Come Here To Me!

Freeman’s Journal, 22 February 1918.

Reading the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements, it is striking just how much of an impact the popular memory of the ‘Great Hunger’ had on Ireland’s revolutionary generation.

The memory of starvation drove some Irish people to radical politics in the decades that followed the calamity, for others it did the very opposite. Dan Breen spoke of people whose lives were shaped only by the “struggle for existence”, for whom “anything that did not relate itself directly to the business of producing food, or the wherewithal to keep body and soul together, had no meaning for them.” Volunteers and others from rural backgrounds recount the oral tradition of the years of hunger as something that influenced them politically; Ned Broy recalled that “harrowing stories of the Famine of 1847 were told by the old people, of starving wretches eating turnips in the fields and dying of hunger or disease of fleeing to America in the coffin ships. Is it any wonder that Irish people who escaped to America and their descendants should continue to nurse hatred of the oppressor in their hearts?”

Given this consciousness of the ‘Great Hunger’, it is not surprising that fear of Famine and starvation was very real to the revolutionary generation. Against the backdrop of serious war time inflation, and with increasingly large exportation of agricultural produce into war-time Britain, much of 1917 and 1918 was spent worrying about food. Even earlier than this, in the winter of 1916, Thomas Johnson of the Labour Party wrote in the Dublin Saturday Post reminding readers that “in 1846 and 1847 the grain harvest was shipped from Ireland to pay landlords rents; today our food supplies are being sold at high prices for consumption in Britain…What say the people of Ireland to a ‘New Protectionism’,that is, to prevent the export of the necessaries of life until the needs of the whole people of Ireland are conserved?”

In winning the people to the idea of the ‘Republic’, advanced nationalists understood the necessity to be seen to take a proactive stand on the issue of the food crisis. This approach led to remarkable scenes in Dublin on a February day in 1918, when Volunteers intercepted pigs near Dorset Street which were being marched to the docks of Dublin, about to be exported to England. Instead, they were taken to a Dublin Corporation yard in nearby Portland Place, slaughtered and the produce distributed to the people of Dublin. It was an important political demonstration of power, showing the republican movement to be concerned with more than nationalist aspiration. As Charles Townshend notes, “this bit of Robin Hood style social banditry was dismissed as mere criminality by the authorities”, but it had a powerful effect in inner-city Dublin.

Diarmuid Lynch, Sinn Féin ‘Food Controller’ during the crisis.

Diarmuid Lynch, born in Cork in 1878, had been a participant in the Easter Rising, privy to the plans of insurrection for some time. American citizenship may have prevented his execution in the aftermath of the rebellion, though he was held in Pentonville Prison until June 1917. A respected political organiser, he was appointed ‘Sinn Féin Food Controller’ during the food crisis. Lynch believed that the action of stopping this food exportation demonstrated Sinn Féin to be “the party of action and not of talk.”

The pigs were taken to a Dublin Corporation yard, where two of the Volunteers, butchers by trade, proceeded to slaughter the animals.  While Dublin Metropolitan Policemen arrived on the scene, they were prevented from intervening. Bill Stapleton, a Volunteer participant, remembered:

…crowds of people fathered outside the Corporation yard, and close on one hundred policemen waited for us to come out.The policemen knocked at the door to gain admittance, but were refused. There was considerable excitement in the neighborhood as the news of the capture of the pigs had gone abroad, but in any case the noise caused by the screeching and dying pigs could be heard a considerable distance away.

As the slaughter occurred, a deal was made with the owners of the pigs, with Stapleton remembering “arrangements were made to purchase the pigs.” Satisfied that they had made their money, they made it clear to the authorities they did not want action taken against the Volunteers. With the withdrawal of the police, lorries arrived into the yard, and the carcasses were taken from the Dorset Street area to Donnelly’s bacon-curing factory near Meath Street. Stapleton recalled “there was considerable excitement and cheering, and we were followed by crowds across the city.”

The scene was far from pretty. Volunteer Charlie Dalton remembered that “the yard was strewn with carcasses of pigs…I was given a yard brush and was told to sweep up the blood which was being hosed into the channel. I felt very superior engaged in this work of national importance.” Still, Dalton could see the effect of the move on the local populace, remembering local women bringing tea and bread to the Volunteers: “I drank the tea with great satisfaction, recalling the time I had seen the very same refreshments handed to the British Tommies…the tide had turned. We were now the heroes of the people.”

Lynch had played a blinder in the press, allowing journalists into the yard, and telling a reporter from the Freeman’s Journal that “pigs were leaving Ireland every week by the thousand, and there was no bacon to be had in the retail shops in Dublin, and the same is true of other parts of the country.”

Such an act of defiance would not be tolerated, and Lynch was brought to trial charged with defiance of the Government, theft and gross disorder. The prosecutor maintained in court that the action was “a startling and unparalleled outrage, and if such conduct was allowed to go on there would be no commercial security in the city.” He was firstly imprisoned in Dundalk Gaol, before deportation to the United States. A song, The Pig Push, celebrating the actions of Lynch and his men, quickly became popular:

I met a friend the other day and this is what he said:

Sinn Féiners they are out again, the streets are running red.

The slaughter it was dreadful thirty-four of them are killed.

I never in my life, said he, saw blood so freely spilled

So says I to him “your dreadful tale, it fills with dismay”

And have thirty-four Sinn Féinrs bold in Dublin passed away?

“No it’s pigs, you fool, that’s killed” says he,”myself I saw it done,

‘Twas Diarmuid Lynch that did the work, by the hokey there was fun.

Lynch was elected in the 1918 General Election as a Sinn Féin candidate in his absence. He took no part in the Civil War, but was later instrumental in attempting to gather historical memories and artifacts relating to the War of Independence period. His actions on Dorset Street deserve to be remembered.