Come Here To Me!

Dublin has a great history of flyposting, indeed in the past we’ve had some great images here showing the tradition, like this one below from 1923 which jaycarax talked about here. The legality of flyposting in Dublin has been ambiguous historically of course, at present the act is prohibited but in post Celtic Tiger Dublin some sites in the city have become unofficial billboards almost.

© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Digging through the archives, two unusual incidents grabbed my attention from the 1980s, which saw Ulster loyalists fly-post on the streets of the capital. One incident even saw a certain Rev.Ian Paisley and others pasting posters which simply read ‘ULSTER IS BRITISH’ outside of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street!

In May of 1984, the Democratic Unionist Party flyposted 30,000 posters on the streets of the north, the posters were simple in design and message, simply showing a Union Jack and proclaiming that ‘ULSTER IS BRITISH’. The simple posters were the response of the party to the New Ireland Forum, a forum which Paisley and other unionists were fiercly opposed to. Ian Paisley and other leading figures from the DUP decided to embark on a trip to Dublin, during which they would paste the poster up in a number of key locations in the city, such as at the GPO and also outside the offices of The Irish Times.

Paisley told the newspapers that the photo of him postering at the GPO would take “pride of place” in his home, and that he was “glad to stand where the 1916 proclamation was read”. His only criticism of the south was that the “roads are very bad”. The daring act of postering O’Connell Street was done under cover of darkness at 3am, and among those accompanying Paisley was Peter Robinson.

Independent, May 3 1984.

Two years later, in 1986, Ulster Loyalists would once more poster in Dublin, however unlike Ian Paisley’s daring 3am photoshoot, this was a much larger operation with about 20 members of the Ulster Loyalist Democratic Party involved in a large scale operation across the city. The ULDP were the political wing of the UDA, and the posters were in opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The posters targeted Garrett Fitzgerald and asked ‘What has Fitzgerald ever done for the ordinary people of Dublin?’ and another stated ‘We will never allow Fitzgerald any involvement in our affairs’.

There’s a lot more to write on the tradition of fly-posting in Dublin of course, but these two incidents certainly are unusual.

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From front page of Sunday Independent, October 22 1967

On October 21 1967, a group calling themselves the ‘North Leinster Unit of the Republican Movement’ attempted a daring attack on the headquarters of Fianna Fáil in Dublin, with the aim of drawing attention to the plight of republicans imprisoned in Portlaoise and Limerick. Two petrol bombs were used in the attempt, but it was a night of high drama with a hijacked taxi thrown into the story for good measure, coupled with the firing of shots. Fianna Fáil HQ, or ‘Aras De Valera’ as it later became known, was located at 13 Upper Mount Street.

The Irish Press newspaper of October 23 noted that the petrol bombing of Fianna Fáil HQ at 9.30pm on the 21st coincided with the delivery of a letter to their editorial office claiming the attack for the ‘North Leinster Unit of the Republican Movement’. Of course, The Irish Press was likely chosen owing to its having a long history of connection to the Fianna Fáil party. The very first editor of the publication was Frank Gallagher, a very capable writer who had worked alongside Erskine Childers on the Republican publicity staff during the War of Independence.

Prior to the attack, there had been a hijacking near Pearse Street public library, when a Dublin taxidriver found himself answering a call to a number of men armed with revolvers. The taxi was driven to the Fury Glen in the Phoenix Park, and the driver tied up and told to lie on the floor in the back of the taxi. The taxi was then driven back to the city by one of the attackers. Two petrol bombs were thrown into the premises, described in a later newspaper report at the time of the court cases which followed as “two-gallon tins containing a mixture of oil and petrol” A man who witnessed the attack chased a car driving off from the scene, and for his efforts shots were fired at him near Government Buildings.

The statement delivered to The Irish Press read, in full:

Saturday nights attack on the Government Party headquarters was carried out by the North Leinster Unit of the Republican Movement. Our objective is to focus attention to the cause of three Republican soldiers at present serving jail sentences because of their ideal of a ‘Free Ireland’. This should also be taken as an indication that militant Republicans will meet Fianna Fáil and its secret police with force. Militant republicans demand the release of H. Greensmith, H.A Grensmith and Joe Dillon.

The case quickly came to court, with four men in custody within an hour of the attack. Typically enough, this being Dublin, they were picked up in a city centre public house. Within weeks, two men were sentenced to six months in prison for their role in the attack. The men delivered defiant statements, with one saying:

I take full responsibility for the action carried out, which was to draw attention to the fact that there are political prisoners in Ireland at the moment.

Remarkably, in March of 1969, there was another less serious attack on Fianna Fáil HQ when a petrol bomb was again thrown at the building, though this time there was little damage, no hijacking and thankfully no shots fired!

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Prisoners outside burning Custom House, Dublin 1921 (NLI)

History Ireland have uploaded a video of the recent War of Independence focused Hedge School held at the National Library of Ireland.

I’ve never seen a waiting line like it at the National Library. Journalists, historians, the generally curious and Dubliners of every kind. Even a certain Vincent Browne was spotted walking away. They could have filled the venue for this one twice or even three times over.

The title of the Hedge School was The War of Independence: ‘four glorious years’ or squalid sectarian conflict? Chaired by Tommy Graham, the speakers are David Fitzpatrick, John M. Regan, Eve Morrison and John Borgonovo.

The video can be viewed here, at the History Ireland Vimeo account. It appears embedding has been disabled so click through.

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From The Irish Times, December 18 1961. A fine base for Lord Gough, but no sign of the man himself.

We’ve looked at plaques in considerable detail on the site, and one thing I really want to get around to in time is the statues of Dublin. ‘All the fellas between Charles Stewart Parnell and Daniel O’Connell’, with the exception of William Smith O’Brien, have gone unexamined. How many Dubliners can name all the statues on O’Connell Street?

We looked briefly too at the loyalist bombing of the Daniel O’Connell statue in 1969, and jaycarax had a fascinating photographic history of Henry Grattan’s statue, the Trinity graduate facing his Alma Mater at College Green.

Of the statues no longer with us, Lord Gough’s has always been particularly interesting to me for a few reasons. Like Victoria, he is a Dublin statue which has ended up many miles from home, though not vanished quite as far as herself (she’s in Australia, for anyone who doesn’t know). The statue was the site of Winston Churchill’s earliest childhood memory, and it is a statue that was in and out of the newspapers for a long time prior to its ultimate removal from the Phoenix Park. It also inspired my favourite Dublin poem, which for a long time was falsely attributed to Brendan Behan, for example even in Ulick O’Connor’s biography of the man, but was in fact the work of quintessential Dub Vincent Caprani. The statue is the work of the great John Henry Foley, responsible also for Daniel O’Connell’s statue at the top of O’Connell Street and the Trinity duo of Burke and Goldsmith among others.

John Henry Foley

Winston Churchill recalled in his autobiographical work My Early Life 1874-1904, that his earliest memories from childhood were set here in Dublin. Asking “when does one first begin to remember?” he went on the write about the unveiling of John Henry Foley’s equestrian statue to imperial war hero Lord Gough at the Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1878. Churchill spent some of his earliest years in Dublin where his Grandfather had been appointed Viceroy and employed Churchill’s father as his private secretary. Churchill’s earliest memory was of his grandfather unveiling the doomed statue.

A great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horse-back, strings pulling away a brown shiny sheet, the Old Duke, the formidable grandpa, talking loudly to the crowd. I recall even a phrase he used: ‘And with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.’ I quite understood that he was speaking about war and fighting and that a volley meant what the black-coated soldiers (riflemen) used to do with loud bangs so often in the Phoenix Park where I was taken for morning walks.

(more…)

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