The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (37 page)

The existence of such a fighting force, comprised as it was of United Kingdom citizens fighting a war against their own country, was in legal terms an act of treason; and it was to avoid the likelihood that they would be shot as traitors if captured that the members of the brigade were granted Boer nationality just before the outbreak of war. Yet the brigade was but one facet of a highly diverse Irish community: some of its members were repelled by the actions of the brigade; others sympathized in secret; still others fought as members of the regular Boer army. And yet, although the numbers of Irishmen enlisting in the British forces had been in steep decline since the Famine – down to a mere 13 per cent of the total in arms by 1900 – the fact remained that far greater numbers of Irishmen would serve on the British side than would support the Boers – in spite of all the passionate urgings of Gonne. In the coming war, Irishman would be pitted against Irishman on the southern tip of Africa.

Members of the Irish Brigade were in the vanguard of the Boer forces that crossed into Natal, and on 20 October British and Boers came face to face at Talana Hill, near the town of Ladysmith. Accounts of the encounter are confused and tainted by propaganda: assertions that regular Irish troops were pleased to be captured by their fellow countrymen and pleased too to defect to the Boer side jostle against other claims that Brigade members showed hostility to captured imperial soldiers. Animosity grew in the subsequent four-month siege of Ladysmith, when the Brigade engaged in regular skirmishes with members of the Dublin Fusiliers, Royal Irish Rifles and Royal Artillery holed up in the town. Later, a British counter-offensive proved disastrously ineffective: during ‘Black Week’ the Boers repulsed British attacks at Stormberg on 10 December and the following day at Magersfontein. At Colenso, in the early hours of 15 December, the Boers (accompanied by members of the Irish Brigade) inflicted a third heavy defeat on the British: the Irish regiments present, and especially the ‘Dublins’, bore the brunt of the onslaught, with four hundred soldiers killed in less than an hour at the crossings of the Tugela river.

The news of the British defeat at Colenso rapidly reached Ireland: the newspapers, regardless of political complexion, could thrill at the news of Irish heroism and martyrdom; while the nationalist press could further revel in the presence of MacBride and his men at the front line. A few days later, Chamberlain arrived in Dublin to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity College (‘He is coming! his hand dyed with freeman’s best blood / His heart black and false as Lucifer’s own’
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); and Griffith, Gonne and Davitt were part of another large, noisy crowd that gathered – in spite of a ban – to protest against the ceremony; the demonstration ended in riot and arrests. (Yeats sent a supportive note.) Gonne had organized the dispatch to the Transvaal of a new flag for the Brigade, and a few days before Christmas it was raised above the Irish camp. It was a cheering gesture of solidarity; at the same time, the Irish Transvaal Committee redoubled its efforts to prevent enlistment in the British army.

Yet Colenso, humiliating and destructive as it had been to British morale, also proved to be the high-water mark of the Boer campaign. On 23 February 1900, Irish troops were in the vanguard of a British assault on Hart’s Hill in an attempt to relieve Ladysmith. The Irish Brigade and Irish regulars exchanged fire, but four days later the Boers had been broken and began retreating towards their own borders, with MacBride’s men now defending the rearguard. On 3 March, the British entered Ladysmith. The Brigade remained active for some months, harrying the British across the veldt of the Orange Free State, but by September the game was up and MacBride and his men slipped across the border into the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. There they were briefly interned before being deported; most of them made for America, though MacBride himself made for Paris and the waiting Gonne. The couple would marry – briefly and disastrously – in 1903.

Thirty-one members of the Irish Brigade were killed in the course of the war – a figure that pales in comparison to the four thousand regular Irish troops that died. Yet it was ‘MacBride’s Brigade’ that created waves in Ireland. Branches of the Gaelic League increased fourfold during the course of the Boer War; and Davitt travelled to the Transvaal later in 1900 in order to observe events for himself. In the first few months of the year, Gonne busied herself with a startling plan to sink Royal Navy vessels on the high seas by disguising explosives as pieces of coal, which would explode when loaded into the ships’ boilers. The execution of the plan depended upon the raising of a very great deal of money and the support of the Boers: lacking both, it failed – but the fact that it was proposed at all illuminates the lengths to which Gonne was prepared to go to achieve her political objectives.

The visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland in April 1900 – her fourth in all, and her first in thirty-nine years – further galvanized the nationalist cause in general.
The Times
piously urged ‘the better class of nationalist’ to welcome her – but such exhortations fell mostly on deaf ears. The royal visit was correctly perceived by nationalists as part of a drive to enlist young Irishmen: Griffith observed that the monarch had come ‘to seek recruits for her battered army’; and Gonne condemned her in vituperative terms in an article for the
United Irishman
entitled ‘The Famine Queen’.
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Although the royal visit proceeded smoothly – not least because Dublin was positively bristling with police and soldiers for the duration of her stay – it also exposed the divisions within Irish nationalism. For many members of the public were frankly proud of the actions of the ‘Dublins’ and other Irish regiments in the South African war; and pleased too with Victoria’s decision that these Irish regiments should be permitted henceforth to sport the shamrock on St Patrick’s Day. The Irish Party leader Redmond was among their number – and was castigated for his decision by many nationalists. He also, however, criticized the royal visit to Ireland: indeed, such a balancing act between imperial and national interests would become a hallmark of his career in general.

Victoria’s presence in Ireland – and the warmth of the welcome she received in many quarters – provided ample evidence of the fundamental ambivalence that marked the Irish relationship to Britain, and highlighted too the many opinions that continued to circulate as to the future of the British and imperial connection. The queen had after all visited Catholic convent schools; loyal toasts had been received from Dublin’s nationalist city councillors; and (amid complaints at having to fraternize with Church of Ireland officials) Catholic clerics had attended royal functions. The erection in 1907 of the Fusiliers’ Arch at St Stephen’s Green in Dublin – a memorial to the South African war and identical in its dimensions to the Arch of Titus in Rome – seemed to seal this ambivalence in stone: it was denounced as a ‘traitors’ gate’ by some, but certainly not by all.

The lengthy defeat of the Boers – the war would drag on until 1902 – and the news coming from southern Africa of burned farms and of women and children held in concentration camps continued to resonate in Ireland. Its impact was magnified by the return of Davitt in July 1900, bringing tidings of plucky Boer resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.
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Nevertheless the political focus moved rapidly on in a wide range of ways. With the death of Victoria in January 1901 came what would inevitably appear as a fresh start, nineteenth-century ceremony and pomp easing into an era of reduced formality. But the South African war was perceived by the government as a warning too: victory, though sweet, was infused with relief; and George Wyndham – who had become Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1900 – now took steps to underpin the peace in Ireland by continuing the government’s policy of constructive unionism.

The result was that the final pieces were now inserted into the jigsaw of land reform. The Wyndham Land Acts proposed that the British government finance the full-scale buyout of the landlords by the tenants, and by 1903 Ireland had completed the process of agrarian reform: the tenant class had become a caste of owner-occupiers. Such reform, however, was significant not merely legally and socially but also psychologically – and the Conservative government was in some ways a victim of its own success. Once enough people controlled their land, the next rational step would be to seek to control their local affairs too – and then their country. Reform breathed new life into the question of Ireland’s political status and made formal independence an outcome that was now seen by some – though not by a majority of public opinion – as perfectly possible.

Elements within Irish nationalism were equally occupied with planning for the future. Griffith and Gonne had established new organizations – Cumann na nGaedheal (Confederation of the Gaels) and Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin) respectively – with the intention of bringing a larger national focus to the energy unleashed by the South African war. Griffith continued to use the pages of the
United Irishman
to amplify his political vision, and in the first half of 1904, a series of articles appeared advocating the idea of Ireland and Britain becoming a dual monarchy. This would be an arrangement similar to the one that had tentatively resolved the fractious relationship between Austria and Hungary and appeared to guarantee the future of the Hapsburg Empire through the
Ausgleich
– the Compromise – of 1867; Griffith’s articles would later appear in book form as
The Resurrection of Hungary
. In addition, in 1905 he founded the National Council: originally intended to resemble a pressure group, it morphed into a modest political movement and in 1907 amalgamated with other similar groups to form a small – and at this point far from radical – party known as Sinn Féin.

The debate as to the future of the country continued to involve a large number of participants. In 1900, the polemicist D. P. Moran had founded the
Leader
, a publication dedicated to the dissemination of a purist vision of an ‘Irish Ireland’ that was Catholic, economically self-sufficient and Irish-speaking. In his writing Moran disparaged a host of enemies, living and dead, from Wolfe Tone and Daniel O’Connell to Redmond and his party, and from Home Rule to Protestants in general and Orangemen in particular. Later, he would come to accept the notion of partition: if Ulster could not be brought around to the national ideal by argument and debate, he reasoned, then it would be better to excise it entirely from the Irish body politic.

Nor did Moran have any patience with the cultural vision of Yeats and his circle, which at this time was also continuing to evolve. In 1899 the Irish Literary Theatre was founded by Yeats, Edward Martyn and the aristocrat Augusta Gregory: it would become the Abbey Theatre in 1904, having secured sufficient funding (courtesy of an English tea heiress) to establish itself in the centre of Dublin. At once, the new institution set about offering its own contributions to the ongoing debate, probing in its productions the ambivalent nature of Irish culture and the form of the country’s identity. In April 1902, in a further demonstration of the range of her interests, Gonne appeared in a production of
Cathleen Ní Houlihan
. Her eponymous role was the embodiment of an Ireland that called for a sacrifice in blood from her sons; one critic commented that ‘I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot’.
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But Yeats and Gregory experimented and adventured too with the European
avant garde
, and disturbed their audiences’ complacencies by staging such works as J. M. Synge’s
The Playboy of the Western World
(1907) with its lurid representations of degeneracy, coarseness and brutality in the west of Ireland. Elements in the audience rose in outrage at the sight of the fresh-tongued, sexualized women and their feeble menfolk inhabiting the stage, police had to be stationed in the auditorium, and Moran condemned the theatre as the ‘shabby’.

At the same time, the widespread deprivation and social distress of the period helped to animate the Irish labour movement. The Irish Trades’ Union Congress had been founded in 1894, but only to represent skilled workers; so-called unskilled and casual labourers remained without union support. Their cause was animated, however, by events in Britain, and in particular by the bitter strike that began in London’s West India Dock in the summer of 1889. The docks were paralysed and the strike soon spread to involve other trades – so after three weeks the employers gave way, offering improved pay and conditions. Dockers and other workers in Ireland absorbed the lessons of the London strikes, and one consequence was the eventual attempt, in 1907, to bring Belfast’s dockers together in order to win a similar deal. The organizer of this attempt was James Larkin, Liverpool-born of Irish parents: but while his efforts had some limited success, they ultimately failed to bridge the sectarian divide between working-class Catholics and Protestants in the city. The following year Larkin left Belfast for Dublin, where in 1909 he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU).

James Connolly was the second notable labour organizer to arrive in Ireland at this time, and his career in particular highlights the many different threads running through the history of the period. Connolly, like Larkin, was British-born (in Edinburgh in 1868) of Irish stock: his father had worked as a carter with the city corporation and the family could, as a result, count on a steady, if slender, wage – enough to scrape a basic education and protect them from the worst ravages of poverty. Connolly enlisted in the British army at the age of fourteen: he discharged himself in 1889, shortly after meeting Lillie Reynolds – a servant and Protestant – at a Dublin tram stop. The couple married a year later, by which time Connolly had renounced his Catholicism in favour of pursuing a socialist dream: by 1888, Keir Hardie had represented local miners at a by-election in central Scotland; the British labour movement founded its own political party five years later; and a socialist world seemed there for the taking.