Come Here To Me!

The Ballyfermot Co-Op of the 1950s, to quote one of its central activists, had the misfortune to fall”foul of reaction.”

From an earlier anti-communist poster, 'Keep The Red Off Our Flag' (Edited by Lookleft Magazine)

While grocery co-operatives formed an important part of many communities in the Ireland of the time, in West Dublin a red scare campaign succeeded in forcing the closure of an important local service. In Dublin’s newly built working class suburbia, the co-operatives offered more than just affordable goods, providing people with inclusive local organisations and a sense of community.

The controversies around the Ballyfermot Co-Op arouse from the belief it was a communist infiltration scheme, with a letter to the press denouncing its presence in the area signed by the secretaries of the local Fianna Fáil, Labour and Fine Gael branches. Much of the hysteria was whipped up by The Standard, a religious newspaper which didn’t hold back in attacking the Co-Op, and even managed to evoke the name of Joseph Stalin in the process.

In his autobiography Just Joe, Joe Duffy recalled the very real power of the church in the Ballyfermot of the 1960s, but pointed back to the story of the Co-Op a decade earlier, writing that:

Ballyfermot was run – in a very real sense of the word – by a big, gruff, silver-haired Kerryman, Canon Michael Charles Troy….He was a larger than life country parish priest transplanted into a sprawling, uncontrollable, volatile urban area with the population of a small city. One of his first acts was to savagely quash attempts by a group of locals to open a co-op shop to bring down prices. Troy smelt a whiff of communism in the ‘co-op’ notion and bullied people into turning against it.

If Troy got a whiff of communism off the Co-Op movement in the locale, it should be noted that leftists were central to its foundation, though it became a much broader movement. One central figure to this story is Joseph Deasy. Born in Dublin in 1922, Deasy was raised at ‘The Ranch’ in Ballyfermot and later Goldenbridge Gardens in Inchicore. He devoted much of his life to progressive politics, and was elected to Dublin Corporation as a Labour Party Councillor in 1945, an impressive achievement at a mere 22 years of age. It was a fellow Labour Party activist, Tim Graham, who initiated the co-operative movement in his area. The first meeting was held in the Workman’s Club on Emmet Road,which led to the opening of a grocery shop on Grattan Crescent in Inchicore, before  the opening of a larger presence on Decies Road in Ballyfermot, leased from the Corporation.

Members of the Co-Op,  including Deasy (back row second from right). Image from Irish Left Review article ‘Joe Deasy: Irish Marxist’

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Thanks to our friend Conor McCabe for uploading this seven minute clip from The Old Grey Whistle Test (BBC2). It features presenter Andy Kershaw traveling to Dublin to report on the local live music scene in May 1985.

It opens with clips of the Ha’Penny Bridge and the Liffey. Followed by images of gig posters for:

– The Virgin Prunes, TV Club, Friday 17th May 1985
– Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, National Stadium, Saturday 11th May 1985
– The Alarm and the Faith Brothers, National Stadium, Sunday 19th May 1985
– Jason & the Scorchers, National Stadium, Thursday 16th May 1985

Cutting to the TV club venue on Harcourt Street, there is footage of live performances from local bands Blue In Heaven performing ‘Big Beat’, Cactus World News performing ‘The Other Extreme’ and Flo McSweeney performing ‘You Are’.

Intertwined between these clips is an interview with DJ and music journalist Dave Fanning.

Finally, presenter Andy Kersahw talks to Paul Cleary of The Blades as he takes them for a walk in the shadow of the now-demolished gasometer. Cleary compares the scene in Dublin to Manchester and Liverpool and discusses their recent record management woes with Electra.

Check it out here. Thanks again Conor.

James Stritch and the Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa Funeral Committee, 1915.

In republican lore, the 18 September 1867 holds a special place. On that day, a police van carrying two prisoners was besieged by Fenians on the streets of Manchester, resulting in the release of the men but the killing of a police constable.  The event would become known as the ‘Smashing of the Van’, later finding its way into a ballad that even Chumbawumba had a pop at:

With courage bold those heroes went

And soon the van did stop,

They cleared the guards from back and front

And then smashed in the top,

But in blowing open of the lock,

They chanced to kill a man,

So three must die on the scaffold high

for smashing of the van.

While the Fenians succeeded in releasing their leaders from police custody, the day also led to the executions of three men shortly afterwards. William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien would find their place in history as the Manchester Martyrs, hanged for their involvement in the affair.  Their defiant cry of ‘God Save Ireland!’ from the docks would inspire a ballad that was only eventually eclipsed in popularity by The Soldier’s Song after the 1916 Rising, serving as a sort of unofficial national anthem until that point. After the deaths of the three, there were enormous political demonstrations throughout Irish cities and towns, and tens of thousands paraded to Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery behind an empty hearse.Frederick Engels understood the enermoity of the hangings, writing to Karl Marx that “the execution of the three has made the liberation of Kelly and Deasy the heroic deed which will now be sung to every Irish babe in the cradle in Ireland, England and America.”

Panic on the streets of Manchester. The 1867 ‘Smashing of the Van’, in which James Stritch participated.

One of those who held up the police van on that eventful September day was James Stritch, a seventeen year old who had recently gone to Manchester in search of work. One account decades later claimed his role as being “to hold the horses drawing the prison van, while the attempt was made to force open the door behind.”

Remarkably, he would later play his part in the drama of the revolutionary period decades later, listed as part of the GPO Garrison and interned in Frongoch after the Rising. The following decades would see his devotion to the Fenian cause grow, and he was centrally involved in republican commemoration for decades, spanning causes from the O’Donovan Rossa Funeral Committee to the founding of the National Graves Association in 1926. To those in Frongoch, he was a living link to the Fenian past. Brendan Behan would later remember that “it was my privilege, at the age of ten years, to march behind the coffin of the veteran Fenian James Stritch”.

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This September 1882 print shows a mob attacking the statue of King William of Orange which stood on College Green, outside Ireland’s historic parliament. The monument predated the parliament building, and was ultimately bombed in the 1920s. There’s a lot going on in this image, but I particularly like the worried looking policemen at the ladder.

16 years after this attack on the monument, one publication would write that:

This equestrian statue of William III stands in College Green, and has stood there, more or less, since A.D 1701. We say “more or less” because no statue in the world, perhaps, has been subject to so many vicissitudes. It has been insulted, mutilated and blown up so many times, that the original figure, never particularly graceful, is now a battered wreck, pieced and patched together, like an old, worn out garment.

The William monument was the work of the wonderfully named artist Grinling Gibbons. While the 1928 bombing failed to destroy the work, it was removed and placed in storage by the Corporation, before suffering the humiliation of being beheaded by persons unknown.

A historic image of Glasnevin Cemetery.

Prospect Cemetery, more commonly known now as Glasnevin Cemetery, is one of my favourite places to wander in Dublin. From ‘Anonymous to Zozimus'( to borrow a phrase) it is the final resting place of more than 1.5 million people. It holds a very special place in republican history too, having witnessed the funerals of figures like Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and Thomas Ashe, which were iconic moments in themselves.

While the most visited graves today are those of revolutionary icons, the story of the cemetery began with a young working class boy. The first burial happened on 22 February 1832, when young Michael Carey from Francis Street became the first ‘resident’ of Glasnevin Cemetery. He was a victim of TB, which was rife in Dublin’s tenements and devastated working class communities.

As the cemetery grew bigger in the generations that followed, so did its staff. Glasnevin’s gravediggers are of course renowned for bestowing an unofficial name upon one of Ireland’s most loved pubs, John Kavanagh’s of Prospect Avenue. As Shane MacThomáis noted in his history of the cemetery, it was common practice for diggers to knock with their shovels on the walls of the pub in the 1870s seeking a pint, but even earlier there had been a close connection between cemetery and pub – in 1836 the Cemetery caretaker, James Moore, complained of finding two unaccompanied coffins lying outside the cemetery, as mourners had crowded into Kavanagh’s.

An advertisement for Kavanagh’s, established in 1833.

This footage from 1974 shows the handing over of two pints through the railings of the cemetery. In reality, it would probably land you in severe hot water!

One interesting aspect of the Glasnevin grave diggers historically has been their grá for industrial action. Indeed, a quick dig into the archives of Irish newspapers shows that in 1907, 1916,  1919, 1920/ 1921, 1937, 1965 and 1971 the gravediggers took strike action, leading to the macabre sight of loved ones burying their own dead.

Why strike?  Normally, an industrial dispute is primarily motivated by the wage question, but there were other issues at play. In August 1919, an anonymous grave digger wrote to the Freeman’s Journal, highlighting the fact that “the poor, forlorn gravedigger with pick and shovel is daily risking his life cutting his way to a depth of 9 or 10 feet. Should the earth slip, were the men not always watchful, what would be the result?” The workers’ believed that a man digging graves alone was in danger, requiring an assistant at all times. In an act of sympathetic striking, a popular tactic of the revolutionary period and something Jim Larkin had introduced into Irish trade unionism in a major way six years earlier, the hearse drivers decided to strike in ‘sympathy’ with the gravediggers during their 1919 dispute.

Picketing grave diggers, 1919.

Gravediggers broke their own strike in 1921 for one day only, to bury Archbishop William Walsh, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. Walsh hadn’t been a great friend to Irish trade unionists – in 1913 he was vocally opposed to plans to send the children of locked out Dublin workers to England, believing that it would put their faith in danger. The dispute had been particularly bitter, and when it ended in May 1921 one newspaper wrote:

It would serve no useful purpose now to discuss responsibilities for the dispute.The strike, after lasting since November, has closed, and we hope that recriminations will close with it and that no such dispute will again bring added pain to Dublin mourners.

Pádraig Yeates, one of the leading social historians of Dublin life, notes in A City in Turmoil: Dublin 1919-1921 that “so frequent were disputes at Glasnevin…that the Councillors asked their Law Agent to examine whether the Corporation would be legally empowered to open its own cemetery.”

In almost every year of the striking grave diggers, you find accounts of people digging the graves of their loved ones. During the 1971 strike, the media rushed to Glasnevin to get pictures of families in the act, making a pretty bad situation all the worse. Volunteers came forward in great numbers to assist families during that dispute, with the Irish Press writing that “so many volunteer gravediggers have visited Glasnevin Cemetery, to assist bereaved relatives and friends in the task of digging graves during the gravediggers strike, that there have been as many as seven men available to do a job which, in normal circumstances, would be performed by a full-time gravedigger.”

A 1971 newspaper image.

The city owes much to its gravediggers of course, something that becomes apparent in moments of hardship and tragedy.  The 1918-19 Flu Epidemic, which John Dorney has noted was a much greater killer than political violence of the time, put enormous strain on cemeteries. To quote Dorney:

…deaths soared  in Dublin with the arrival of the flu in July 1918. A total of 36.1 deaths per thousand were recorded in the city in last quarter of 1918, rising to 37.7 in the first quarter of 1919. At the Adelaide hospital  497 admissions with flu and 32 deaths were reported in October 1918 ‘often within 24 hours of onset’. In the city as a whole 250 deaths a  week were being recorded by November 1918.

At the height of this tragedy, Glasnevin witnessed 240 burials over a period of only 8 days.The flu epidemic even struck some those who had been lucky to survive the 1916 Rising. Richard Coleman, a veteran of the Battle of Ashbourne, lost the battle to the epidemic in December 1918, and 15,000 followed his coffin from Westland Row to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Today, the cemetery continues to grow. The gravediggers remain, and featured in the very moving documentary One Million Dubliners. Thankfully,their striking days appear to be over.

Glasnevin gravediggers, 1960s. (the men were named by Shane MacThomáis as Tommy Bonass, Tommy Byrne and Benny Gilbert)

Home Rule Buildings, thanks to Luke Fallon.

A few doors down from the Dublin City Library and Archive on Pearse Street is this aging sign for Home Rule Buildings.

The newspaper archives are throwing up nothing, and I’m curious to know the story behind it. A Dublin businessman or planner expressing his political aspirations through the naming of a block? Perhaps it was a response to the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill, though as we know it was put on ice with the outbreak of the European War in 1914.

The sign is over Conefrey’s Pharmacy at 136 Pearse Street.

No doubt someone else knows!

Home Rule Buildings

Mahon Printers today. (Donal Fallon)

I love the slowly peeling signage of Ardiff Mahon Printers on Yarnhall Street, a street just off Bolton Street. I would often use the street as a shortcut to Henrietta Street on a walking tour, but never really gave it much thought beyond convenience.  While the aging Mahon signage is a great example of the kind disappearing rapidly across the city in favour of printed alternatives, Mahon Printers themselves have a great history, as a printer of republican newspapers and propaganda during the revolutionary period.

Every revolutionary movement requires its printing presses of course. I find it quite remarkable that the man who printed the 1916 Proclamation, Christopher Brady, was ultimately turned down for a 1916 medal or pension when he applied decades later – surely his contribution warranted one? Propaganda and communication is central to any radical movement, and printers are a key component of both.

In the years before the 1916 Rising and indeed the turbulent period after it, there existed a vibrant ‘Mosquito Press’ in Ireland, which battled against the oppressive Defence of the Realm Act to produce political publications that challenged the authorities. Separatist newspapers of just about every variety encountered great difficulty. The Dublin Metropolitan Police ‘Movement of Extremist’ files not only monitored who was going where, but also who was printing what. Copies of many newspapers like Irish Freedom, The Workers’ Republic and the Irish language Na Bac Léis were scrutinised by the police.

The Mahon printing firm of Yarnhall  Street  was one of the most commonly used by radicals a century ago, which was unsurprising given that the Mahon’s were themselves radicals.  Ross Mahon, a compositor with the family business, found himself interned in the Ballykinlar Camp in 1920, while Patrick Mahon was also arrested by the authorities in that same year. The family could claim to be ‘out’ in 1916, while their business premises endured great hardship during the War of Independence years owing to intimidation.

Mahon’s Printing Works postbox (Donal Fallon)

One newspaper which the authorities found particularly troubling was Irish Freedom,  which sought to advance and promote the political aspirations of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and which was edited by Seán Mac Diarmada. The first issue of the paper in 1911 laid out its ideology plain and simple for readers: “The Irish attitude to England is war yesterday, war today, war tomorrow. Peace after the final battle.”

It was not a voice of moderation or reformism; on the eve of a Royal Visit in 1911, Mac Diarmada argued that “Ireland wants no concession from England. We want what is ours; that is our country, and by the Lord we mean to have it, come what may.” Irish Freedom was printed by Mahon’s, and the eventual suppression of the paper in December 1914 was hardly surprising to anyone – that the paper lasted as long as it did was perhaps more surprising. At a public meeting following the suppression of the paper and others like it, Francis Sheehy Skeffington condemned the “cowardice” of the authorities in going after the printers of publications they found politically criminal. Indeed, printing newspapers like Irish Freedom brought great risks to Mahon’s and other businesses; as Seán T. O’Kelly recalled, it was normal procedure that when a printing premises was raided by the loathed ‘G Division’ of the DMP, “essential parts of the printing presses were seized and taken away, presumably to Dublin Castle.”

In the aftermath of the outlawing of publications like Irish Freedom, the newspaper Scissors and Paste was born, with its name derived from the fact this paper was made up almost exclusively of excerpts and cutouts from British papers and ‘neutral sources’, making it a headache for the authorities. Still, it too had its moment of judgement, and the offices of Mahon’s were raided on 2 March 1915, with British military authorities forced employees to help them dismantle printing equipment.

The masthead of Scissors and Paste. Conceived by Arhur Griffith, this paper hoped to get around suppression by drawing its content from the mainstream press. It didn’t succeed! (Image Credit: South Dublin Libraries)

One of Mahon’s most important undertakings was the printing of the souvenir programme of the funeral of  Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, which took place in Dublin on 1 August 1915. In a political show of strength, tens of thousands lined the streets of the capital for the veteran separatist, who was buried in Glasnevin cemetery. The graveside oration by Patrick Pearse concluded with the defining words that “Ireland unfree shall never at peace”, while a volley of shots rang out over the cemetery. The funeral souvenir programme included articles by James Connolly and Thomas MacDonagh, as well as the speech of Pearse. In reading Connolly’s piece today, it seems clear he was looking towards insurrection:

The Irish Citizen Army in its constitution pledges its members to fight for a Republican Freedom for Ireland. Its members are, therefore, of the number who believe that at the call of duty they may have to lay down their lives for Ireland, and have so trained themselves that at the worst the laying down of their lives shall constitute the starting point of another glorious tradition – a tradition that will keep alive the soul of the nation.

O Donovan Rossa funeral souvenir, printed by Mahon in 1915 (Image from Capuchin Archives, via Na Fianna Eireann History)

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A number of recent publications on the 1916 Rising (you might have noticed there’s been quite a few!) have included the wonderful maps of the Dublin Fire Brigade’s Chief Officer Thomas P. Purcell, showing the destruction to the city following the 1916 Rising. I’ve used them a few times on the blog, most recently in an article on 1916 looters.

The innovative Purcell, engineer and quick thinker, was followed by Captain John Myers, who assumed the position in 1917 and held it for ten years. That meant he would hold the position throughout the revolutionary period that followed Easter Week  and into the birth of the Free State.

Evidently, he was sympathetic to the republican movement. In 1920, when the Church of Our Lady of Refuge in Rathmines went up in flames, local IRA men feared an arms-dump would be revealed in its remains. One IRA man would describe Myers as “a very fine fellow and, from the national point of view, thoroughly sound and reliable in every way.” Volunteer Michael Lynch remembered:

I told him the true story and asked him to see that the Rathmines people got no inkling whatever of the fact that some dozens of rifles and revolvers were lying in the debris under the floor of the church. He told me not to worry, that nobody would ever know. The incident passed unnoticed by anybody.

Just as Purcell had produced the detailed maps in 1916, Myers would do likewise in 1922, following the bombardment of the Four Courts and the Battle of Dublin. As with the maps of his predecessor, they reveal the sometimes surprising extent of  damage as a result of combat in a crowded urban environment:

Myers map showing destruction in the area of the Four Courts, 1922. (Thanks to Las Fallon, DFB historian, for map)

The Four Courts complex was occupied by Republican forces on 13 April 1922. In an event that had strong echos of the occupation of buildings by republicans in 1916, a green flag was raised above the complex. ‘Easter Week Repeats Itself’ was a popular Republican poster at the time, seeking to draw a continuity between the events of 1916 and 1922.  Among those to seize the building was 1916 veteran Liam Mellows, as well as Rory O’Connor, Ernie O’Malley, Peadar O’Donnell and Seán MacBride, son of the executed 1916 leader Major John MacBride.

The seizing of the Four Courts troubled not only the new Free State authorities, but also the British state. General Macready informed Winston Churchill days after the Republican seizure of the building that “”it is vitally important to avoid a general conflict, because it is probable Rory O’Connor…hopes to embroil British Troops in order to bring about unity in the Irish Republican Army against a common enemy.”

Militarily, the Republicans were up against it in terms of strategy and capability. Ernie O’Malley would later recall that “it seemed a haphazard pattern of war. A garrison without proper good, surrounded on all sides, bad communications between their inside posts, faulty defences..relieving forces on our side concentrated on the wrong side of the widest street in the capital [O’Connell Street].”  The bombardment did eventually come on 28 June, and the new Free State drew on the British state for support. Two borrowed eighteen-pounder guns were utilised to attack the Four Courts from across the Liffey. Days later, War News, the newspaper of the Republican forces, would encourage their supports to “rally to the flag”, insisting that “The attack on the Four Courts… is a complete failure…Despite continuous heavy gun and rifle fire, the defences of the Four Courts are intact.” This wasn’t quite the case in reality.

The battle led to the destruction of the Public Records Office, the forerunner to the National Archives of Ireland. Historians have spent decades debating if this was a deliberate act of destruction, or a tragic casualty of the fighting. Regardless,Peter Cottrell, in his history of the Civil War, recounts how:

A column of smoke rose over 200ft in the air as the ensuing fire consumed centuries-old documents. For hours fragments of ancient documents floated over Dublin and the event led Churchill to write to Collins after the fighting saying that “the archives of the Four Courts may be scattered but the title-deeds of Ireland are safe.”

What is interesting about the map produced by Myers above is the extent of the damage to buildings in the vicinity of the Four Courts, primarily caused by the debris of explosions. The area around the Four Courts was heavily populated, with a high density of tenement accommodation.

Myers map showing the destruction of Upper O’Connell Street (Sackville Street), 1922. (Thanks to Las Fallon, DFB historian, for map)

Myers second map shows the destruction in the area that became as ‘The Block’,  which included the Hammam and Gresham Hotels. Oscar Traynor commanded the Republican forces here, which included small contingents from the Irish Citizen Army and the Communist Party. Buildings were seized on 29 June, in the hope of diverting the Free State from its assault on the Four Courts.

It was evidently clear from the beginning of the Battle of Dublin that the Free State’s availability of armoured vehicles provided it with a crucial upper-hand. Todd Andrews, later to pen the classic memoir Dublin Made Me,  recalled that “a single armoured car approached, opening up this time exclusively on the Tramway Office. I was returning fire rather futilely with my rifle when a hall of bullets caught my firing slit blasting sand from the barricades with great force…I was stunned for a while.”

By 5 July, the Republicans surrendered ‘The Block’, with some senior figures, including Éamon de Valera, successfully escaping before this. Despite the call to surrender, 1916 veteran Cathal Brugha would instead choose to die with a gun in his hand, emerging from ‘The Block’ to engage Free State soldiers. Michael Collins was moved to write to a friend that “when many of us are forgotten, Cathal Brugha will be remembered.”

This map could have looked much worse than it does; as Padraig Yeates notes in his history A City in Civil War, “another conflagration was averted only when gallons of whiskey and other spirits were removed from Gilbey’s and from Findlater’s before the flames reached them.” Las Fallon, in his history Dublin Fire Brigade and the Irish Revolution, quotes Myers himself describing this as “the most critical period of the whole of the fire fighting.” Las also notes that “in total, eighty buildings were destroyed or partially destroyed in the battle for Dublin.” While the Pro Cathedral survived the flames, St. Thomas’s Chruch, which was Church of Ireland, was destroyed.

Much like Captain Purcell before him, Myers had done his best under stressful conditions. Joseph Connolly, an Irish Citizen Army who had participated in both the Easter Rising and the Civil War, would later assume the role of Chief Officer himself.

Captain John Myers. This image appears on the front of Dublin Fire Brigade and the Irish Revolution, available here for €7.50..

Saturday 9 April 2016

The Cabra 1916 Rising Committee and the East Wall History Group are co-organising a day of talks in City Hall with historians Brian Hanley, John Dorney, Hugo McGuinness, Stephen McCullagh and Maeve O’Leary. Entrance is free.

‘Rebellion : A Peoples History’ poster.

Saturday 23 April 2016
Republican Sinn Fein are hosting their main commemorative march. Assembling at 1.45pm at the Garden of Remembrence.

RSF poster

On Saturday at 3pm, the Seán Heuston 1916 Society are hosting a public meeting in the Teacher’s Club with Tommy McKearney (ex-hunger striker), Kieran Conway (author of Southside Provisional) and CHTM’s Donal Fallon.

Seán Heuston 1916 Society, Dublin public meeting

Sunday 24 April 2016

On the 100th anniversary of the Rising, the National Graves Association are hosting a Citizens Commemoration.
Assembling at the GPO from 12.30pm and then a march to Glasnevin Cemetery for the unveiling of a new monument at St. Paul’s Cemetery which marks the graves of a number of Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army killed during the Rising.

NGA poster

Assembling at Merrion Square at 2pm, the ‘Reclaim the Vision of 1916′ are organising a march and pageant.  Patrons of the organisation include Robert Ballagh, Jim Fitzpatrick, Betty Purcell and Tommy McKearney.

Reclaim the Vision of 1916 march.

Monday 25 April

Frongoch & the Birth of the IRA talk.

*Ringsend*

Saturday 30th April

The Stoneybatter and Smithfield People’s History Project will unveil a plaque on North King Street to remember sixteen locals killed by the British Army. They are assembling at 2.30pm on Manor Street and will march the short distance to North King Street to unveil the plaque.

Monday 2nd May

Saturday 14 May

On the 100th anniversary of the execution of James Connolly, éirígí are holding their main centenary commemoration. Assembling at 2pm at the Wolfe Tone statue at Stephen’s Green and marching to the GPO.

Eirigi 2016 march

Benito Mussolini with a bandaged nose, after the 1926 shooting:

In April 1926, President W.T Cosgrave sent by telegram his best wishes to a recently wounded Benito Mussolini. Coming after an attempt on the life of the Fascist leader, Cosgrave wrote:

On behalf of the Government of the Irish Free State, I have the honour to congratulate Your Excellency, and the Italian people, on the providential escape of Your Excellency from the odious attempt on your person. Sincerely hoping that the wound is not serious, I send you my most earnest wishes for your speedy recover. The infamous attempt has caused much indignation here.

For Cosgrave, it was particularly important that the Free State send its best wishes, as it was an Irish assailant who made the attempt on Mussolini’s life. Ninety years ago this Thursday, Dublin born woman Violet Gibson fired a revolver shot in Rome that could have changed the course of human history. The story is well known today, and has been the subject of a book and an excellent RTE Radio documentary. This post is  primarily concerned only with how the event was reported at home.

The shooting of Mussolini in front of an adoring crowd was a dramatic event, and that drama was captured in contemporary press reports. The Irish Times reported that

The Italian Prime Minister, after opening the International Surgical Congress in the Capitol of Rome, was passing through a cheering crowd in the square to his motor care, when “an elderly woman in dark clothes” (afterwards identified as the Hon. Violet Gibson) dashed out and fired a small revolver almost point-blank in his face….

Signor Mussolini remained self-composed, reassured his entourage, and while pressing a handkerchief to the wound, gave orders that no reprisals were to be carried out against his assailant, who had been arrested. She was protected by police from the fury of the crowd, who tried to lynch her. She was carried to the police station by police and carabineers.

The shot Gibson fired grazed the nose of Mussolini, and while the press here condemned the “wicked and unprovoked attack”, in truth she did little damage to Mussolini beyond  his requiring a bandaged nose for a number of days. While a lucky escape, he did succeed in making political capital off the event, telling a gathering that he was prepared to “take his share of danger, and had no intention of shutting himself up, or of losing touch with the Fascist rank and file or the Italian people.” In the initial panic that followed the event, newspaper offices belonging to the political opposition were attacked in Rome and other cities, as many believed the assassination attempt to be the work of a communist agent in a country that was polarised by left-right division.The Popolo d’Italia went as far as to accuse Anti-Fascist sections of the foreign press of being in a large measure responsible for what Violet Gibson had done.

Violet Gibson after her arrest, April 1926.

Almost immediately, the Irish media were reporting that Gibson was a troubled individual, The Irish Times stating that the “the attempted assassination of Signor Mussolini by an Irishwoman…seems to be more tragic from the side of the assailant than that of the Italian Duce. The Hon. Violet Gibson is a lady of eccentric temperament.” Rather than being the communist hit-woman some had speculated her to be, Gibson emerged in the pages of the national media as the daughter of Edward Gibson, the 1^st Baron of Ashbourne. Her father had served as Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and she herself had been presented as a Debutante to Queen Victoria, and was raised in the comfortable surroundings of a Georgian Dublin square. Her brother, the present Lord Ashbourne at the time of the shooting, was described in the press as  “an ardent supporter of the Gaelic revival movement and a fluent speaker of the Irish language”, and he was in Dublin attending a Gaelic League conference when he heard the news from Rome.  It emerged that Violet had tried to kill herself in a convent in Rome a year before shooting Mussolini, claiming that “I tried to die for the glory of God.” A sister was asked to comment on why she had taken the drastic course of action she did:

Why then did she try to kill Mussolini? Was it that she considered him to be the enemy of Catholicism, or was it for another cause? I, who know her best, can offer no answer to that, for who shall analyse or anticipate the actions of one who is mentally afflicted?

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Fenian Street Plaque, photographed today.

At present, the city is undoubtedly witnessing with a very real housing crisis. It is by no means the first.

In 1963, over a period of only weeks, four lives were lost in Dublin when tenements came crashing down to the ground in Bolton Street and Fenian Street. On both sides of the Liffey, it became apparent many working class Dubliners were still living in accommodation that was unfit for human habitation. We’ve looked at this crisis on the blog before. It was fifty years on from the Church Street tenement collapses of 1913, an eerie reminder that for many, life had changed little. When a tenement collapsed on Fenian Street, two passing children were killed. In our 2013 post we noted:

There were scenes of anguish on the streets at the time, with the Irish Press writing that “Hundreds of Dubliners, many visibly crying, crowded the narrow streets leading to the scene of the collapse as firemen and Gardaí frantically shoveled bricks, rubble and mortar aside to reach the victims.” The two young girls, described by their loved ones as inseparable, were returning home from buying sweets at a corner shop. One man, Andrew Dent, jumped for his life from the collapsing tenement.

The plaque on a housing scheme on Fenian Street today is a simple reminder of this tragic event, naming young Linda Byrne and Marion Vardy, and noting that after this tragedy, “the project of clearing inner city tenements began in earnest. Within a decade the population of Westland Row Parish had fallen from 20,000 to less than 6,000.”This image from the Irish Photo Archive gives a sense of the destruction on the street following the tragedy.

I have often missed it passing by, though the plaque is relatively new, not appearing in this 2014 Google Street View image (the plaque is located more or less immediately behind the parking signage today):

Several newspapers today have picked up on the fact that the remembrance wall unveiled yesterday in Glasnevin Cemetery includes an incorrect Irish language spelling, with ‘Éirí Amach’ becoming ‘Eírí Amach’. You can watch RTE’s coverage of the unveiling of the wall here:

Glasnevin have been quick to state that this will be amended, but there’s another problem with the wall. While the incorrect inclusion of Volunteer Andrew Cunningham as a civilian casualty has gone largely unnoticed, it is a mistake that goes beyond a fada.

Andrew Cunningham, listed as a ‘civilian’.

Andrew Cunningham was from Pigeon House Road in Ringsend. A member of the Irish Volunteers from the time of the inception of the nationalist organisation, he was a silk weaver by trade. Cunningham was shot on the Ringsend Road on 1 May, which is after the surrender of P.H Pearse and the rebel forces, but sporadic shooting remained a problem in parts of Dublin. Very little is known of Cunningham with regards a biographical sketch; Ray Bateson notes in history Deansgrange Cemetery & the Easter Rising that his death left a widow, Kathleen, and two children living at 11 York Terrace.

He was only 26 years old at the time of his death, a reminder of the youth of many of the participants in the Easter Rising. His brother, Michael Patrick Cunningham (born in 1888) was also a silk weaver and an active member of the Irish Volunteers, and took part in the Rising too. My thanks to Damien McDonald for the comment below this post, which notes that “he fought with the Roe’s Distillery Garrison, which occupied a building on the other side of James’s Street from the South Dublin Union.”

Volunteer Andrew Cunningham, died 1 May 1916. (My thanks to Jason Walsh McLean)

Part of a list of those ‘killed in action, 1916’ contained within Bureau of Military History Witness Statement #1686

Cunningham’s service was referenced in an edition of the Catholic Bulletin published in 1916, and in the Wolfe Tone Annual on the thirtieth-anniversary of the rebellion. Buried in Deansgrange Cemetery, a simple grave marker of a cross decorated by Easter Lilies was replaced in 2013 by the National Graves Association.

NGA grave to Cunningham in Deansgrange Cemetery. (My thanks to Jason Walsh McLean)

The unveiling of the Glasnevin wall has proven hugely controversial in recent weeks.  Artist Robert Ballagh, part of the Reclaim 1916 group, has been a vocal opponent of the wall since plans of it were first announced some time ago. Some relatives have criticised the wall, while others support it.

A mural in the Mens Shed of Loughlinstown unveiled in April 2016, and including Andrew Cunningham (thanks to Jason)

The widow and children of Andrew. This image appeared in nationalist publications after the Easter Rising, as did images of other families who lost loved ones in the Volunteers and the ICA.

Glasnevin will remain an important centre of commemoration in the years ahead and throughout the Decade of Centenaries. In 2015, there was some controversy at the centenary of the funeral of veteran Fenian O’Donovan Rossa, with some taking issue with the speech delivered by John Green of the Glasnevin Trust. To quote from the blog of journalist and broadcaster Jude Collins:

Glasnevin Trust Chairman John Green delivered an oration on Rossa. There was no mention of his IRB exploits or the involvement of the IRB preparation for the funeral. He made an assertion that Rossa, as he lay on his death bed, dementia riddled, supported Home Rule and John Redmond – in effect Constitutional Nationalism / politics. How wrong and historically inaccurate.

After the commemoration I spoke with Dr Shane Kenna, biographer of Rossa. He was appalled that the state hijacked the event to suggest Rossa died a constitutionalist. He didn’t. This allegation was proven fictitious as constitutional Nationalists tried to claim Rossa’s legacy, particularly at a time when their support for an unpopular war was doing them considerable damage. Rossa’s wife Mary Jane agreed the allegation was fabricated, yet the State commemoration decided to go with it! Why? Well, to call Rossa anything else would be dangerous ground for them, handing the political initiative to others.

Regardless, on the subject of Glasnevin, it is worth highlighting that the 24 April will see the unveiling of the recently restored 1916 Plot memorial in the St. Paul’s Section of Glasnevin Cemetery.

Frank Ryan, editor of IRA newspaper An Phoblacht, unveils the first memorial at the 1916 Plot at St. Paul’s section, Glasnevin. 1929.

A memorial was first unveiled at the site of the 1916 Plot in 1929 by the National Graves Association, with Frank Ryan delivering the oration.A new memorial replaced it in 1966 for the Golden Jubilee of the Rising, but in recent years it has weathered badly and required restoration.  Among the Volunteers and ICA dead in the 1916 plot is Charles D’Arcy, a fifteen year old member of the Irish Citizen Army who was shot in the vicinity of City Hall early in the rebellion.

We wish the NGA every success with the unveiling of the restored 1916 Plot, which is a fitting memorial to those buried there.

Restoration work underway on the 1916 Plot at St Paul’s, Glasnevin (Image Credit: National Graves Association)