Come Here To Me!

12 D’Olier Street.

Easy to miss, a plaque at number 12 on D’Olier Street marks the location of the offices of Irish Freedom, the newspaper of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Founded in 1910, the newspaper was the public expression of a secret revolutionary underground movement. Bulmer Hobson,once described by British intelligence as the most dangerous man in Ireland, recalled that “the paper was the property of the IRB and was financed by a monthly subscription of one shilling collected from each member in each IRB Circle. It was printed by Patrick Mahon, Yarnhall Street.”

Founded in Dublin and New York City on Saint Patrick’s Day 1858, the oath-bound movement popularly known as the Fenians had considerable influence in Irish American life in particular. James Stephens, a founding Fenian and the self-described ‘Provisional Dictator’ of the body, built contacts with radical movements across the continent and beyond, even proclaiming that “were England a republic battling for human freedom on the one hand, and Ireland leagued with despots on the other, I should, unhesitatingly, take up arms against my native land.”

The abortive Fenian uprising in 1867 had an important influence on many of the 1916 leaders, who stood in the same tradition. The 1867 proclamation, sent to The Times in London, was, in many ways, a more radical document than that read out at the GPO in 1916, with a very definite separation of church and state and its rallying cry  that “Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us. As for you, workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour.”

A disastrous bombing campaign of London followed in the 1880s, primarily brought about by the determination of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, an exiled Fenian leader based in the United States. Thomas J. Clarke was imprisoned for his participation in the so-called dynamite campaign. By the early twentieth century, the IRB movement was in decline. By 1910, it was estimated to have as few as a thousand members in its ranks. Dan Breen dismissively recalled a generation who had become great fellows for talking and drinking and doing very little after that’. However, a younger generation of political radicals such as Bulmer Hobson, Dennis McCullough and Seán Mac Diarmada were crucial to the reorganisation of the secret society.

At D’Olier Street, the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom was managed by Mac Diarmada, literally a stones throw from the watchful eye of the DMP intelligence police headquarters. The paper was highly seditious, maintaining that “our country is run by a set of insolent officials, to whom we are nothing but a lot of people to be exploited and kept in subjection. The executive power rests on armed force that preys on the people with batons if they have the gall to say they do not like it.”

Much like James Connolly’s newspaper The Workers’ Republic, Irish Freedom believed the lessons of the past were to be applied in future, studying previous insurrections and their tactical failures and successes. The newspaper reflected Mac Diarmada’s deeply held belief that when world war came, it was the duty of Irish nationalists to seize upon it. The very first issue of the paper maintained that “the history of the world proves that there is but one road to freedom and that is the red road of war.”

With the passing of time,the newspaper became more and more radical in tone,and with the outbreak of the First World War and its campaigning against Irish recruitment into the British army, its days were numbered. Unsurprisingly, the newspaper was suppressed in the winter of  1914.

Revolutionary Dublin 1912-1923 : A Walking Guide by Donal Fallon and John Gibney is available now from Collins Press.