Redemption. - Redemption. Part 75
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Redemption. Part 75

Such was not the case for Conor Larkin.

The British returned the bodies of Conor and Long Dan Sweeney. What followed, in defiance of British law, was a public lying-in-state followed by graveside oratory over Long Dan Sweeney that ascended them to martyrdom.

My mother accompanied Conor's casket in a simple cortege over the breadth of Ireland all the way to Ballyutogue. At each crossroad, town, and village, a new honor guard of Home Army would accompany him to the next gathering. Children laid flowers on the roadway, women wept and prayed, and men were nudged by long-dormant stirrings for freedom.

When, at last, Father Dary Larkin put his brother to rest alongside their father in St. Columba's churchyard in Ballyutogue, Mother flung herself on Conor's grave as a spontaneous keening erupted from mourners from Derry and Donegal and then, from all over the land.

Mother's lifelong posture of composure was flown as bitter-thorn wailers purged their grief through uncontrolled leaps in and out of madness. They spilled from the Larkin cottage and clogged the wee paths, dancing and howling around Conor's cairn.

Mother stretched her distraught body upward like a banshee and joined the night keeners, rending her clothing and hair and flesh through ten hours of darkness until the damp-chilled dawn finally broke and she crumpled.

Aye, all of Ireland now knew that the whisperings about Atty Fitzpatrick's clandestine love with Conor Larkin were true. When my sister Rachael and I were able to pull her from his grave, she remained in the Larkin cottage until a week later, when the final revelers had exorcised themselves and drifted back to their own fields and villages.

During that week a disturbing scenario developed. To be direct, the mutual offerings of consolations between Rachael and Father Dary did not appear to be very ecumenical in nature to me.

As the waking week played out, I and others drank the public house and shabeen dry. Between hail-and-farewell toasts to the deceased, I did not know whether I should spend my time comforting Mother, who remained beyond my reach in any case, or to step in between an obviously budding forbidden romance.

Sorrow will out, and at last I was able to pack my two girls back to Dublin where Rachael went into a familiar role of becoming Mother's older sister. I thought this no time to offer Rachael unsolicited advice about the problems of falling in love with a priest.

Father Dary...mind you, it is not possible to dislike this man...had blazoned a light of hope in hopeless Derry. He fronted for an ailing Bishop with great compassion. Father Dary was much loved and far too liberal and, thus, in constant and deep trouble with the hierarchy.

He had been aloof from the Brotherhood. He took me aside during the funeral and allowed that he might be amenable to listen to us on special occasions. Was this due to his brother's death? Or, just possibly, my sister Rachael's beauty? After we left Ballyutogue, Father Dary did seem to find an inordinate amount of church business to bring him down to Dublin.

As for Mother, after a lifetime of hard sledding in the movement, she "hit the wall." The robustness that she carried off on the stage as "Mother Ireland" or that empowered her to blast her way through a meeting of the Brotherhood's Supreme Council was no longer there.

Her grief for Conor Larkin seemed consummate. She had worked with and supported two great, powerful, and daring men. With them both in their graves, her own energies were spent. She wisely withdrew from the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood but continued a significant, though lesser, role of elder statesman.

It is to be remembered that the raid on Lettershambo Castle gutted the upper echelons of the Supreme Council. Although not a member by choice, Conor was a spiritual leader as well as our most brilliant organizer and tactician in a land lamentable for the lack thereof.

Long Dan Sweeney was the revolution that was. His legendary glories going back to Fenian times irrevocably evolved into myth.

We lost our dear Lord Louis De Lacy, a mystical Gael who gave his barony to train our people. Loss of Dunleer was devastating to us.

And God love him, little Seamus O'Neill, the author of brilliant, stabbing, mocking, logical words, was dead in Lettershambo and, after all, words were one of Ireland's few weapons.

In the transition a tobacconist, a former bartender, a roving Irish soldier of fortune, an academic, a labor leader, and, depending on one's definition, one, two, or three poets took over the Supreme Council. It was an Irish stew without a single substantial military ingredient.

I, of course, carried on the role assigned me at birth, to do my stuff in the Four Courts. They did not name me Theobald for nothing.

Part Two: Of Nobler Causes.

As the year 1916 came into view, dark clouds lifted from a number of issues.

The war in Europe was going to come down to a numbers game. The side that could absorb their casualties best would be declared the winner.

The big fellow in the numbers game was American manpower. America was still not committed. Ireland, therefore, had to supply its share of fodder until America could be lured in on the side of the Allies, but Ireland was a wee player in the numbers game.

American sentiment had always been strong for the Allies. France was America's first ally and vital to America's gaining her independence from England in 1776.

Britain represented America's principal heritage, her language and culture, and much of her original population.

On the other hand, America had to be concerned with her large German population, as well as a large Irish contingent, vocal and with republican leanings.

Wars are generally undertaken when a greedy nation or greedy alliance has a surplus of food and munitions and men. Men are the most expendable. Wheat is much more difficult to come by, as England learned when the Dardanelles was closed and Ukrainian wheat became unavailable.

Well now, no ambitious nation or alliance is going to admit to being greedy, is it? It is imperative for a nation embarking on a war to invent and superimpose a more noble reason than greed.

The American Revolution gives a clear and stunning example of changing cause in midstream. The Revolution began throughout the colonies as a series of disconnected and scattered forays protesting British inequities, mainly in taxation.

Difficult for one to blow a tax protest into a full-blown people's revolution. Thus the revolution elevated itself, donning the most magnificent mantle in human history by declaring it was really a war for independence and human dignity.

Take the American Civil War. This conflict came about to save the union as the result of two different economic, cultural, and moral entities trying to exist within a single nation.

Over a time, as the war developed, the brilliant Mr. Lincoln reinvented the far nobler cause that the abolition of slavery was what the war was really about.

This war now engulfing the European continent came about because two greedy alliances lusted for more of each other's empires. However, recruiting posters could hardly read: JOIN THE ARMY BECAUSE WE ARE VERY GREEDY.

The nobler cause had to be discovered, invented, or found under a rock, did it not? What emerged, heroically, from the Allied viewpoint, was that this was a "war to save democracy" for the world and affirmed the rights of small peoples to their freedom. Belgium, for example.

However, most nations burn the candle at both ends. The Allies, in addition to saving the world for democracy, fully intended to snatch for themselves the German, Turkish, and Austrian colonies.

A number of tiny nations took the Allies at their word and reserved a seat at the postwar peace conferences and treaty signings.

Among these small peoples were the Irish, who had surely earned at least a voice in the future of their country by the Irish blood now being spilled in defense of democracy.

Ireland represented a spearhead of discontent. If the Irish came to the peace table with their very own representatives, it could set off a chain reaction throughout all of Britain's colonies.

It became paramount to England's postwar strategy to keep especially the Irish away from the peace table. Britain could not defend or justify this business of waging a war for democracy if the Irish dared to show up.

Thus, England launched a well-devised campaign against Irish independence: "The British Parliament has already passed an Irish Home Rule Bill that was agreed to by the Irish Party."

"We have thousands of Irishmen, all volunteers, in British uniform. Obviously, they must have felt very British themselves to enlist."

"We have permitted the Irish to form their own Home Army to defend Irish soil."

"Certain Irish scoundrels are sleeping with the Hun."

To which I answer: "The Irish Home Rule Bill demands Irish loyalty to the British Crown and allows the British Parliament to veto any legislation passed by an Irish government. The Irish Party is one election away from extinction."

"Thousands of Irish joined the British Army because it was the best job offer they had ever had."

"The Irish Home Army is of Gilbert & Sullivan caliber, its men armed with fierce broomsticks and century-old blunderbusses."

However, I never got to present my case to Woodrow Wilson. The British case sounded good to the American president because he wanted it to sound good. The big boys weren't going to let the little fellows screw things up, and alongside the British, the Irish were small potatoes, so to speak.

Although the Irish had come to America under the most abominable conditions, fleeing tyranny and deprivation, their support for the old country was boisterous but weak. Once the St. Patrick's Day Parade down Fifth Avenue broke up and the pubs were drunk dry, their net effect in Ireland didn't amount to much.

In Ireland itself, the nation had been beautifully divided by Dublin Castle's centuries of underhanded intrigue.

The cornerstone of British power in Ireland lay with an Anglo-Ascendancy awarded vast acreages of our land for the initial conquest and colonization of the country. These were the landed gentry, the bankers and factory owners, a privileged class intent on staying privileged through loyalty to England.

Ascendancy power was supported in one province: Ulster. By the importation of a Protestant population, it was likewise rewarded with privilege.

The Catholic middle class, such as it was, didn't want the boat rocked, and the Catholic hierarchy, protecting its own well-being, considered the Crown its benefactor. The Church did ugly work in purging generation after generation of Irishmen of their nationalistic aspirations.

Otherwise, Dublin Castle had set up a large Catholic constabulary and systems of briberies, small civil service jobs, spying, and whatever else was needed to keep the lid on the pot.

This left the Irish masses the most wretched in Europe, with more than three quarters of the population in a perpetual state of misery and subservience.

Once the Irish nation of her great Celtic chieftains had been shattered and scattered early in the 1600s, future risings from Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet on through the Fenians were paltry affairs led by enormously courageous men, dreamers who ended up on the gallows with their necks hoicked in half after making a gallant speech from the dock.

These words became our mythology.

A Gaelic revival in recent times tried to connect that glorious past to our miserable present, but lost much of its zeal with the death of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Ireland had been committed to the war with England by a discredited John Redmond and a defunct Irish Party. Sinn Fein, the new republican political entity, was starting to win the minds of Irishmen, but elections were to be a long way off.

Indeed, the British felt so secure that they called for a draft of Irish youth into the Army in early 1916. What they were telling the Irish was..."You aren't Irish and WE OWN YOU."

This jangled a nerve. It is one matter to volunteer for the Army, but it is quite another to be forced to serve. After centuries of trying, the British still could not understand that Irishmen did not consider it any great honor to be British.

Even though the British gingerly backed away from Irish conscription, the republican movement, led by the secret Brotherhood, knew that the Irish were being set up for yet another betrayal.

Conor Larkin had wondered if the Irish people could ever be awakened from their centuries of lethargy. Actions like Sixmilecross and Lettershambo said that there were a few good men left to keep the flame from flickering out.

What was desperately needed now was for the Irish people to make a smashing statement in the streets that our demands for freedom will no longer be deferred and that we are now ready to make the sacrifice and take the risk to win what is ours. WE WANT TO BE AT THE PEACE TABLE.

Otherwise the right of Irish freedom would again be passed over, and this time there could be a slide back into accepting underclass status in servitude to the Crown for another century or two.

Part Three: The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Were Not Made in Dublin.

The Irish have always had a surplus of opinions. Several different volunteer defense groups cropped up. The one that we are keenly concerned with was a fairly well-knit group whom, for all practical purposes, we shall call the Irish Home Army.

Its founder, president, and chief of staff was Eoin MacNeill, an Ulsterman of mixed religious background. MacNeill was a straight-down-the-line Gaelic revivalist and republican. The extent of his military expertise was that he was a professor of history at Dublin University and an academic at the Royal Irish Academy.

In matters of a pending revolution, MacNeill steered a tenterhooks course with his Home Army, making certain it didn't get mixed up in anything with live ammunition. MacNeill did arch up his back to warn the British he would fight any attempt to conscript his men.

Otherwise he stayed aloof from intimate contact with the aggressive Irish Republican Brotherhood, although he certainly realized the Home Army was riddled with Brotherhood people.

Chief among the Brotherhood infiltrators into the Home Army was Padraic Pearse, who rose to second in command behind MacNeill. Pearse, who likewise had earned his military qualifications as headmaster of a secondary school, was a prominent force on the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood fully intended to use the Home Army as its instrument of a rebellion. The Supreme Council, therefore, secretly plotted the Rising without bothering to consult with Eoin MacNeill, Commander of the Home Army. They came to a decision that rebel Ireland would rise on Easter Sunday of 1916.

The gist of the plan was for Padraic Pearse to call up the Home Army for maneuvers on April 23, as was within his power to do. It was commonplace in Dublin these days to see the various volunteer groups holding maneuvers by storming buildings, throwing up barricades, and engaging in mock street battles, as well as marching through the town in close order drill.

Dublin Castle didn't put much coin in all this. The Home Army was held in quite shallow esteem.

A simultaneous rising of the countryside was also planned. Sir Roger Casement, a retired Anglo-Irish diplomat of Ulster Protestant origin, was a diehard Brotherhood man. He would travel first to America and thence to Germany to gain support. His plan was money from America and guns and possibly troops from Germany.

The German guns would be landed somewhere in the west of Ireland and put into the hands of republicans to support the Dublin Rising.

Many years ago Conor Larkin told me that this kind of coordinated operation was scarcely an Irish tradition. In utter confidence, he told me he felt it close to impossible to plan and execute a mission involving several thousand men-especially Irish men.

Sir Roger Casement learned bitterly that most Irish-Americans supported the Allies in the Great War, and a rebellion in Dublin would probably not sit well with them. Finding little support in America, he went on to Germany.

The German High Command was curious to learn how serious their involvement in Ireland should be. The wildest of scenarios might see German submarines using the waters off the west coast of Ireland, and possibly even some German troops or officers landing there. They offered Casement to form up an Irish Brigade out of their stockpile of Irish prisoners of war. When only fifty-two men volunteered, and most of them sleazy, German enthusiasm dimmed.

Nonetheless, Germany had to keep a hand in, should the rebels get lucky. Casement's plea for a hundred thousand rifles was reduced to one shipload of twenty thousand.

In the beginning of April, Padraic Pearse, as second in command and chief of operations, issued an order from Home Army Headquarters, Liberty Hall, the Dublin trade union building. He called on the Dublin Brigades to assemble with arms and ammunition for maneuvers on Easter Sunday, April 23.

The chief English representative at Dublin Castle, Lord Nathan, and his military commanders saw the document and did not seriously investigate the possibility of trouble.

In a stroke of something less than genius, Pearse issued a second order switching the maneuvers to Monday, April 24. He reasoned that because it was a bank holiday more men would show up at Liberty Hall. Also, the British officer corps would be out of Dublin for the opening of the horse races at the Fairyhouse Track.

The German ship Aud disguised as a Norwegian freighter, was at sea with twenty thousand rifles while Casement himself was slipped back into Ireland by submarine.

The Aud finessed its way through the British blockade and made into Tralee Bay, awaiting the signal to unload. It never came. There had obviously-and predictably-been a communications foul-up and the Aud soon became as conspicuous as a lighthouse. A British naval patrol was dispatched to investigate and, with all escape routes closed, the crew of the Aud scuttled her, sending the ship and twenty thousand rifles to the bottom of Tralee Bay.

Sir Roger Casement, hiding in the fields, was betrayed by an informer who had landed with him as a member of the defunct Irish-German brigade.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eoin MacNeill got wind of the Brotherhood plot to use his Home Army and issued a countermanding order, which was published in newspapers over the country.

With all this activity and more foul-ups building, Dublin Castle still failed to get overly concerned. As a matter of precautionary routine after the Aud incident, a sweep was made to round up "known republicans, Sinn Feiners, Brotherhood, and other known trouble makers" in the rural areas.

As for Dublin, not so much as an extra soldier or constable was put on duty.

Part Four: Easter Monday, 1916.

It was a leisurely day. The Brits were off at the races. Despite the conflict of orders a number of men of the Home Army, by bicycle, foot, and tram, assembled at Liberty Hall, which bore a banner with the battle cry: WE SERVE NEITHER KING NOR KAISER, BUT IRELAND.

A terrible moment of decision was at hand. In order to put up a battle long enough to gain world attention, the Brotherhood felt that a minimum of three thousand men was needed. Only fifteen hundred showed up.

Padraic Pearse, a poet, scholar, and keeper of Gaelic mysticism, reckoned we should get on with it, knowing it was now a suicide mission. "If nothing else," he said, referring to Tom MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, and his good self, "Ireland would rid itself of three bad poets."

On that note, the Rising was committed.

My job, of course, would be to come in with my partner, Robert Emmet McAloon, after the fighting was over and see what we could legally do to save our people.

As for Mother and Rachael, I was glad they were not to be intimately involved in the fighting. They had a number of duties to carry out from the message center and hideaways. The woman of record was to be Countess Constance Markievicz, an Anglo aristocrat much like Mother, who would command a unit at St. Stephen's Green, a park in the center of the city.

So, off they went in their undermanned, underarmed little units to challenge the mighty lion who had come to their shores and taken their land almost a millennium earlier.

What follows will not particularly be told in the order it happened, but should give one a clear picture of the kind of battle that took place.

Countess Markievicz's total lack of military experience showed itself immediately as she planted her troops in the middle of St. Stephen's Green, a small square park surrounded by three-and four-story buildings. British troops grabbed the buildings surrounding her and poured in rifle and machine-gun fire compelling her unit to withdraw to the nearby College of Surgeons, where they dug in and made a splendid fight.

Edward Daly, a slight, pale, mustachioed twenty-five-year-old in command of a "battalion" of a hundred-odd men, seized the Four Courts, from which the British had dispensed black justice on the Irish. He needed five times the troops he had in order to face the nearby array of British barracks holding twenty times his number.