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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Seán MacDíarmada moved in the shadows, ultra-cautious about what he committed to paper, aware that his letters could be intercepted by the police. Because of this, history has not allocated MacDíarmada the prominent role he deserves in the organisation of the Easter Rising. This book gives Seán MacDíarmada his proper place in history. It outlines his substantial role in the detailed planning of the Rising, which led to him signing the Proclamation of the Irish Republic: second only to Tom Clarke.
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Reviews
The 16LIVES Series
JAMES CONNOLLY Lorcan Collins
MICHAEL MALLIN Brian Hughes
JOSEPH PLUNKETT Honor O Brolchain
EDWARD DALY Helen Litton
SEÁN HEUSTON John Gibney
ROGER CASEMENT Angus Mitchell
SEÁN MACDIARMADA Brian Feeney
THOMAS CLARKE Helen Litton
ÉAMONN CEANNT Mary Gallagher
JOHN MACBRIDE Donal Fallon
WILLIE PEARSE Roisín Ní Ghairbhí
THOMAS MACDONAGH Shane Kenna
THOMAS KENT Meda Ryan
CON COLBERT John O’Callaghan
MICHAEL O’HANRAHAN Conor Kostick
PATRICK PEARSE Ruán O’Donnell
BRIAN FEENEY – AUTHOR OF16LIVES: SEÁN MACDIARMADA
Brian Feeney is an historian and political commentator. As a writer, his work has received awards and critical acclaim. He is co-author of Lost Lives, the definitive work on all those who died as a result of the Troubles, and he is the author of the best-selling Sinn Féin, A Hundred Turbulent Years. A columnist for the Irish News, Brian is a respected commentator on Northern Irish politics. He lives in Belfast.
LORCAN COLLINS – SERIES EDITOR
Lorcan Collins was born and raised in Dublin. A lifelong interest in Irish history led to the foundation of his hugely-popular 1916 Walking Tour in 1996. He co-authored The Easter Rising: A Guide to Dublin in 1916 (O’Brien Press, 2000) with Conor Kostick. His biography of James Connolly was published in the 16 Lives series in 2012. He is also a regular contributor to radio, television and historical journals. 16 Lives is Lorcan’s concept and he is co-editor of the series.
DR RUÁN O’DONNELL – SERIES EDITOR
Dr Ruán O’Donnell is a senior lecturer at the University of Limerick. A graduate of University College Dublin and the Australian National University, O’Donnell has published extensively on Irish Republicanism. Titles include Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803, The Impact of 1916 (editor), Special Category, The IRA in English prisons 1968–1978 and The O’Brien Pocket History of the Irish Famine. He is a director of the Irish Manuscript Commission and a frequent contributor to the national and international media on the subject of Irish revolutionary history.
DEDICATION
To my wife Patricia.
16LIVES Timeline
1845–51. The Great Hunger in Ireland. One million people die and over the next decades millions more emigrate.
1858, March 17. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians, are formed with the express intention of overthrowing British rule in Ireland by whatever means necessary.
1867, February and March. Fenian Uprising.
1870, May. Home Rule movement founded by Isaac Butt, who had previously campaigned for amnesty for Fenian prisoners.
1879–81. The Land War. Violent agrarian agitation against English landlords.
1884, November 1. The Gaelic Athletic Association founded – immediately infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
1893, July 31. Gaelic League founded by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill. The Gaelic Revival, a period of Irish Nationalism, pride in the language, history, culture and sport.
1900, September.Cumann na nGaedheal (Irish Council) founded by Arthur Griffith.
1905–07.Cumann na nGaedheal, the Dungannon Clubs and the National Council are amalgamated to form Sinn Féin (We Ourselves).
1909, August. Countess Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson organise nationalist youths into Na Fianna Éireann (Warriors of Ireland) a kind of boy scout brigade.
1912, April. Asquith introduces the Third Home Rule Bill to the British Parliament. Passed by the Commons and rejected by the Lords, the Bill would have to become law due to the Parliament Act. Home Rule expected to be introduced for Ireland by autumn 1914.
1913, January. Sir Edward Carson and James Craig set up Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) with the intention of defending Ulster against Home Rule.
1913. Jim Larkin, founder of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) calls for a workers’ strike for better pay and conditions.
1913, August 31. Jim Larkin speaks at a banned rally on Sackville (O’Connell) Street; Bloody Sunday.
1913, November 23. James Connolly, Jack White and Jim Larkin establish the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) in order to protect strikers.
1913, November 25. The Irish Volunteers founded in Dublin to ‘secure the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland’.
1914, March 20. Resignations of British officers force British government not to use British army to enforce Home Rule, an event known as the ‘Curragh Mutiny’.
1914, April 2. In Dublin, Agnes O’Farrelly, Mary MacSwiney, Countess Markievicz and others establish Cumann na mBan as a women’s volunteer force dedicated to establishing Irish freedom and assisting the Irish Volunteers.
1914, April 24. A shipment of 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition is landed at Larne for the UVF.
1914, July 26. Irish Volunteers unload a shipment of 900 rifles and 45,000 rounds of ammunition shipped from Germany aboard Erskine Childers’ yacht, the Asgard. British troops fire on crowd on Bachelors Walk, Dublin. Three citizens are killed.
1914, August 4. Britain declares war on Germany. Home Rule for Ireland shelved for the duration of the First World War.
1914, September 9. Meeting held at Gaelic League headquarters between IRB and other extreme republicans. Initial decision made to stage an uprising while Britain is at war.
1914, September. 170,000 leave the Volunteers and form the National Volunteers or Redmondites. Only 11,000 remain as the Irish Volunteers under Eóin MacNeill.
1915, May–September. Military Council of the IRB is formed.
1915, August 1. Pearse gives fiery oration at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.
1916, January 19–22. James Connolly joins the IRB Military Council, thus ensuring that the ICA shall be involved in the Rising. Rising date confirmed for Easter.
1916, April 20, 4.15pm.The Aud arrives at Tralee Bay, laden with 20,000 German rifles for the Rising. Captain Karl Spindler waits in vain for a signal from shore.
1916, April 21, 2.15am. Roger Casement and his two companions go ashore from U-19 and land on Banna Strand. Casement is arrested at McKenna’s Fort.
6.30pm.The Aud is captured by the British navy and forced to sail towards Cork Harbour.
22 April, 9.30am.The Aud is scuttled by her captain off Daunt’s Rock.
10pm. Eóin MacNeill as chief-of-staff of the Irish Volunteers issues the countermanding order in Dublin to try to stop the Rising.
1916, April 23, 9am, Easter Sunday. The Military Council meets to discuss the situation, considering MacNeill has placed an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper halting all Volunteer operations. The Rising is put on hold for twenty-four hours. Hundreds of copies of The Proclamation of the Republic are printed in Liberty Hall.
1916, April 24, 12 noon, Easter Monday. The Rising begins in Dublin.
16LIVESMAP
16LIVES - Series Introduction
This book is part of a series called 16 LIVES, conceived with the objective of recording for posterity the lives of the sixteen men who were executed after the 1916 Easter Rising. Who were these people and what drove them to commit themselves to violent revolution?
The rank and file as well as the leadership were all from diverse backgrounds. Some were privileged and some had no material wealth. Some were highly educated writers, poets or teachers and others had little formal schooling. Their common desire, to set Ireland on the road to national freedom, united them under the one banner of the army of the Irish Republic. They occupied key buildings in Dublin and around Ireland for one week before they were forced to surrender. The leaders were singled out for harsh treatment and all sixteen men were executed for their role in the Rising.
Meticulously researched yet written in an accessible fashion, the 16 LIVES biographies can be read as individual volumes but together they make a highly collectible series.
Lorcan Collins & Dr Ruán O’Donnell, 16 Lives Series Editors
CONTENTS
Introduction
Seán MacDiarmada left no political testament other than the short statement he gave to the priest who accompanied him to his execution and that statement does not elaborate on his views. His letters reveal little of his political beliefs. They are mainly reports of the current state of affairs in Ireland sent to Irish-Americans, or personal plans and gossip sent to friends.
MacDiarmada was ultra-cautious about what he committed to paper, aware that his letters could be intercepted by the police. All his adult life from the age of twenty-three in 1906 until his execution a decade later he was tailed by the police. His caution and obsession with secrecy were such that ironically, if it were not for the reports of this police surveillance little would be known about his activities as the IRB’s national organiser. Speeches he made in that role which are reported in Sinn Féin or the Gaelic American were written and editorialised by Arthur Griffith or Pat McCartan and may contain more of their views than of MacDiarmada’s.
Since he did not keep records or a diary or commit his views to print, and since he moved in the shadows, history has not allocated MacDiarmada the prominent role he deserves in the reorganisation of the IRB and in the planning and organisation of the Easter Rising. This book goes some way towards attempting to remedy that deficiency.
In recent years new means of access to primary sources to help any study of Seán MacDiarmada have become available. Principally there are the witness statements of the Bureau of Military History (BMH), now searchable online, which yield hundreds of references and cross references under several different spellings of his name; MacDermott, or McDermott with one or two ‘t’s’, and various spellings of MacDiarmada. He signed himself Seán MacDíarmada in his will and on the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
Nevertheless the witness statements in the BMH have to be treated with caution because they were given thirty to thirty-five years after the event. There is also the fact that predominantly they were provided by pro-Treaty IRA members. Besides the lapse of time and the provenance of the statements there is also the tendency of people to resort to hagiography when talking about someone like MacDiarmada, a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation.
The census returns for 1901 and 1911, also searchable online, have enabled MacDiarmada’s 1911 census return to be discovered and examined for the first time. Dublin Castle Special Branch Files from the British Colonial Office (CO 904) are now available on CD-ROM.
A growing number of secondary works have given MacDiarmada due attention. The starting point is Gerard McAtasney’s 2004 book Seán MacDiarmada: The Mind of the Revolution. Brian Barton’s The Secret Court Martial Records of the Easter Rising (2010 edition) provides a detailed commentary on primary sources about MacDiarmada’s execution. Charles Townshend’s Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (2005) gives new insights into the documents and sequence of events in Holy Week 1916.
This book sets out to give Seán MacDiarmada his proper place in the years leading up to the Easter Rising and his role in the detailed planning of the Rising which led to him signing the Proclamation of the Irish Republic second only to Tom Clarke. Along with Clarke, MacDiarmada reorganised the Irish Republican Brotherhood from 1908 on, and from 1912 the pair of them ran its organisation on a day-to-day basis, acting as a two-man executive of the IRB Supreme Council.
Since Clarke was a former prisoner on licence and liable to be returned to jail for any misdemeanour, MacDiarmada was the man who travelled the country and recruited members to the IRB as he saw fit. By late 1915 MacDiarmada held in his grasp lines of communication to all the major figures in the rump of the Irish Volunteers across the country who had rejected John Redmond’s call to arms in September 1914. MacDiarmada had allocated roles to them in the planned Rising. All this planning and organising were done surreptitiously under the noses of the official Volunteer command structure and until the last minute it seemed MacDiarmada would pull it off. This book details how MacDiarmada went about taking control of the organisation of the Rising and how his plans fell apart so that the Rising that happened was not the one he planned.
In the course of writing this book I am indebted to Dr Seán MacCorraidh, Dr Éibhlín Mhic Aoidh and Dr Seán MacLabhraí of St Mary’s University College, Belfast who helped me decipher and translate Seán MacDiarmada’s 1911 census return and clarified other relevant items in Irish. Also to Mr Pat McDermott of Belfast, Seán MacDiarmada’s grand-nephew, for family details and information.
Any remaining errors in the book are my own.
Chapter One • • • • • •
1883 – 1905
A Leitrim Upbringing
Seán MacDiarmada originally aimed to be a schoolmaster. For a clever and able boy, the eighth of ten children of a carpenter and part-time farmer, the chance to become a national school teacher offered an attractive prospect of advancement, a regular income, possibly a rent-free house beside a school, and a pension on retirement. It was also one way out of rain-soaked, poverty-stricken Leitrim. However, the route to a teaching post at the end of the nineteenth century was long and arduous. John McDermott, as he was known until his twenties, stuck at it for seven years, from 1897 to 1904, but the last hurdle, the King’s Scholarship examination, was too high and he could not surmount it.
Aspiring teachers like McDermott followed what was essentially a five-year apprenticeship from thirteen or so, the age when most other children left elementary school, the name for primary school in those days. School, for the vast majority of Irish children in rural districts in the nineteenth, and well into the twentieth century, was a one-room stone building where local children aged five to thirteen sat at rows of oak desks. They were taught together by the ‘master’, a person of some standing in the parish, who strove to bring each year group in the class up to a series of national ‘Standards’ in English, Arithmetic and other subjects like Geography and History.
Bigger schools sometimes afforded an assistant teacher but more often the master was helped by an older boy or girl who aspired to be a teacher. They were called pupil teachers or monitors but they were essentially dogsbodies, filling the inkwells, marking the work of junior pupils and tidying up at the end of the day. They came in to the school early and left late, using the extra time to study work set by the master and to prepare simple lessons for the class, given under the supervision of the master. Pupil teachers were paid a pittance, about £1 a month or less, which works out about €108 in today’s money.
After about five years, the pupil teacher sat what was in effect his or her final examination, the King’s Scholarship. If successful, a ‘call’ to a teacher training college in Dublin followed, but competition was so intense that a mere pass was usually not enough.
The exam was daunting. Florence Mary McDowell, a County Antrim writer and former national school teacher, described in her 1972 book Roses to Rainbows the exam she sat before the First World War:
Teachers were expected to know things. They were not expected to think, but they were certainly required to know. Everything was to be learned by heart: Joyce’s Irish History, British Constitutional History, the Physical and Political Geography of the World, no less, Music, Drawing, Penmanship, Arithmetic and Mensuration, English, Reading, Poetry, Drama, Composition and Literature. One failed the whole King’s Scholarship, a pre-requisite to training in Dublin … if one failed in any one of the ‘Failing Subjects’ English, Arithmetic, Music, Drawing, or the all-important Penmanship.
The sad reality is that McDermott had no chance of passing. The school he prepared in, Corracloona National School, still sits in rural isolation, renovated and modernised on the road from Glenfarne to Kiltyclogher. It is still a one-classroom primary school, and was no place to prepare for the KS. When McDermott was studying there in 1903 his access to the necessary resources must have been severely limited. He took a correspondence course with the Normal Correspondence College in London. Such courses were a very popular way at the end of the nineteenth century for students to gauge their abilities against a national standard and even to obtain recognised certificates and diplomas.1
In McDermott’s case one handicap was the absence of a library in the nearest village, Kiltyclogher, an hour’s walk away. However the lack of available books was not necessarily fatal since a lot of the KS syllabus was based on rote learning. McDermott’s Achilles’ heel was mathematics. It is quite possible that the master at Corracloona, Mr Magowan, did not have either the time or the knowledge to teach McDermott the mathematics the KS demanded, because McDermott took extra tuition with Mr James Gilmartin, assistant national teacher at Corracloona. McDermott told a friend at the time: ‘I hate Euclid and I’m afraid that the old rascal will have revenge on me if he catches me at an examination.’ It was a certainty that ‘the old rascal’ would catch him at the KS because Euclidean geometry was an essential component of the exam, but McDermott did not have to meet Euclid to fail. Records show that it was not only the more esoteric aspects of mathematics that presented McDermott with difficulty: as a schoolboy, he regularly failed elementary arithmetic.
Given that deficiency, the standard of the KS was such that no matter how hard he worked he was never going to pass. In 1904, after struggling for seven years, two years longer than normal, McDermott inevitably failed the exam and saw his hopes of advancement vanish.2 With no skills, no qualifications and no prospects, he was now twenty-one and still living at home with no visible means of support in the poorest, rainiest county in Ireland, a place people had been leaving in droves since the Famine.
Despite his humble background, there must have been some surplus cash available to account for John being allowed to stay on at school for seven years after the usual leaving age. It is probable that, in addition to money earned through carpentry and farming by his father, there was money coming in from family members working abroad, money known in those days as ‘remittance money’. By the time of the 1901 census, when John still had three years ahead of him as a monitor at Corracloona, one brother and two sisters had already left home. John himself, who at this stage of his life was still officially ‘John Joseph’, as he had been baptised, would not be long in following.3
How and by what steps did John Joseph McDermott, from remote rural Leitrim, become Seán MacDiarmada, one of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation? Are there any clues in his family background or upbringing, or did he acquire all his opinions and convictions after moving to Belfast in 1905?
McDermott had been born in January 1883 in a remote farmhouse at a place called Corranmore in the townland of Laghty Bar in County Leitrim, near its border with County Fermanagh.4 Even today the way to the family home is an easily missed left turn off the road from Glenfarne to Kiltyclogher. In 1883 it must have been little more than a boreen. The thatched stone-built house the McDermotts lived in, now a National Monument, is a hundred metres off that narrow road at the top of what would have been a muddy path. It is built on the foundation of a flat rocky outcrop at the top of a small hill with a good view of the surrounding countryside.
Ten metres from the front of the house, the land slopes away steeply from the exposed rock towards a boggy depression covered with trees and lush grass. Two hundred metres to the right of the front door is a peat bog still being cut today, covering about three acres. To the McDermotts, the land would have offered no opportunity for arable farming. On each side of the house and at the back were small stone outhouses, enumerated in the 1901 census as a cow house, a calf house, a piggery, a barn and a shed. The two outhouses, one on each side of the family home, have been restored like the house itself, but those behind the house are in ruins.
The McDermott home had three rooms, two on the ground floor and a loft converted into a large sleeping space, probably by John’s father, Donald McDermott, using his carpentry skills. It is hard to see how the small-holding could have sustained ten children, five boys and five girls, at the level of prosperity evident in an 1890 family photograph, without the supplement of cash from those skills (which, according to local tradition, are responsible for the pews in St Michael’s Catholic church in nearby Glenfarne). Indeed, Donald McDermott must have regarded wood-working as his primary occupation, because he described himself as ‘carpenter’ in the 1901 census. The 1890 photograph shows Donald McDermott’s wife Mary, two years before she died in 1892 when John was nine.
Not surprisingly, after the body blow of rejection by the King’s Scholarship examiners in 1904 and the realisation that seven years of study had come to nothing, McDermott thrashed around for about a year looking for a different direction to his life, but above all for some means of employment. His first excursion in search of work, following the traditional route of thousands of men from Leitrim and northwest Ireland to Scotland, proved to be abortive. Unlike many others, he did not head for the coal mines or factories of Scotland’s central belt, or Glasgow’s shipyards, or the potato fields of western Scotland, but joined a cousin in Edinburgh doing gardening work.
Of course it was not real gardening as McDermott had no knowledge of that. It amounted to labouring: digging, brushing, sweeping and as McDermott himself said later, ‘raking paths’.5 He did not last long, and soon he was back in the family home where he probably spent the summer helping out on the farm. In October 1904, after the potatoes were saved, he headed to Tullynamoyle in County Cavan to study the curious combination of Irish and book-keeping at night school taught by Patrick McGauran. According to a Kiltyclogher ‘Commemorative Booklet’ produced in 1940, McDermott lodged with a local family at Tullynamoyle during his night school course, which lasted until March 1905. There is no evidence that he was in employment during this period, which suggests that family money must have provided his rent and upkeep.
It’s true that McDermott wrote to a friend extolling the benefits of learning book-keeping as a way to advance his career prospects, but could it be that McDermott went to Tullynamoyle mainly to learn Irish from McGauran? Why else choose to go there, thirty kilometres from his home instead of, say, to Enniskillen, forty kilometres away and on a better road? Or Sligo, much the same distance? It goes without saying that both towns would have offered far superior facilities for learning book-keeping. A century ago Tullynamoyle did not exist as a village: it was a townland. The so-called ‘night school’ must have been a room in McGauran’s house or one he rented in another house. On the other hand, neither Sligo nor Enniskillen would have provided the same opportunity to learn and speak Irish as Tullynamoyle did in the person of Patrick McGauran, who was highly regarded as a native Irish speaker and teacher.
The 1940 commemorative booklet reports McGauran recalling that McDermott was ‘anything but a book-worm’.6 According to the booklet, McDermott at twenty-two was of average height, which would have been about five-foot-six in those days, ‘with strong dark hair, well-marked eyebrows and dark blue eyes’.7 He loved hunting rabbits, and one piece of information betraying something of his political predilections is that, for the purpose of hunting or coursing, he kept a greyhound called ‘Kruger’ (named after Paul Kruger, the Boer War general and later President of South Africa). So it was likely that McDermott sympathised with the ‘pro-Boer’ (and anti-British) position adopted by Irish nationalists at the turn of the century. It’s also noteworthy that he was politically aware enough to choose a name like Kruger for his dog.
McGauran said that the only subjects that captured McDermott’s attention related to Ireland and its language, heroes and history, and he read everything he could find about those topics. He was keen on poetry, ‘especially Irish patriotic poetry’, and the work of Scottish poet Robert ‘Robbie’ Burns. McDermott’s party pieces were Emmet’s speech from the dock and a dreadfully maudlin, saccharine ‘poem’ called ‘The Celtic Tongue’, a lament on the death of the Irish language written by a Fr Michael Mullin from Kilmore in County Galway (who died in Chicago in 1869). Not much about book-keeping there.
According to Fr Charles Travers in a 1966 article, McDermott had ‘a fair fluency in Irish’ from his youth. His mother and father spoke Irish to each other, and at that time older people in the district used Irish almost exclusively, to the point that many of them had difficulty with English when they came into the towns to market.8 The 1901 census records that at the age of eighteen McDermott did not speak Irish, even though his father could, but ten years later McDermott filled in his own 1911 census return in colloquial Irish and by that stage was a fluent speaker. Did he go to Tullynamoyle to perfect the basic Irish he had learnt from his parents at home, or was he illiterate in Irish and went to McGauran to learn how to read and write the language?
Given his subsequent political trajectory the very fact that he took a conscious decision in 1904 to learn Irish is significant. Unlike book-keeping, Irish would not have improved his career prospects. His decision may have been driven either by the prevailing romantic nationalism of the Irish-Ireland movement, namely zeal for all things Irish, whether language, literature or sports, which was going from strength to strength in the country at the time, or by political conviction, or both. The fact that he chose to memorise Emmet’s speech from the dock and Fr Mullin’s romantic doggerel about the fate of the Irish language (along with the name he gave his dog) are all evidence of McDermott’s political leanings, though the fact that 1903 was the centenary of Emmet’s execution and the occasion of much commemoration might have had something to do with his selection.
It should also be noted that Emmet was one of the figures in Irish history McDermott especially revered and mentioned regularly in speeches when he became a prominent republican after 1908. In the years after he settled in Dublin he always involved himself in some aspect of the annual commemoration of Emmet’s rebellion. Regardless of the reasons, a commitment to romantic nationalism, pro-Boer views and the Gaelic revival were the sentiments he was known for in 1904 and 1905, and which people remembered about him years later.
However, there is little direct evidence about McDermott’s political views in his early life in Leitrim. Essays he wrote in 1903 in preparation for his KS exam reproduce the simplistic nationalist interpretation of Irish history that attracted him to Robert Emmet’s famous speech. Examples of his rhetoric include, ‘The power which still holds us slaves was brought on by the bigotry and spite of one treacherous man more than seven hundred years ago’, or about the British Empire, ‘In every way the colonies are of use to this nation but for poor Ireland nothing is of any use till the yoke of English tyranny is shaken off.’ Simplistic they may have been, but such uncompromising views were well beyond the settlement for which the Irish Parliamentary Party, or Irish Party as it was commonly known, had been striving. The Irish Party represented most Irish people in Westminster at the time and had been working since the 1880s for Home Rule, a very limited form of self-government under British rule rather than true independence.
Expressing strong nationalist opinions in his essays seems to have been as far as McDermott went. There is no evidence of his involvement in any political activity. Nonetheless, considering where he grew up McDermott could hardly have been unaware of the major issue then exercising people in rural Ireland. The period from 1898 to 1902 was a time of great unrest as people, particularly in Connacht, agitated for compulsory land purchase to end the system of tenancy that had kept many in rural areas in grinding poverty. The campaign was led by the United Irish League (UIL) established in 1898 with a simple and direct slogan: ‘The Land for the People’.
Starting off as a movement of rural tenants, the UIL quickly developed momentum and all the leading figures in Irish nationalist politics rapidly became involved with the UIL. Within two years the dynamic behind the drive for land purchase proved a political imperative which managed to re-unite the factions into which the Irish Party had split after Charles Stewart Parnell’s fall from grace in 1891. By 1901 the UIL had 100,000 members in over 1,200 branches throughout the country, though its strength lay mainly in Connacht. It was also acting as the local organisation for the Irish Party in each rural constituency.
The UIL’s campaign reached its climax in 1901 and 1902 as agitation turned to boycotting landlords and their agents and there were instances of what in the nineteenth century were called ‘outrages’ (attacks and damage) against livestock and property. The British government responded to the intensified agitation with use of the draconian 1887 Crimes Act, which provided special powers for the Dublin Castle administration. The chief secretary for Ireland could ‘proclaim’ a county, which meant giving police widespread powers of arrest and the power to ban meetings of the UIL, as well as giving courts the authority to conduct trials without juries. By 1902 Leitrim was one of nine counties that had been ‘proclaimed’. Thirteen Irish Party MPs were in jail, including Patrick McHugh, the MP for McDermott’s constituency, North Leitrim. The UIL campaign was finally successful in 1903 with the passage of the Wyndham Land Purchase Act. Although the Act did not make land purchase compulsory, it sounded the death knell of landlordism in Ireland by making it attractive for landlords to sell. Under the terms of the Act the British government paid landlords the difference between the sum offered by tenants and the sum the landlords demanded.
In the case of the McDermott family, they rented their land from the Tottenham estate, an estate which by the turn of the century was particularly contentious. It is worth taking a look at the background to the estate, which provides the political context in which the young McDermott grew up. The Tottenham family’s main holdings were in Wicklow and Wexford, but until the 1870s the branch of the family in Leitrim held an enormous acreage in the county, 14,561 acres. The family seat was Glenfarne Hall, which they built in the 1820s on the shores of Lough McNean, which at that point forms the county borders between Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh. The family also financed the building of the village of Kiltyclogher in the same period.
During the Land War in the 1880s, which was largely about the same issues that later motivated the UIL, the Leitrim estate was owned by Colonel Arthur Loftus Tottenham. The Land War raged from 1879 through the early 1880s and was at its most intense in Connacht with attacks on property and livestock and occasionally individuals working for landlords. Organised by the Land League, many of whose prominent figures were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), or Fenians, which had been involved in an uprising against British rule in 1867, the aim of the agitation was to achieve security of tenure for tenant farmers, rent control and compensation for any improvements they made if they gave up the tenancy.
The British prime minister William Gladstone was sympathetic to the demands and worked to produce a settlement. The McDermott’s landlord, Tottenham, was MP for County Leitrim from 1880 to 1885, after which the constituency was divided in two and Irish Party members won both seats. Tottenham provocatively told Gladstone’s 1880 Bessborough Commission on the Irish land question that ‘the best manure for land is that it should be well salted with rent’. He strongly opposed Gladstone’s Irish policies and resisted the 1881 Land Act, which offered ‘fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure’, in uncompromising fashion at Westminster with a lengthy speech.
Tottenham had other urgent business to attend to in 1881 besides attending Westminster. It was the height of the Land War and he was evicting tenants. The Freeman’s Journal of 4 December 1882 lists thirty-nine families Colonel Tottenham evicted between June 1881 and November 1882, including two families of McMorrow, one of five and one of six individuals. McDermott’s mother’s maiden name was McMorrow and the family tradition is that Tottenham had evicted her family. He also evicted a McDermott family of eleven in June 1881, though McDermott was such a common name in the district that it is impossible to say if they were any relation.
Even more pressing, and perhaps the explanation for his need to keep his land ‘salted with rent’, was the fact that by the end of 1881 Tottenham had become insolvent. In the 1870s he had undertaken to complete the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway line from Enniskillen to Sligo, which cost him £347,000, the equivalent today of €32.5 million. Tottenham enlisted the financial support of his wealthy Westminster colleague Sir Edward Harland, the MP for North Belfast and one of the owners of Belfast’s enormous Harland & Wolff shipyard, pledging his estate as surety for Harland’s loan. In 1881 the cash ran out and within two years the estate passed to Harland, who quickly began to look at ways to realise his cash. He managed to sell Glenfarne Hall, its demesne and some mountainous parts of the estate to a Colonel John George Adamson, but the tenants also tried to buy their holdings and the matter went to the Land Judge appointed to resolve such disputes under the 1881 Act Tottenham had so strenuously opposed.
What is the relevance of all these transactions to McDermott? After all, they took place before he was born in 1883. Quite simply, it is that the matter of the Tottenham estate went into the Chancery Division of the High Court in London in the 1880s and was still there over twenty years later, a source of contention and rancour between the numerous tenants who wanted to buy the land they rented and Colonel Adamson, who procrastinated endlessly. There had been an agreement in the 1880s to sell, but Colonel Adamson would not budge until an allocation of turf-cutting allotments had been made to his satisfaction. At the height of the United Irish League agitation for compulsory purchase at the turn of the century, the dispute became more heated.
In 1902 and 1903 the Irish Party MPs for Sligo and North Leitrim, John O’Dowd and Patrick McHugh, repeatedly asked questions in Westminster of Chief Secretary George Wyndham about progress in the sale of the estate. They were obviously responding to growing trouble caused by evictions as a result of tenants refusing to pay rent pending the sale of land to them.
About the time the campaign for compulsory purchase got underway, there were over one hundred evictions from the estate in 1898 to clear the land for Adamson’s hunting parties operating from Glenfarne Hall, and conflict continued for the next five years. In August 1901 John O’Dowd MP complained to Wyndham about the prosecution of ten men at Kiltyclogher for riot and unlawful assembly.
Six months later, in February 1902, Patrick McHugh MP demanded a settlement of the matter of the Tottenham estate to put an end to evictions,9 alleging that the RIC had deliberately created trouble in July 1901 after one. He told the chief secretary in a Westminster debate that members of the United Irish League had attended the scene of the eviction ‘to show sympathy with the victims’ and when ‘sixty or seventy men were returning home’ afterwards the RIC attacked them and beat them and charged a number with unlawful assembly – probably the same occasion O’Dowd was complaining about the previous August.
It is inconceivable that the eighteen-year-old McDermott was not aware of the goings-on on the Tottenham estate, the agitation which resulted in prosecutions in Kiltyclogher in 1901, and the imprisonment of Patrick McHugh in 1902, by which time the county had been ‘proclaimed’. However, there is no evidence that he played any part in these events or any like them. All that can be said for certain is that McDermottkept his head in his books in Corracloona in 1902 and 1903, preparing for his KS exam. Whether he acquired his ‘advanced nationalist’ (the polite term for republican in those days) opinions from reading, or from another source, is impossible to say.
However, one interesting piece of material which might throw some light on the question comes from McDermott’s father’s obituary in Irish Freedom, the Irish Republican Brotherhood newspaper McDermott would manage from 1911 until its suppression in 1914. Donald McDermott died in August 1913 at the advanced age of eighty-six and his obituary contains this paragraph.
He was one of Ireland’s true sons and one of those men who, guided by high principles and an ardent love of his country took his place in the ranks of the IRB. Like many of the Brotherhood he flung himself heartily into the campaign of the Land League. One of the last things Donald McDermott did was to ask for his old friend and comrade John Daly.
It’s not known who wrote the obituary, though the IRB’s Bulmer Hobson and Patrick Sarsfield O’Hegarty, who was the Cobh postmaster as well as being an IRB man, normally wrote most of the paper. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the paper’s business manager Seán MacDiarmada (as he was known by then) was not consulted about his father’s obituary. Indeed it is quite likely that the only reason there was an obituary in the paper at all was because the deceased was the manager’s father.
There is no way of knowing whether all the claims in that paragraph are true, but equally there is every reason to believe it is not a complete fabrication. By 1911 Seán MacDiarmada was well known in Leitrim, having played a major role in a hard fought by-election in the county in 1908 as the Sinn Féin party organiser. Making outlandish claims in Irish Freedom would have brought his family ridicule.
His father was born in 1827 so he could easily have joined the IRB in his fifties during the organisation’s resurgence at the time of the Land League, which got under way on a large scale after 1879. If it is true that Colonel Tottenham evicted the family of his wife, Mary McMorrow, in 1881, it may have spurred Donald McDermott into action with the Land League.
The mention of ‘his old friend and comrade John Daly’ is particularly intriguing. Born in Limerick in 1845, Daly had been in the Irish Republican Brotherhood since the age of eighteen and had fought in the 1867 rising, an ambitious but largely unsuccessful insurrection against British rule. Daly served time in jail in England with fellow IRB man Tom Clarke and became especially friendly with Seán MacDiarmada in the years before the 1916 Rising. MacDiarmada often stayed with the Daly family in Limerick, he and Daly exchanged correspondence, and a photograph exists of Daly, Tom Clarke and MacDiarmada together.
By the turn of the century Daly had become a successful businessman in Limerick, running a bakery business and even becoming lord mayor of the city. He helped finance Irish Freedom and during his long and chequered career was a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB during the Land War in the 1880s and the IRB organiser for Connacht and Ulster. It is quite conceivable that he did meet Donald McDermott in that capacity during the Land War, because he would have visited Leitrim (although there is no evidence that they did meet). It is also hard to believe that Daly would have allowed Donald McDermott’s obituary to contain the reference to himself if it was an invention. If true, the link with MacDiarmada’s father may help explain why Daly and his family were on such good terms with MacDiarmada in the years before 1916.
