1916 (42 page)

In the event, MacNeill was tried by general court martial, as opposed to field general court martial and this may have had a significant role in saving his life. A general court martial consists of a president and twelve officers, as opposed to a president and two officers for field general court martial. Still more significantly, a general court martial required the presence of a ‘judge advocate’, normally a deputy judge advocate general, invariably a military officer who was a qualified lawyer and who was required to assist the members of the court martial on matters of law in much the same way that a judge assists a jury at a civil trial. This aspect, naturally, ensures a much more sophisticated hearing on legal issues.

MacNeill had taken some steps himself to bring this situation about. In a memoir written in the 1930s he records:

I certainly had no desire to be executed, and knowing well the frame of mind of Dublin castle and the British military command, I determined to use what means I could to delay the court martial proceedings, calculating that executions, if they took place would be a cause of public horror, and that the British government itself would be forced to put a stop to them.
⁶⁸

This, of course, is precisely what occurred. MacNeill then retained solicitor and counsel, his leading counsel being James Chambers KC, a unionist
member of parliament. His lawyers then applied to be allowed to appear for him and received a reply from Maxwell of 12 May:

Sir John has carefully considered the points raised by you and has come to the conclusion that [MacNeill’s] case does present more difficult questions of law and of the admissibility of evidence than those which have up to now been tried before field general courts martial. He has therefore decided that the case of Mr MacNeill will be brought to trial before a general court martial and not before a field general court martial.
⁶⁹

On the same day MacNeill wrote to his solicitor saying that on the previous evening he had been handed a charge sheet by an officer who did not speak to him other than to confirm his name. It was in the following form:

Charge.

Did an act, to wit did take part in an armed rebellion and in the waging of war against his Majesty the King, such act being of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the Defence of the Realm and being done with the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy. Alternative 2 Did attempt to cause disaffection among the civilian population to his Majesty.

MacNeill recorded that the second charge was written in pencil.
⁷⁰

This, as MacNeill’s son in law and biographer Michael Tierney points out, ‘looks very much as if by some extraordinary blunder the accused had been momentarily admitted to the deliberations of his accusers.’
⁷¹
The ‘alternative’ charge clearly demonstrates that they despaired of convicting him of the graver charge at an open and professionally conducted trial.

The first charge, of course, is that of which all the executed prisoners were convicted. It was an extremely ambitious charge to bring against a man who had attempted to countermand the orders leading to the rebellion: to judge from the later court martials it may have been hoped to support it on the basis that MacNeill would clearly have tolerated or even led some rebellion, and perhaps the Easter week events were that rebellion. Alternatively, said the Crown, his own correspondence showed that he would have led a rebellion in the event of an attempt to disarm the Volunteers and that, they hoped, would be enough.
⁷²

This charge, however, was difficult to bring home in a legal proceeding
with a professionally qualified judge advocate and defence lawyers including a unionist MP, whose verdict was subject to review on legal grounds. Significantly, the military prosecutors did not in the end attempt to do so. On 16 May they brought forward a new charge sheet with twelve counts. Eight were for ‘attempting to cause disaffection amongst the civilian population’, two were for committing an act to the prejudice of recruitment, one for making statements likely to prejudice recruitment and the twelfth was for possession of documents, including a newspaper and Volunteer documents, ‘the publication of such documents being a contravention of the provisions of regulation 27 of the Defence of the Realm regulations’.
⁷³

These charges were in large part simply an embarrassment. MacNeill had certainly been a sustained, provocative and coherent opponent of the government and anyone who paid attention to him would not have been encouraged to join the Crown forces. But he had never done anything directly or indirectly in relation to recruitment and the alleged attempts to cause disaffection had been an embarrassingly long time before his arrest and trial in May 1916. Although Maxwell hated MacNeill and considered that the fact that he had not been actually involved in the rebellion to be pure happenstance, the military lawyers did not even charge him with an offence remotely likely to carry the death penalty. There is evidence that the members of the court martial may have resented this, because in convicting him on all counts they added the unnecessary finding that ‘the accused committed all the offences with the intention of assisting the enemy’.
⁷⁴
But the game was over before it began. Indeed, the most interesting part of MacNeill’s memoir is of his post-arrest interrogation by a Major Price who attempted without success to get MacNeill to implicate the parliamentarians Dillon and Devlin in the rebellion.
⁷⁵

MacNeill’s circumstances made it particularly difficult to convict him on the gravest charge. But his determined defence also contributed to his survival. His most important tactical victory, however, was to procure an open trial. It is difficult to think that this would not also have benefited some of the executed prisoners, specifically those in whose cases, in General Macready’s words ‘the evidence … was far from conclusive’.
⁷⁶

I
NTRODUCTION

What role did the Catholic church in Ireland play in the lead up to the 1916 Rising, and what was its reaction to the armed uprising? There are no simple answers to these two questions. Professor John Whyte set out his view of the response of the church to the event in an essay published in 1967.
¹
Based almost entirely on secondary sources, the late Professor Whyte provided a very perceptive account that has stood the test of time. But his work has been added to by a new generation of historians privileged with access to primary sources in different ecclesiastical archives. I refer in particular here to the work of Brian P. Murphy, Thomas J. Morrissey and Jérôme aan de Wiel.
²
The last-named has worked extensively in ecclesiastical archives in Ireland, London, Rome, the Holy See and Paris. He has found a number of very important sources and has helped to provide a new interpretation of the role of the Catholic church in Ireland during the First World War.

My essay will build on that published work. In the past two years I have returned, in particular, to the archives of the Irish College in Rome, where I have consulted the O’Riordan, Hagan and Curran papers. By re-reading those sources, I will attempt to provide another interpretation of the role of the church during the period of the Rising and beyond. Episcopal and clerical reaction to the Rising, and in particular to the subsequent repression and deportations, helped to formalise an already implicit understanding in Irish politics between the hierarchy and the emerging Sinn Féin movement, which led ultimately to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement on 6 December 1921 and the establishment of the Irish Free State. I am uneasy about using the term ‘alliance’. It implies too formal a relationship. What existed was both a shared hostility to the British government’s mishandling of Irish affairs over three decades and a strongly held belief that self-determination was the way forward for Ireland – a self-determination that for the Catholic hierarchy did not include partition. As the latter became an inescapable aspect of British policy in Ireland, feelings within the church hardened in favour of going beyond home rule and devolved local government.

The British reaction to the 1916 Rising resulted in a style of repression that had not been visited upon the country even during the land wars of the 1880s. It was brutal and draconian and showed scant respect for the rule of law or for the rights of the accused rebel leaders. Mass deportations intensified that sense of public outrage. The Catholic hierarchy and clergy were exposed throughout the conflict to the feelings of their communities. This article seeks to show the contradictions, tensions and complexities of a church caught in a revolutionary situation. Without any initial support for the act of revolution, leading churchmen and women appeared to ascribe the Rising to the work of the left and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The reaction was hostile, if appreciative of the ideals and courage of the participants. That initial hostility and ambivalence, however, changed in a short time to a marked hostility to the British authorities and a shift in allegiance to an emerging coalition clustered around the name Sinn Féin. David Miller put the process in the following way:

It is a remarkable story in which the church protected, and indeed augmented, her interests – the fervent devotion of her people and the institutional conditions which, she believed, fostered that devotion – up to the last hours of the old order and yet entered the new order with those interests intact for the future as well.
³

This article provides a partial explanation as to why and how this situation came about.

It is best to begin by describing the leading personalities in the Catholic church in Ireland at the time of the 1916 Rising. Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin was born in 1841. He taught on the staff of St Patrick’s
College, Maynooth, before being made archbishop in 1885. Although seventy five years old and in very poor health, he was the
de facto
leader of the Irish hierarchy when the violence broke out on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916. He was confined to his bedroom on doctor’s orders with instructions that he should not be disturbed for April, May and June, before being sent to Wicklow to recuperate. The Archbishop’s house in Drumcondra was relatively close to the city centre. It was a port of call for many people in the weeks leading up to the Rising. Walsh, therefore, through his secretaries, was kept well informed about political developments and plans for a rising. His intellectual faculties were as sharp as his disillusionment with the Irish party was profound. That attitude of outright hostility to the Irish party and its leadership became more pronounced in the aftermath of the Rising. He remained in charge and in control.

His position on Irish politics was shared by many of the bishops. He was very well served by his secretary, Michael Curran, a strong nationalist with close ties to radical cultural nationalists such as the future President of Ireland, Seán T. O’Kelly. Curran was an eye witness to most of the major events of 1916 and he has left a very valuable testimony with the Bureau of Military History. Based on his diary, his memoir chronicles his experiences during the critical months from April to December 1916.
⁴
(His account should be read in parallel with the testimony of O’Kelly, also contained in the Bureau of Military History.)
⁵
Curran also corresponded extensively during the Rising with the rector of the Irish College in Rome, Michael O’Riordan, and with its vice rector, John Hagan.
⁶
There is now thus a wealth of new primary source material, which sheds new light on the changing attitude of leading churchmen during those days of revolution and repression.
⁷

Walsh’s counterpart in Armagh, Cardinal Michael Logue, was a year older. Born in 1840 he had succeeded to the primacy in 1887. Like Walsh, he had been a professor in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. In contrast to Walsh, however, Logue held on to his faith in the Irish party for much longer. He was a strong critic of direct British rule in Ireland and supported home rule. His mistrust of the ruling Liberal party was summed up in the following quotation, delivered after the publication of ‘the people’s budget’ of 1909: ‘England had not only robbed us but continued to rob us and the heaviest hand laid for years was laid on us at present and by a party about which we were all so enthusiastic – the grand old Liberal party of England.’
⁸
The First World War introduced further tensions into the relationship between the leadership of the Irish Catholic church and the British government. Returning from the conclave that had elected Pope
Benedict XV in 1915, Logue had denounced the ‘barbarism of the Germans [in September 1914] in burning Rheims Cathedral’, but was quick to counter propaganda claims in London that he had declared himself a supporter of the British.
⁹

The Archbishop of Cashel, John Harty, was born in 1867. Between 1895 and 1913 he was on the staff of Maynooth where he held the chair of dogmatic theology and was senior professor of moral theology. He helped found the
Irish Theological Quarterly
in 1906. He was a strong supporter of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Healy had a keen interest in economic and social matters. Made an archbishop in 1913, he died in 1946 having played a very prominent role in the political life of a country striving for independence.
¹⁰
John Healy (born in 1841) was archbishop of Tuam from 1903 until 1918. A professor at Maynooth from 1879 to 1884, he was a prolific writer and editor for several years of the
Irish Ecclesiastical Record
.
He was a strong advocate of land reform and was open to political change.
¹¹
He said on the occasion of his episcopal jubilee in 1909: