Come Here To Me!

Richard O’Carroll

While the Irish Citizen Army was regarded as the armed-wing of the trade union movement a century ago, it should be noted that there were also many trade unionists and men from the left of the political spectrum in the ranks of the Irish Volunteers.

Richard O’Carroll was the Secretary of the Ancient Guild of Incorporated Brick and Stonelayers’ Trade Union, as well as an elected Labour representative to Dublin Corporation. As a member of the Irish Volunteers he took part in the Easter Rising, and he met his death in tragic circumstances. Later this year, the Members’ Room of City Hall will be renamed in his honour.

Trade unionists and leftists in the Volunteers:

There were a variety of reasons why some from the left of the political spectrum would opt to join the Irish Volunteers over the Irish Citizen Army. In some cases, it was merely down to local convenience. Thomas Pugh, who fought under Thomas MacDonagh and Major John MacBride at Jacob’s during the Easter Rising, had been a member of the Socialist Party of Ireland who would recall that “the first time I heard the Soldiers Song was at a celebration held by the Socialist Party.”  For Pugh, a chance encounter with Richard Mulcahy in the hallways of the National Library that was enough to convince him to join the Irish Volunteers, which were more geographically convenient:

Coming up to about three weeks or a month before the Rising I felt that something was coming off soon, and when I met Dick Mulcahy one day in the National Library I said to him, “I’ll join the Irish Citizen Army”. He said, “Join my Company”, I suppose because I had been at some of the drills of his Company at 25 Parnell Square in the Gaelic League Hall. I said, “I’m more in favour of the Citizen Army, but wouldn’t the sensible thing be for me to join the nearest Company”, and I went down to the Father Mathew Park and joined “B” Company of the 2nd Battalion.

It has been suggested, most notably by Sean O’Casey in his history of the Irish Citizen Army, that there were strong class divisions between the Volunteer and Citizen Army forces. O’Casey claimed that “the old lingering tradition of the social inferiority of what were called the unskilled workers, prompted the socially superior tradesmen to shy at an organisation which was entirely officered by men whom they thought to be socially inferior to themselves.”  A great article on ‘The Irish Story’ blog, examining the ‘Rabble and the Republic’, looks at some of the class complexities of this period. In the commments section, historian Brian Hanley correctly points out that “skilled and white-collar workers” were more likely to join the Volunteers than the ICA.

While it is true that white-collar workers tended to join the Volunteers, there were notable exceptions to this – for example the Connolly siblings of Gloucester Street. Seán Connolly, the first rebel fatality of the Rising, was a clerk in the motor taxation department of Dublin Corporation, while his brother Joseph was a firefighter, and one of few in the movement who was capable of driving a vehicle. Both men would have been of a social class more normally found in the Volunteers, but strong Larkinite sympathies in their family ensured their membership of the Citizen Army. As Hanley has pointed out, there were middle class women in particular in the ranks of the ICA, who perhaps favoured the status and position on offer within the workers’ force to Cumann na mBan.

A poster for the inaugural public meeting of the Irish Volunteers.

The belief that the Citizen Army were drawn primarily from the ranks of unskilled workers is reflected in the firsthand account of Liam de Róiste, an active member of the Irish Volunteers from their inception, who provided the Bureau of Military History with a diary that amounts to a running commentary of the revolutionary period. He noted in 1916 that:

Since Larkin went to America, James Connolly is in command of the Citizen Army and the Transport Workers’ Union. Connolly, I believe to be a sincere Socialist Republican and a determined man. The men he leads are also, beyond doubt, a determined body of men; dock labourers and other workers called “unskilled.” The work of Larkin, Connolly and others at Liberty Hall has aroused their intelligence and done much to educate them.

Some trade unionists and socialists, perhaps members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the ‘IRB’, or the Fenians) or other nationalist bodies prior to the emergence of a distinct workers’ militia,  may have felt a strong affinity to the nationalist movement, for example in the case of Peadar Macken, who had been a member of the Socialist Party of Ireland, and who contributed towards publications like Jim Larkin’s The Irish Worker. Macken, Charles Callan has noted, was a member of the oath-bound IRB from about 1900. Elected as a Dublin Labour Party alderman in 1911, he was a member of the Irish Volunteers from the inception of the organisation. Macken was tragically killed during the Easter Rising at Boland’s Mills, as a result of a shot fired by a fellow Volunteer. Macken Street is today named in his honour.

Seán McLoughlin, the son of an Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union  (ITGWU) activist, was a veteran of the Gaelic League and Na Fianna Éireann, who despite socialist inclinations had joined the Irish Volunteers, with whom he would fight at Easter Week. He briefly joined the Irish Citizen Army in the War of Independence period, and was active in communist political agitation for decades, both in Ireland and Britain. Michael Molloy, one of the compositors who worked on the 1916 proclamation in Liberty Hall on the eve of the rebellion, and who was hired by James Connolly to compose and print trade union materials, took part in the Rising as an Irish Volunteer at Jacob’s factory. Also at Jacob’s during the insurrection was Patrick Moran, an active trade unionist who in 1917 was centrally involved in the established of the Irish National Union of Vintners, Grocers and Allied Trades, the forerunner of today’s Mandate union.

Macken Street Flats, January 2016. Peadar Macken, like O’Carroll, was a Labour-aligned Irish Volunteer. (Thanks to Patrick Brady for image)

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Previously on the blog, we’ve looked at the 1875 Dublin whiskey fire. It was as chaotic a day as any day you can magine. A fire in a bonded warehouse created a scene where burning whiskey flowed like lava through the streets of the historic Liberties, destroying much in its path. Those who poured water on it in the hope of stopping the spread of the flames merely made a bad situation worse, and it took an innovative Dubliner, Fire Chief James Robert Ingram, to stop the madness. You’ll have to read the article linked above for that story.

To give a taste of it all though, the Illustrated London Times noted that:

Crowds of people assembled, and took off their hats and boots to collect the whiskey, which ran in streams along the streets. Four persons have died in the hospital from the effects of drinking the whiskey, which was burning hot as it flowed. Two corn-porters, named Healy and M’Nulty, were found in a lane off Cork-street, lying insensible, with their boots off, which they had evidently used to collect the liquor. There are many other persons in the hospital who are suffering from the same cause. Two boys are reported to be dying, and it is feared that other deaths will follow.

I was delighted recently to come across this series of contemporary illustrations, which capture the bizarre nature of the day perfectly. Animals ran throughout the Liberties, but the illustration I particularly like is the one that shows Dubliners drinking the whiskey from their boots!

Contemporary illustrations showing the whiskey fire of 1875.

Many people would claim in the decades that followed the Easter Rising that they were in the General Post Office, and in some cases such claims have proven untrue. One man who was there however, and who certainly wished to be anywhere else, was Second Lieutenant A.D Chalmers of the 14th Royal Fusiliers. Chalmers, who was on leave at the time, was going about his business in the General Post Office when the combined forces of the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army and other nationalist organisations came charging into the building. He had the total misfortune of becoming one of the first prisoners  – if not the very first prisoner –  of the newly declared Irish Republic.

There are references to Chalmers and his fellow prisoners in a number of rebel Witness Statements, but he also gave a colourful recollection of events to The Irish Times in the days that followed the insurrection. On 5 May 1916,  a time when executions were still underway, the paper reported that Chalmers was at the post office at noon on Easter Monday when he noticed “about three hundred Sinn Féiners” coming up the street. He claimed that he then turned to another spectator and said “look at that awful crowd; they must be on a route march.” In the weeks and months leading up to the Rising, the sight of armed men parading on the streets of Dublin is one that ordinary Dubliners would have witnessed. As such, many people (including Chalmers) didn’t quite take things seriously at first that April morning.

Chalmers told a journalist that he heard the cry of “Charge!”, and next thing he knew he was taken prisoner as:

One of them presented a bayonet at his breast, and the other prodded him in the back with  a pike, a weapon favoured by many of the rebels. Lieutenant Chalmers, who was in Dublin on sick leave, was unarmed. After being searched for arms, the lieutenant was bound with wire obtained from the telephone box and put into the box, which faced Nelson Pillar. By this time the public had scattered…

By contrast with the claims of Chalmers himself, Irish Volunteer Desmond Ryan would later allege that the prisoner had “bandied indignant words” at the rebels as they took control of the building, and in this historian Lorcan Collins has suggested he may well have been “the author of his own misfortune.” Clad in a military uniform however, it’s difficult to see any circumstance in which he wouldn’t have become a prisoner. One of those who helped bundle Chalmers into the telephone box was a young Michael Collins.

A telephone kiosk inside the GPO prior to the Easter Rising (Image Credit: Irish Volunteers Commemorative Organisation)

The telephone box was not the safest place to be on Easter Monday. When a force of Lancers arrived on horseback to inspect the scene, a volley of shots rang out from the General Post Office, sending men and horses alike crashing to the ground beside the Nelson Pillar. It was reported that “bullets went through the telephone box” in the midst of this.

One man who showed sympathy for the plight of Chalmers was The O’Rahilly, the Kerryman who had spent the previous day travelling the country informing Volunteers that the rebellion was off. When it went ahead, on a smaller scale than envisioned, he took his place in the fight, telling Countess Markievicz that “it is madness, but it is a glorious madness.” It was O’Rahilly who had Chalmers removed from the telephone box, according to Chalmers telling Volunteers on duty that “I want this officer to watch the safe to see that nothing is touched. You will see that no harm comes to him.”

The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, published in the aftermath of the fighting, claimed that in total the number of prisoners grew to sixteen, and that “prisoners had been taken in as occasion offered.”  Fearghal McGarry, in his study of rebel Witness Statements, The Rising: Easter 1916, suggests that the number of prisoners was much higher than this, and that “there were around thirty-five in the GPO, and another thirty in the Four Courts.” These were primarily policemen and soldiers captured in the early stages of the rebellion. As McGarry notes, “the GPO garrison was fortunate enough to seize an Indian army medical officer who cheerfully offered his expertise to his captors.”

A young Michael Collins. He served as aide-de-camp to Joseph Mary Plunkett in the GPO, and helped bundle Chalmers into the telephone kiosk.

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It is a brisk twenty minute walk from Portobello Bridge to the bottom of South Great George’s Street but on your way into town you pass about 30 pubs. They are in order:

The Portobello (33 Sth. Richmond St.)
O’Connell’s (29 Sth. Richmond St.)
The Bernard Shaw (11-12 Sth. Richmond St.)

The Bleeding Horse (24-25 Camden St. Upr.)
Cassidy’s, 42 Camden St. Lwr.)
The Camden Exchange (72 Camden St. Lwr.)
Anseo (18 Camden St. Lwr.)
Devitt’s (78 Camden St. Lwr.)
The Palace (84-87 Camden St. Lwr.)
Flannery’s (6 Camden St. Lwr.)
Ryan’s (92 Camden St. Lwr.)

Whelan’s (25 Wexford St.)
Opium Rooms (26 Wexford St.)
The Jar (31 Wexford St.)
Against The Grain (11 Wexford St.)
The Karma Stone (40 Wexford St.)
The Swan (58 York St.)

J.J. Smyth’s (12 Aungier St.)
Capitol Lounge (1 Aungier St.)

The Long Hall (51 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)
Hogan’s (35-37 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)
Chelsea Drug Store (25 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)
Soder and Ko (64 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)
Izakaya (12-13 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)
The Globe (11 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)
The George (89 Sth. Gt. George’s St.)

There are also a couple of pubs which are no longer open but whose fronts are still very much visible. Murphy’s (30 Sth. Richmond St.) next door to O’Connell’s has been closed for some time. The Aungier House (43 Aungier St) on the corner with Digges Street has been derelict for nearly 20 years. The former Shebeen Chic (4 Sth. Gt. George’s St.) premises is currently empty but no doubt will be taken over by new owners soon.

There’s something for nearly everyone on this stretch. Locals and tourists alike. For the LGBT Community (The George), for one of the best pints of Guinness in the city (The Long Hall), for cheap cocktails (Capitol Lounge), for Blues fans (J.J. Smyth’s), for DIT students (The Karma Stone), fans of craft beer (Against The Grain), techno and house lovers (Opium Rooms), for country folk (Flannery’s), true music heads (Anseo), for the pizza and hipster crowd (The Bernard Shaw) and so on and so on.

However in late 2015, a small pub called Delaney’s and its next door off licence at number 17-18 Aungier Street shut its doors without much fanfare or fuss.

Delaney’s, Aungier Street from c. 2015. Credit – Jar.ie.

I think it is reasonable to argue that this was one of the last remaining genuine working-class ‘local’ pubs left in this part of the South Inner City.

Only a stone throws away from the the glitz of Fade Street and the shopping district surrounding Grafton Street, Delaney’s was an anachronistic institution for this part of town. It was a pub that did not attempt to compete for the business of tourists or anyone else. By no means was it an unwelcoming bar but it was certainly a local bar for local people with a sizeable number of patrons coming from the nearby York Street flats.

Footballers from Aungier Celtic outside Delaney’s (July 2014)

It was a pub that offered cheap pints, a Lotto Draw for the local football club on Mondays, Karaoke on Tuesdays and Bingo on Wednesdays. DJs with names like DJ Gaz and DJ Bubbles played on the weekend. There was a darts table and a poker table. The pub had no website but an active Facebook personal account.

If you’re standing with your back to Central Bank, where would be the nearest pub that would match such a description south of the Liffey? I think you’d have all the way to Townsend Street or Pearse Street in one direction and all the way to Thomas Street in the other.

In just a few months, the pub was closed, renovated and re-opened as an up-market cocktail bar called Bow Lane. Now you can get a Pompelmo (grapefruit vodka cocktail) for €11 or bottles of red wine like a Gagliardo Serre Barolo (2007) for €105.

Bow Lane cocktail bar, Dublin. Credit – hotspots.ie.

Online newspaper articles about the opening of the new business are quite interesting. Particularly the kind of language being used.

A piece in the DailyEdge described Delaney’s as a “closed-down pub” and “an unassuming place you’ve probably been walking past for years”. The fact remains that Delaney’s wasn’t a long-term derelict pub, it was only shut for a very short time.

FFT.ie called it the “extensive refurbishment” of an “old rundown unit adding to the ongoing transformation of one of Dublin’s oldest streetscapes”.

Lovin’ Dublin revealed that patrons to the new venue could expect a “authentic inner-city pub experience”. Whatever the hell that means. Before declaring that “oxtail ragú lasagnette, roasted squash fettuccine and slow-cooked rabbit pie” will be on offer. Hmmm.

Their own blurb was a nauseous bit of PR nonsense:

Bow Lane is an authentic, late night cocktail bar that appeals to a cross-section of Dublin society from the gritty underclass of sophisticates to creatives and the party set. Bow Lane has areas that satisfy a want for exclusivity and other areas that create a space for typical Dublin social intercourse.

Brief history:

No. 18 Aungier Street is a terraced, three bay, four-storey building which has been a licensed premises since at least the mid 19th century.

From 1852 to 1890 the lease holder of the business was John Hoyne, a Wine Merchant and Grocer.

On 13 June 1890, The Irish Times described the premises as:

old-established, well and favourably known. A retail seven-day, licensed grocery, tea, wine, spirit, and malt drink concerns, unexceptionally situated on one of the greatest and still rising main line streets in Dublin. The establishment has very fine frontage. The exterior and interior are in splendid condition. A depth of 150 feet gives ample room for present genuine trade and further extension as may in future requite for increased business.

In 1892 it was owned by a Joseph C. Reynolds but by 1901, the census shows that it was the hands of Patrick Coughlan from Kilkenny:

18 Aungier Street, 1901 census. Credit – census.nationalarchives.ie.

The business was put up for sale in 1924 and then again in 1930 when it was was described in The Irish Times (7 June 1930) as a “spacious” premises with “bar fitting, cash desk and show cases … in richly-carved Domingo wood; there is good yard space with beer and bottling stores and excellent lavatory arrangements.”

It went through a slew of names in the 20th century – Patrick Brady’s The Central Bar (1930s), the Central Bar (early 1970s) and The Millhouse Inn (late 1970s).

According to Rareirishstuff.com, this is an image of The Central Bar, on Aungier Street in the 1950’s.

The Central Bar was home to the Dublin Welsh Choir in the 1970s. Members included Irish republicans Roy Johnston, Deasún Breathnach and long-term CHTM! contributer PhotoPol.

Members of the Dublin Welsh Choir in the Central Bar, 18 Aungier St. in 1971. Thanks to Photopol for passing on the information.

From about 1980 to 1997, it was known as Gleeson’s. In late 1980s, the bar had been sold for £200,000 to a German businessman Hans Heiss who moved to Ireland with his Irish wife.

Gleeson’s, 18 Aungier Street. (The Irish Times, 13 January 1992).

In the early 2000s, the pub was known again as The Central Bar before finally setting on Delaney’s.

This was not an extraordinary pub that could boast the best pint of Guinness in the city or a remarkable Victorian interior but it was a genuine neighborhood bar in a part of town that has very few left.

Its closing down and redevelopment (almost) overnight into an expensive, cocktail bar should not go unnoticed.

Reading contemporary Irish and British newspapers from the aftermath of the Easter Rising in Dublin, I’ve been struck by how frequently comparisons were drawn between the six-day insurrection in Ireland and the events of the Paris Commune in 1871.

From 18 March until 27 May 1871, a radical and revolutionary administration took control of the city of Paris, seizing upon the disillusionment of working people with the French political system following the collapse of the Second French Empire, and rising militancy among workers in the French capital. To quote from Karl Marx’s study The Civil War in France:

“The proletarians of Paris,” said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, “amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs…. They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”

A Parisian barricade, 1871 (Libcom)

The workers took to the barricades, and as Robert Toms has noted, “about 900 barricades were built all over the city, including those prepared in advance, such as the useless defence lines in Western Paris and the huge, much-photographed, redoubts facing the Place de la Concorde, constructed laboriously and impressively by the Commune’s Barricades Commission.” The red flag was adopted by the ‘Communards’ over the French tricolour,  and they called for the seperation of church and state, the abolition of night work in bakeries and other social, political and economic reforms.

Coverage of the Commune in Dublin newspapers in 1871 had been anything but kind. The Freeman’s Journal reported that “the women of Paris have been prominent in the streets, with a red flag, demanding arms…and conducting themselves like ugly fiendish sisters of the witches in Macbeth.” The Nation, a nationalist newspaper that had been established by the Young Irelanders, went as far as to state that the aims of the Commune “are such as are utterly repugnant to the genius of the Irish race. Religion and Patriotism, the two most holy and glorious principles  known to human nature, have ever been the guiding lights of the Irish people, the motive power of all their actions.”

The Commune was ultimately violently suppressed, during what became known as the ‘Bloody Week’. While historians of the Commune have disagreed on the extent of the loss of life, some have suggested as many as twenty thousand died in the suppression of the Commune. Vladimir Lenin would later write “20,000 killed in the streets…Lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at nothing.” The suppression of the revolutionary Paris experiment was, perhaps unsurprisingly, welcomed by the sections of the Irish press who had condemned the Paris Commune as total madness.

A contemporary illustration showing the arrest of the Commune, by the forces of ignorance and reaction.

When a meeting of what was reported to be a “section of the Dublin branch” of the Socialist International took place in a small room above a shop on the northside of Dublin later in April 1872, a contemporary newspaper report noted that the speaker was interrupted and informed that “the Internationalists had shot the archbishop and priests of Paris, and great uproar ensued.” To compound the misery of those present, it was reported that the landlord of the house “burst into the room in an excited state, and called those present a set of ruffians and blackguards. He said he had been led to let the room on the pretense that the meeting was to be for a discussion of the labour and wages question, and that he would sooner burn the house over his head than hire it for the nefarious purposes of Internationalism.”

Members of the ISRP, including James Connolly, in the Phoenix Park.

The Paris Commune was actively commemorated by James Connolly’s fledgling Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) in Dublin in the 1890s. Connolly had personally come into contact with Leo Meillet, a veteran of the Commune, in his Edinburgh days. Meillet, as Donal Nevin has noted, was “a French refugee who had been mayor of a commune in Paris”, and he would tell an Edinburgh commemoration that “without the shedding of blood there is no social salvation.” Connolly would utilise similar rhetoric in the pages of his newspapers, telling readers of the Workers’ Republic in February 1916 that “without the shedding of blood there is no redemption”, though he pointed towards a biblical source for inspiration. Connolly occasionally invoked the memory of the Commune in his newspaper, for example in May 1899, writing that “the Commune, if it had been successful, would have inaugurated the reign of real freedom the world over – it would have meant the emancipation of the working class; therefore as it failed it serves as a mark for all the literary prostitutes who sell themselves into the service of capitalist journalism. Long live the Commune!”

Connolly was somewhat obsessed with the tactics of urban warfare and insurrection, writing a regular column on the theme in his newspaper, and lecturing members of both the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers on the subject. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of the Commune better than most. James Barry, a young Volunteer in Cork, remembered that Connolly had spoken to him and others in the southern city and that “the subject of his lecture was street fighting. He went into considerable detail in explaining the tactics to be employed in the seizure, occupation and defence of barricades in city streets.”

Yet beyond Connolly, other planners of the insurrection had also been studying urban warfare, such as Joseph Mary Plunkett and Patrick Pearse. Patrick Caldwell, a member of the Kimmage Garrison who fought in 1916 in the Sackville Street area, remembered that “when I heard the order about the barricades it recalled to my mind a lecture that had been given in Kimmage previously by P.H. Pearse on street fighting and barricades.”

In the manifesto to the citizens of Dublin issued on the Tuesday of Easter Week, the Provisional Government encouraged able-bodied citizens to assist them by building barricades. In spite of this, and all the studying of urban warfare, the best advice came from Major John MacBride in Jacob’s at the end of the rebellion. He informed the young men around him that if they should get a chance to fight again, they should not get trapped inside four walls. While barricades made sense, MacBride was right in the criticism of other aspects of the rebel tactics.

A rebel barricade on the streets of Dublin, 1916.

After the Rising: Media comparisons with Paris.

While Dublin was reproducing its squalid version of the Paris Commune it was natural that anxiety should be felt as to the possibility of an outbreak in those western and southern counties which have more than once led the way with mischief, agrarian or political, was afoot.

The above report,  which gave this piece its title, comes from the pages of the Irish Examiner on 4 May 1916. By then, the executions of the rebel leaders were still underway, but a sort of normality had returned to Dublin. The paper, based in Cork, was grateful that the “squalid” scenes in Dublin hadn’t spread significantly to other parts of the country, though there was some fighting in Galway.

In the regional press of the west of Ireland, there was similar sentiment and comparison. The Roscommon Herald, which Joseph Lee has noted “seized every opportunity to denounce Larkin”, went as far as to state that the Proclamation aimed to establish a “socialistic republic”, before comparing the events in Dublin to those in Paris. The paper evoked the Commune again in mid-May, following the execution of Connolly, and denounced “the red week” in Dublin, and the Proclamation for being “drafted on Suffragette lines”, by giving “votes equally to men and women, and it also has a lot of other crank notions.”

It’s not surprising that the most strident condemnation of the rebels and their ambitions came from the press owned by William Martin Murphy, the tycoon businessman who was a constitutional nationalist and former MP, and who had clashed with Larkin and Connolly so ferociously three years earlier during the 1913 Lockout. His Irish Catholic denounced the insurrection by stating that “Pearse was a man of ill-balanced mind, if not actually insane, and the idea of selection him as chief magistrate of an Irish Republic is quite enough to create serious doubts as to the sanity of those who approved of it…To find anything like a parallel for what occurred it is necessary to have recourse to the bloodstained annals of the Paris Commune.”

The remnants of a Dublin barricade, Manchester Guardian (National Library of Ireland collection, via Century Ireland)

The conservative Spectator in Britain praised what they saw as the moderate approach of the British military in surprising the rebellion, writing in late April that:

The rebels are hiding behind the women and children. The French were faced with a somewhat similar situation during the Commune, and as a result of their efforts to put down the insurrection quickly half the great buildings in Paris were reduced to ashes. It is of course conceivable that this, after all, may have to be the fate of Dublin, but it is obvious that we must do everything we can to avoid it. That being the situation, it is clearly both foolish and unpatriotic to nag at the Government for not doing more, or to distract them by recriminations over past errors.

Some in the British press placed the blame for the destruction of Dublin firmly on the shoulders of the rebels, and stated that this was a repetition of what had occurred in Paris. The Daily Sketch  wrote that just as Paris “suffered more destruction at the hands of its own insurgents than from the enemy s bombardment so does Dublin today, with its blazing buildings, shattered street-barricades, and piles of wreckage, present as tragic a spectacle as if the city had indeed been shelled by an invading foe.”

To a younger generation today, the events of the Paris Commune are almost unknown, indeed even in France it is not part of the historical curriculum. That those events  were the first thing brought to mind by many in the contemporary press of Ireland and Britain in 1916 is interesting in itself.

Nurse Margaret Keogh(Image credit: http://www.myleskeogh )

Margaret Keogh (In some sources Margaret appears as Kehoe, in others Keogh, but more on that below) has gone down in some history books as a Cumann na mBan activist shot on the first day of the Easter Rising in the chaos of the occupation of the South Dublin Union. One account notes that she was a “Volunteer”, who  was “shot dead outside of the South Dublin Union”, while the Wikipedia page of Cumann na mBan repeats the claim of her membership. Yet while Nurse Keogh did die on the first day of the Easter Rising having displayed great bravery, it was not as a revolutionary republican.

Dublin’s workhouses, as Joseph O’Brien notes in his study Dear,Dirty Dublin,  were the last resort of the very poor in the city. In addition to the overcrowded North Dublin Union in North Brunswick Street, which could accommodate some 2,700 paupers,  the poor and sick came to rely on the South Dublin Union at James’s Street for assistance. Both the permanently destitute and those in need of emergency assistance came to the Unions, and it has been noted that by 1916 the South Dublin Union “housed about 3,200 of the poor and elderly and a large staff of doctors, nurses and ancillary workers.” While intended as workhouses, Maurice Curtis has noted in his history of the Liberties that “workhouses were also the inappropriate homes for many who suffered from long-term mental illness, becoming de facto asylums.”

The South Dublin Union, photographed many years later as part of a project to record rebel positions in 1916. (Image Credit: Bureau of Military History section, Military Archives Website)

While there are questions around whether it was morally right to occupy such a site, there was also the difficult question of just how it could be held if taken. The SDU was a sprawling 50-acre site, but Éamonn Ceannt of the 4th Battalion of the Irish Volunteers had only approximately 120 Volunteers at his disposal, as Professor Eoin MacNeill’s disastrous countermanding order had led to most of his Battalion not mobilising on Easter Monday for action.  In addition to taking the SDU, Ceannt intended for his men to seize Roe’s Distillery in Mount Brown,Watkins’ Brewery on Ardee Street and the Jameson Distillery on Marrowbone Lane, not to be confused with its namesake across the River Liffey. Among the 120 who did show up to partake in the insurrection were W.T Cosgrave, later Taoiseach, and Cathal Brugha, who would die on the Republican side of the Civil War divide.

Reading about the poverty and hardships of those for whom the SDU was a home, either temporarily or on a long-term basis, it can be difficult to comprehend why it was seized. The logic of seizing it however, according to historian Paul O’Brien who has written a detailed account of the fighting in the area, was that “the South Dublin Union and its outposts were a major defensive position in the south-west of the city.” It was hoped that the Volunteers could halt British advances along the quays and from Kingsbridge Railway Station, and O’Brien has noted that “Ceannt knew that British reinforcements would be dispatched from Richmond Barracks,Islandbridge Barracks and the Royal Barracks.” Patrick Smyth, who worked a the SDU, remembered years later that:

The Volunteers on entering closed the gates and barricaded same. They immediately took over the buildings known as the board room and clerks offices and also a department called the orchard sheds and the Nurses home where Ceannt remained in command. No word was spoken to me.

The most intense fighting at the SDU took place early in the week of the Rising.While some rebel positions, such as Jacob’s factory, were largely left unmolested, the  British made the decision to move against the SDU garrison, and unsurprisingly given the scale of the site they succeeded in occupying parts of the grounds of the Union in the very early stages of the Rising.

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These scans are from Devoid Media (No.1 Vol.1), a publication that came out of Trinity College Dublin in the early 1980s. The first issue of the mag included an interview with Larry from The Blades, which has already found its way online thanks to The Blades Fan Group on Facebook.

As well as plenty of coverage of the bands of the day, such as The Low, The Atrix and The Blades, the mag included an interesting little feature on the North City Centre Community Action Programme (NCCCAP), which was more popularly known as the ‘N- treble C-A-P’. They were receiving quite a lot of attention at the time, as local activist and TD Tony Gregory had just achieved the famous ‘Gregory Deal’ from Charles Haughey, which promised very significant investment in the north inner-city, an area that successive governments had totally ignored.

Haughey and Gregory, from ‘The Heart of the City’ (Bandon Book), see here for more on this wonderful book.

Over the following years, Gregory would use his Dáil seat and influence to highlight social issues and problems in the north inner-city, ranging from the spiraling drugs crisis to housing, and he was jailed for his involvement in solidarity activity around Dublin street traders. In Pushers Out: The Inside Story of Dublin’s Anti Drugs Movement, Andre Lyder notes that:

In 1986 Gregory supported protests by traditional Dublin women street traders, who were being relentlessly pursued by the Gardaí, on behalf of city centre businesses, for illegal trading. He was ordered by a judge to sign a bond that would have effectively precluded him from associating with the traders but went to prison rather than sign it. ‘The Gardaí’, he would often point out, ‘prefer to chase a few women with bananas in prams around the north inner-city than to chase heroin dealers.’

Yet while Tony Gregory was a remarkable activist, it’s important to note he was part of a broader network of people, that included activists such as his brother Noel, Fergus McCabe and Mick Rafferty. For Devoid Media, Fergus McCabe answered the questions.

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Image: Luke Fallon 

Thanks to Luke Fallon for these images, all taken on Thursday  at Moore Street. These were taken in the very early stages of the occupation.

We went down to Moore Street ourselves to have a look at what was taking place.  I fully support the idea of a 1916 interpretive centre on Moore Street, however the ambiguous nature of the plans for the street beyond it worries me greatly,  and it seems the government is colluding with a disgraced developer to the potential detriment of the streetscape. While we have a ‘national monument’ of four buildings, the entire area has historic significance that has to be considered. Regardless of your views on the future of the street, it’s quite telling and damning that the authorities have sat on this for so long, and allowed history to crumble. It’s like people were surprised when 2016 finally came around.

Lastly, while walking down Moore Street today I heard a conversation between two people who were lamenting the way the street has gone in recent times, and laying the blame firmly at the feet of  the migrants who are there today. To me, they are the saviours of the street, along with the traders who have been there for generations. Were it not for them, I have no doubt the wrecking ball would have moved in long ago. It is not only its history that makes Moore Street what it is, it is also its diversity.

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(Image:Las Fallon)

I was quite dumbfounded by this item when I first saw it, but it’s actually a Minimax fire extinguisher from 1920, produced on Middle Abbey Street. In recent days it has left our family home (where it sat in the shed) for Marsh’s Library, hopefully to form a part of their forthcoming exhibition on the library in the revolutionary period.

Archbishop Marsh’s Library is the oldest public library in Dublin, and today houses a remarkable collection of books, with over 25,000 items in its collections. G.N Wright wrote about the place in his classic nineteenth century history of Dublin, but funnily enough he said that “the situation of this library is so very inconvenient and remote from the respectable part of the city, and the books it contains so obsolete, that the public do not derive much advantage from it.” Given that the library is right beside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, it seemed a strange observation.

Jonathan Swift was  a frequent visitor to the library, not surprising given that he served as Dean of the neighboring Cathedral. For those less trusted, books were to be viewed inside of one of the three wired alcoves, essentially cages. It was one way to ensure books didn’t go missing. Swift may have enjoyed the use of the library on many occasions, but he didn’t think much of Archbishop Marsh himself. As Frank McNally noted in his An Irishman’s Diary column last year:

In 1710, when the latter was in his 70s, Swift suggested Marsh had been unique, given his educational and other advantages, in having “escaped” any kind of greatness. He added: “No man will be either glad or sorry at his death except his successor”.

The revolutionary period of the twentieth century sometimes encroached on the library, as it did many aspects of life in the city. It became an unusual victim of the limited fighting around the Jacob’s factory during the 1916 Easter Rising, when bullets from a British Army machine-gun stationed nearby inflicted permanent damage on a number of books, which can still be seen today. Jason McElligott has written in the pages of History Ireland that “each book has a relatively compact entry hole of 1.5cm on its spine, but the exit hole at the back is five to six times larger.”  The tragedy of the ‘1916 books’ is that they had been deposited in the library by Elias Bouhereau, a Huguenot refugee who brought them with him as he fled religious persecution in France.  In this great Storymap video, Jason talks about the damaged books, and says that at the time it was noted that the books were “wounded”:

In 1920,  in the midst of the War of Independence, the records of the library show that they wisely decided to invest in two Minimax fire extinguishers. The flames of the revolutionary period took out all kinds of collateral damage, and business was good for the Middle Abbey Street firm who warned the public that “day by day fires are occurring”, and “day by day Minimax…puts fires out.”

Fire extinguishers were very much in fashion in the Dublin of the time it’s fair to say. Among the things that were lost to the flames of the 1916-23 period in Dublin were big chunks of Whitelaw’s Survey, an incredibly detailed census of Dublin taken in 1798,  and waxworks of Wolfe Tone and the King of England.  Thankfully, the library didn’t need to use their investment.

Harry Pollitt (1890-1960)

To be a communist in the Ireland of the 1930s was tough work. Clerical denunciation was fierce, and so too was the media. To the Irish Independent in 1933, it was simple: the “Russianisation” of this country had to be prevented, as “communism must be treated as a deadly and soul destroying peril.”

Condemnation from the pulpit or the newsstand was one thing, but physical confrontation was another thing entirely. In March 1933, over three nights, Connolly House on Great Strand Street was besieged by a mob whipped into a frenzy by a Jesuit preacher in the Pro Cathedral, who told them that “here in this holy Catholic city of Dublin, these vile creatures of Communism are within our midst.”

While Irish communists got a hard time of it, particular scorn was reserved for those visiting the country. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) frequently sent representatives to Dublin in the 1920s and 30s, often to address public gatherings.  The visit of Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the CPGB, was enough to instigate a riot in Rathmines in January 1936.

Pollitt had become General Secretary of the party in 1929.  Born into a working class family in Greater Manchester in 1890, his mother had been a member of the Independent Labour Party of Keir Hardie, and as a young man he joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s Worker’s Socialist Federation. He was a very capable leader,  however the CPGB (like its Irish equivalent) was ultimately accountable to the Comintern, and the control of Moscow.

Irish Times, 13 January 1936

A public speech by Harry Pollitt on 11 January 1936 was, rather unsurprisingly, the target of protest. On that occasion, the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS) were the instigators of opposition, but in the Dublin of the 1930s there were any number of groups who could be behind such scenes. The Saint Patrick’s Anti-Communist League and the Irish Christian Front were just two of the anti-communist bodies operating in the city.

Coming prepared, the CYMS gathered outside Rathmines Town Hall long before the meeting began, with banners proclaiming that ‘Dublin Rejects Communism’ and ‘For Faith and Fatherland’. Their leaflets warned that “prominent communists from overseas are assisting the local propagandists to convey the message of Moscow to Catholic Ireland.”

What is remarkable about the meeting, before even getting into the violence, was the number of people who came to hear Pollitt. The Irish Times reported that “four or five hundred people” were in the room. Before the meeting had even begun in earnest, the Irish Independent  reported that “scuffles and free fights took place, and chairs, pokers and sticks were freely used as weapons.” It was reported that:

The fight was waged fiercely in the  hall, and in the attack chairs were used by the ejectors. One chair came flying through a side door to the lecture hall, but was caught in its flight.The objectors were eventually driven by force of rushes to the outside door when the Gardai came on the scene.

Politt did speak in Rathmines, not allowing the chaos to interfere in the business of the day, and likewise Jim Larkin Jr. spoke before the crowd. The organisers promised that “this was the first of a series of meetings proposed to be held to which they proposed to bring over to Dublin men and women who represented the best thought in Europe.” This was met by boos, and when one young lad at the back of the hall seized to moment to stand upon a chair and “make an appeal to the Catholics present”, it didn’t take long for him to end up on his arse and the trouble to begin again.

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Great credit is due to those at Northern Visions TV (NVTV) for this recent documentary on Winifred Carney. Born in Bangor, she was raised on the Falls Road in West Belfast and became an active trade union campaigner in Belfast. The Dublin connection is that Winnie was present in the General Post Office in 1916, as Secretary to James Connolly. In the folklore of the rebellion, she has become known as ‘the typist with the Webley’.

Carney was one of three women to remain in the General Post Office after the roof of the rebel headquarters caught fire, and she took part in the dangerous evacuation to Moore Street. Carney stood as a Sinn Féin candidate in the 1918 Westminster elections, though unusually her manifesto included her call for a Workers’ Republic. Standing in the solidly Unionist  Central East Belfast, she unsurprisingly failed to take a seat.

The Irish Citizen Army at Liberty Hall following the Easter Rising. Notice the damage to the building. Carney is sitting in the front row, beside the street lamp.

This documentary includes great contributions from Margaret Ward, the author of one of the most important studies in Irish historiography, in the form of Unmanageable Revolutionaries. First published in 1983,it  was the first in-depth study of women in the Irish revolution. The documentary also includes fine contributions from relations of Carney and Belfast local historians.

This is a great effort and hopefully we will see a lot more like it in the year ahead, highlighting the often overlooked contribution of women a century ago.