Come Here To Me!

Of the ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ W.B Yeats immortalised, the average Dubliner can name many. In our street names and train stations, hospitals and memorials their names are found across the city and county. Some like Pearse and Connolly are very familiar figures, and have been subject to much study. Others however have managed to escape the same level of evaluation. Incredibly, almost a century on from the event, some of the executed leaders are only now becoming the subject of biographies. One such biography has just recently been released by O’Brien Press, looking at Sean Heuston. It forms a part of their ambitious Sixteen Lives series, and comes from historian and Dubliner John Gibney.

Laurance Campbell at work on his great statue for Seán Heuston, which today sits in the Phoenix Park near the zoo.

Among the youngest of the executed, Heuston was born in 1891 into Dublin’s inner-city, known as Jack to his siblings and baptised John Joseph. Gibney notes that six of the sixteen executed were Dublin men, with Heuston joined by the Pearse brothers, Michael Mallin, Roger Casement and Joseph Plunkett. Heuston’s working class background is worth pointing out, in a rebellion too often spoken of as a middle class insurrection. Born at 24 Lower Gloucester Street, it is known today as Seán MacDermott street to inner-city Dubliners. This area of the city captures the rise and demise of Dublin better than any other for me. It’s fashionable eighteenth-century existence is very much at odds with what would follow, and as Gibney writes “Dublin has presented a number of faces to the world, but two of the best known go hand in hand, as the splendor of the eighteenth century gave way to the squalor of the nineteenth.” Thirty-two people died of tuberculosis between 1894 and 1897 on this once highly respectable street, and the family moved to Jervis Street, and later to Dominick Street, yet another tenement area. The search for employment was to take Seán out of the city however, and to Limerick, where he succeeded in gaining employment as a clerk with the Great Southern and Western Railway. This offered all kinds of benefits, not least an eight hour day, when compared and contrasted with the precarious nature of work for most young men in Dublin at the time.

Undoubtedly the most recognisable image of Heuston, this photo appears on the front cover of the book. It was popularised after the Easter Rising and his execution.

Any study of Heuston has to examine Na Fianna in some detail, and Gibney does that here. A fascinating organisation, it was in many ways “an Irish nationalist alternative to the imperialist ethos of Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts”, who were becoming more and more active in Ireland. A small plaque on Camden Street until recently marked the location where the first meeting of this organisation occurred, though sadly the building was recently destroyed. Heuston joined this organisation in Limerick, later praised by Liam Mellows for his ‘herculean work’ in developing the organisation there. He returned to Dublin in 1913, but remained active in the movement.

So what of the Lockout? Interestingly, it doesn’t feature here. It’s not for any lack of research on Gibney’s part, rather that being in a reasonably secure position and unlikely to have been affected in any material sense, Heuston “left no indication as to his views on the Lockout.” It is important to remember that Arthur Griffith and other Irish nationalists were sometimes even hostile to ‘Larkinism’ (With Griffith famously stating that “Not the capitalist but the policy of Larkin has raised the price of food until the poorest in Dublin are in a state of semi-famine”), but for most the great political question of the day was the tug-of-war between Irish nationalism and unionism. Heuston would play an active role in the landing of weapons at Howth and in the Irish Volunteers movement following the devastating split brought on by the First World War.

The book has a couple of brilliant little anecdotes and quirky stories, one of which involves Heuston’s attitude to ‘G-Men'(political detectives from the DMP). It’s noted that:

On one occasion he drew a detective away from the Volunteer headquarters on Dawson Street by bringing a wrapped parcel resembling a rile with him around the city; Hueston eventually revealed to the luckless detective that he had wasted his time by throwing the parcel into the Liffey near Queen Street Bridge.

Another little gem comes from Easter Monday itself, with Michael Heuston describing young Sean at the family home.

He removed the boards and began to take out the ammunition from the place in which he kept it and to put it in a pile on the floor. ‘What are you taking out that for?’ said mother. ‘Wasn’t it alright where it was?’. ‘Well want it all for the parade’. I thought you weren’t going to take that till ‘The Day’? said Duckie; to which she received no answer.

The Mendicity Institution today (Donal Fallon)

Heuston and a small band of men were tasked with taking the Mendicity Institution, which would provide a means to cause havok for soldiers attempting to enter the city from the nearby Royal Barracks. A home for the down-and-out, Gibney sets the area in its historical context, detailing the strong connection to The Dead by Joyce. This position was held initially by a small force of just over a dozen Volunteers, later reinforced with more Volunteers who had arrived from Swords to partake in what they hoped would be a political revolution. Yet the outpost was largely by-passed by British forces, until attempts were being made in earnest to suppress the rebellion immediately. Still, the fall of the outpost led one Volunteer to remember:

We tried to find consolation as we thought of how long Heuston had held out against such superior numbers and that it was ridiculous to think that he could have beaten off such forces. There was nothing to be ashamed of in losing such a scrap, particular under such adverse conditions.

What followed next secured his place in history, with execution at Kilmainham Gaol. The Catholic Bulletin would write after the rebellion of young Heuston in glowing terms, noting his deep religious faith and the fact that his brother was then an ecclesiastical student and his sister a nun. One interesting effect of both Heuston’s youth and this religious dedication in the family is that unlike some of the other leaders today, not only are there are no grandchildren or great-grandchildren to the fore in commemorating Heuston, there aren’t even grandchildren from his siblings.

This is not the first book in the Sixteen Lives series to examine one of the men for the first time on this scale, indeed Brian Hughes’ account of Michael Mallin was also a very important addition to the historiography of the period. It’s in examining the lesser-known individuals that this series really shows its worth. We sometimes think everything is written on Easter Week and it’s time for historians to move on, but in reality there are some individuals, even among Yeats’ ‘Sixteen Dead Men’, still demanding attention.

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Sean Heuston by John Gibney is available to purchase here from the O’Brien Press, and in all good bookshops.