Come Here To Me!

Image: Luke Fallon 

Thanks to Luke Fallon for these images, all taken on Thursday  at Moore Street. These were taken in the very early stages of the occupation.

We went down to Moore Street ourselves to have a look at what was taking place.  I fully support the idea of a 1916 interpretive centre on Moore Street, however the ambiguous nature of the plans for the street beyond it worries me greatly,  and it seems the government is colluding with a disgraced developer to the potential detriment of the streetscape. While we have a ‘national monument’ of four buildings, the entire area has historic significance that has to be considered. Regardless of your views on the future of the street, it’s quite telling and damning that the authorities have sat on this for so long, and allowed history to crumble. It’s like people were surprised when 2016 finally came around.

Lastly, while walking down Moore Street today I heard a conversation between two people who were lamenting the way the street has gone in recent times, and laying the blame firmly at the feet of  the migrants who are there today. To me, they are the saviours of the street, along with the traders who have been there for generations. Were it not for them, I have no doubt the wrecking ball would have moved in long ago. It is not only its history that makes Moore Street what it is, it is also its diversity.

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(Image:Las Fallon)

I was quite dumbfounded by this item when I first saw it, but it’s actually a Minimax fire extinguisher from 1920, produced on Middle Abbey Street. In recent days it has left our family home (where it sat in the shed) for Marsh’s Library, hopefully to form a part of their forthcoming exhibition on the library in the revolutionary period.

Archbishop Marsh’s Library is the oldest public library in Dublin, and today houses a remarkable collection of books, with over 25,000 items in its collections. G.N Wright wrote about the place in his classic nineteenth century history of Dublin, but funnily enough he said that “the situation of this library is so very inconvenient and remote from the respectable part of the city, and the books it contains so obsolete, that the public do not derive much advantage from it.” Given that the library is right beside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, it seemed a strange observation.

Jonathan Swift was  a frequent visitor to the library, not surprising given that he served as Dean of the neighboring Cathedral. For those less trusted, books were to be viewed inside of one of the three wired alcoves, essentially cages. It was one way to ensure books didn’t go missing. Swift may have enjoyed the use of the library on many occasions, but he didn’t think much of Archbishop Marsh himself. As Frank McNally noted in his An Irishman’s Diary column last year:

In 1710, when the latter was in his 70s, Swift suggested Marsh had been unique, given his educational and other advantages, in having “escaped” any kind of greatness. He added: “No man will be either glad or sorry at his death except his successor”.

The revolutionary period of the twentieth century sometimes encroached on the library, as it did many aspects of life in the city. It became an unusual victim of the limited fighting around the Jacob’s factory during the 1916 Easter Rising, when bullets from a British Army machine-gun stationed nearby inflicted permanent damage on a number of books, which can still be seen today. Jason McElligott has written in the pages of History Ireland that “each book has a relatively compact entry hole of 1.5cm on its spine, but the exit hole at the back is five to six times larger.”  The tragedy of the ‘1916 books’ is that they had been deposited in the library by Elias Bouhereau, a Huguenot refugee who brought them with him as he fled religious persecution in France.  In this great Storymap video, Jason talks about the damaged books, and says that at the time it was noted that the books were “wounded”:

In 1920,  in the midst of the War of Independence, the records of the library show that they wisely decided to invest in two Minimax fire extinguishers. The flames of the revolutionary period took out all kinds of collateral damage, and business was good for the Middle Abbey Street firm who warned the public that “day by day fires are occurring”, and “day by day Minimax…puts fires out.”

Fire extinguishers were very much in fashion in the Dublin of the time it’s fair to say. Among the things that were lost to the flames of the 1916-23 period in Dublin were big chunks of Whitelaw’s Survey, an incredibly detailed census of Dublin taken in 1798,  and waxworks of Wolfe Tone and the King of England.  Thankfully, the library didn’t need to use their investment.

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Harry Pollitt (1890-1960)

To be a communist in the Ireland of the 1930s was tough work. Clerical denunciation was fierce, and so too was the media. To the Irish Independent in 1933, it was simple: the “Russianisation” of this country had to be prevented, as “communism must be treated as a deadly and soul destroying peril.”

Condemnation from the pulpit or the newsstand was one thing, but physical confrontation was another thing entirely. In March 1933, over three nights, Connolly House on Great Strand Street was besieged by a mob whipped into a frenzy by a Jesuit preacher in the Pro Cathedral, who told them that “here in this holy Catholic city of Dublin, these vile creatures of Communism are within our midst.”

While Irish communists got a hard time of it, particular scorn was reserved for those visiting the country. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) frequently sent representatives to Dublin in the 1920s and 30s, often to address public gatherings.  The visit of Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the CPGB, was enough to instigate a riot in Rathmines in January 1936.

Pollitt had become General Secretary of the party in 1929.  Born into a working class family in Greater Manchester in 1890, his mother had been a member of the Independent Labour Party of Keir Hardie, and as a young man he joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s Worker’s Socialist Federation. He was a very capable leader,  however the CPGB (like its Irish equivalent) was ultimately accountable to the Comintern, and the control of Moscow.

Irish Times, 13 January 1936

A public speech by Harry Pollitt on 11 January 1936 was, rather unsurprisingly, the target of protest. On that occasion, the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS) were the instigators of opposition, but in the Dublin of the 1930s there were any number of groups who could be behind such scenes. The Saint Patrick’s Anti-Communist League and the Irish Christian Front were just two of the anti-communist bodies operating in the city.

Coming prepared, the CYMS gathered outside Rathmines Town Hall long before the meeting began, with banners proclaiming that ‘Dublin Rejects Communism’ and ‘For Faith and Fatherland’. Their leaflets warned that “prominent communists from overseas are assisting the local propagandists to convey the message of Moscow to Catholic Ireland.”

What is remarkable about the meeting, before even getting into the violence, was the number of people who came to hear Pollitt. The Irish Times reported that “four or five hundred people” were in the room. Before the meeting had even begun in earnest, the Irish Independent  reported that “scuffles and free fights took place, and chairs, pokers and sticks were freely used as weapons.” It was reported that:

The fight was waged fiercely in the  hall, and in the attack chairs were used by the ejectors. One chair came flying through a side door to the lecture hall, but was caught in its flight.The objectors were eventually driven by force of rushes to the outside door when the Gardai came on the scene.

Politt did speak in Rathmines, not allowing the chaos to interfere in the business of the day, and likewise Jim Larkin Jr. spoke before the crowd. The organisers promised that “this was the first of a series of meetings proposed to be held to which they proposed to bring over to Dublin men and women who represented the best thought in Europe.” This was met by boos, and when one young lad at the back of the hall seized to moment to stand upon a chair and “make an appeal to the Catholics present”, it didn’t take long for him to end up on his arse and the trouble to begin again.

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