Liam Mellows: Soldier of the Irish Republic ~ Selected Writings, 1914–1924

LIAM

MELLOWS

Dr Conor McNamara has written extensively about the history of the Irish revolution and rural society. He was previously a winner of the National Library of Ireland, History Fellowship (2009) and was awarded the 1916 Scholar in Residence at NUI Galway (2015–17). He was a Moore Institute, NUI Galway, Visiting Fellow (2017) and this is his fifth publication.

LIAM

MELLOWS

Soldier of the Irish Republic

SELECTED WRITINGS

1914–1922

Conor McNamara

First published in 2019 by

Irish Academic Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.iap.ie

© Conor McNamara, 2019

9781788550789 (Paper)

9781788550796 (Kindle)

9781788550802 (Epub)

9781788550819 (PDF)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro 11/14 pt

Cover front: Liam Mellows portrait taken in the United States, circa 1919 (National Library of Ireland, NPA LME); Irish Republican leaders, NYC (1919): Harry Boland, Liam Mellows, Éamon de Valera, Patrick McCartan and Diarmuid Lynch standing, John Devoy seated (National Library of Ireland, NPA RPH6); Howth Gun Running, 1914 (National Library of Ireland); Four Courts bombardment (National Library of Ireland).

Cover back: Irish Volunteers, US postcard (National Library of Ireland).

Contents

Index of Writings

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Behold the Mysteries of Faith: Liam Mellows, A Life in Search of the Heroic

Chapter 2. ‘Real live, earnest Irish rebel boys’, History of Na Fianna Éireann (1917)

Chapter 3. Re-imagining Insurrection, ‘The True Story of the Galway Insurrection’ (1917)

Chapter 4. ‘A cause that is as great as that of any race’, American Speeches, 1917–20

Chapter 5. ‘I have not fought for that Treaty’, Dáil Éireann Contributions, 1921–2

Chapter 6. ‘The Irish Republic is the People’s Republic’, Civil War Writings, 1922

Chapter 7. ‘I don’t care about myself. Work on and hope on’, Letters, 1917–22

Chapter 8. ‘I die for the truth. Life is only for a little while’, Final Letters, 1922

Epilogue: The Battle for the Soul of Liam Mellows

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Index

Index of Writings

Chapter 2. ‘Real live, earnest Irish rebel boys’, History of Na Fianna Éireann (1917)

1. The History of the Irish Boy Scouts (1917)

Chapter 3. Re-imagining Insurrection, ‘The True Story of the Galway Insurrection’ (1917)

1. The True Story of the Galway Insurrection (1917)

Chapter 4. ‘A cause that is as great as that of any race’, American Speeches, 1917–20

1. ‘This country remains under a stigma’, Hibernian Hall, Roxbury, Boston, 1 April 1918

2. ‘A cause that is as great as that of any race’, Washburn Theatre, Chester, Pennsylvania, 23 April 1918

3. ‘Let America speak now on behalf of Ireland’, Irish Race Convention, Central Opera House, New York, 18–19 May 1918

4. ‘Irish people have left in them some remnants of a soul’, Central Opera House, New York, 29 June 1918

5. ‘The greatest moral cowards on earth’, Madison Square Garden, New York, 21 September 1918

6. ‘There is still autocracy to reckon with’, Maennerchor Hall, New York, 19 November 1918

7. ‘Never in the whole history of Ireland has there been such a time’, Central Opera House, New York, 5 January 1919

Chapter 5. ‘I have not fought for that Treaty’, Dáil Éireann Contributions, 1921–2

1. ‘I have not fought for that Treaty’, Dáil Éireann, 17 December 1921

2. ‘We do not want peace with dishonour’, Dáil Éireann, 4 January 1922

Chapter 6. ‘The Irish Republic is the People’s Republic’, Civil War Writings, 1922

1. ‘We will continue the struggle’, Bodenstown, Co. Kildare, 20 June 1922

2. ‘The Irish Republic is the People’s Republic’, Workers’ Republic, 22 July 1922

3. ‘The stake in the country people were never with the Republic’, Mountjoy Jail, 26 August 1922

4. ‘The necessity of getting the Provisional Republican Government established’, Mountjoy Jail, 29 August 1922

5. ‘Where is the government of the Republic?’, Mountjoy Jail, 11 September 1922

Chapter 7. ‘I don’t care about myself. Work on and hope on’, Letters, 1917–22

Letters from the United States, 1917–20

1. ‘Cant, hypocrisy and big talk’, to Barney Mellows, 4 November 1917

2. ‘I am a citizen of the Irish Republic’, to NYC Draft Board, 9 January 1918

3. ‘I have failed lamentably’, to Miss Herbert, New Jersey, 10 February 1919

4. ‘The Cause comes first’, to Patrick McCartan, 28 February 1920

5. ‘Content to remain a slave?’, to the Jordan Family, Co. Wexford, 19 March 1920

Letters to the Irish-American Press, 1917

1. ‘I am no informer’, Gaelic American, 10 November 1917

2. ‘A new Irish plot’, Gaelic American, 10 November 1917

3. ‘To fight for unconquered Ireland is a sin’, Gaelic American, 17 November 1917

Letters to the Hearn Family, Westfield, Massachusetts, 1917–20

1. ‘Principle and liberty are more than the breath of life’, 28 May 1917

2. ‘Ireland’s time is God’s time’, 19 July 1917

3. ‘To eat their hearts out in exile’, 24 January 1919

4. ‘Thoroughly exhausted’, 25 March 1919

5. ‘The old man can never be the same to me’, 9 March 1920

6. ‘Hoping against hope’, 1 September 1920

Chapter 8. ‘I die for the truth. Life is only for a little while’, Final Letters, 1922

1. Last Letter to the Hearn Family, Massachusetts, 8 December 1922

2. Last Letter to ‘My Dear Comrades in Mountjoy’, 8 December 1922

3. Last Letter to ‘My Dearest Mother’, 8 December 1922

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the professional support of the staff at a number of libraries and institutions in Ireland and the United States: the Dublin City Library, Irish Studies Section, at Pearse Street; Tamiment Library, New York University; the New York Public Library; the National Library of Ireland; and University College Dublin Archives. The digitised archives at the Bureau of Military History, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin, and Villanova University have been invaluable.

At Irish Academic Press, Conor Graham and Fiona Dunne are exceptionally supportive and a pleasure to work with. I am indebted to friends and fellow historians, Brian Hanley, John Cunningham, Tony Varley and Martin O’Donoghue for sharing their knowledge of Irish republicanism. My thanks to Luke Callinan for his help with translation. For his unstinting support, I will always be very grateful to my friend, Lorcan Collins. I am very thankful to Seona MacReamoinn, Alessandra Nania and everyone at the University of Minnesota, Dublin Programme, for their friendship and support. Marie Mannion, heritage officer at Galway County Council, continues to show what local authorities can achieve in regard to public history. Mary Harris and Dan Carey at NUI Galway have been most supportive over the last number of years. To my parents and to the extended Meagher family, New York, I am most thankful. I am grateful to my wife, Meredith, for putting up with all of this.

Conor McNamara

Athenry, Co. Galway

April 2019

CHAPTER 1

Behold the Mysteries of Faith: Liam Mellows, A Life in Search of the Heroic

On a wet afternoon in October 1924, the body of Liam Mellows reposed alongside ten of his republican comrades in the Carmelite Church, Whitefriar Street, in Dublin’s south-inner city. ¹ He would shortly depart on his final journey to be laid to rest among the Jordans, his mother’s people in Castletown, Co. Wexford. Mellows would have appreciated the choice of location as the Carmelite Priory in New York had been his refuge during four years of turmoil while exiled in the United States. ² Over the previous days, with no advance notice, the bodies of the seventy-seven republicans executed by the Free State in 1922–3 were exhumed and handed over to their families to be laid to rest among those who loved them, the defeated of the Irish Civil War. ³

Following Mass, the hearses formed up in front of the church while throngs of onlookers crammed the surrounding streets; similar scenes were being enacted in towns and villages across Ireland. A republican guard of honour flanked the coffins, followed by small groups of relatives, clergy and sympathisers. At 2.45 p.m. the motorcade began its silent procession through the rain-drenched streets and north to Glasnevin Cemetery, the scale of the crowds forcing the authorities to close the city to traffic.⁴ The hearse carrying Mellows’ remains broke off early from the procession and made its way through the south of the city and on towards the Wexford countryside. Countess Markievicz would later deliver the graveside eulogy while the National Army surrounded the mourners to prevent a final salute by the Irish Republican Army to their fallen commander.

Liam Mellows was a central figure in the republican movement in both Ireland and the United States from his first involvement with the Fianna Éireann republican boy scouts in 1911, until his execution at the height of the Civil War in December 1922. A full-time organiser for the Fianna, a movement that was to provide a coterie of officers for the republican movement, he championed the concept of national salvation through an insurrection of the young. A member of the first executive of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913, he was appointed a national organiser and was at the forefront of the organisation’s preparations for the 1916 Rebellion. Dispatched to Galway in October 1914, he was to lead over 500 Volunteers in the doomed Galway Rising, where he commanded an army bereft of desperately needed rifles from the ill-fated German steamship, the Aud. It was the first bitter disappointment among a litany of personal disasters that was to follow.

In the aftermath of the rebellion, Mellows spent four years as a representative of the Irish Volunteers in New York where he was tasked with helping secure money, arms and political support for revolution in Ireland. Styled ‘Commandant Mellows’, his time in the United States was unhappy and he suffered emotionally, confined to his bed and malnourished at one point; jailed in the infamous Tombs Prison while his comrades in Clan na Gael dithered over his bail; vilified and shunned by the American Fenians, and worst of all, labelled an informer in 1917 by no less than the Mayor of New York, John P. Mitchel, grandson of the famed nineteenth-century revolutionary and Young Ireland leader, John Mitchel.

Upon his return to Ireland in November 1920, Mellows became a member of the GHQ of the Irish Volunteers and was responsible for the procurement of arms during the War of Independence. The role entailed dangerous liaisons with European arms dealers and supporters in Britain. Distrustful of Michael Collins, who he felt was undermining him, the position demanded absolute secrecy and his activities during this period remain shrouded in mystery. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence, Mellows was one of the most influential opponents of the agreement. His role in occupying the Four Courts with the anti-Treaty IRA leadership in April 1922 was central to the events that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. Captured in the bombardment of the building in June, his execution in December, alongside Richard Barrett, Joseph McKelvey and Rory O’Connor in Mountjoy Jail, in retaliation for an attack on two pro-Treaty members of Parliament in which TD Sean Hales was killed, was among the most divisive acts of the new state. During the decades that followed the disastrous Civil War, Mellows and his comrades in the Four Courts Executive of the IRA were frequently singled out for blame for their role in instigating the conflict.⁵

Elected a member of Parliament for two constituencies in the 1918 general election, and again for Galway in the uncontested election of May 1921, Mellows never pretended to be a politician; he loathed politics and, above all else, espoused physical force as the engine of the Irish revolution.⁶ Like his idol, Patrick Pearse, Mellows was unmarried, puritanical in habits and ruminated profoundly over his own actions, putting the cause of the republic before all else. While he was a senior figure among the revolutionary elite, he remained an outsider within the coterie of leading militants. A gifted but reluctant public speaker, he published his writings anonymously, heaping credit upon his subordinates while privately suffering profound self-doubt.

Beginnings and Reinvention

Born in Hartshead Military Barracks in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1892, to Sergeant William Mellows of Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and his wife Sarah Jordan of Monalug, Co. Wexford, Liam Mellows’ life was a triumph of reinvention. Christened William Joseph, after both his father and grandfather, and known as Willie to his family, he adopted the Irish version of his Christian name in adolescence. Liam’s father, William, attested at the Curragh Camp with the 20th Regiment of Foot in 1871, spending thirty-two years in the army, seven of which he served overseas.⁷ William was also born in a military barracks, when Liam’s grandfather was serving overseas in Gonda, India, and it was his father’s hope that Liam would be the third generation of the family to serve in the British military.

The origins of the Mellows family are unclear and it is probable they were descended from Protestant English stock. The Mellows name originates in Nottinghamshire and at the turn of the twentieth century there were just two families with the surname in Ireland.⁸ In 1901, William, Sarah and their four children, Jane, Liam, Frederick and Herbert, were living in Cork City where William was stationed.⁹ Their eldest daughter Jane, aged fourteen, was considerably older than Liam, aged eight; with younger brothers, Herbert and Frederick, aged five and six respectively. Over the preceding years, the family had lived a transient existence as their father was transferred from Fermoy to Manchester and Glasgow. A sickly child, Liam was sent to stay for long periods with his maternal grandparents in North Wexford. His schooling was interrupted by the family’s constant uprooting and his formative education was gained at British military schools attached to Wellington Barracks, Cork, Portobello Barracks, Dublin, and the Royal Hibernian Military School, Dublin. By 1911, the family had moved again, this time to Fairview, a respectable northern suburb of Dublin.¹⁰ Aged eighteen, Liam had already turned his back on his father’s military aspirations, however, and rather than apply for a commission, he found work as a book-keeper, with his brother Fred, then aged sixteen, employed as a clerical worker.¹¹

The two Mellows brothers, William and Herbert, reinvented themselves as Liam and Barney, republican revolutionaries, in adolescence through their involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fianna Éireann boy scouts. Despite the boys’ political conversion, there is no evidence of rancour within the family and the walls of their final family home on Mount Shannon Road in the south of the city were bedecked in photographs of their father’s and grandfather’s military adventures. Wexford republican Robert Brennan recalled a place of warmth, ‘we often stayed at the Mellows home in Dublin and, I must say, if ever there was ever a happy family, it was the Mellows in those days’.¹²

Tragedy struck the family in 1906 with the death of eldest daughter Jane from tuberculosis, compounded by the subsequent death of younger brother Frederick. The family had previously lost a third child, Patrick, as an infant, while living in England. The loss of his siblings had a profound effect on Liam and throughout his life, friends observed his sense of fatalism. Mellows’ close comrade Alfred White noted the contrast between Liam and his younger sibling, ‘his brother Barney, volatile, nimble-minded, was in sharp contrast to Liam, on whom the responsibilities of life as the elder brother were thrust at an early age’.¹³ Cumann na mBan member Annie Fanning, who helped Mellows escape to the United States, was warned by Liam that ‘people who helped him always got into trouble or died’.¹⁴ A comrade from the War of Independence concluded that Mellows ‘felt it was his duty to give himself for Ireland’¹⁵ and following the Truce with Crown Forces in July 1921, Mellows told senior IRA commander Sean Moylan, ‘many more of us will die before an Irish Republic is recognised’.¹⁶

‘The sword and its allies’: Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Volunteers

Fenian leader Tom Clarke became an influential early mentor for the young Mellows, who instinctively shared the older man’s admiration for physical force and contempt for politics. Clarke was revered by younger militants in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) for having spent fifteen years between 1883 and 1898 in English prisons for his role in the Fenian dynamite campaign.¹⁷ Clarke and Mellows shared a family heritage in the British army that consolidated an instinctive bond. Like the much younger Mellows, Clarke grew up in a British military garrison in South Africa where his father, who like William Mellows was also a sergeant, was stationed. Following his release from jail, Clarke spent almost ten years in New York where he purchased a small farm before returning to Ireland with his family in 1907 and establishing a tobacco shop on Parnell Street, which was to become a hub of activity for younger members of the IRB eager to earn his approval.

Under Clarke’s influence, Mellows joined the circle of young militants under his guidance who established the republican boy scouts, Na Fianna Éireann, in 1909, and began publishing the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom in November 1910. With Con Colbert, Pádraig Ó Riain and Eamon Martin, Mellows entered the company of like-minded, serious young men who had for several years, along with Denis McCullough, Patrick McCartan and Bulmer Hobson, been in the process of transforming the IRB from a drinking club for old Fenians to a conspiratorial anti-imperialist sect. The group shared an energy and commitment to direct action that shocked the romantic nationalists of older generations and in Patrick Pearse, Seán MacDiarmada and Clarke, they found leaders for whom abstract notions of Ireland’s destiny were to be distilled into a commitment to violent insurrection.

Mellows’ military background and education saw him take on a series of time-consuming roles within the emerging movement, first as a travelling organiser for Na Fianna in April 1913, and, subsequently, as regional organiser for the Irish Volunteers in 1914. His military bearing and sincere approach won him plaudits among sceptical activists, but it was his personality that won him the enduring friendship of republicans around the country. Athlone organiser Tomás Ó Maoileoin recalled, ‘I have rarely met anyone with such an attractive personality.’¹⁸ Mellows’ lifelong friend Fr Henry Feeney recalled, ‘Mellows was well below average height, frail looking with fair, almost white hair. He wore rimless glasses of the pince-nez type and did not, at first sight, inspire great respect or confidence. But the thin, frail body was tough and sinewy, immune to cold and hardship.’¹⁹ A compulsive worker, Mellows’ fondness for practical jokes and his penchant for rebel songs was the highlight of many evenings among comrades. Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Leary sought out his company after his release from jail in New York, as ‘Mellows was an accomplished bard with a repertoire of Irish folk songs, war and love songs which was inexhaustible which made me forget the shadow which the Tombs’ bars and the poison which its bad ventilation had cast upon my mind.’²⁰ Mellows’ first taste of prison life came at the end of July 1915 when he served three months’ imprisonment in Mountjoy, under the Defence of the Realm Act, after speaking at a Volunteer meeting in Tuam, Co. Galway.

‘The desert of exile’: New York

Mellows, along with Ernest Blythe, was deported from Ireland under the Defence of the Realm Act at the beginning of April 1916 and forced to lodge in the town of Leek in Staffordshire, only to be smuggled back into Ireland, via Belfast, disguised as a priest by his brother Barney and Nora Connolly in the days before the Rising. In Galway, he was to lead a force of over five hundred rebels, without sufficient arms or ammunition, for one week in the Galway countryside attacking the police at Clainbridge, Oranmore and Carnmore. Following the rebellion, Mellows spent several months hiding out in the remote countryside on the Galway–Clare border before making his way to Cork and on to Liverpool from where, under Volunteer orders, he crossed the Atlantic for New York City. Upon arrival in America, he made an immediate impact on John Devoy, the leader of the American Fenian network, Clan na Gael, who regarded him as ‘the most capable man who had so far arrived in America’.²¹ His four years in New York were to be the unhappiest of his life, however, and he became a victim of perpetual intrigue between rival factions within Clan na Gael. Exasperated to the point of despair, the experience was to test his commitment and emotional limits. In his role as representative of the Volunteers, Mellows initially worked closely with Devoy and his close circle centred around the Gaelic American newspaper where he was initially employed. Following a succession of clashes with the American-born leadership of the Clan, however, Mellows was politically marginalised and personally shunned, and he subsequently defected to the Irish Progressive League.²² The personal abuse directed towards him was such, however, that he dropped out of revolutionary politics altogether for a time and sought work as a labourer; however, as a comrade explained, ‘the Clan hounded Liam systematically, procuring his dismissal from one job after another, even from labourers’ work on the docks’.²³

Mellows’ time in the United States started badly and went rapidly downhill. As the leading ‘Commandant of the Rising’, as he styled himself, he was in high public demand, making his first of many public appearances in January 1917 at a meeting organised by Cumann na mBan, where he spoke alongside Hanna Sheehy Skeffington.²⁴ Mellows was one of a coterie of high profile ‘1916 Exiles’ in the city, including James Connolly’s daughter, Nora, and Margaret Skinnider, Irish Volunteer officers Robert Monteith and Paddy and Hugh Holohan, and Frank Robbins of the Irish Citizen Army, who drew enthusiastic crowds to prestigious venues, including Madison Square Garden and the Central Opera House. Both Cumann na mBan and the Volunteers were organised in the city, renting premises on the Upper East Side.²⁵ The Irish-American community supported republican events in significant numbers and eight thousand people attended a Gaelic football tournament under the auspices of the Volunteers at Celtic Park in August 1917.²⁶ Mellows regularly inspected the New York Volunteers, who were commanded by Major Thomas J. Nolan; however, he ended his association in April 1917, when, with America’s entry into the war, the New York Volunteers pledged ‘to make a tender of the services of the regiment to President Wilson’.²⁷ The New York Volunteers’ decision to support the burgeoning American war effort was the first manifestation of the cleavage in revolutionary circles that was to emerge between Irish-Americans, whose primary allegiance was to their country of birth, and the Irish in America, who saw America’s wartime alliance with Great Britain as a betrayal of Ireland’s claim for independence. America’s ‘duty to Ireland’ and her apparent betrayal of that debt through her alliance with Britain was to be one of the abiding themes of Mellows’ public speeches, making him a problematic figure for Clan na Gael, who wholeheartedly supported America’s war effort during a time of heightened national patriotism.

Mellows’ attitude to American life was coloured by the US government’s approach to Ireland’s claim for independence, which was dictated by their wartime alliance with Britain. Unlike most speakers at Irish-American political meetings, Mellows made no effort to conceal his contempt for the stance of the US government. His comrade Alfred White recalled, ‘at his first public meeting in America, he refused to use the safe speech written for him and spoke as he thought’.²⁸ White even claimed the Clan tried to send Mellows and fellow Sinn Féin TD Patrick McCartan to Germany, ostensibly in search of arms; however, ‘it was an easy way of getting rid of both of them in the awkward situation brought about by the war’.²⁹ Mellows’ closest personal friend in New York, Fr Peter Magennis, provided a succinct summation of his comrades in the Clan, ‘again and again the question comes into my mind can men who stoop so low to hit so meanly be really sincere in their major works and yet I think they are sincere, in so far as they can see’.³⁰

In January 1918, William J. Flynn, Chief of the United States Secret Service, tendered his resignation from the force he had led for six years to loud approval from the Irish community in New York. The Gaelic American newspaper claimed credit for helping ‘run Flynn the brute out of town’ for his attempts to ‘hurt the Irish people’ by labelling them ‘disloyal’ and ‘traitors to America’.³¹ Flynn earned the ire of the city’s Irish-American revolutionaries for his aggressive campaign against them, and in particular, the manufacture of a ‘German Plot’ in 1917 that saw several senior figures imprisoned, central among them, the recently arrived Liam Mellows.³² The ‘plot’ was a component of a wider campaign, led, John Devoy claimed, by ‘Anglomaniac politicians and newspapers’ who ‘assailed the Irish cause’.³³ As ever, the affair generated lingering suspicions and accusations of betrayal among the revolutionaries themselves that were to have lasting consequences.³⁴

The Committee on Public Information led by George Creel was a powerful wartime governmental agency created to generate public support for America’s entry into the First World War.³⁵ In late September 1917, the agency leaked information to the New York papers alleging that the Secret Service had uncovered a ‘German plot’ to attack England from Irish naval bases, facilitated by Clan na Gael in New York. The Gaelic American hit back at the allegations accusing the Mayor of New York, John P. Mitchel, and William J. Flynn of being the authors of the ‘plot’, claiming their ‘evident object is to help England in her hopeless endeavour to hold Ireland down, and to bolster up Mitchel’s tottering political fortunes’.³⁶ The ‘revelations’ centred around the ‘discovery’ of cipher documents discussing a proposed German landing in Ireland, along with papers pertaining to Roger Casement’s attempt to organise German support