEN came the great episode of the week. Commandant Ceannt crept on bended knees to the side of his comrade. He found him lying in a pool of his own blood. The two men embraced. Cathal said "Let us sing 'God Save Ireland.' Eamonn". Then he collapsed. But he had held up the enemy's advance for four hours.
When the order came to surrender on Sunday afternoon,
April 30th, Eamonn Ceannt marched out with 43 surviving comrades. The British Commander who accepted Ceannt's surrender, Sir Francis Vine, spoke in high terms of "the bravery of the rebels."
Ceannt marched his men right through the streets of Dublin statue in O'Connell Street, where he ordered them to pile up their arms.
"His bearing," says a newspaper report of the period, "was poble, almost magnificent. Even the officers and soldiers in command of the captured rebels looked on in wonder."
CEANNT was taken to Richmond prison that Sunday night. On Monday morning he was picked out as a leader, and the following Wednesday was condemned and sentenced to Kilmainham Jail.
On the Saturday afternoon after the surrender he was visited by his wife. She was allowed 20 minutes' conversation with him in his cell's conversation with a warder. There was nothing in the cell for him to lie on or even sit on.
On Sunday, May 7th, he was informed at four in the afternoon that he was to be shot at 3.45 on the following morning. He immediately asked that his relatives be sent for, and that he be supplied with writing materials, and a table, and chair. His request was granted.
He wrote letters to his wife and little son, and to the people of Ireland.
He then told his son Ronan, then only 10 years old, a pupil at Pearse's college, St. Enda's:—
"To my poor little son Ronan. From his father who is about to die to-morrow for Ireland—Health and prosperity.
"P.S.—Take good care of your life mother, and may God preserve you both, and give you a long and prosperous life together. God save Ireland!"
(Continued On Page 8)
The Rebel Piper at the Vatican
(Continued From Page 4)
ON the Sunday page before his execution, when he attended Mass in the prison Chapel, he noticed that his prison sister-in-law, Miss Lily O'Brennan, was among the 60 women prisoners in the gallery of the church. They had served in the Republican Red Cross during the Rising.
That was the same she saw of him, but she left this poem about him, written in 1916 while she was still in jail:
He walked apart. God moulded his childhood To understand his ways. Unobtrusive and quiet Nature appealed to him, and the lark's piled was ever in his heart and on his lips.
And when he grew to boyhood she called him And brought him to her fount and there he drank A nation's purifying draught In history, Language and Song.
A

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Howth gun
running
veteran's
story
IRISH PRESS Reporter
24.5.36
CHICAGO engineer Pat McGinley (65), who returns to the U.S. to-morrow after a holiday at his old home on Gola Island, Co. Donegal, told for the first time of his part in the Howth gun-running in 1914.
Whilst salmon fishing off Downings he got a telegram from Francis Joseph Bigger of Belfast, whom he had met the year before at Ardglass, Co. Down, to go to Belfast.
He did so, and was given a letter and told to go to Bangor in Wales where he would contact Erskine Childers.
On Childers asking him to find another good seafaring man, he wired for Gola fisherman Charlie Duggan, who joined them a week later.
They started off early one morning in the yacht, with Mrs. Childers, the Hon. Mary Spring-Rice and Capt. Gordon Shephard. Then for the first time Mr. McGinley was told of the proposed gun-running.
"After two days we sighted a German tug, about eight miles from Crookshaven on the German coast and tied up alongside.
"There were 6,800 rifles and plenty of ammunition on board, and these were transferred to the yacht. The tug then towed us across to the English side where a dense fog descended.
"On the way to Dublin weather very stormy and the sails were repeatedly ripped from the ropes We reached Howth on Saturday.
"On Sunday we moved close to the pier, where the volunteers took only an hour to get all the arms and ammunition off.
"The coastguards flashed signals to warships to catch them. When they went outside another fog saved them. They got out of Howth at 4.30 and six hours later were in Holyhead."
After the yacht had returned to Holyhead, he said, the only boat back to Dublin was one carrying British troops to suppress the demonstrations which had been started by the landing of the guns.
Mr. McGinley said that he and a companion were taken on board this ship, the only two civilians on it, and were brought back safely to Dublin without arousing the slightest suspicion

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Pen portraits of the seven signatories—No. 3Connolly: 'Hoarded Passions'
By Desmond Ryan
A MONG the contributory causes of the Rising listed by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland, to the 1916 last on his list, were the "hoarded passions" of the 1913 labour disputes and Bachelor's Walk.
James Connolly had already linked those two events in his slogan that the cause of Ireland was the cause of Labour, and the cause of Labour was the cause of Ireland. The British military authorities heartily agreed when they sent the Helga to shell Liberty Hall, trundled 18-pounders on to the Dublin quays and placed machine-guns on the Custom House, the Tara Street tower of the Fire Station, and on what is now the roof of the Irish Press.
No insurgents
Fortunately, Liberty Hall, that Wednesday morning, was empty of insurgents, even if the contemporary hostile accounts reported at first that the rebels seemed to be vigorously replying with rifle-fire and machine-gun.
Then it was suggested by the same wind of first the 18-pounders and then of the Helga, and made good their escape in time. The rebels, in fact, had not been there since noon on Easter Monday, even if they were making as much noise elsewhere as the Helga. First the Loop Line then saved Liberty Hall's outer walls, and windows and using much ammunition, sailed away towards Boland's Mills.
The Liberty Hall fireworks had a strictly moral purpose, according to the virtuous contemporary commentators: not only was Liberty Hall a thorn in the side of the Irish centre of social anarchy in Ireland, the brain of every riot and disturbance.
And so, when it was decided to use
artillery to defeat the rebels, Liberty Hall was selected as the very first target because of its priority in notoriety.
And all the time in the insurgent Headquarters in O'Connell Street, James Connolly, Commandant - General, Dublin Division of the Army of the Republic, as he listened to the Helga guns, and the more formidable guns soon to come, had but one comment to make to the fighters around him: "Don't be alarmed. When the British Government is using artillery in the City of Dublin it shows they must be in a hurry to finish the job, but there are a probably forces coming to help us." Later, he told William Pearse that the British must believe the Germans had landed or were about to land. William Pearse had been somewhat puzzled by Connolly's claim in lectures on street fighting, that artillery would not be used against an Irish insurgent, "because a capitalist government would not destroy capitalist property."
And even when Connolly added that such a use would be too fatal an admission that insurgent forces held the capital, William Pearse was amazed that a man who knew so much of the history of revolutions, and whiffs of grapeshot for sedition could argue so. The British, ever practical and pragmatic, settled this argument by prompt shell-fire and due compensation, shells for the rebels and cheques for the rest.
Had no scruples
Sir John Maxwell had no scruples about artillery, and declared that he would not hesitate to destroy rebels, and was as good as his word. His biographer, Sir George Arthur, would appear to have a suspicion that there was something in this belief of Connolly's that the use of artillery was too dangerous an admission of rebel strength and status. "Except for the bombardment of Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army," writes Sir George, "guns were scarcely used, and only when sniping could not be mastered by machine-guns or
JAMES CONNOLLY
rifle fire was a round of shell called into requisition." Artillery fire, he argues, was only used "to reduce the barricades or against a particular base known to be strongly held." Or, in a word, everywhere, and above all against the building, soon known to be unoccupied, Liberty Hall.
James Connolly did not live to read the contemporary moralists or Maxwell's biography, but he left an answer for his critics. The zeal to shell Liberty Hall would not surprise him. He wrote of a Dublin paper that criticised "Larkinism," "In theory, they admit that conditions were intolerable, and that Larkin was justified in making war on them; in practice they unite to defend those conditions, and rebels against them." Connolly could not foresee, to be sure, that in spite of the Helga and the 18-pounders, Liberty Hall would be standing
forty years after, and if ear-marked for demolition through honourable old age, yet ear-marked, too, for a more glorious reconstruction.
And if he really had such a blind spot on the use of artillery as William Pearse, Colonel J. J. O'Connell and others were persuaded he had, and this was not one of his timely disingenuous propaganda strokes, what Connolly defended in this: "Remember. It is easy for us now to be wise after the event, and tell with unerring accuracy just when the blow might have been struck with the greatest probability of success.
"It is easy for us now because we know certain things which it was impossible for the Fenian leaders to know. If we know where they made a mistake it is not because our judgment is better than was theirs, but rather because we are judging a crisis that is past and whose happenings are all therefore familiar to us."
Real memorial
Connolly's most permanent memorial — if his name on the Cuchulainn statue in the General Post Office be excepted—is surely the four volumes of his collected works published some years ago by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. He ranks with William Thompson, Davitt and Lalor as among the greatest Irish champions of social justice and as one of the Irelanders.
As he was marching away from Liberty Hall forty years ago, he said, "We are marching out to be slaughtered." Connolly himself was most certainly and most barbarously slaughtered, but his spirit lived on through the war of independence and inspired the Labour movement—and indeed the whole nation—with the spirit of the poet he had quoted in his defiant challenge in December, 1914:
"The graves of those murdered for freedom bear seed for freedom
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow."

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THE IRISH PRESS, THURSDAY, APRIL, 5, 1954
Pen portraits of the seven signatories - No. 4
'Make no lament for me' said
Mac Diarmada
By John Crawford
"Yet from the dead appears one with calm brow
And lovely features, who though weak of frame
Possessed a heart of fire : I see his face
And whisper softly Seán Mac Diarmada's name."
THE lines are by Mgr. de Brún who was one of the last to see Seán Mac Diarmada in his cell in Kilmainham, before his execution on 12th May, 1916 (Mac Diarmada, with Connolly, was the last to be shot.) They conjure up the picture of a hero—but a rather insubstantial one. To seek among the literature of the time is to get no firmer a picture.
A boyish figure
We see the boyish, limping figure, the man whom everyone liked; we sense the intensity of purpose inside him; but very little more. Seán Mac Diarmada is probably the least well known of all of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. Perhaps that is the way he would have liked it himself.
He was born in Kiltyclogher, Co. Leitrim, in 1884, the eighth child in a family of ten. He intended to be a teacher but as a pupil-teacher he had a row with the school manager and went off to Glasgow where he worked as a barman. Back in Ireland, he worked in public-houses in Belfast and also, for a time, as a tram-driver. It was in Belfast that he first came in contact with the national movement. After a brief spell in the A.O.H., he joined the Dungannon Club which had been founded in Belfast by Denis MacCullough and Bulmer Hobson.
Soon he was in the I.R.B., and was closely associated particularly with Tom Clarke, in the re-organisation of the Brotherhood. He became treasurer of the Supreme Council in the new organisation.
Mac Diarmada was, above all, the organiser. In those formative years, from
1907 to 1912, he travelled tirelessly over the country, holding meetings and organising Sinn Fein clubs. As well as that he ran 'Irish Freedom' from its office at 12 D'Olier Street, Dublin.
An attack of polio
In 1912 he suffered an attack of polio which left him lame in one leg. It detracted little from his activity, however. He still travelled, holding meeting after meeting, building up the Sinn Fein, and later, the Volunteers' organisation.
In 1913 he was arrested for a "seditious" speech in Tuam, Co. Galway, and served four months' hard labour in Mountjoy. At the last moment he remembered that he had secret and confidential papers on him, but managed, just in time, to smuggle them into the safe custody of Liam Mellows, before the police found them.
It is easy, perhaps, to see why Mac Diarmada has not attracted as much attention as his fellow-leaders. For he was essentially the worker behind the scenes, the indispensable man in any revolutionary movement, playing the part that ensures the results but earns little of the glory.
A tireless worker
For thirty shillings a week, Mac Diarmada threw himself into the unglamorous work of organisation, attending meeting after meeting, committee after committee—sometimes as many as six in the same day. Whatever is doing, Mac Diarmada is there—the "kidnapping" of James Connolly, the fateful interviews with MacNeill, the march on the Post Office, the surrender.
We catch glimpses of him during those days for which he had worked so long and so hard—furiously denouncing a group of looters; forecasting to Dr. James Ryan that all the signatories of the Proclamation
would be shot but the others let free; at the end, on the Saturday, in Moore Street, preparing for the surrender by shaving and putting on a clean collar.
A 'dangerous fanatic'
Calm, collected, what his enemies would have called a "dangerous fanatic." Dangerous, yes, because the urgency of his purpose was never deflected—he was always the most active in insisting on the necessity of a Rising. But "fanatic," no, if one is to believe the unanimous testimony of all who knew him as a shrewd, practical and entirely likeable person.
He was no intellectual—and never pretended to be. Perhaps this was something of a drawback in the company in which he found himself, in which, even for nationalist, revolutionary movements, there was a more than normal preponderance of intellectuals.
We have no writings of Mac Diarmada as we have of Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh and Plunkett. When he spoke it was in the simple words of the fighter, the worker.
On that tragic Saturday morning in Moore Street he read Pearse's letter of surrender calmly and solemnly to the men who had fought all that desperate week. He ordered food to be served to everyone, saying that they should take a good meal as they might not be too well fed where they were going. He went on :
"The only terms the British military authorities would listen to were unconditional surrender. We surrendered not to save you but to save the city and the people of this city from destruction. You would have fought on. No matter, I am proud of you.... But this week of Easter will be remembered, and your work will tell some day."
His execution
Mac Diarmada was treated with no more humanity by his captors than Connolly, who was executed on the same morning, was. He was left standing in the green space in front of the Rotunda Hospital, lame as he was, for several hours after the surrender, without a stick to support him. At 3.45
Seán Mac Diarmada
a.m. on the 12th May the last two of the protracted executions, for which even some Irishmen had called insistantly, took place. Connolly and MacDiarmada, both cripples, were shot. Mac Diarmada's last words from his cell in Kilmainham are worth quoting. In a letter to his "dear brothers and sisters" he wrote :
His last words
"Make no lament for me. Pray for my soul and feel a lasting pride at my death. I die that the Irish nation may live. God bless and guard you all and may He have mercy on my soul.... The cause for which I die has been symbolised during the past week by the blood of as good men as ever trod God's earth, and should not I feel justly proud to be numbered amongst them? Before God, let me again assure you how grand and happy I feel. It is not alone for myself I feel happy but for the fact that Ireland can produce such men."

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Letters to the Editor
1P 23.1.26
MacNeill and the Rising
Sir,—The letter of Dr. Michael Tierney seems to imply that, when Maj. Florence O'Donoghue, during his very interesting talk on Easter Week last Sunday night, stated inaccurately that, at one moment in the days preceding the Rising, Eoin MacNeill withdrew his opposition to it, he was doing an injustice to the memory of MacNeill.
Nothing was manifestly further from Mr. O'Donoghue's intention. In making that statement he was obviously being complimentary to him!
Had Eoin MacNeill joined with Pearse in the Rising and been shot with him, he would be remembered along with Pearse in the hearts of the plain people of Ireland.
Mr. O'Donoghue may have been inaccurate but only slightly. The points seems to me to be this. After the happenings in Kerry, a couple of the leaders went to see MacNeill and told him of them. He said, as I believe and others have written besides me, that, in the mind of Dublin Castle, contact with the Germans on the part of the Volunteers having been established, the Government would now attack, that is, seek to disarm the Volunteers, and that that brought MacNeill to the position he had always publicly help, namely, that the Volunteers would resist attack.
A short time previously, at a crowded meeting in the Round Room of the Mansion House, he had banged the desk before him and said most vehemently, to loud cheering: "Let their forces against us and we will meet them."
But how? By each individual Volunteer standing, gun in hand, at his own doorstep, in the presence of his mother, his wife, his sister?
It is a small step from "we will resist attack," to "we will take up positions beforehand in order to resist attack as effectively as possible."
Those leaders, MacDonagh and MacDermott, who saw MacNeill on Good Friday morning, having heard him state the first of these two principles, assumed that he accepted the second one of Mr. O'Donoghue's inaccuracy.
It is correct, as Dr. Tierney states, that MacNeill at no time gave whole-hearted assent to the plans for a rising made during the preceding twelve months in conjunction with the Germans.
But, when the big decision was taken on Easter Sunday it was a new decision. It was, for all
practical purposes, MacNeill's position.
It was inevitable now that the Volunteers would be disarmed and disbanded and positions were taken to resist attack. MacNeill, of course, was justified in complaining that, about situation had been brought by activities kept secret from him.
MacDonagh told him plainly that he had been but a pawn in the great game since the beginning.
It is very probably that it was Eoin MacNeill who made the Rising a success. His last minute cancelling order, when he thought that after all there might be a chance of the British not attacking—served as a very successful ruse de guerre, to throw the British off their guard and enable a flying start to be made.
I hope Dr. Tierney will not think I am trying to do injustice that MacNeill's memory is saying that I was the first to inform him that fighting had started, and that the Rising was definitely under way—on that Easter Monday morning between twelve and one, after a few minutes intense thought, said:
"I must go home and put on my uniform and join in." I said: "What after all that has happened?" He said: "Yes, now that it has started." I thought it the best circumstances, I had ever heard.
If Eoin MacNeill changed his mind or was persuaded to change his mind later in the day, he was entitled to his opinion. My veneration for the memory of that great scholar and patriot is as deep as Dr. Tierney's.
"Justice was begun to be done," to use his phrase, by Patrick Pearse when he wrote in his letter from Kilmainham that both MacNeill and he, had acted in what they conceived to be the best interests of Ireland.
Justice was sentenced in 1917, the day the prisoners were released, when Eamon de Valera insisted on MacNeill marching beside him at the head of the column of prisoners marching from the National Aid office to the Mansion House.
In several books on the period, written by men who were in the movement and in sympathy with the Rising.
Mise le meas,
Llam O Briain.
Galway.
Sir,—I have not seen the press reports to which Dr. Tierney refers in his letter in your issue of 20th, but may I quote the words I used in the Radio talk so that there may be no misunderstanding?
"Early on Friday morning, after they had become aware of MacNeill's orders, Pearse, MacDiarmeda and McDonagh interviewed MacNeill again and told him of the expected arrival of the cargo of arms. Thereupon, MacNeill was understood to have withdrawn his opposition, saying that if arms were being imported a fight was inevitable and they were all in it."
I have first-hand documentary evidence summarised this necessary what took place.
Until the evidence to which Dr. Tierney refers is published, no further comment seems to be called for, except that, as there appears to be a conflict of evidence, the point at this issue cannot be decided upon any mere assertion that the statement I made is baseless. It is very far indeed from being so.
—Yours faithfully,
F. O'DONOGHUE.
Eglantine Park,
Douglas Road, Cork.
A Chara,—In your issue of Saturday last it was stated that the British gunboat Helga, shelled Liberty Hall from the river Liffey during Easter Week, 1916. This is not correct.
The Helga tried to shell Liberty Hall from about the position of what is known as Guinness Wharf on the Wednesday. The first shell hit the lower portion of the railway bridge. She was then moved out into the centre of the river. Her gun was elevated without success, and gave up the task.
The following morning a land gun was placed on Burgh Quay close to the Liffey wall near Tara St. by the British military. Part of the wall was prised into the river to give the correct elevation for the gun to do the job effectively.
I trust this information will correct a long standing inaccuracy.
Is mise,
FRANK ROBBINS.
5 Fairview Terrace, Dublin.

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What Bit Them ?
MUTINY AT THE CURRAGH. By A. P. Ryan. (Macmillan. 18s.)
Observer
13.05.26
By A. J. P. TAYLOR
THE British governing classes (whoever they may be) enjoy a deserved reputation for political wisdom. Intellectually undistinguished, comparatively uncultured, they have always known when to yield. They have paid out the rope of compromise with a steady hand; and as a result here they still are, working the only historic constitution in Europe — a comfortably aristocratic Cabinet, a long waiting-list at every public school, the Monarchy universally admired, even the House of Lords generally accepted.
Once only have the established classes taken leave of their senses. In the five years between Lloyd George's famous Budget and the outbreak of the First World War they abandoned their traditional discretion and whipped up political passions until they brought the United Kingdom to the edge of civil war.
What caused this strange aberration which almost brought them and us to disaster? Mr. Ryan suggests that it was boredom—"boredom with law, order and the hitherto largely unquestioned processes of democratic procedure." "Leaders on all sides had grown weary of the long peace." Perhaps we should relate this lapse of the politicians to a wider framework. Enthusiasm for violence was a general disease of the time. Wealthy women used the Vote as an excuse for behaving like stage-anarchists; respectable trade union leaders prepared for a revolutionary general strike; musicians and artists stunned the public with Futuristic brutality; historians and philosophers preached the virtues of war. Men went to the edge of catastrophe largely because they were convinced that they could never fall over; there was exhilaration in showing off their strong nerves. The British governing classes had long talked about democracy; they were exasperated when others took this talk seriously. Most deeply of all, they were roused by the Irish question. This had been the one flaw in British common sense for a century previously; the flaw was maintained to the last.
* * *
THE high point of Mr. Ryan's book is the extraordinary episode in the spring of 1914, when British Army officers took a leaf from the Syndicalist book and threatened to refuse to obey the orders of their lawful superiors. To make this episode comprehensible, he has to go back to the start of the Home Rule Bill in 1912; and he should have gone further back still—to the Parliament Act and to Lloyd George's taxation of land values. The calamitous story starts in 1909, not in 1914 nor even in 1912. Indeed the Parliament Act caused much of the mischief. If Home Rule had been rammed through in a single session, the talk of violence could never have matured. There would have been no time to organise the private armies or to take the Covenant. The two sides could not have taken up
positions from which there was no retreat; and Ireland would have received Home Rule—with what results for good or ill who can say? The Parliament Act sprang from slovenly thinking—from the belief that delay is always healing; whereas sometimes a radical operation is the most gentle, as well as the most certain, cure.
The Parliament Act was not the only slovenly part of the story. Indeed everything in it was slovenly and muddled. The Liberals embarked on Home Rule without either wanting it or reflecting on its consequences; the Conservatives were equally irresponsible. Carson, a Dubliner, cared little for Ulster; he wished to preserve the Union. And on the other side Churchill, who was the most strenuous for coercing Ulster, was also the strongest advocate of excluding Ulster from Home Rule. The final outcome turned everyone's hopes upside down. Everyone wanted a united Ireland, associated in some way with Great Britain. What they got was a divided Ireland, the larger part an independent republic, and Ulster possessing the Home Rule against which it had prepared to wage civil war.
* * *
THE truth is that all the politicians, from Asquith to Carson, were playing an exciting game. The stakes were higher than ever before; their nerves needed to be stronger. But it never crossed their minds for a moment that anything real would come out of it—that guns would go off, men be killed, or a constitutional system overthrown. It is not surprising that the Army officers, who might have to do something, fell into bewilderment and acted in a silly way. One of them, Sir Henry Wilson, behaved with criminal irresponsibility, as Mr. Ryan shows. The rest were simply puzzled and foolish. But it was the sort of folly that has destroyed empires.
Mr. Ryan tells the story with elegant detachment. He has profited from the memory of some survivors; and by examining the record of Sir Charles Fergusson shows how a little sense could have avoided the whole upset. His book is a little ungenerous in ignoring other writers—Dangerfield, for instance, who has discussed the same period in greater depth, and Strauss, who has illuminated the long course of the Irish question. The meticulous conscience of the professional historian is also slightly shocked by Mr. Ryan's casual errors. He is unaware, for example, that Dundee was a two-member constituency. "Lewes and Lewes" are not a well-known firm of London solicitors. The London Library keeps its periodicals on the fourth and fifth floors, not in "the catacombs."
Still, the book is wonderfully illuminating; and a great deal more entertaining than most contemporary novels. The rulers of old England certainly showed plenty of dash, even when they were steering her on to the rocks.

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ÉIRÉ
IRELAND
IRIS SHEACHTAINIÚIL NA ROINNE
GNÓTHÁI EACHTRACHA
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE
DEPARTMENT OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
Uimhir (No.) 318: 9-IV-1956.
CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ
MAJOR IRISH CITIZEN ARMY 1916
BEAN CROSA O CROID OR SON NA HÉIREONNI 1916