Unlikely Rebels by Anne Clare

10 - A Question of Guns
    The céilís, concerts, drama, Gaelic sport and Irish classes and romances were largely convivial, social aspects of the Irish Ireland dream, yet, distinct from that, with the borders inevitably blurring at times, were the starker features of what was evolving around the country. ‘John’ Gifford wrote of the men and women involved: ‘Some were in Sinn Féin; others in the Irish Republican Brotherhood; others in the Inghínidhe na hÉireann. Still more were in the ranks of the Gaelic League or the GAA. Within a few years these scattered groups had coalesced, and an Irish revolutionary force was in being.’ [1]
    These were obvious milestones on the road to rebellion. After 1913, it became obvious that the influence of the republican press, the bitterness engendered by the lock-out strike and the consequent formation of the Citizen Army were slanting events closer to armed confrontation. At the same time, the unionists in the northern counties, reacting to the ‘threat’ of John Redmond’s dream of Home Rule for Ireland, decided to arm. Apart from private purchases from Germany of arms and ammunition by wealthy unionists, £100,000 – a huge sum in those days – was subscribed to buy the arms that were smuggled into Larne, County Antrim, in April 1914. The importers deliberately cut off public communications on the day of the arms arrival, and, in a convoy of motor cars, 35,000 rifles and five million rounds of ammunition were distributed across Ulster. No police stopped the convoy, though what they did was illegal. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the Conservative Party, the unionist Ulster landlords – none of them wanted Home Rule either, and this illegal army had their tacit support. Even more significantly, the British army officers in the Curragh, County Kildare, mutinied and refused to march against the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). They resigned their commissions rather than oppose those they perceived to be friends.
    They were to have no such misgivings when the nationalists in the south proceeded to arm. In fact, the UVF did the south of Ireland militants a favour: they pointed the way. Three months later, in July 1914, a nationalist Protestant, Erskine Childers, lent his yacht, The Asgard , to enable the importation into Howth Harbour, County Dublin, of a much humbler cargo than that at Larne. The subscribers of the purchase price of £1,500, in comparison with the north of Ireland’s £100,000, were fellow Anglo-Irish Protestants: Sir Roger Casement, the Honourable Mary Spring Rice (a daughter of Lord Monteagle and sister of a British ambassador), Alice Stopford Green (later a senator in Seanad Éireann) and a Captain Berkeley. In all 1,500 rifles were bought, of which 900 came on The Asgard. That figure made the purchase price approximately £1 per rifle, so it is obvious they were not the best rifles in the world. One might even wonder if they were not relics of the Napoleonic wars. No matter how it is viewed, numerically or qualitatively, this was David confronting Goliath. Apart from the £100,000 UVF importation, the republicans also faced the weaponry of the three official armed agencies supporting unionists, north and south. On one small island there were now nine ‘armies’:
    1. the British army of occupation (armed)
2. the Royal Irish Constabulary (armed)
3. the Dublin Metropolitan Police (armed)
4. the Ulster Volunteer Force (armed)
    On the republican side, minimally or not at all armed:
    5. the Irish Republican Brotherhood ( IRB) 6. Na Fianna (a sort of boy-scout nationalist movement set up in Dublin in 1909 by Bulmer Hobson and Countess Markievicz among others)
7. the Irish Citizen Army (ICA)
8. the Hibernian Rifles (a small, exclusively Catholic militia based in Dublin)
9. the Irish Volunteer Force (which included the IRB)
    Goliath had far superior numbers and equipment. David had 700 years of resentment, a