1916 (43 page)

There are some people now disposed to regard me as a West Briton, if not something worse, because I cannot fit myself into the very rigid mould they have been kind enough to cast for us all; but I do not heed them because I am sure that thinking men, both now and hereafter, will judge me by my acts and writings rather than by these wild statements and I am prepared to abide by that test.

Although strongly opposed to unconstitutional agitation, he was in 1914 a supporter of the Irish Volunteers.
¹²

On the eve of 1916, the four Irish archbishops were very different in style and in temperament. All were independent-minded, but strongly disillusioned by the failure of London to introduce home rule. They shared a deepening suspicion of the
bona fides
of the Liberal government and of their commitment to bring about home rule for the island of Ireland. The other three archbishops usually deferred to William Walsh of Dublin to provide political leadership for the church as a whole. Their disillusionment with the Irish party, and with the leadership of John Redmond, intensified during the early war years. There was a growing admiration for the Irish Volunteers led by Professor Eoin MacNeill and for a progressive nationalist coalition. This point will be developed later.

There were still a number of strong admirers of Redmond and the Irish party on the bench of bishops, even in the wake of the 1916 Rising. Patrick
O’Donnell had been bishop of Raphoe since 1888. He was translated to Armagh in 1922 as coadjutor with right of succession, a position he took over in November 1924. He was made a cardinal in 1925 and died in October 1927. An academic, he had spent his early professional priestly life as professor of dogmatic and moral theology at Maynooth. O’Donnell was the theologian in residence for the hierarchy at the time the Rising broke out. He was supported in his commitment to the Irish party by the Bishop of Ross, Denis Kelly. Both O’Donnell and Kelly remained staunch supporters of the Irish party until 1919. Despite their great integrity, they did not represent the political views of the bulk of the Irish bishops at the outbreak of the Rising.

The actions and archives of the rector of the Irish College in Rome, Mgr Michael O’Riordan, and the vice rector, Fr John Hagan, are central to this study. O’Riordan held his post from 1904 until his death in 1919. Hagan, vice rector since 1904, succeeded him.
¹³
Both men were very strong nationalists and saw it as part of their duty to represent Irish interests (of both church and nation) in Rome.

Under both O’Riordan and Hagan, the Irish College was known as a centre of strong nationalist views. O’Riordan had come to prominence in the early years of the twentieth century when he published
Catholicity and progress in Ireland
.
¹⁴
This first appeared in article format and later as a volume. It was a response to Horace Plunkett’s
Ireland in the New Century
,
which was published first in 1904 and had gone into four editions by 1905. O’Riordan took exception to the thesis that Irish Catholicism was the enemy of modernity. His rejoinder ran to over 500 pages. He retained a strong intellectual interest in the development of Irish politics. He was responsible for producing a number of pamphlets in Italian on that subject.

John Hagan was also well known in Ireland. He was the author of the long-running series in the
Catholic Bulletin
,
‘Wine from the royal pope’, a series of historical articles based on his work in the archives of the Holy See.
¹⁵
He also wrote the ‘Letter from Rome’ in the
Bulletin
under the pen name ‘Scottus’, and contributed articles on a variety of other topics under a series of different pen names to the same publication. He furthermore produced a four volume
Compendium of catechetical instruction
.
Upon his death in 1930 the
Catholic Bulletin
devoted a substantial part of one edition to his memory.
¹⁶
Hagan, more so than O’Riordan, developed very strong and active political interests. His correspondence contains letters from leading political figures of the struggle for Irish independence, including Seán T. O’Kelly and Éamon de Valera. His friendship with O’Kelly dated to the 1916 period, while his friendship with Curran went back to the period when they were seminarians in Clonliffe College, Dublin.

The two leaders of the Irish College had, by 1916, come to share the scepticism of a number of the most prominent of the Irish bishops about the reliability of Irish nationalist MPs. The judgment was that they appeared to have spent so long in Westminster that they had failed to retain their independence. John Redmond’s commitment to the war effort had ended, in Hagan’s view, the era of independent opposition by the Irish party at Westminster.

The Irish College served as the conduit between Rome and the bishops at home. O’Riordan was the agent of the Irish bishops in Rome. He also acted in that capacity for the bishops of Australia and New Zealand. The Irish College, therefore, handled the most sensitive of business for dozens of bishops from all over the world. That meant that the rector was the recipient of a large volume of correspondence, which provided a commentary on events in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Ireland. The letters frequently contained the unpublished thoughts on politics of bishops too cautious to express such views in public. The vice rector was also in receipt of a wide range of correspondence. In this way, their combined correspondence is a very valuable source for the study of the period leading up to and after the 1916 Rising.

It is important to stress that the rector was far less politically engaged than the vice rector. Nevertheless, both men shared a sense of mutual disappointment with the performance of the Irish party and with the failure of the British government to put home rule for Ireland into practice. The Irish College had the reputation in Rome for being strongly nationalistic. That may also have held true for many of the seminarians. But politics divided the large Irish community in Rome even prior to the Rising. There were many Irish religious houses in Rome. The Dominicans had a community in San Clemente and the Franciscans in St Isadore’s. There were Irish Augustinians, Capuchins and Pallotines in the city. The Irish Christian Brothers had a house at Marc Antonio Colonna. There were many Irish living as members of the Jesuits, Benedictines etc. in Rome, where there
were also many houses of Irish women religious. Within that extended Irish diaspora there were many people who had been out of Ireland for a long time. Support for the Irish party and John Redmond was strong. That was not the case in the Irish College.

With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 the official British presence in Rome had increased. Besides the mission to the Italian state, London had reached the conclusion that the Holy See was also a priority. Without wishing to have formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican, Sir Henry Howard established a ‘mission’ there. Sent originally in 1914 to represent the king of England at the enthronement of Pope Benedict XV, he had remained in Rome on ‘mission’ to the Vatican. Initial British concern was less with Ireland than with the perceived need to counter the increase in German and Austrian influence over the pope after the outbreak of war.

O’Riordan and Hagan were aware that the British government had a number of senior curial officials sympathetic to its cause. Cardinal Gasquet, a Benedictine monk, was a staunch British nationalist and an influential member of the curia. Cardinal Merry del Val was in the same camp. An Anglo-Spaniard, he had been decisively defeated in the conclave that followed the death in 1914 of his staunch patron, Pius X.
¹⁷
Despite being far less of a force than under the previous pope, he continued to wield influence. He was no admirer of Irish nationalism and was perceived by the Irish College leadership to be hostile to Ireland and its political cause.

There were also a number of English clerical and religious houses in Rome that supported the policies of the government in London on the Irish question. The English College was one such institution. Relations between the English and Irish Colleges were somewhat distant during the war years. Overall, both Hagan and O’Riordan were very much aware of having to confront a formidable pro-British force inside the Holy See, in Rome, and even within a number of Irish religious foundations in the city.

The 1916 Rising was not the catalyst for a rupture between the Catholic church and the Irish party.
¹⁸
This is confirmed by Fr P.J. Walsh, a relative and early biographer of Archbishop William Walsh. He argues that the
archbishop, while in favour of the 1912 home rule settlement, disapproved of Redmond’s statement that he was prepared to accept the bill as a ‘full and complete settlement of Ireland’s claim’. Walsh disliked Redmond’s speech in the House of Commons at the outbreak of war. He also viewed with great suspicion the negotiations for the temporary exclusion of a portion of Ireland from the operations of the bill.
¹⁹
Michael Curran followed the same line of argument in his memoir.
²⁰
Thomas J Morrissey’s biography of the archbishop has made extensive use of that source, as will I in the following pages.
²¹

When compiling his account of events, Curran drew extensively on his own personal experience during those difficult years. While close to Walsh he was a man of strong personal political views. His interpretation of Walsh’s political development, therefore, must be qualified and become the subject of wider research. It would not be prudent to rely upon Curran in an uncritical way as a guide to the political outlook of Archbishop Walsh. In my view, however, he is reliable in broad outline. Curran was in a privileged position to witness at first hand the process of Walsh’s disillusionment with the Irish party and the British government. Although overstating the case, he wrote that Walsh had ‘thoroughly realised that constitutional methods to active reform were utterly useless’. That was the position he had adopted, wrote his secretary, ‘long before the Larne gun-running and the formation of the Ulster Volunteers’. They had failed ‘through the subservience of the Irish party to the English Liberals, aggravated by place hunting for their supporters’.
²²
The ‘final blow’ came from the downright treasonable speeches and activities of the highest-placed and more aristocratic members of the Tory governing classes of England and their unqualified support of the Ulster Volunteers. Among those were numbered members of parliament and ‘the highest serving officers and former members of Conservative governments’. At first disapproving of the Irish Volunteers, he came to accept that there was ‘full justification for their formation since the arms of the Ulster Volunteers frightened and coerced the weak English government’. His opinion of the Irish Volunteers fluctuated, ‘but he never believed that the movement would succeed in its objects’. The archbishop always feared ‘that some wild irresponsible element would force matters to extremes and ruin the entire national cause’. He became more and more pessimistic ‘as much in respect of the helplessness for the time being of Irish efforts as of the strength of the anti-Irish campaign in England’.
²³
Indeed, the views attributed here to Archbishop Walsh are very much an accurate reflection of the opinions of Michael Curran.

The alternative to the Irish party during the early war years was a new political coalition of radical and revolutionaries who were associated with the cultural nationalist movement, the Gaelic League and the GAA. At the political level, opposition to Redmond’s party centred on the ideas of Arthur Griffith and Sinn Féin on one side, and Pádraig Pearse and the new radicals on the other. The latter was a member of the IRB as were the other signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army were allied to the IRB by the beginning of 1916. Both radical Labour and the IRB were intent upon staging a revolution with the assistance of the Germans who, it was commonly believed in those circles, would win the war.
²⁴

Curran described the breakdown within Irish nationalism as follows: ‘There was the parliamentary party section, the Eoin MacNeill section, the underground IRB section, headed by Pádraig Pearse who supported Eoin MacNeill at council meetings, and lastly a large body of the rank and file who abstained from the dissensions that began to arise after Redmond’s coup and who, inspired solely by the Volunteer ideal, avoided factional conflicts.’ The archbishop’s secretary stated that he had relations with ‘the right wing’ of the Volunteers.
²⁵

The chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers, Professor Eoin MacNeill, was oblivious to the IRB plans for a rising. Born in the glens of Antrim, he had attended St Malachy’s College, Belfast. He was a founder member of the Gaelic League and the first editor of
An Claidheamh Soluis
.
Since 1909 he had been professor of early and medieval Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD). He was married with eight children. As chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers he had consistently opposed participation by Irishmen and women in the First World War. MacNeill did not believe that armed resistance by the Volunteers was justifiable unless in reaction to the imposition of conscription or an attempt by the British to suppress the movement he led by force of arms. He was to be deceived by his closest comrades over the revolution.