PART TWO took us to the East Clare By-Election of 1917 and public comment on it at the time, and even more significant, comment made in confidence by Britain’s Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, to the British Cabinet.
When, in 1967. Wimbourne’s memorandum was at last made available to view in Britain’s Public Record Office, not one in a million people could remember who or what he had been.Apart from his noble title he had been called Ivor Churchill and was equally forgotten. Eamon de Valera had retained his Clare seat break for 42 years, was into his second 7 year term as President of Ireland
Realising that a Republican wind was threatening to blow John Redmond’s Parliamentary Party away, and that Irish recruitment to the British Forces was drying up, and that Irish emigrants and their sons in the USA and the British Empire were not keen to help Britain in her war, the British decided to invite various interests to an Irish Convention. Its terms were not ones which a weak Republican movement would have accepted.With Republican sentiments blowing a gale, and men and women flocking into Sinn Fein, The Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan, the reinvigorated movement declined to participate. But MacLysaght took part, with a watching brief for Sinn Fein.
Britain’s Chief Secretary for Ireland, Mr H.E.Duke opened the proceedings with a string of cliches ending with “Gentlemen, nil desperandum reipublicae” and, for the benefit of less cultured ears translated -“Never despair of the republic.” As MacLysaght was perhaps the only republican there, the Chief Secretary may not have “wowed” the gathering.
The Convention came to nothing and was most likely not meant to be more than a diversion (not a Divarsion despite the Chief Secretary’s gaffe!) devised by Lloyd George to fool public opinion across the world.
(Speaking of a diversion, or digression, I used have a memento of the Irish Convention, a silver cigarette case presented by the Cork Reception Committee of the Irish Convention in September 1917 to my grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, for service to it. I imagine the service was secretarial, during the summer break from his teaching at Christian Brothers’ College, Cork. The cigarette case is on loan to the MacDonagh Centre in his native Cloughjordan, together with a postcard,written in Irish by Thomas MacDonagh to his 9 year old God-daughter, my aunt Eileen, in 1904. One of MacDonagh’s legacies to the world was a sovereign democratic Irish Republic. A joint legacy of Patrick Kennedy and Thomas MacDonagh to Ireland is the Association of Secondary Teachers (ASTI) of which they were founder members in 1909. Kennedy was its first President and his friend, younger by 12 years, its first Secretary.)
MacLysaght had told the Convention delegates,all of them older and most of them hostile, that he held Sinn Fein views, as did Ireland’s constituencies, that his presence there was proof that he recognised the ideals of others, and hoped for a settlement from the Convention. He said if the Convention failed it would require revolution and bloodshed…..that he did not fear the ultimate result of the revolution -Irish freedom, but as an individual -a farmer and a businessman – he contemplated its immediate prospect with apprehension.
MacLysaght deals next with the Great War, which he considered remote, as he had no relatives in it. Writing, at great length in his Diary on June 3 1918,he reckoned that many joined the British forces at its beginning during a wave of enthusiasm “probably owing to propaganda about German Hunnishness in Belgium” and others joined “because of Redmond’s action in pledging Ireland though without obtaining Ireland’s consent by consultation with anyone.” He reckoned unemployment had been the greatest spur to enlistment and a spirit of adventure was also a factor, but that by the time he was writing many wearing British uniforms had become Sinn Fein supporters. He told of one of his workers, a young Connemara man who joined the British Army and given leave to vote in the East Clare By-Election the previous July and voted for De Valera. Apparently many soldiers voted Sinn Fein MacLysaght notes that young Irishmen home on leave from the British Army were not ostracised by their republican contemporaries or neighbours but socialised with them. He was writing in his diary at the time, in County Clare. “Todd” Andrews in his own memoir “DUBLIN MADE ME” recalled in his old age how in Dublin
neighbours and contemporaries socialised with squaddies home on leave at that time. I’ve read nothing or heard nothing to persuade me that Dublin and Clare were untypical in this attitude.
I’ll skip also, MacLysaght’s references to the Anti-Conscription campaign of 1918 and the arrest by the British of Sinn Fein leaders and leave you with his diary entry for 28 January 1919. I think it deserves repeated readings and so I’m putting it in in bold Italics. And I’ll defer completing my appreciation of MacLysaght’s life and work for another instalment or two –
“28 January 1919
It is somewhat contrary to the generally accepted view of Ireland, and especially of Clare, that Dick Forsyth, a British officer on leave, should be so tremendously popular here and indeed that he should be staying with us at all. He is a Scottish highlander, but the real explanation is that we have no antagonism to individuals whatever -as a speaker said at the meeting in Dublin to demand the release of the prisoners, we actually welcome individualforeign soldiers; what we resist is an army of occupation, and that is what Ireland is experiencing though the Great War is over. Meanwhile Dail Eireann has assembled and, thank God, has carried out the business of its sitting entirely in Irish, a big change indeed from the conditions of a few years ago. I am entirely with the Republican party; I am doubtful about the immediate future, Peace Conference and so on, but am sanguine about our ultimate success.
Just one thing occurs to me to mention before I put this diary away: an example of how our claim for self-determination for small nations –championed by Britain in the case of the Czechs – is misrepresented by politicians and newspapers there. In quoting statistics for last year’s
general election they give the total votes cast for and against Sinn Fein only in contested elections, completely ignoring the 25 constituencies where Sinn Fein candidates were returned unopposed, thus presenting an entirely misleading picture.”
The post EDWARD MACLYSAGHT (1887-1986) – AN ENGAGING AND HONEST WITNESS PART 3 by Donal Kennedy appeared first on Jude Collins.