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CHAPTER 1

Inspired

The Socio-Political Milieu, 1886–1913

Richard James Mulcahy was the second child and the first of three boys among eight siblings in the family of Patrick and Elizabeth Mulcahy (née Slattery).1 He was born on 10 May 1886 at 70 Manor Street, a terraced development of two- and three-storey houses in the former Manor Demesne area on the western edge of the original Viking and Anglo-Norman port settlements of Waterford City.2 In 1841, these houses were occupied for the most part by ‘merchants and private families’3 who, according to the Municipal Reform Act of 1840, were each given the title of burgess at a rateable valuation of £10 or more.4 But, in 1843, Waterford Corporation offered a seventy-five-year lease for the building of houses on land adjacent to the nearby New Barrack.5 Manor Street might thereby have begun to lose its cachet, something which, in turn, helps explain the fact that Mulcahy received his national (primary) school education from the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic order founded by Edmund Ignatius Rice in 1802, ostensibly for the purposes of providing education to the poor of the city.6

Two of those schools, under the common title of The Christian Schools, were situated in close proximity to Mulcahy’s home at 4 Manor Street and at 28 Barrack Street.7 In time, the latter came to be called Mount Sion in honour of the name given to the Brothers’ first monastery8 and this was the school which Mulcahy attended.9 However, because his father, who hailed from Carrick-on-Suir, was promoted to the position of postmaster in Thurles in 1898,10 Mulcahy completed his final year of national school education there. Once again, he was under the care of the Christian Brothers and once again his school was only a short walk from his home, the former on Gaol St, the latter on Main St.11

There are two observations worth making about these schools. The first observation is that the Brothers adopted a dual approach to their pedagogy. In one sense, they set out to make their students literate and to provide them with the basic practicable skills necessary to gain employment. This is evident in the general curriculum which, in 1862, a social commentator listed as being: ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography … book-keeping … geometry, mensuration, drawing and mechanics’.12 But, in another sense, the Brothers prepared their charges for God. For example, each school day commenced with a long communal recitation of prayers, the core sentiment of the opening one being: ‘Most Merciful Creator! I offer myself to thee this day … Receive, O Lord, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my whole will.’ Then, on the hour, each class would recite the Hail Mary; at noon The Angelus; and at three the Salve Regina.13

The second observation is that the Brothers did not participate in the 1871 system of payment-by-results, whereby school inspection was formalised with the purpose of making teachers more accountable for imparting the 3Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). Not alone were the Brothers not prepared to give up using their own textbooks, neither did they envisage compromising on the display of religious nomenclature and iconography or on the timetabling of devotional exercises.14 Even so, because the prevailing educational ethos became so competitive, they, with an exponential increase in the number of pupils under their care, were almost certainly driven by results as much as were teachers in other types of schools, or even more so, due to having something to prove.15

At any rate, in 1899, Mulcahy moved from Gaol Street to Pudding Lane, another Brothers’ school, in order to commence his three-year second-level programme of preparation for the final intermediate certificate examinations.16 These examinations were standardised, written, public tests according to the terms of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act of 1878, whereby, for the first time, a student had to pass six subjects in order to get an overall pass result.17 Moreover, there were four courses available: classical; modern literary; mathematical; and experimental science.18 Also, similar to the payment-by-results scheme of the national schools, incentives were built into the system. For instance, capitation grants were dependent upon a school’s examination results and the top pupils were honoured with exhibitions, medals and book prizes. In such a competitive environment, therefore, learning by rote and by grinding became commonplace.19

Mulcahy did well. His aggregate result was sufficiently distinguished for him to be awarded a £20 exhibition and to be allowed to finish his schooling at the relatively up-market Rockwell College, Cashel. However, family circumstances obliged him to refuse the offer. Instead, in December 1902, his father gave him a start as an unpaid assistant in his own post office.20 In all probability Mulcahy had mixed feelings about that. Even so, on balance, he was one of the fortunate ones. For example, in the game of maximising the return from the allocation of school grants, schools withdrew more than half of their final year students, adjudging them incapable of passing the examination in the first instance.21 Also, in Mulcahy’s year, concerning those who actually sat the reformed and expanded examination, there was such a high failure rate that the pass mark had to be dropped from 40 per cent to 30 per cent (except in the case of English), meaning that 8,379 students sat the examination, with 4,938 passing (59 per cent) and 249 (3 per cent) receiving exhibitions.22

At this juncture, therefore, it seems reasonable to ask the following question: to what extent was Mulcahy affected by the process of nationalist, maybe even republican, politicisation which, it is popularly believed, existed in the Brothers’ schools? Part of the answer to that question can be explained by the dual approach of the Brothers’ pedagogy, referred to above. On the one hand, Mulcahy’s distinguished intermediate certificate result made him more determined than heretofore to do well in life and, thereby, to take his place among a rising, self-confident and self-expressive Roman Catholic petit bourgeoisie. On the other hand, his spiritual training gave him an aura of gravitas and dignity, qualities which happened to meld harmoniously into emancipative patriotism, a further developing interest of his.

Another part of the answer, however, can be explained by the uniqueness of the Brothers’ textbooks, in that those publications ‘gave a much more Irish orientation to the content’, whereas the official texts (and the texts of religious orders, like the Presentation Brothers, who were affiliated to the National Board of Education) ‘were geared to the British cultural assimilation policy of the time’.23 Their Irish history books, in particular, portrayed events from the perspective that the majority of the Irish people and their Church suffered containment and neglect at the hands of perfidious Albion. Nonetheless, in offering a solution to that dilemma, more by presumption than by prescription, the books’ authors were careful not to wander into the domain of physical force republicanism. Instead, theirs was a message of national self-determination based upon ethno-cultural and moral persuasion, the uniqueness of the Irish language being the principal identifier here.24

And, in essence, in 1902, that was the message which Mulcahy and a small number of his classmates heeded when answering the call of an interested teacher to attend spoken Irish classes after school hours.25 An indication of the strength of that calling was the fact that, the year before, due to prolonged illness, he had been obliged to give up ‘troublesome’ grammatical Irish as one of his school subjects on account of performing very badly at it in his exams.26

In the meantime, as has just been mentioned, he underwent his apprenticeship at home. Then, six months later, having lately turned seventeen years of age, he formally commenced employment as a junior postal sorting clerk in Tralee.27 This work was badly paid, labour intensive, antiquated, monotonous, repetitive, hierarchical and regimental. For example, in the General Post Office (GPO) in Sackville [O’Connell] Street, Dublin in 1871, ‘Boys … did nothing but turn all the letters face up, stamps the one way, and pack them in oblong columns. Fourteen boys took these away and by means of a single stamp obliterated her Majesty’s face and impressed the circular date-mark.’28

In any event, after a few months, he was transferred to the telegraph section in Bantry post office.29 From the point of view of prestige, this was a good move because, in comparison to the job of sorting letters, the sending of cryptic messages by the electromagnetic, key tapping, Morse code system, then an almost global phenomenon, meant that a professional practitioner had to have a particular skill set, involving memory, concentration and dexterity: ‘The pace and continuity of attention in telegraph work in a large office is far greater than in any other Government Office. A telegraphist cannot pause at will in the middle of his work … and he constantly works in an atmosphere of high pressure.’30 Also, the telegraphist needed patience: ‘It [the key-tapping method] was very slow and admitted of frequent and serious errors.’31 And, because Bantry was a head office offering money order and savings bank facilities,32 there were the competitive interests of the business world to be aware of: ‘No cog in the wheel of industry fulfils a more vital function [because] … Transactions involving hundreds of thousands of pounds daily pass through the hands of the Telegraph Staff.’33 But, despite the relative sophistication of those demands, a telegraphist, similar to a sorting clerk with whom he was categorised, remained subject to the vagaries of shift work, divided duties, a half hour meal break and unscheduled overtime.34 This meant that ‘his social life is destroyed’.35

Little wonder then that Mulcahy made it his business to try to wriggle free once again. His escape was secured in 1907 when, having completed a correspondence course, he was promoted to the position of clerk in the engineering branch, Wexford.36 Finally, a year later, he was transferred, in the same capacity, to the sectional engineer’s office at Aldborough House, Portland Row, in the north-east of Dublin’s inner city.37

Therefore, the period, 1903–1908 shows Mulcahy – ambitious, speculative and industrious – making rapid progress in his career. But, more importantly perhaps, in terms of the man who would ultimately rise to prominence in the Irish freedom movement, he made progress in other areas as well. For instance, this was a time of exponential growth for the Gaelic League. Yet, due to the social aspect of the movement being so attractive, a lot of young people enrolled for less than noble reasons, with the result that linguistic standards suffered accordingly. (Besides, there was the complexity of the language itself, together with the advanced standard of the League’s teaching in a mixed-ability classroom environment.38)

Not so for Mulcahy, however; the moment he joined its classes in Bantry and Skibbereen, study was by far and away his primary consideration.39 Consequently, he became favourably known to teachers of the calibre of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, Conchubhar Ó Muimhneacháin and Éamonn Motherway.40 Ó hAnnracháin, in particular, was impressed by his tenacity – ‘He started speaking it [Irish] when he had only a small amount and he carried on until he mastered it. He was sincere from the start.’41 Similarly, his capacity for autonomous study42 came to the fore during his visits to the nearby Gaeltacht (a native Irish speaking area) of Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaigh. For example, in the house of Siobhán an tSagairt, a place he considered ‘his university’,43 he would write down verses and stories in order the better to commit them to memory.44

Still, at that time, he did not graduate into the more advanced section of the Irish–Ireland community. For example, he never participated in any of the protest campaigns of the Celtic Literary Society (CLS). There was an obvious reason for that: membership of Cork’s branch of the CLS,45 similar to the CLS’s main centres of activity in Dublin, London and Liverpool,46 came principally from within its own urban area, and its extramural organisational activities consisted of written fraternal communications with the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in the outlying towns. Nonetheless, whenever the opportunity arose during peer group discussions and conversations, Mulcahy was known to unapologetically stand up for his nationalist beliefs.47 Indeed, he would seem to have considered the championing of the philosophy of self-help and the ideology of national self-determination – arguments in favour of which were to be found in his then choice of political reading material, specifically The United Irishman, The Resurrection of Hungary and The Republic48 – to be as important a nationalist identifier as speaking the Irish language was, for example.

The United Irishman, a broadsheet, with the sub-title ‘A National Weekly Review’, sold for a penny and was published on Saturdays. It was founded in 1899 by Arthur Griffith after he returned from South Africa and, from the very outset, it struggled to survive: ‘Very few people – only one here and there – bought or read the “United Irishman”.’49 Even at its best, ironically just before a libel case forced its closure on 14 April 1906, its print run might have reached the relatively meagre figure of seven thousand copies per annum.50 (It depended for its survival upon the limited largesse of a few private donors who were strongly associated with the CLS.51) Hence, from a practical point of view, it was a difficult paper to get a hold of in any place outside its main Cumann na nGaedheal/Sinn Féin/CLS club outlets in Dublin and London especially. In that event, people forwarded second-hand copies to one another. For example, O’Donovan Rossa sent Liam de Róiste a copy from New York.52 And, having been first introduced to The United Irishman by his Thurles friend, Jim Kennedy,53 who was centre of the local Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (see Appendix 1), Mulcahy similarly received copies now and then from some of his work colleagues.54

Mulcahy was interested in The United Irishman because of Griffith’s political commentary, not because of the paper’s literary or historical pieces – ‘I had been reading the United Irishman from about 1903 … [and, as a result,] I was involved in Sinn Féin thought.’55 Propaganda was an obvious facet of Griffith’s discourse. For example, in 1903, in commenting upon the annual report of the inspector general of the British army, he praised Hungarian mothers for allegedly forbidding their sons to join the Austrian army, resulting in the army being so weakened as to be ‘unable to stand before either France or Prussia’.56 But, also, he could turn a baleful eye on what he called the ‘national character’: ‘The carelessness, thoughtlessness, lack of principle and general apathy in Ireland are often stunning.’ Likewise, he detested what he considered was mean-spirited capitalism. For example, he was vehemently opposed to William Martin Murphy’s proposal that an international rather than a national exhibition be staged in Dublin in 1905: ‘The French, German, and American manufacturers enjoy protection. The Irish don’t … and that is why we have advocated as Swift advocated, as the [eighteenth-century militia] Volunteers advocated, and as the Young Irelanders advocated … that … preference … be given in all cases by the Irish people to Irish products and Irish manufactures.’57

Nevertheless, by far the most important piece of political writing ever to appear in The United Irishman was Griffith’s series of twenty-seven articles, which he published during the period, 2 January–2 July 1904. Mulcahy made no claim to have read all of those. But later he did read them, indeed studied them – ‘Griffith was our great teacher … the interpreter of the past … the pointer out of our resources … our guide’58 – when they were published as a penny pamphlet (in reality, a book, it being ninety-nine pages in length) on 26 November 1904 under their full title, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland.59

In this seminal publication, which was instantly and broadly so popular that, within three weeks, a second print-run was ordered in order to keep up with the ‘profound’ demand,60 Griffith first drew the reader’s attention to the evolution of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich (compromise) of 186761 and then proceeded to select examples from Irish history which were capable of being linked to it. For instance, he chose Daniel O’Connell’s brief dalliance with the concept of ‘a council of 300’ (an entity which, by the way, never met) as worthy of mention in the context of Deák’s gradualist initiative, deducing therefrom that a similar body of local representatives could be established in Dublin in order to formulate policies and laws for the Irish people. Also, allegedly similar to the 1848 bloodless revolt in Buda and Pesth (sic), the 1782 initiative of Ulster’s ‘300 Irish Protestants representing the 200,000 armed defenders [alias Volunteers]’, whereby ‘the independence of their country must ever be maintained, and that the Catholics of Ireland were their brethren’, was cited.62

Mulcahy, because his Gaelic League Irish history lessons were both broad and deep, would have been aware that Griffith’s parable was deliberately selective and optimistic.63 Nonetheless, it was the moral of Griffith’s story, delivered in what P.S. O’Hegarty described as a ‘cool, aggressive, and logical appeal to intelligence’,64 which impressed him, as much as it did most other readers, so much so that, in later life, he was able to look back and be fully convinced that the effect which it had upon him was both harmonious and uplifting, ‘like a quiet blood transfusion’65 or, as he articulated more prosaically in another encomium, ‘everything he [Griffith] wrote about Ireland inspired and calmed us and steeled our wills at the same time’.66 In practical terms, this effectively meant that, from 1904–6, Mulcahy, unlike Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough for example, did not look askance at the prospect of a dual monarchy (what was soon referred to as ‘the kings, lords and commons’ compromise67) but instead was satisfied, certainly in the period 1904–6, to settle for ‘some kind of Home Rule’.68

Next, Mulcahy moved on to The Republic after The United Irishman. The Republic was a ten-page, neat little newspaper which, because of financial troubles,69 lasted a mere twenty-three weeks, 13 December 1906–16 May 1907. It was sold every Thursday at the conventional price of one penny and, similarly to The United Irishman, its general purpose was educational, reaching out to its home readership in Belfast as well as to the nationalist enclaves of Dublin, London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow.70 But, technically speaking, it was a much better communicator than The United Irishman, in that it was economical in both content and style. It rarely included reportage and cultural copy, though it did have a regular Irish language piece and it was written, for the most part, in a direct manner, with two clearly defined columns per page and with short paragraphing. Equally it utilised well delineated, cleverly exact and sarcastically humorous political cartoons, allegedly sketched by the Belfast artist Jack Morrow.71

Most importantly, however, and differently to The United Irishman, its particular purpose, representing Hobson’s and McCullough’s Dungannon Club, the name of which ‘revived the memory of the Irish Volunteer movement of 1782’72 (referred to above), was unapologetically republican: ‘We stand for the Irish Republic, because we see that no compromise with England, no repeal of the Union, no concession of Home Rule or Devolution will satisfy the national aspirations of the Irish people nor allow the unrestricted mental, moral and material development of the country.’ Moreover, it did not shy away from physical force: ‘a national movement, virile and militant … must be established’.73

It is a pity, therefore, that Mulcahy did not leave behind a record of his reaction to those republican theories as he did in his retrospective admiration for Griffith’s moderate nationalist rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that, whereas he did not join the Sinn Féin party until after the German Plot arrests of May 1918 and, in fact, did so in order to pursue a republican agenda, he joined the IRB in 1908, a year after The Republic went out of circulation. Therefore, it seems reasonable to argue that, in the short term, The Republic exerted at least as much of an influence on him as The United Irishman did.

That, then, was the republican mindset of the 22-year-old man who set off for Dublin in August 1908. To the casual observer he might have come across as an impecunious, lower middle-class type, someone who, with boyish features and a small slight frame, superficially exemplified little that was unique or distinguishable, other than being clean and neat perhaps. Plus, he was ‘afflicted with an immobilising shyness’.74 So, while he was determined to overcome that problem, the capital’s cramped physical and social conditions must have proved challenging for someone who cherished privacy and valued his own space. In 1911, for example, the inner city – a densely populated, yet vital elliptical-shaped area, delineated to the north and south by the Royal and Grand Canals – contained close on 240,000 inhabitants.75

Even so, Mulcahy, despite his shyness, was determined to get the best out of the place: ‘when I say that I was conditioned in 1908 to take full advantage of all the opportunities of Dublin, that refers to taking full part in the community of the Irish language movement, taking a full mind review of Irish conditions and Irish circumstances.’76 However, this is not to infer that he sampled the full nationalist fare of the city. After all, he was different to Seán O’Casey, Peadar Kearney, Earnán de Blaghd (Ernest Blythe) and Bulmer Hobson in that he was not interested in the theatre, not even the nationalist theatre of the Abbey, though in fairness not all Irish-Irelanders were pleased with the Abbey, as witnessed by the anger meted out the previous year to John Millington Synge’s faux Gaelic play, The Playboy of the Western World.77 Different too to Harry Boland, he was not attracted to sport, not even to the GAA. And, as has been stated already, unlike Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh and Patrick McCartan, for example, he was not then interested in joining Sinn Féin.

Therefore, notwithstanding his own determination to broaden his palette, his move to Dublin was more of a continuum than a fresh start, in that he fully intended to pursue the same interests, though more deeply. Once again, because self-improvement, with the purpose of moving himself further up the respectable middle-class ladder,78 was already an ambition of his, he availed of the capital’s applied educational courses. He attended evening classes in foreign languages, science and shorthand at the Technical College, Bolton Street,79 and he continued to hone his Irish language skills. For example, he belonged to the advanced class in the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League and he paid return visits to Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaigh, as well as staying in Rinn Ó gCuanach, Dungarvan, on a number of occasions.

However, of the two of these interests, his career and the language, he no doubt enjoyed and was most stimulated by the latter because, apart from anything else, as was intimated earlier, competence in it gave him a definite stature and respect within the young, enthusiastic, nationalist community he had his eye on:80 ‘He was very extreme in his support of things Irish … He talked Irish, wore Irish made suits and boots, and bought only Irish whenever he could. All his letters carried half-penny stamps only – postage that time was a penny and a half-penny. “If you buy only half-penny stamps,” he said, “the British post office has less profit.”’81

But ultimately the most important interest he would develop stemmed from his reading of The Republic and that was his enrolment in the IRB. Jim Kennedy again played an important part here. The pair met when Mulcahy made a brief visit home to Thurles before moving to Dublin. Their conversation turned to national affairs, after which Kennedy gave him the contact address for Mick Crowe, the former IRB divisional centre for Munster.82 Then, two days after arriving in the city, Mulcahy was initiated into the Brotherhood. However, seemingly because Crowe did not ask him to swear, he never actually took the pledge: ‘I never went through any process of oath taking other than whatever kind of process I went through when Crowe showed me the slip of paper out of his waistcoat pocket.’83

In any case, even though such casualness was not conducive to the proper workings of a revolutionary organisation, it was the pally, lenient methods of communication and procedure of the then semi-formal and semi-exclusive IRB which, along with his Irish–Irelandism and his determination to advance himself by acquiring as many of the socially acceptable conventional cues as possible, those being a full education, a prestigious job and financial security, which helped Mulcahy settle into life among the rural migrant community of the north inner city during the next few years, 1908–13.

In a sense, therefore, the other side of his life, viz. his irredentism, especially his physical force separatism, was theoretically at variance with the achievement of his bourgeois aspirations. But this was a contradiction which, at the time, he would seem to have been blissfully unaware of. However, the process of its resolution was soon at hand due to the politico–military domino effect which the issue of home rule would release upon the way of life of the entire island of Ireland.

The event which triggered that seemingly inexorable cascade of dominos occurred on 29 April 1909 when David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Herbert H. Asquith’s Liberal government, introduced his ‘People’s Budget’ to an astonished Commons. However, it was the landed members of the House of Lords who reacted with greatest alarm to his introduction of a supertax, land taxes and death duties. Their response was to scupper the measure by exercising a veto in the knowledge that a constitutional crisis would ensue but also in the confidence that the Conservatives would win the following test election. Their gamble backfired, however, when, after two attempts, the Liberals prevailed, having secured the backing of Labour and that of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), more significantly.84 The legislative end result of that titanic struggle was the Parliament Act of 18 August 1911, the main clause of which ensured that the House of Lords, if it was of a mind, could merely delay a bill’s passage through the Commons by two years, thereby seemingly guaranteeing that Asquith’s 1912 Home Rule Bill, the quid pro quo for the IPP’s support in getting the Parliament Act through in the first place, would become law in late 1914. Ulster’s Loyalists, being intelligently led, efficiently organised and well connected, reacted immediately by defiantly and illegally forming their own, quasi-nationalist defence militia, termed the Ulster Volunteers, a title which became the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) a year later, in January 1913.85

The first group of southern nationalists to respond in a practical way to those developments, at the behest of Bulmer Hobson and with the assistance of Seán MacDiarmada, was the Dublin centres board of the IRB:86 ‘every member would have to do a certain amount of drill, and arrangements were then made to make drill compulsory for all the young members’.87 Accordingly, within a week, in July 1912, secret drill practice took place in the hall at the back of the Irish National Foresters’88 premises at 41 Parnell Square under the guidance of Con Colbert and Seán Heuston, who were former Fianna Éireann boys.89 For his part Mulcahy felt invigorated by the training: ‘The drills … brought new life into the organisation.’90

Also, he might possibly have got wind of the tentative rise in militarism among some of the moderate nationalists associated with Sinn Féin during the spring and summer of 1913 because, five months later, on 20 January 1913, at the quarterly meeting of Sinn Féin’s national council, The O’Rahilly91 successfully proposed a resolution, seconded by Éamonn Ceannt, that it behoved all Irish men to acquire competence in the use of guns. More than that, Sinn Féin rented a shooting range in Harold’s Cross on Sunday mornings during the following summer months. But, most significantly of all, on 1 November 1913, O’Rahilly accepted for publication in An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light), i.e. the Gaelic League bilingual weekly newspaper, Eoin MacNeill’s famous call to arms, ‘The North Began’. This article, while not attracting a wide readership, was the very catalyst which advanced republicans had been waiting for. Hobson immediately contacted O’Rahilly. Both were agreed that MacNeill, who was founder, along with Douglas Hyde and Eugene O’Growney, of the Gaelic League in 1893 and a prestigious Gaelic scholar, was the ideal person to front the foundation of a volunteer army. They went to MacNeill and his response was so positive that, on the evening of 25 November 1913, the Irish Volunteers were launched at the Rotunda complex, Parnell Square.92

So, having spent the previous two years attending his IRB monthly meetings ‘in a spirit of patience and hope’ that the issue of Home Rule would work for the better of the country,93 and having of late received a welcome fillip from the introduction of basic military training into the IRB syllabus, Mulcahy very much welcomed the arrival of the Irish Volunteers onto the political scene. He categorised that movement as a ‘rallying point’.94 And he was more than satisfied ‘to “join [up] … and [then to] take your orders from your superior officers”.’95