Espionage and Assasination with Michael Collins' Intelligence Unit: With the Dublin Brigade Read Free Page B

not to be missed by Tom Clarke and the Brotherhood. If England would not interfere with Irishmen arming themselves to prevent the operation of a British Act of Parliament, it could not interfere with Irishmen who armed themselves ostensibly to defend it. A meeting was held in the largest hall in Dublin to enrol recruits for an Irish Volunteer Army in defence of the Home Rule Act.
    But to Tom Clarke and the Irish Republican Brotherhood it was the opportunity to bring their men out into the open and to drill and arm them for the next revolt. The meeting was crowded to overflowing. Thousands of young men were eager to be enrolled, and thousands more were recruited in the country. John Redmond took alarm and did the only thing left to him. He approached the Executive of the Volunteers and asked for representation upon it for his nominees. To avoid a split, this was granted, but the aims of the two sections were diametrically opposed, and this became apparent a few months later with the outbreak of the European War.
    To the IRB, the Volunteers were to make ‘England’s difficulty Ireland’s opportunity’ and to fight for Ireland against England at home. Redmond’s idea was that they should be used to hold Ireland for England against a possible invasion of England’s enemies; and when, without consulting the Executive Council, he pledged them for this purpose in the British House of Commons, and, from recruiting platforms in Ireland, appealed for recruits for the British Army in Flanders, cohesion was no longer possible. The Volunteers broke up into two sections – the Irish Volunteers controlled by the original Executive Council, and the National Volunteers controlled by John Redmond.
    Meanwhile, the English Parliament passed a suspensory Act to prevent the Home Rule Act from coming into force, and at a meeting of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood held in August 1914 it was decided that the war should not be allowed to end without a rising in arms. Lord Salisbury, after the Boer War, had taunted the Irish Parliamentary Party with the fact that he had been able to withdraw every British soldier fit for active service out of Ireland. The IRB decided that a similar boast should not be made in their day. They had no illusions about what the end of the revolt would be, but they believed that in suffering the extreme penalties which would follow, they would reawaken their countrymen to faith in the old cause of Irish freedom, which was being overlaid by the conciliatory policy of the Parliamentarians.
    On Easter Monday, 1916, Ireland rang with the news that the Volunteers had risen in Dublin. The Rising, during which Dublin was held for a week, was made by 687 men, including the soldiers of the Irish Citizen Army under James Connolly, a Republican Socialist.
    The Rising was not only a renewal of the age-long struggle for national liberation, but was a protest against the continued British occupation while England was professedly fighting a war in Europe to free small subject nationalities from the domination of the Central Powers. The advertisement given by the European War to the principle of self-determination did much to rouse and stimulate to action many in Ireland who might not otherwise have resorted to extreme measures, and determined them to draw attention to the fact that the principle was not being applied to one of the oldest nations in Europe. Among the 687 Irishmen who left their homes on that historic Easter Monday with little hope of ever returning to them, were men of education and high position whose names were known and respected by their countrymen.
    The surrender was followed by the execution of sixteen leaders, including Tom Clarke, aged seventy-four, and Seán MacDermott; sentences of death, commuted to penal servitude for life or long terms of years upon seventy-one other persons, including William Cosgrave, then Minister of Local Government and President of the