Mags GarganMags Gargan describes how this newspaper reported on the Rising in the weeks after the insurgency
Easter week 1916 was one of the rare occasions that The Irish Catholic did not go to print. Located at offices in Middle Abbey Street, at the heart of the violence in Dublin, some members of staff became trapped by flames and gunfire and one man was killed by bullets flying through a staircase window.
While the 1916 Rising is now seen as a pivotal step in Ireland’s path to independence and its leaders considered national heroes, in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, when Dublin city centre was reduced to rubble, there was much hostility towards the defeated insurgents.
Seen through the eyes of a Catholic newspaper, which had supported the Home Rule political campaign and was now surrounded by death and destruction, it is perhaps understandable that the paper took a hard line against the Rising.
First issue
The first issue published by The Irish Catholic after the week of fighting covered the dates of April 29-May 6, 1916. Writing “while the echoes of musketry were yet ringing in the air and the fate of the paper was still in doubt”, an editorial on the rebellion did not hold back on making the paper’s views on the Rising and its leaders abundantly clear.
“The movement which had culminated in deeds of unparalleled bloodshed and destruction of property in the capital of Ireland was as criminal as it was insane,” the paper stated. “Only idiots or lunatics can ever have supposed that it could prove successful. Traitorous and treacherous as it undoubtedly was, it was most of all traitorous and treacherous to our native land.”
The paper went on to call on parliamentary representatives and leading citizens “to unite in pressing on the responsible authorities the imperative importance of adopting measures – financial and otherwise – for the removal of the difficulties which now confront many of our people”.
“Cruel and enormous losses have been inflicted on numerous law-abiding citizens, and it seems to us that – in face of this regrettable fact – it is the bounden duty of the government to make known their readiness to at once provide the credit or the funds required to mitigate the disastrous effects of an intolerable outrage, not only against the law but against all the principles of common sense and the primary instincts of loyalty to Ireland.”
The paper did not report on the death of a member of staff until the next issue of May 13 under the heading ‘Hemmed in by bullets and fire’. In what seems like a hierarchical or a class-based attitude to what happened at the offices of The Irish Catholic, the report outlined the “most trying experience” of two unfortunate production staff trapped in the building before mentioning the caretaker who was shot.
“Though the premises in which the offices of The Irish Catholic are situated are in the very heart of the zone most devastated by fire and by the hail of bullets that swept the locality, the material injury done to them was happily light – only a few windows being broken – though the house was the scene of the lamentable tragedy described lower down,” begins the report.
“Two members of staff, Messrs Kavanagh and Green, had a most trying experience, being held up in the offices for three days while the fighting was at its height. They came to business on Thursday morning (27th) but finding no signs of work being resumed, were about to depart in the late afternoon when they were driven indoors by a hail of shrapnel and bullets.
“The place was between two fires and insurgent snipers in houses in the vicinity added a third danger. When released by the military on Saturday night, the pair had not partaken of any food for a day and a half.
“On Friday a new horror commenced, in the danger of the fire which was raging in the houses round, including the dwelling in which they had taken refuge. The only other occupant of the premises was the caretaker, Mr Watson, aged about 60, who on Friday evening lost his life in terribly tragic circumstances. He was going from a top room to the basement when a bullet penetrated a back window of the staircase and killed him instantly.
“It appears that Mr Madden, a painter who occupied the adjoining home, had gone on to his roof to gauge the possibility of the fire reaching them when he was ‘potted’ by a sniper, being wounded in the head.
“This drew further fire and the bullet that ended Mr Watson’s life. Mssrs Kavanagh and Green were unable to reach their homes until Sunday morning, April 30.”
In the same issue under the heading “Dublin’s heroic priests” The Irish Catholic paid tribute to “the splendid gallantry and incessant labours of our Dublin priests, secular and regular, during the continuance of the Easter Monday rebellion”.
In an editorial proclaiming “Hats off to the priests of Dublin!” it stated that in every locality in which fighting occurred, priests were busy in “consoling families in anguish as to the fate of loved ones wounded or missing, in aiding in providing for the poorer residents of the respective districts whom circumstances had deprived of the necessities of life”.
The paper said “something akin is also to be reported of the sisterhoods of the convents in or adjacent to the perturbed areas” and it also applauded the “splendid work” done by the city’s hospitals and the “fortitude and tenacity” of the staff. “Nuns, doctors and nurses literally forgot all concerns for themselves in their anxiety to yield to every possible succour to the wounded.”
The priests of the pro-cathedral had to deal with the worst ravages of “flame and artillery destruction”. Fr O’Reilly CC risked his life walking through streets “raked with fire” to attend the wounded and dying, and the cathedral had to deal with a large “body of refugees who sought shelter from burning buildings and shell and rifle fire”.
The ministrations of the Capuchin community in Church Street brought them “continually in the line of fire from one side or the other”. “Thursday and Friday nights brought scenes of deadly conflict in their vicinity. The military were slowly but surely closing their cordon on the insurgents in Church St. and an armoured motor-car was careering about and spitting fire at some of the insurgent positions.”
The paper said the fate of the monastery would have been uncertain if the resistance had held out much longer and the bullets that were “ringing about the place” nearly killed the father provincial, when some came crashing through his window.
The priests of Westland Row and Haddington Road areas and the Carmelites of Whitefriar’s Street were also praised for their efforts to attend the wounded and administer last rites under “heavy fire”.
The 1916 rebel leaders, however, were treated with ridicule and scorn by the paper. In a short report in the May 13 issue, the paper stated “all the signatories of the document proclaiming the Sinn Féin Republic have been executed”, with the exception of James Connolly. Patrick Pearse was described as a “nominal barrister”, founder of a failed school and a “man of ill-balanced mind, if not actually insane”, and said that electing him as leader called the sanity of the others into question.
The report states that a large number of “unfortunate dupes of the plotters of a monstrous outbreak” were sentenced to imprisonment and many hundreds of prisoners were sent to England.
The “notorious Roger Casement” was a prisoner in the Tower of London after attempting to land arms off the coast of Kerry.
The paper reported that the “dangerous mountebank” would be charged with high treason and went into some detail on claims that Casement had been campaigning for a German overthrow of England. The paper followed his trial closely in later issues and reported on his execution in the issue of October 12, 1916.
Countess Markievicz, whose death sentence was “commuted to penal servitude for life”, was described as an “extreme Sinn Feiner” who led the mob cheers for strike leader Jim Larkin in 1913 after his arrest during the “Larkinite troubles”, and a raid at her house had found “a printing press and type used for printing pro-German literature”.
In an editorial on the Rising the paper said recriminations were not “statesmanlike” and “to us it seems sufficient to survey the admitted facts”, while placing the blame for the “abortive rebellion” on members of Sinn Féin “acting under German inspiration”.
However, Dublin Castle officials and the Act of Union were also targeted, with the paper saying the rebellion would not have happened if the “administration of our national concerns had been in the hands of Irishmen”.
It said that the one “satisfactory circumstance” connected to the Rising was that the “overwhelming majority of our citizens and fellow countrymen had absolutely no sympathy with the Sinn Féin conspiracy and its German paymasters”.
The editorial described the Rising as an “outrage against all democratic and national principles” and expressed a fear that if the rebellion had succeeded Ireland would have been reduced to some kind of military dictatorship where the conspirators would have control of the ballot boxes.
The Irish Catholic called for immediate government action to help the loyal citizens who had suffered as a result of the rebellion, and expressed a hope that it would discriminate between the authors of the “abominable and irreligious movement” and the “fools who were their dupes and instruments”.
It claimed that many people had been ignorant of the purpose of taking up arms, thinking it was for one of the parades that a “fatuous Castle administration” had permitted to “become a usual spectacle on the streets of our city”. “A single charge of cavalry and the arrest of a few of the prominent conspirators a couple of weeks before would have saved Dublin from the enormous loss and ruin we all deplore today.”
In the following May 20 issue, the paper reported that Prime Minister Asquith met with prisoners arrested in the rebellion during his brief visit to Dublin.
No details of the visit were available but The Irish Catholic expressed the hope that Mr Asquith could not fail to recognise the real intentions of those he interviewed and justice should prevail for the innocent who were interned at home and in England.
The paper stated that many innocent people were rounded up for merely being at one time enrolled in Sinn Féin and that “little as we approve of the rebellion, we are not going to remain silent when unoffending fellow citizens are killed in cold blood and the responsible local military chiefs take no adequate steps to secure investigation”.
In the same issue the paper reported that a “very impressive appeal for clemency” for the rebels in Co. Wexford, particularly in Enniscorthy, had been made by the residents of the town, where there had been no loss of life and those taking part were “very young, many of them boys”.
In an editorial the paper said “whatever may be the defects and defaults of the established system of government in Ireland – and we are certainly among the least likely to be found contending that it is irreproachable – it seems to us that the idea that it should exist only at the mercy of any group of conspirators who may take it into their heads to seek its violent overthrow – by means of arms and money supplied by alien enemies of the Empire – is a theory inherently monstrous”.
Rebels
The paper felt that the small group of rebels should not have claimed to speak for the people of Ireland or, without any political experience, attempted to seize control of the country.
“The liberty, property and prosperity of every citizen, however humble, would have been at the mercy of a group of self-appointed dictators, destitute of even a shadow of a claim to the confidence of the nation.” The Irish Catholic also did not shrink from criticising the authorities, saying that Lord Aberdeen “reduced the Viceregal office to a level beneath contempt” and the chief secretary “practically abandoned his duties in this country”.
The Irish Catholic was a stanch supporter of Home Rule and believed the rebellion proved that the government created by the Act of Union did not work.
It said Ireland still demanded native government because “she believes that she yet possess men honest and conscientious enough to really rule – men who will not pander to every manifestation of popular ignorance or prejudice, and who will prefer the peace, security and liberty of all classes of our people to the gaining of personal advancement by winning the fleeting favour of an ill-informed proletariat.
“We need say no more, but to say less would be traitorism to the highest and holiest interests of Ireland. The lesson written on the ruined walls of our city is one which everyone who is not a fool can easily read.”
IC caretaker represents many anonymous victims
Peter Costello
William Watson, a painter and part-time caretaker for The Irish Catholic, is representative of the many anonymous victims of the Easter Rising in the way in which he died and was buried.
The Irish Catholic in those days published on a Saturday. Though none of the editorial staff made it through the barricades thrown up by the military to make up the paper that week, two of the production staff arrived in the offices on Thursday, April 27. Once inside No. 55 Middle Abbey Street, they found they could not get out.
The next day, April 28, to see how the fires raging to the south were encroaching on the building, Mr Denis Madden (63) who lived in No. 54, a house painter, got up on his roof. He attracted the fire of snipers and was shot dead. He left a wife, daughter and a son of 27 with learning difficulties.
In The Irish Catholic office William Watson had also gone up on the roof and was making his way down stairs to the basement when he was shot dead by a sniper through a back window. A bullet passed through his heart killing him at once.
William Watson, then nearly 60, had been born in Queen’s County (now Laois). He was married to a Dublin woman, and they had two sons, Francis (born about 1889) and William (born about 1892). In 1916 the Watsons and their son William (who was working in an office) lived in Swift’s Row (just behind the office building – the houses were mostly tenements). Francis, a painter, lived in Marlborough Street.
Mr Watson’s body was taken to Jervis Street Infirmary two streets away. There a doctor pronounced him dead, and a death certificate was issued to his wife, who had come over from Swift’s Row to be present.
Dead and wounded
The hospital was receiving dead and wounded from all over that quarter of the city. The mortuary was quickly filled. Mr Watson’s remains were removed (perhaps under cover of night) to Glasnevin Cemetery.
He was buried there in a hurried way on May 2. He is in a single unmarked grave in a common plot in the St Paul’s Section (on the other side of the Finglas Road).
That day he was but one of 68 people buried in Glasnevin. Their families were not, it seems, present.
As Mr Madden’s religious persuasion was unknown to the cemetery authorities, he was buried with a brief Catholic religious ceremony, as the authorities assumed the casualties would be largely Catholic. A priest was on hand over the week to do this. There are plans for a memorial with all the names on it to be raised sometime next year.
During the insurrection 485 people died, 54% of these were civilians, men, women and children, mostly from gunshot wounds. Details are still lacking about many of them. They in some ways are the real victims of the Rising.
William Watson’s death was at least registered by his wife later in May. That of Mr Madden next door was never registered.
Later death certificates were issued for the executed leaders, but their deaths were not registered until 2000, at the behest of Bertie Ahearn, making early preparations for the 1916 celebrations.
If that seems odd, odder still is the fact that Michael Collins’ death has still not been registered.