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The Easter Rising in GalwayAuthor(s): Fergus CampbellSource: History Ireland, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1916: 90th Anniversary Issue (Mar. - Apr., 2006), pp.22-25Published by: Wordwell Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27725423Accessed: 27/10/2010 08:55
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Most accounts of Easter 1916 focus on the Dublin rising and neglect the risings in other
parts of Ireland: north County Dublin, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, and south-east Galway.
Fergus Campbell examines the key events of the Easter Rising in Galway. Why did more
than 500 poorly armed small farmers and agricultural labourers make a stand against the
British state, and what was its significance to the broader history of the Rising?
THE EASTER RISING
IN GALWAY
As soon as the Great War broke out in August 1914, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), operating as a secret caucus
within the Irish Volunteers, began to plan a
rebellion against British rule in Ireland.
Operating on the old IRB maxim that 'England's difficulty is
Ireland's opportunity', they planned for a countrywide rebellion. The Germans agreed to supply 20,000 rifles;
organisers were sent throughout the country to radicalise
local nationalists and train them in arms; and conspirators met in Dublin and elsewhere to discuss military strategy and
political objectives.
As part of this initiative, Liam Mellows was sent to
organise the Irish Volunteers in County Galway in March
1915. Mellows was born in Lancashire in 1892 to Irish
parents, and was then reared in County Wexford. Later he
gained some military training and joined the IRB in Dublin.
Frank Hynes, captain of the Athenry branch of the Irish
Volunteers, recalled the arrival of Mellows in the town:
'We got word from Dublin that an officer was being sent down to organise and train the Volunteers in
County Galway... When he arrived I was introduced
to a little fellow with glasses. My impression of him
22 History IRELAND March/April 2006
GALWAY RISING
was that he may be a clever lad?he was about 22 years? but couldn't be much good at fighting. His name by the
way was Liam Mellows. He came in when the men were
lined up, six footers most of them. Liam addressed them, "Now men I was sent down to get you to do a bit of hard
work, so I want you to be prepared for a week of very hard work". I could see the faintest trace of a supercilious smile on some of the men. When he was finished talking
Larry [Lardner, the commanding officer of the Galway
brigade of the Irish Volunteers] and himself went off to
arrange about digs. Then the smiles broke out to
laughing. "Who is the ladeen," asked one fellow, "who
talks to us about hard work?"'
In time, however, Mellows won the support and respect of the
majority of the Irish Volunteers in Galway, and in 1966 a statue
of him was erected in Eyre Square in Galway city.
Class conflict
Mellows quickly organised the separatists in Galway and found
many recruits for the Irish Volunteers in a well-organised secret
society that had links to the Irish Republican Brotherhood
(IRB). An agrarian secret society had existed in Galway since
1907 and was largely responsible for the waves of land agitation that swept across the county during the first two decades of the
new century. However, this secret society was itself a revival of a secret society that had originated in the early 1880s, and
probably had roots in the secret society tradition of the early nineteenth century. There was enormous poverty throughout the west of Ireland at that time, with the majority of the
population surviving on a diet of potatoes and little else.
Indeed, most landholdings were too small and too poor in
quality to provide the small farmers who lived on them with a
reasonable standard of living. Consequently, there was
continued agitation by small farmers to implement land
redistribution in the region. In particular, smallholders agitated against farmers (known
as graziers) who occupied large farms on which they grazed cattle for export to the lucrative British market. Small farmers
believed that their living conditions could be improved by the
redistribution of this grazing land amongst the rural poor? small farmers and agricultural labourers?and the secret society
supported their struggle for a more just division of land.
Members of the Galway secret society?then under the
leadership of the Craughwell blacksmith Tom Kenny?flocked into the ranks of the Irish Volunteers and provided Mellows
with almost 2,000 supporters in the county on the eve of the
Rising. Kenny, who was 38 in 1916, was the IRB centre for
County Galway but was also an associate of leading republicans in Dublin (John MacBride, Sean MacDiarmuida and Arthur
Griffith, for instance), as well as president of the Connacht GAA
council.
'Surrender, boys, I know ye all'
The insurgents who assembled in Galway on Easter Monday 1916 undertook a number of separate attacks on the British
army and the police in the county. There were two unsuccessful
attacks on police barracks at Clarinbridge and Oranmore on
Tuesday. Another group of rebels, who had camped out at
Carnmore crossroads overnight on Tuesday, encountered a
British army patrol coming out of the city at dawn on
Wednesday morning. Michael Newell, one of the rebels at
Carnmore, remembers what happened:
Opposite page: Liam
Mellows?pictured here
(extreme right) with pro
and anti-Treaty
commanders on the eve of
the Civil War on 8 May 1922?was sent to organise
the Irish Volunteers in
County Galway in March
1915. (George Morrison)
Right: Tom Kenny of
Craughwell (top) and
Martin Finnerty of Gurteen
(bottom), the two most
prominent Fenians in the
county.
,.#
#'
T noticed a girl on a hill at Kiltullagh waving a white
apron, apparently in order to attract our attention ... I
looked to see what was wrong and saw a number of motor cars about half a mile away coming in our
direction from Galway City . . . Captain Molloy ordered us to take cover behind the walls. Just as we had taken
cover, fire was opened on us. The cars proceeded to
about one hundred yards from our position and then
halted. The enemy advanced on foot on our position,
firing all the time. Captain Molloy ordered us to open fire, which we did, but the enemy fire was so intense and
the bullets striking the top of the walls, we were
compelled to keep down, and we were only able to take an occasional shot. The enemy advanced up to the
crossroads and Constable Whelan was pushed by District
Inspector He[a]rd up to the wall which was about four
feet high, the district inspector standing behind Whelan
and holding him by the collar of his tunic.
Constable Whelan shouted, "Surrender, boys, I know
ye all". Whelan was shot dead and the district inspector fell also and lay motionless on the ground. The enemy then made an attempt to outflank our position but were
beaten back. The enemy then retreated and continued to
fire until well out of range of our shotguns. They got back into the cars and went in the direction of
Oranmore.'
After this incident all the rebels united at Athenry, where there were about 500 men (from Oranmore, Clarinbridge, Maree,
Athenry, Craughwell, Rockfield, Newcastle, Derrydonnell, Cussaun and Kilconieron) armed with just 25 rifles, 60
revolvers, 300 shotguns and 60 pikes. However, the rebel
position at Athenry was exposed and open to attack, and so the
rebels retreated to Moyode Castle and Limepark, to the south of
Athenry, both of which were deserted 'big houses'. Frank Hynes
explained the decision to decamp to Moyode:
'Anyone reading this account would be inclined to think
that we were acting in a rather cowardly manner... why
History IRELAND March/April 2006 23
... ....... ..... . . . ......4
..... ......K
did we keep retreating[?] ... The Volunteers who were
out in Galway numbered between five and six
hundred; we had about fifty full service rifles and about
thirty rounds for each rifle. The rest were old shotguns . .. and a good many [Volunteers]
. . . were not armed
at all . . . After the scrap with the peelers we called a
meeting and decided to retreat to a place called
Moyode. This was a castle which was owned by one of
the big landlords called Pers[s]e. It was about five miles from us. The argument in favour of Moyode was that
we could defend it at least until our ammunition would
be spent. The castle was in charge of a caretaker so there was no trouble in capturing it.'
In fact, the Galway rebellion (like that in Ireland more
generally) was undermined by two events. The first was the
capture of 20,000 German rifles en route to the insurgents. If
these arms had been distributed in Galway (and elsewhere
throughout Ireland) as had been planned, then a much more
extensive insurrection could have been attempted. The second was Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order, which cast rebel
forces into a state of confusion on the day before the rising was due to begin. Thus the vast majority of Irish Volunteers
did nothing during Easter week. Although many of the
Galway Volunteers did 'come out', they were insufficiently armed to take on the military forces that gathered around
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them. In fact, marines began to encircle the rebel position at
Limepark on the Friday, and HMS Gloucester in Galway Bay had been shelling the fields around Athenry from Tuesday onwards. Ultimately the Galway rebels were forced to bow to
the inevitable. On Saturday 29 April, five days after the Galway rising
began, the rebels returned to their homes, while Mellows and the other leaders went on the run. Mellows escaped to New
York, Lawrence Lardner went into hiding in Belfast, and Tom
Kenny travelled to Boston, where he remained until 1923. Most of the rebels were arrested the following week and
imprisoned in English and Scottish jails before being transported to Frongoch in south Wales, where the rank-and
file were detained until August. The more prominent rebels were finally released at Christmas 1916.
'I was looking for the freedom of my country as any decent man would do in an unfree country' In terms of their social composition, the Galway rebels were
young Catholic men from small farm, labouring and artisan
backgrounds. Some of them were Irish-speakers and members
of the Gaelic League; most of them were hurlers and members
of their local GAA clubs. Almost all of them were members of
the Galway secret society who had been sworn into the IRB by the two most prominent Fenians in the county, Martin
Finnerty of Gurteen and Tom Kenny of Craughwell. The
Galway insurgents had not?in most cases?benefited from
the various land acts passed by the British government, and
probably held firm to the belief that the land question could
only be solved by an independent Irish republic. It was for this reason that they staged an insurrection against both the
British state in Ireland and the landlords who owned the
thousands of acres of grazing land that surrounded their
smallholdings. In their responses to the questions put to them
by the Royal Commission on the Rebellion, the insurgents
generally explained their motivation in nationalistic terms.
When asked if he knew what he was doing when he joined the
Galway rebellion, Michael Kelly of Clarinbridge 'answered that I did, and [said] that I was looking for the freedom of my
country as any decent man would do in an unfree country'.
History IRELAND March/April 2006
However, the rebels' concept of 'freedom' encompassed
economic as well as political liberty, and the two struggles against the British state and the landlord class were viewed as one and the same. Gilbert Morrissey of Craughwell explained that the aim of the secret society was
'. . . to keep the spark of nationality alive in us until the opportunity came. This was not so difficult in
County Galway because, in a sense, arms were never
put away. If the people were not fighting against the British forces proper, they were making a fair stand
against its henchmen, the tyrant landlord class, their
agents and bailiffs, who were backed up and protected by the Royal Irish Constabulary.'
There was, however, some division among the leadership of the Galway rising. Liam Mellows identified the rising
primarily as an insurrection against British rule in Ireland, but the local leaders of the secret society viewed the insurrection as a broader agitation in favour of land redistribution. The conflict within the leadership was primarily between Mellows and Tom Kenny, the leader of the Galway secret society. Kenny was an extraordinary figure who was so influential in
south-east Galway that the police described him as a 'local monarch'. He envisaged a radical transformation of Irish
society and the creation of a more egalitarian Ireland that was
fairer to small farmers and labourers. During the rising, Kenny tried to push Mellows in a more radical direction by proposing that the rebels seize cattle and land as well as
attacking the police and army. This conflict came to a head at
Moyode Castle on Thursday when the two men discussed the future direction of the insurrection. In the event, Mellows
rejected Kenny's suggestions that the rebels should seize land and attack the bourgeois members of the home rule
movement in the locality. Kenny was infuriated and later characterised Mellows as a coward and an inept political leader, writing in 1917: 'Fair-headed Bill, you are good for
nothing only drinking tea at Walshes of Killeeneen'. The
Galway rising, despite Kenny's best efforts, remained on a
straightforward nationalist footing.
'We could not have held it'
The Galway rising demonstrates that if arms had been
successfully distributed throughout Ireland a countrywide insurrection would have been a distinct possibility. The
county inspector for west Galway explained that if MacNeill had not issued his countermanding order the rebels would have taken control of the entire county:
'It is pretty plain now [May 1916] that the rebellion was precipitated and if it had been deferred until later when all was ready it would not have been confined to the districts of Galway and Gort but would have embraced the whole county and we could not have held it.'
If a full-scale provincial insurrection had been staged, then the Easter Rising could have constituted an extremely serious
military outbreak, given that there were about 15,000 Irish Volunteers in the country before the Rising and about the same number of British soldiers and police (RIC). Certainly, this was the view of the RIC's inspector-general, writing in
May 1916:
Opposite page: Athenry (top)? about 500 rebels gathered there
at the outbreak of the Rising but
owing to its exposed position
soon retreated to Moyode
Castle (bottom). Above: H MS Gloucester in
Galway Bay had been shelling the fields surrounding Athen ry
from Tuesday onwards.
Right: Sir Roger Casement (bare
headed) on board the German
submarine U19?'That the Sinn
F?in insurrection was so quickly
put down ... must be ascribed
to the fortunate arrest of Sir R.
Casement and the failure of the
German ship to land the
required arms and ammunition'.
(George Morrison)
'That the Sinn F?in insurrection was so quickly put down and that it was confined to so few districts outside the
metropolitan area, must be ascribed to the fortunate arrest
of Sir R. Casement and the failure of the German ship to
land the required arms and ammunition. There is no reason whatever to believe that if these arrangements had not miscarried the Irish Volunteers in any county would have held back. In fact the evidence is all the other way.'
Secondly, the Galway rising?like that at Ashbourne and
Enniscorthy?demonstrates that the Easter Rising was not a
'blood sacrifice'. If all that was intended by the leaders of the
Rising was a gesture to provoke British violence and therefore Irish republicanism (as some historians have suggested), it is
unclear why 20,000 German rifles were imported and why arrangements were made for an insurrection throughout the
provinces. The rationale for the Rising may have been poorly worked out and even foolhardy, but the intention at the outset was military victory and not glorious suicide. x
Fergus Campbell lectures in British and Irish history at the School of Historical Studies, University ofNewcastle-upon-Tyne.
Further reading:
F. Campbell, Land and revolution: nationalist politics in the west of Ireland, 1891-1921 (Oxford, 2005).
M. Dolan, 'Galway in 1916', Connacht Tribune, 2, 9, 16 and 23
April 1966. C. D. Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (2nd edn,
London, 1987).
History IRELAND March/April 2006 25
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