Come Here To Me!

A plaque commemorating Phil Shanahan on The LAB Gallery, James Joyce Street.

Located in the heart of Dublin’s ‘Monto’ red light district, Phil Shanahan’s public house was perhaps an unlikely rendezvous point for republicans during the years of the Irish revolution. British soldiers, Irish radicals, prostitutes and others all seem to have frequented the premises, which was located at 134 Foley Street. Dan Breen, one of those who instigated the War of Independence with the Soloheadbeg ambush in Tipperary, recalled that:

The lady prostitutes used to pinch the guns and ammunition from the Auxiliaries or Tans at night, and then leave them for us at Phil Shanahan’s public house. I might add that there was no such thing as payment f or these transactions, and any information they had they gave us.

At Foley Street, Shanahan’s was right in the thick of the Monto, described beautifully by Michael Foley in his history of Bloody Sunday as “a playground for adventurers, crooks and acute observers of the human condition.” Immortalised by Joyce as ‘Nighttown’ in Ulysses,  the area had emerged as a centre of prostitution from the 1870s.

1919 wanted poster for Dan Breen, who remembered the pub as  ‘the rendezvous of saints and sinners’.

Phil Shanahan  (1874–1931) was not a product of inner-city Dublin, hailing instead from Tipperary’s Hollyford.  As a young man he had hurled for his native county,  and could boast of being ‘out’ at Easter Week, fighting with the Irish Volunteers in Jacob’s factory. Timothy Healy, the nationalist politican and lawyer, recalled meeting Shanahan after the Rising, when he faced difficulty holding on to his public house licence:

I had with me to-day a solicitor with his client, a Dublin publican named Phil Shanahan, whose licence is being opposed, and whose house was closed by the military because he was in Jacob’s during Easter week. I was astonished at the type of man – about 40 years of age, jolly and respectable. He said he “rose out” to have a “crack at the English” and seemed not at all concerned at the question of success or failure. He was a Tipperary hurler in the old days. For such a man to join the Rebellion and sacrifice the splendid trade he enjoyed makes one think there are disinterested Nationalists to be found. I thought a publican was the last man in the world to join a Rising!

Unsurprisingly, the pub was popular too with British soldiers, an important part of the Monto economy. Luke Kennedy, a senior IRB man, recalled that soldiers returning from the front and soldiers based in Dublin were often willing to part with guns for cash; “We procured quite a large number of arms by purchasing them from British military. A lot of British soldiers used to frequent Phil Shanahan’s public house and it was there most of the contacts were made.” Similarly, Thomas Pugh of the Volunteers recalled:

Sometimes an Australian fellow would come in, throw a .45 revolver on the counter and put out his hand for a pound. That was a recognised thing. The women used to steal rifles and .45 revolvers and anything they could get their hands on.

Shanahan’s functioned as something of a drop off point for acquired weaponry. Unsurprisingly, given Shanahan’s Tipperary connections, plenty of what was left there seems to have made its way into the hands of the very busy Tipperary IRA. Seamus Reader, O/C of the IRA in Scotland, recalled that having succeeded in having explosive material shipped to Dublin, “It was taken to Phil Shanahan’s and, I understand, the No. 3 Tipperary Brigade got the bulk of it.” Thomas Leahy, a Dublin docker in the ranks of the Irish Citizen Army, remembered that “many a rifle and ammunition was brought to Phil Shanahan’s shop in Foley Street.”

Plaque to Phil Shanahan on the LAB Gallery, July 2017.

Shanahan was a republican first and foremost, but also a reluctant politician. In 1918,  Shanahan was chosen to contest the election as a Sinn Féin candidate against Alfie Byrne, perhaps the most celebrated local politician in the history of the capital.  It was a rare electoral defeat for Alfie. Thomas Leahy recalled:

Alfie Byrne was the sitting member and Phil Shanahan the proposed. We had all our work cut out in that Ward, for it was the biggest industrial area in Dublin, composed mostly of the ex-British soldier element, whose wives looked on Alfie Byrne as a tin god; so, knowing what was in front of us, we got a very strong group of men and women to organise an election committee and Phil himself worked hard, not for himself, but for the Republic. As he often reminded his followers, he was a soldier and not a politician.

Shanahan would later oppose the Anglo-Irish Treaty, failing to secure election to the Third Dáil in 1922. He left the capital in 1928, living out his final years in his home town of Hollyford, County Tipperary.

Today, the location of Shanahan’s is occupied by The LAB Gallery.  This important site of the revolutionary period could have been forgotten entirely, but at Easter 2014 a plaque was unveiled by Terry Fagan and the North Inner City Folklore Project, with  Shanhan’s native Tipperary well represented in the gathered crowd. It is one part of Monto that certainly deserves to be remembered.