Why Did Sympathy Turn To The Executed Leaders?

mikefoxo wrote: »

I remember hearing from history class that when the Rising was over the rebels were jeered and hated, but when they leaders were executed public sympathy turned towards them and against the British. Why was this? I mean because of them half of Dublin was a mess, and a huge number of civillians were dead. Ireland was at war, being part of the Empire, so the leaders were executed without trial. It seems a bit much that the opinions of an entire country would have turned with the deaths of a few people who were despised

Why we've got it wrong about Dubliners and 1916
IRELAND IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Professor Joe Lee
THE traditional interpretation is that public opinion initially denounced the 1916 Rising but swung around once news of the executions that began on 3 May touched some mysterious latent chord in the Irish psyche, and the Rising began to be bathed in a retrospective golden glow for having restored the national pride of a beaten breed, a sentiment caught in John Dillon's defiant tribute in the teeth of the House of Commons on 11 May, all the more remarkable for Dillon's continuing devotion to the Home Rule Party as the only hope for achieving some form of selfrule in the face of bigger British guns.

This scenario is still widely accepted. I accepted it myself for many years. After all, don't we have evidence of onlookers hurling abuse at prisoners, and of cups of tea for the British army? What more do we need?

It is only when one gets around to asking that most elementary, but essential, historian's question ? how do we know? ? that one begins to doubt this interpretation; the late Desmond Greaves, biographer of James Connolly, is one of the few to have done so. It transpires that we actually know extraordinarily little about public opinion during the Rising. We know what propagandists on all sides want us to think. But we know little about the public itself.

Nowadays we would rely on the media and opinion polls to gauge opinion. But there were no instant polls in 1916. We might surmise that the media informed and reflected opinion. Even if there was no radio or television, didn't the press keep the public informed? Well, actually, no. Military censorship was imposed when the Rising broke out on Easter Monday, 24 April. Even when Dublin papers appeared during the week, they could contain no account of events. Few papers appeared in any case. On Tuesday, it was only The Irish Times and Irish Independent. On Wednesday and Thursday, it was the Times only. On Friday and Saturday, there was no paper at all. There were no Sunday papers at the time. The Times reappeared as the only Dublin paper on the following Monday and Tuesday, 1 and 2 May. The Express joined the Times on Wednesday. The Irish Independent reappeared on Thursday 4 May. The first Redmondite paper, the Freeman's Journal, did not reappear until 5 May, nearly a week after the surrender.

Most people, therefore, had only the most fragmentary information on what was happening during the Rising.

Rumour naturally filled the vacuum, and two rumours in particular.

The first was that it was a 'German' rising. German troops were actually sighted in the more imaginative versions.

For those with relatives fighting Germans in France, this was enough to condemn it out of hand. What else could they deduce from the reference to "our gallant allies in Europe" in the proclamation of the Republic itself, if they knew about it.

The second rumour widely reported in the provincial press was that it was a socialist rising, with Jim Larkin even having been seen, back from America to strike terror into the hearts of respectable citizens. Larkin's was a name to conjure with, the high profile leader of the workers in the Dublin lock out of 1913. This was a quarter truth, in that the Citizen Army under Connolly was highly active in the Rising, but Connolly, though a far more profound thinker than Larkin, had nothing of his charisma or public profile.

The main Dublin media was uniformly hostile, the Times and Express as unionist-empire papers, the Freeman's Journal as Redmondite, and the Independent as Catholic capitalist.

Unionists naturally denounced the treachery to Britain and the empire. Home rule journalists naturally denounced the treachery to the party. The provincial press was generally more guarded, invariably lamenting, and usually denouncing the Rising, but often demanding no reprisals even before the executions began, and frequently admitting it could vouch for little because of the lack of information.

What then about comment during Easter week on the ground, so to speak? Firstly, we must accept that we will never know what most Dubliners thought, because most did not vent an opinion. They knew, for the most part, as little about the realities as did people down the country. Large parts of the city were as reliant on rumours as Ballydehob.

One would expect relatives of recruits serving in the British forces to be bitterly opposed to the 'German' Rising. If one allows a modest multiplier of four for relatives and friends of the 18,698 war-time recruits from Dublin, in addition to the ordinary pre-war recruits, this would leave up to a third of the city population with an instinctively hostile reaction ? and probably an even higher proportion of adults. The Protestant population, still quite numerous in some areas, and overwhelmingly unionist, would be opposed anyway. This was the sort of calculation that de Valera seemed oblivious to as he was being led a prisoner along Northumberland Road.

De Valera, the Earl of Longford and TP O'Neill ? his authorised biographers ? tell us, "felt that the onlookers and indeed the people of Ireland did not understand. It galled him to think that people who were rushing to their doors to give cups of tea to British soldiers could not see they had a right to freedom." Look carefully at this. De Valera was an eye-witness to behaviour on Northumberland Road. But how does one slide from this to that little follow-up phrase, "and the people of Ireland"? How could de Valera know what the people of Ireland thought at that moment? It was still a bit early for looking into his own heart.

He had no information on the matter. So little did he or his men know of what was happening in the rest of Dublin, much less Ireland, at the time, that they were loath to accept the surrender orders from Pearse and Connolly. How far was de Valera entitled to assume Northumberland Road would be representative of Ireland?

The 1911 census reflects the status of Northumberland Road as one of the most salubrious addresses in Dublin, peopled by wealthy business people and senior civil servants, with a goodly sprinkling of rentiers and spinsters, and even the occasional intellectual like Professor Tom Kettle.

If it was socially highly unrepresentative, it was even more so in religious terms. It had slightly more Protestant than Catholic males (or perhaps I should say non-Catholic rather than Protestant, to pay due respect to the solitary resident staunchly returning his religion as 'Freemason', the one indomitable 'Agnostic', and the one incurable optimist ? from Antrim ? returning himself as 'Christian'). And it would seem a reasonable bet that there would be few republicans, much less Citizen Army sympathisers, among the type of Catholic to be found on the road.

There were, it is true, far more Catholic women that either Protestant women or Catholic men. The main reason was simple enough. The lifestyles of the homeowners depended on servants. And the vast majority of servants, in Protestant no less than Catholic houses, were Catholics. It is unlikely, however, that they would be rushing to outrage their masters and mistresses, whatever their private feelings, which may in any case have mirrored those of their employers, by cheering the rebels. De Valera and his men were likely to have a long wait for their cup of tea on Northumberland Road.

To go to the polar opposite in social terms, North King Street earned a high profile during and after the Rising. A jury on 16 May found soldiers responsible for murdering two unarmed civilian prisoners and burying the bodies beneath floorboards. Sir John Maxwell, the British commander, engaging in damage limitation in an interview with the Daily Mail, insisted on not only "the popularity of the soldiers in Dublin today", but even in North King Street itself, "which I visited yesterday", and "saw the solders talking in the friendliest way with the women at their doors". One is left to wonder if these were the same women he was referring to when he claimed in nearly the same breath that during the Rising itself, "we tried hard to get the women and children to leave the North King Street area; they would not go; their sympathies were with the rebels. . ." What exactly do women chatting to soldiers mean in terms of political ideology? A letter from a unionist civil servant, Bonaparte-Wyse, on 28 May, recorded that "the city is quiet now, but there is a very menacing tone among the lower classes who openly praise the Sinn Féiners for their courage and bravery, and there is a lot of abuse of the soldiers. At the same time the latter seem to be popular, at least with the female population.

The sympathies of the ordinary Irish are with Sinn Féin.

They want independence and their only criticism of the rebellion is that it was foolish (not criminal or otherwise wrong), but just foolish because it had no chance of success." That somewhat similar sentiments were recorded by James Stephens in the early days of the Rising a month earlier makes one wonder how much of this represented continuity with sentiments during the Rising, rather than a subsequent transformation.

I would provisionally hazard the following conclusions, readily accepting they may require modification.

Unionists opposed the Rising on ideological grounds.

Some Home Rulers (but we can never know how many) opposed it on ideological grounds also, because they were genuine empire men and women, and sought Home Rule within the empire not simply as stepping stone but as the terminus. Many Home Rulers opposed the Rising on tactical grounds ? because it had no chance of success and would damage the prospects of Home Rule, much less independence.

Many more opposed it on the pragmatic grounds that they had sons or brothers in the war.

How many Irish nationalists condemned it in principle, it is impossible to say. The number, however, is likely to have been much smaller than reference to blanket condemnation suggests.

If this reading of opinion is correct, the executions did not so much cause a reversal as a crystallisation of Irish nationalist opinion towards the Rising ? once the public was belatedly in a position to learn what the real Rising was.

©Joe Lee is Professor of History in UCC
August 13, 2000