Willie Pearse by Róisín Ní Ghairbhí

Willie Pearse by Róisín Ní Ghairbhí

Author:Róisín Ní Ghairbhí
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847177483
Publisher: The O'Brien Press


Chapter Eight

1914-1916

‘Difficult Things’

On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot dead in Sarajevo, triggering a diplomatic crisis that led to the major powers being drawn inexorably towards war by late summer. Against this backdrop, guns were landed for use by the Irish Volunteers at Howth on 26 July. Given that the Larne gun-running was undertaken to defend unionism from a perceived threat to Protestant (and loyalist) identity, it was perhaps ironic that the nationalist gun-running was master-minded mainly by a group of well-off Protestant nationalists, some of whom moved in the circles in which Willie socialised. Among these were Alice Stopford Green and Bulmer Hobson, as well as Mary Spring Rice, a leading Gaelic Leaguer and a cousin of Dermod O’Brien, the artist who exhibited a portrait of the Lord Lieutenant at the RHA exhibition two years previously. Willie’s fellow artist Cesca Trench was present as an observer in Howth, but it seems the Pearse brothers were in the West at the time, though Patrick received updates on the event. Attempts by the police to seize the arms were mostly unsuccessful, and that evening, tensions escalated when shots were fired by the military following a confrontation between a hostile crowd of Volunteer sympathisers and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers at Bachelors Walk. Three deaths ensued and soldiers were confined to barracks.

From the outset there was anger among nationalists at the differing treatment meted out to them. The Larne gun-running had not been the subject of police or army intervention, and armed Ulster Volunteers had been marching openly in Belfast on the day of the Howth gun-running. A few days later, tens of thousands of Dubliners took part in the funeral procession of the Bachelors Walk victims, with many sobbing openly at the scene of the shootings. Crowds cheered the armed Volunteers who marched alongside numerous other groups, including the Lord Mayor, the Fianna, marching bands, trade union representatives, forty priests and sixty Christian brothers.

On Saturday 1 August and in the early hours of Sunday 2 August more arms were landed at Kilcoole, County Wicklow. This time Willie was fully privy to the plans, as members of the Fianna and others were on standby at St Enda’s overnight. During the long evening and early hours of the morning, Willie and Patrick gave the Fianna present a talk concerning the Hermitage and its former resident, the famous lawyer and one-time defender of the United Irishmen John Philpot Curran. There was also a semaphore demonstration.1 As they waited for news from Kilcoole, Willie took part in an animated round-table discussion with Patrick and ‘barristers, solicitors, carpenters, doctors, labourers, unemployed etc. etc. discussing revolution’.2 When a charabanc (a large open-topped vehicle) carrying arms broke down on the way from Kilcoole, cars were sent out and the guns were brought to St Enda’s, from where they were later distributed to those Volunteers known to be sympathetic to the more militant nationalists who opposed John Redmond. The Irish Volunteers were now, like their



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