Pana pamphlet

TheIrish Neutrality League

and theImperialist War

1914-18

2 The Irish Neutrality League and the Imperialist War 1914-18

3The Irish Neutrality League and the Imperialist War 1914-18

Introduction - The Irish Neutrality League, 1914Roger Cole Page 4

‘A Vivid Impression Upon the World’: The Irish Neutrality League, 1914Francis Devine Page 6

Constance de Markievicz and the Irish Neutrality LeagueMargaret Ward Page 14

Francis Sheehy Skeffington - A Pacifist in an Age of MilitarismAiden Lloyd Page 17

War Resistance in Britain During the Great WarNeil Faulkner Page 21

‘Fixing a Truck Rolling Into a Precipice With a Thread of Silk’: The German Peace Movement, 1914-1918Horst Teubert Page 23

No Doubt Where Connolly Would Stand TodayJack O’Connor Page 25

Irish Trade Unionism, Neutrality and the First World WarMick O’Reilly Page 27

Harnessing the People of Ireland to England’s War ChariotMíceál Mac Donncha Page 33

Imperialsm & Independence 1914-22Daltún Ó Ceallaigh, Page 36

Endnotes Page 41

Notes of Contributors Page 44

Contents

Designed byConleth Adamson

Tel: 01 831 8103Mobile: 087 673 7441E-mail: [email protected]

G R A P H I C S E R V I C E S


On 12 October 1914 James Connolly chaired a public meeting of the Irish Neutrality League (INL) in the Ancient Concert Rooms in what is

now Pearse Street. The event was in response to a meeting held in the Mansion House at which John Redmond advocated a recruitment drive to encourage Irish men to join the British Army. Connolly’s aim was to launch a campaign to bring together all of those opposed to Irish participation in the war, that would, he said, ‘prove historic in the annals of this country’. Since the period 1914-1918 did prove to be historic, it is only fitting to look back at our history to explain how the INL was then only the latest expression of the deeply rooted values of peace, neutrality and Irish independence. The first person to advocate Irish neutrality was Theobald Wolfe Tone in a pamphlet entitled The Spanish War. Written in 1790, this was Tone’s first political pamphlet. In it he put forward the case that at a time when the Spanish and British Empires were about to go to war over a trade dispute in the North-West coast of America, Ireland should remain neutral. He stated that ‘Ireland should look then to our own resources, and scorn to sue for the protection to any foreign state, we should spurn the idea of being a satellite round any power, however great, and claim at once, and enforce, our own rank among the primary nations of the earth. Then should we have, what under the present system we shall never see, a National Flag, and the spirit to maintain it’. In historical terms this was a major shift in ideology. For centuries the conflicts taking place in Ireland were not, in fact, about seeking national independence, but were merely a side-show of the English based civil wars. Tone, like many of his generation, was inspired by the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The same values that

inspired the American and French Revolutions ran through his veins. The historic nature of Tone’s pamphlet and its advocacy of Irish national independence and neutrality clearly inspired those that supported the INL. This, in turn, led to the pamphlet being re-published by Cuman na mBan in 1915.

This historical continuity was continued in 2006 when the Peace & Neutrality Alliance (PANA) decided to re-publish this pamphlet again to mark the tenth anniversary of its own foundation. In the midst of the virtual orgy of celebration by the Irish ruling political caste of our participation in the Imperialist war of 1914-1918 - the so-called ‘war to end all wars’ - PANA is again re-iterating the right of the Irish people to have their own independent foreign policy, with positive neutrality at its core, pursued through a reformed United Nations. As this pamphlet shows, we are not licking it off the stones, but continuing on a great tradition of neutrality.

James Connolly, who chaired that historic INL meeting in Pearse Street, had always made it clear that he was a Republican because he was a socialist. He linked the cause of Irish National Independence through the creation of an Irish Republic with socialist values. But in doing so he came into conflict with socialists who instead saw socialism being achieved within the British Union. The most prominent of these was Belfast’s William Walker. In his debate with Walker, Connolly states: ‘for the propagation, universally, of our ideal of a true internationalism, there is only required the spread of reason and enlightenment amongst the peoples of the earth, whereas the conceptions of internationalism tacitly accepted by our comrades of the ILP [Independent Labour Party - Walkers’s Party] in Belfast,

IntroductionThe Irish Neutrality League, 1914


require for it to be spread by the flash of the sword of militarism and the roar of a British 80-ton gun’. (Desmond Ryan (ed), ‘Introduction’ in Socialism & Nationalism, Three Candles, Dublin, 1947).

The nineteenth century version of Walker Socialism is clearly alive and well and continued by the concept of ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’ as advocated by successive British Labour governments who supported the wars on Iraq, Syria and Libya. It is the same concept that built and supports the use of nuclear weapons, the ultimate British 80-ton gun.

Connolly, in the INL, was attempting to bring together all the progressive forces in Ireland - socialists, Republicans, pacifists and feminists - that opposed the Imperialist war of 1914. The INL did not have a long life, but its core ideology was to unite all of those opposed to the imperialist war and to promote Irish Independence & Neutrality. Like Tone, many decades before, he sought to build an alliance to build a Republic.

PANA, following in his footsteps, has sought to have a wide range of voices: Irish, British, German, historians and political activists, in the publication. I would like to thank all the contributors, Neil Faulkner, Aiden Lloyd, Micheál MacDonncha, Daltún Ó Ceallaigh, Jack O’Connor, Michael O’Reilly, Horst Teubert, Margaret Ward, and especially Francy Devine who edited the pamphlet.

But PANA as an organisation is not just about history. History is only useful as an aid in analysing the current crisis. It reminds us why the political elite are celebrating the Imperialist war of 1914-1918. In joining in the celebrations it is demonstrating their tacit support for the imperialist wars in 2014. They have totally

destroyed the values of Connolly and Pearse by turning Ireland into a US aircraft carrier. Shamefully our political elite turn a blind eye to Israel and its mass murder of innocent men, women and children in Palestine. They appear, at the time of writing, to support the growing escalation of conflict with Russia over the Ukraine in the full knowledge of its potential disastrous consequences.

The purpose of PANA, therefore, in publishing this pamphlet, is not just to give a history lesson pointing out the futility of war, but to help rally those forces in the Ireland of 2014 who are still in favour of a Republic. The people who are still opposed to Imperialism and who actively seek to rebuild a majority, as our ancestors did, in opposing the First World War and who went on to win 1918 election. It is our desire that in the next general election these people will achieve a clear majority in Dáil Éireann and we believe that that is the only real way to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Rising.

Roger ColeChair

Peace & Neutrality Alliancewww.pana.ie


The Irish Neutrality League’s (INL) brief existence in late 1914 has received scant acknowledgement. As it was active only between September and early December,

this is understandable. What the INL stood for should not, however, be obscured. Arguably, it was an organisation that actually merits greater attention as what it did achieve – or assist in the laying the organisational foundation stones for – was of considerable significance. In addition, the INL’s fundamental premise – that of Irish neutrality – although now largely unfashionable continues to hold relevance and potential for the modern Irish State. As such, the INL deserves further investigation.

Formation of Irish Neutrality LeagueOn 8 September, 1914 the Third Home Rule Bill received royal assent although a suspensory act postponed its operation until after the war. The following day a conference of revolutionary leaders was arranged by Éamonn Ceannt after James Connolly had urged William O’Brien (Dublin Trades Council) (DTC) to ‘put him in touch with the right people’.ii O’Brien’s brother Daniel, active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), proved useful and a meeting convened in the library of the Gaelic League at 25 Parnell Square, Dublin. Connolly (Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union) (ITGWU) and O’Brien joined Thomas Clarke (presiding), Ceannt, Arthur Griffith, John MacBride, Seán MacDermott, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett. iii Connolly and O’Brien were the outsiders to what was an Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) core. Most interestingly, the signatories to the 1916 Proclamation were in attendance, possibly formally sharing a common table for the first time. O’Brien claimed Connolly advocated ‘making definite preparations for organising an insurrection’ and that contact

be made with Germany ‘with a view to military support’. The consensus was against but two committees were founded – one to develop contacts with Germany, the other to manage propaganda and clandestine recruitment to the cause. Clarke and MacDermott gave some credence to Connolly’s argument but all was to change after John Redmond’s speech of 20 September at Woodenbridge. The second committee effectively created the INL on 28 September with Connolly as President; Thomas Farren (Treasurer); iv Seán T. O’Kelly (Secretary); and a committee of Arthur Griffith, Madame Markievicz, Seán Milroyv, O’Brien, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and J.J. Scollan. Apart from the trade unionists, the others have been described as ‘the rump of Sinn Féin’.vi One view was that, as it was inspired by the IRB, the broad labour movement exercised caution regarding the INL.vii

In late August, earlier efforts had been made by O’Kelly and Milroy, described as ‘Honorary Secretaries pro tem’ of the ‘Irish Committee’ when writing to, among others, O’Brien. Two addresses were given in correspondence: 12 D’Olier Street and 8 Belvedere Place.viii This circular talked of forming ‘an association for the purpose of discussing Ireland’s interests and placing them before the public’. The press was ‘very much in the hands of the English agencies’ but ‘public opinion’ could be reached through open meetings and newspapers – a reference to the Irish Worker and Nationalist weeklies. The first public meeting would be held in the Trades Hall, Capel Street on Monday, 28 September. This meeting was presumably postponed through preoccupation with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s mass recruitment meeting announced for 25 September in the Mansion House. This was in response to Redmond’s Woodenbridge Speech where he pledged the Irish Volunteers to the British war

‘A Vivid Impression Upon the World’:

The Irish Neutrality League, 1914


effort. O’Brien forwarded the circular to Connolly in Belfast where he worked as ITGWU District Secretary. Returning the document, Connolly appended an observation that he thought it a ‘desperate situation’ and bemoaned the fact that ‘our friends of the Conference have not got sufficient dash or desperation to deal with the matter’. The Asquith meeting would be a ‘military affair’ and the city would be ‘in the hands of the military to carry it through’. He added, ‘in a sense all our future is on the cast of that die. I am ready for any call’.ix

A further meeting of those gathered on 9 September decided to seize the Mansion House twenty-four hours before Asquith’s rally to prevent it happening. A joint Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and Irish Volunteers (IV) force would be assembled for the purpose. O’Brien recalled that ‘one of those who volunteered for this enterprise’ was Sheehy-Skeffington, well known as a pacifist. Only about eighty Volunteers and forty ICA members could be mustered, however. On the night the attempt was made – 24 September – two of those IV members assembled in 41 Parnell Square were ‘afterwards Ministers of Saorstát

Éireann – Richard Mulcahy and Joseph McGrath’. ICA members gathered at Liberty Hall. Word was received that the Mansion House was already ‘strongly held’ by British Military personnel with reinforcements standing by. O’Brien concluded ‘in view of our small numbers’ the attempt was abandoned. In the light of events, the IV meeting decided to eject Redmond’s nominees from their Executive leading to the creation of the Irish National Volunteers under Redmond’s control.x

The INL issued a circular on 5 October through O’Kelly and Milroy under the heading ‘Ireland and the Anglo-German War’. This outlined the INL’s purpose of ‘defining Ireland’s present attitude towards’ the war as ‘one of neutrality, watching Ireland’s interests at every phase of the war, preventing employers from coercing men to enlist, inculcating the view that true patriotism requires Irishmen to remain at home, and taking steps to preserve the food supplies of Ireland for the people of Ireland’. It continued

‘England’s quarrel with Germany cannot involve Ireland except on the ground that Ireland is willingly subject to England. However much our sympathy or antipathy may be awakened we think steps should be taken to keep the nationalist position well defined. A declaration of Irish neutrality would make a vivid impression upon the world. It would also develop some national dignity in Ireland. It would not affect the Home Rule Act, which will not be put into operation until the war is ended, and will then be subject to an amending Bill dictated by Sir Edward Carson. This means the partition of Ireland.’

It warned that ‘efforts were being made’ by the British Government and private employers ‘to force their employees between twenty and thirty-five years of age into the British Army under threat of dismissal’. Such pressure would ‘soon be more extensively used if the people supinely submit to this commercial conscription’. The circular concluded by demanding that Ireland’s food supply be protected before reminding ‘the young men of Ireland’ that ‘true patriotism calls upon them to remain in Ireland and to stand prepared to guard Irish interests alike against false friends and open enemies’. The INL circular concluded: ‘if you are unable to be present … may we hope that you will send us an assurance of

INL Circular, 5 October, 1914, NLI, William O’Brien Papers, Ms 13,954, Circulars & Letters of the INL


your moral and material support’. The signatories were Connolly (President), O’Kelly (Secretary), Farren (DTC, Treasurer) and Committee members Griffith, Markievicz, Milroy, O’Brien, Scolllan and Sheehy Skeffington, significantly none of whom were IRB.xi

The ITGWU’s weekly newspaper, the Irish Worker, advertised the INL’s inaugural public meeting in the Antient Concert Rooms on 12 October, 1914 for ‘those interested in the recruiting campaign and the conservation of Ireland’s food supply’. It would be addressed by ‘prominent representatives of Nationalist and Labour bodies’ and would not be a ‘ticket meeting’.xii This first public gathering was to be a ‘strictly Irish but non-partisan conference’ to ‘prevent the real and abiding interests of the Irish nation being forgotten in the paroxysms of a carefully manufactured but spurious Jingoism’.

INL Public MeetingThe Irish Worker duly reported the ‘mass meeting’ held ‘under the auspices’ of the INL. This ‘demonstration was principally intended to act as a set off’ to Redmond and Asquith’s Mansion House recruitment rally and to ‘define’ Ireland’s position ‘in relation to the present European War’. The room ‘filled to overflowing with an enthusiastic audience’. Connolly took the chair to applause and was accompanied on the platform by Griffith (editor, Sinn Féin); O’Brien (President, DTC); John T. Kelly [Seán T. O’Kelly],xiii TC; Milroy and Scollan (Ancient Order of Hibernians, Irish-American Alliance) (AOH-IAA); Major John MacBride; ‘ex-Alderman Macken’; and Markieviczxiv.

Connolly began, hoping that they were launching a campaign that would ‘prove historic in the annals of this country’. He shared the platform with men ‘from all classes … labour men’ and those ‘who by no stretch of the imagination could be called labour men’. He cited ‘Home Rulers and Republicans, Socialists and Sinn Féiners (applause)’. He recognised those from the ICA, Cumann na mBan, Inghinidhe na hÉireann and ‘various Franchise Leagues’. They had abandoned their ‘strangely different’ ideals and ‘ideas of the future that were strangely hostile’ to make a ‘common platform’. This broad and disparate alliance characterised both INL and subsequent opposition to Irish involvement in the war.

All speakers echoed Connolly’s assertion that England’s enemies were not necessarily Ireland’s enemies and ‘it was their duty to gather together the forces in Ireland’ to ‘place their country in the position it ought to occupy – a position of neutrality (applause)’. Their duty was not to the Empire but to ‘Ireland and to Ireland only (cheers)’. Connolly recognised that opposition to the war would likely be dismissed as anti-British, pro-German, even cowardice. When he mentioned Redmond, the hall filled with groans. Redmond wanted them to believe that England had ‘closed for ever the record of her past in this country’ but, to further applause, Connolly insisted they could ‘never map out their plans for the future unless they were able to understand the past’. England’s previous promises had not been kept and they should not be believed now ‘unless [we] had the power … to see that they were kept’. Redmond should have consulted ‘the voice of Ireland’ before doing Asquith’s bidding. The ‘opportunity’ for the ‘nation’ to be ‘born again’ was lost. Connolly derided English claims of standing by Belgium. They had despatched their forces not into Belgium but to the safety of being ‘beside the big French force’. It was an imperialist war. Germany

INL Circular, Ireland & the War, NLI, William O’Brien Papers, Ms 13,954, Circulars & Letters of the INL


was fighting ‘for the commerce of the seas’ and ‘building up a sane civilisation in Europe (cheers)’. Despite the audience’s reaction, it was not clear what he meant by ‘sane civilisation’. Connolly concluded by pointing out that it was ‘no rigged meeting’. They had ‘no RIC force to protect it’. To ‘loud applause’, he concluded ‘Irishmen wanted ‘to see their country emerge from the present crisis with her dignity preserved’.xv

Councillor O’Kelly, Board of Erin, AOH, read apologies from local politicians ‘in all parts of Ireland among them John Daly of Limerick’, the veteran Fenian.xvi Milroy (AOH-IAA) said Ireland’s attitude to the war should be directed purely by ‘her own interests’ and he asked what were they ‘going to get out of the European rumpus?’ There was ‘no chivalry in John Bull’s mind’, the only real ‘consideration [was] for swag’. He dismissed the defence of small nations explanation and pointed to the imperial interests that underlay the conflict. As for Germany, he suggested that their ‘arms might yet be the means of freeing Ireland (loud applause)’before concluding that Irish nationalism was opposed to all foreign rule ‘whether English, French or German’.

O’Brien promised DTC support. He did not want to see Ireland embroiled in England’s war nor Irishmen coerced into the British army. Challenging Redmond, his advice to any Irishman was ‘to stop at home (cheers)’. Scollan derided ‘Union Jack Redmond’, prompting loud applause. Griffith said Irish people had been brought up to believe that the proper place to fight for Ireland was in London. Now they were told that that proper place was the north of France. He suggested that ‘at some future date’ the ‘place may possibly be at the North Pole’. The proper place to fight was, of course, ‘in our own territory’. As to the idea that the war was to defend religion, Griffith asked was it the religion of the King of England, President of France or Tsar of Russia? He too dismissed the arguments about defending small nations. MacBride suggested that the slogan of his youth ‘Pay no rent!’ should now become ‘No recruits!’ He added, ‘No recruits for the cowardly nation that shot down women and children in Bachelor’s Walk’.xvii In the evening’s most incendiary remarks, he finished by suggesting that Irishmen who enlisted ‘deserved to be shot in this world and damned in the next’. The Irish Worker

noted that ‘Major MacBride’s vehement utterance was received with prolonged cheering’.

The Freeman’s Journal, Irish Independent and Irish Times completely ignored the INL meeting. Their pages brimmed with pictures of Redmond and enthusiastic recruiting meetings around the country. INL sentiments and support did not suit this agenda. Sinn Féin noted that ‘the entire Dublin Press … suppressed all reference’ to INL activity, although they thought the Independent was ‘disturbed’ by its existence. The Independent was ‘against neutrality’ but their directors had ‘no more intention’ of sending their sons to the Front any more than John Dillon or Redmond did’.xviii On 13 October, the paper’s editorial stated ‘it was the duty of this country to contribute as many men as may be required’ as ‘this’ was ‘as much an Irish as a British, a French or a Belgian war’. Ireland was, after all, ‘an integral part of the United Kingdom’. On 14 October, the Irish Times leader welcomed British Labour’s pamphlet The British Labour Movement & the War signed by fifty-nine leaders of the Trades Union Congress and General Federation of Trade Unions. It ‘set a splendid example to the Irish people’ and was ‘further proof of the solidarity of the British Empire’. It claimed that ninety-nine percent of Irishmen ‘sympathise heartily with the Allies and were ‘convinced of the justice and necessity of their cause’. It made no reference to the INL or Irish trade union opposition. xix Brief accounts of INL meetings were carried in Irish Freedom, Sinn Féin and Éire-Ireland. O’Brien re-published extracts of an INL circular in Labour News on May Day, 1937.xx

INL Activity & DemiseThe INL’s ‘temporary address’ was 17 Parliament Street. Having invited all Labour and Nationalist bodies to participate, the INL paraded on Sunday, 25 October ‘at various places of historic interest connected with the memory of Irish patriots who suffered and died for Ireland’. A ‘vast public meeting’ in St Stephen’s Green, chaired by Connolly, concluded events. xxi O’Brien recorded that the INL held a ‘number of lectures’ delivered by ‘Tom Ashexxii and Miss Wyse Power,xxiii ‘who had lately returned from Germany, and others’.xxiv

According to Pádraig Yeates, the INL was ‘so pro German that leading Volunteers and IRB members, such as Ashe, had no problem


addressing its meetings’. But then such people had begun the INL. Wyse Power’s speech, reproduced in full in Éire-Ireland, was, by her admission, ‘disjointed’ but sought to ‘give the lie to some of the many statements about Germany current here’. She gave a first-hand impression of Germany.xxv Yeates adds that ‘another leading ally’ was Sheehy Skeffington, joint editor with his wife Hanna of the Irish Citizen. Sheehy Skeffington ‘differed from his comrade’ Connolly in being a ‘committed pacifist, ready to campaign and even die for the labour cause but not to kill for it’.xxvi That Ashe and Sheehy Skeffington could be INL supporters indicates the breadth of opinion it incorporated, its binding threads being Irish neutrality and national interest. The evidence for the INL’s pro-German attitude appears selective, evidence that the INL was seed tray for Connolly’s ambitions for insurgency less so. As soon as war was declared, Connolly determined on insurrection.xxvii

O’Brien acknowledged that the INL had a ‘small membership: in fact it was an organisation without members’. British Military ‘restrictions made continuation of such an organisation impossible’. Although short-lived, it nevertheless ‘did useful work’. It was the INL, at Connolly’s suggestion, who ‘decided to popularise the wearing of the Republican colours – green, white and orange’.xxviii Many of those involved, re-surfaced in 1915 as part of an Anti-Conscription Committee, a case of the usual suspects creating vehicles of convenience – like the INL – when strategic considerations demanded. To that extent, the INL becomes a thread in a jacket that was finally worn at Easter 1916 and in the Anti-Conscription strike, 1918.xxix

After James Larkin’s departure for America in October, Connolly became ITGWU Acting General Secretary. One of his first acts was to hang a large streamer across the front of Liberty Hall proclaiming ‘WE SERVE NEITHER KING NOR KAISER – BUT IRELAND’. It simultaneously became the Irish Worker masthead from 24 October. On Friday, 4 December, military and police entered Liberty Hall under the Defence of the Realm Act and dismantled and removed part of the printing press, suppressing the Irish Worker. On 19 December, the authorities removed the offending streamer. O’Brien recalled Connolly’s frustration, criticising the IV for not ‘pursuing

a more vigorous policy’ and relations between ICA and IV being ‘anything but cordial’.xxx For Clarke and MacDermott, the INL no longer had purpose. They committed to a ‘closed’ military insurrection and allowed ‘open’ organisations in tandem with Sinn Féin or Labour to lapse. Connolly complained, his instinct still valuing mass organisation, boots on the street, protest demonstrations and lobbying by motion and meeting.xxxi

The INL, like the streamer, vanished from view to be dismissed by some as ‘ineffectual’.xxxii The large and enthusiastic crowd that attended the Ancient Concert Rooms and the subsequent adherence to the INL’s line on the war by the trade union and labour movement, indicated that the INL’s ideas simply sank underground as fungal spoors awaiting facilitating conditions when they could reappear. Indeed, it might be argued that those spoors were of older vintage as Connolly, Griffith and MacBride, together with Maud Gonne, had been active in the Irish Neutrality Association – an element of the Irish Transvaal Committee – that opposed British recruitment for the Boer War in 1900. Greaves suggests that these efforts ‘brought recruitment to a virtual standstill, despite unemployment’. Could it be that, for some, the INL replicated a previously successful model?xxxiii It was more likely, as Pádraig Ó Snodaigh suggests, that in the gathering atmosphere of public repression of anti-war sentiment and activity, the IRB decided that ‘to retain more freedom of action and movement it was deemed prudent, apparently, to quietly let’ the INL ‘fade away’ and create ‘more chances to continue their activities’ without unnecessary public attention.xxxiv

INL, Recruitment, Internationalism and the ITUCSuccess for the INL and others opposing recruitment, in 1914 at least, was limited. Enthusiastic crowds attended the first departures: ‘none other than the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were given a ‘rousing send-off’ by Dubliners’ as they sailed for France in August. There was dissent, within both Unionist and Nationalist communities, even if their leaders saw opportunity to gain concessions from Britain in exchange for their support. Dublin Castle was nevertheless wary of the ‘possibility of Germany exploiting pre-war anti-English feeling’. Redmond


advised against making martyrs of dissidents, part explanation for the press ignoring the INL. Only Sinn Féin carried the INL declaration adopted ‘with an extraordinary burst of enthusiasm’ at its Mansion House meeting. This alleged that Irish recruits bore the brunt of casualties; that workers were coerced to enlist; and that, for the British, Irishmen were more expendable than Englishmen, not least as they did not have to be withdrawn from industrial employment. The declaration’s – appended in full below – other main point was protection of Irish food supplies.xxxv

By February 1915, it is estimated that 50,000 Irish had enlisted. Relatively lower recruitment in Ireland – in contrast to Scotland or Wales – would be explained more in terms of the dominance of agriculture than by political or denominational factors. By May 1915, the ITGWU had lost an estimated 2,700 men to the army. Sheehy Skeffington experienced being ‘jeered and hooted’ by antagonistic crowds as he addressed anti-recruitment meetings.xxxvi

In these circumstances, the INL – and other anti-war dissidents – were readily cast as pro-German, anti-English, or simply as cranks. Minorities are often so dismissed, their arguments conveniently buried. It has been argued that the ‘identity of those who advocated neutrality, in the absence of any means of enforcing it, left even sympathetic observers convinced that ‘neutrality’ simply meant hostility to Britain’. Another cited John Dillon who ‘in a telling phrase remarked that a man who calls himself a neutral is either an enemy or a coward’.xxxvii Despite Irish peace campaigners, particularly among suffrage groups, there was no specific anti-war organisation before the INL, which can be seen as part of a wider and long-standing international movement for peace and neutrality. The Neutrality League in Britain, for instance, argued that ‘ongoing neutrality’ was the ‘only sane way’ for their country to ‘promote its pacifism and avoid the ills of war’. As with many others, Sir Norman Angell, a life-long peace campaigner, was caught off guard by events that summer. On 28 July, 1914, in a ‘last-ditch attempt to prevent British participation in war, he ‘hastily organised the Neutrality League’. It printed a manifesto, lefalets and press releases using the popular phrase ‘ENGLISHMEN DO YOUR DUTY AND KEEP YOUR COUNTRY OUT OF A WICKED AND STUPID WAR’. The League

attracted significant financial backing and support from prominent clergy and C.P. Scott, editor and publisher of the Manchester Guardian. Hundreds of meetings were held and 500,000 leaflets distributed on 2-3 August, mostly in London. The League questioned the demonisation of Germany, took issue with Britain’s alliance with France and Russia, and argued that Russia, not Germany, would be the dominant European power if war ensued. As with the INL, the League was short-lived and, measured against its objectives, unsuccessful. There is no evidence of any connection between the INL and their British counterparts.xxxviii

One study nevertheless observed that the INL ‘advocated the same premise’ but could not resist adding ‘albeit tinged with a distinct anti-British flavour’. There had been various peace and neutrality movements in Europe and North America since the mid-nineteenth century.xxxix Among them, the Socialist International adopted an anti-war resolution at Basel on 24 November, 1912, committing the allied socialist parties to reject and resist an imperialist war. This intention dissolved into thin air once Germany declared war. By August 1914, a disillusioned Connolly was aware that whatever international peace movements and intentions had existed, they had been swamped by the drive to war. Concerns for internationalism and peace still motivated Connolly, however, and the INL, in its purest concept, attempted to convince the public of the sanity of that position.

The Irish trade union movement, generally, opposed the war. There was always the danger of the movement splitting, however, as British-based unions and Unionist members displayed enthusiasm for war. An attempt in August to issue a manifesto under the heading ‘Why Should Ireland Starve?’ under the ITUC banner caused division. William E. Hill (Railway Clerks’ Association) wrote to ITUC Executive Chair Thomas Johnson from London, strongly objecting to assertions in the proposed manifesto that working men and women would bear the costs of a ‘European War for the aggrandisement of the capitalist class’ and that Irish food supplies would be exported. These comments were ‘unworthy’ and based on ‘no evidence’. They would make ‘Irish labour stink forever in the nostrils of Irish people of all classes and shades


of opinion, to say nothing of the workers over here who are prepared, though it be not their fight, and though they have fought all they knew to prevent it as long as prevention as possible, to make their sacrifices’. Hill suggested that a ‘strong’ Committee of Irish Labour be formed instead, something the INL was not perceived as being, despite the presence of Connolly, Farren and O’Brien. Hill concluded his letter to Johnson, then living in Belfast and representing the British-based National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen & Clerks, by asking ‘forgive me if I seem to have written strongly but I feel very strongly’. He felt it would be a ‘tremendous catastrophe if by any ill-advised step at this juncture, the whole future of the Irish labour movement was to be destroyed for at least a generation’.xi

Although London-based, Hill was Dublin-born, growing up in an ‘ultra-conservative family’. In his early years he was an ‘ardent Orangeman’

following in the footsteps of his father, a ‘prominent official in the Orange Institution’. Hill himself became Deputy Grand Secretary, City of Dublin Grand Lodge, but came to ‘oppose some Orange policies’ and ‘after expressing his point of view’ to the Dublin Lodges was ‘deprived of his office and resigned’. Disillusioned with Unionism, he joined the Labour Party. The proposed anti-war manifestation was part of Hill’s political subsequent disengagement from Irish labour.xii

Johnson asked that his name be removed from the signatories. The ‘facts’ did ‘not warrant’ the manifesto and its terms were ‘undesirable being almost entirely inflammatory and denunciatory’, its ‘sole constructive suggestion’ being a reference that Local Authorities should control food supplies. Johnson concluded his letter to ITUC Secretary P.T. Daly with the statement that he was ‘conscious of the fomenting of a mere anti-English agitation in Ireland’. In his view, the manifesto went far beyond the ITUC’s ‘warrant’. A revised draft appeared in the Irish Worker on 22 August but with no names of Executive members appended, merely the device ‘Published by National Executive Irish Trade Union Congress & Labour Party’. Johnson nevertheless campaigned against recruitment for anti-militarist reasons. This episode demonstrates the tensions and divisions within trade unionism, fractures that became more acute as men died. Divisions notwithstanding, on 2 September, the ITUC adopted a resolution disapproving of the ‘insidious and cowardly action of employers in dismissing men from their employment with a view to compelling such dismissed men, by a process of starvation, to enlist as volunteers’.xlii Dublin-based labour leaders organised a counter demonstration to Asquith’s recruitment rally on 25 September. Congress – then far less organised and with no great resources – refrained from directly supporting the INL, however.xliii

ConclusionThe INL was short-lived and had limited impact on public opinion riding a wave of jingoism and war mania. Unlike its British equivalent, it had limited resources and was denied press coverage. It did, however, draw together strands of political thought that had previously, whilst well aware of each other, not gathered purposefully together around a table. From the beginning, the INL was only one response to Ireland’s invidious position of being

Source: NLI, Thomas Johnson Papers, Ms 17,112, Documents relating to ITUC manifesto ‘Workers & the War’, August 1914


embroiled in Britain’s war. Other responses were to lead to 1916 and the creation of a (partially) independent Irish State, one that would adopt a policy of neutrality.

Today, however the INL is assessed, the opportunity for a neutral Ireland to ‘make a vivid impression upon the world’ and, through that mechanism, ‘to develop some national dignity’

remains unfulfilled. In the context of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, any number of conflicts fomented by the same grasping imperialist interests as those colliding in 1914, an assertively neutral Ireland could play a significant leadership role for peace. For consideration of that possibility alone, the INL and its values merit attention a century after its brief flowering.

Francis Devine

Appendix:Declaration Adopted by INL, 12 October, 1914

By the operation of the English Government in Ireland the male population of the country between the ages of 20 and 45 has been reduced from over 2,000,000 to less than three-quarters of a million in the last sixty years. In the same period the annual food production of Ireland has been diminished from a sufficiency to feel a population of twenty millions to a quantity sufficient only for a population of seven millions.

England, for the prosecution of the war which has declared upon its trading competitor, Germany, is seeking further drafts from the remnant of the population of fighting age, which still remains upon our soil. It is suggested, by an English newspaper the Liverpool Weekly Post, that the Irish should be coaxed to provide 300,000 of her 700,000 men of military years to form England’s fighting force, while the Englishmen of the same age should be kept at home in England ‘to capture German trade’.

There are to-day in England 7,000,000 men between the ages of 20 and 45, or nearly ten men for every man of that age in Ireland. Thus England, herself, has ample material to draw upon to do her own fighting. She is determined, however, in the language of the Liverpool Post not to ‘derange her industry’ by drawing to any serious extent upon her own people if she can induce the Irish to fight her battles. Ireland must be equally determined to safeguard her present and future interests by keeping her manhood in Ireland to work for Ireland.

Already the casualty lists disclose that, as in the war against the Boers, the proportion of Irish soldiers in the English army falling victims in this war, is far greater than the proportion of English soldiers in that army. From last Friday’s casualty

list it appears that the loss of regiments recruited in Ireland was 57, as against 19 recruited in England. That is, almost five Irishmen suffered to one Englishman – indicating that as in the past England’s Irish recruits are sent to bear the brunt of the battle.

It is the first duty of Ireland to protect and conserved the lives of its own people. No good Irishman can stand by indifferent if coercion, concealed or open, be applied to Irishmen to join the British army. That coercion of a secret kind is at present being used we have reason to know. Against hints or threats of loss of employment or custom, or any other of the methods of the complex machinery of intimidation which exists in this country against the liberty of the individual, it is the duty of the nation as a whole to guard its people. With this as one of its main objects the Neutrality League is instituted.

Unlike England, Ireland is not dependent upon the maintenance of a fleet to ensure its food supplies. We raise upon the soil of Ireland more than sufficient food for our whole population. To safeguard so much of it as is essential to the maintenance of the population between this harvest and next harvest is a prime national necessity. The Neutrality League is also instituted with the object of carefully watching that the food reserves of the country are not depleted beyond the point necessary to the welfare of the people.

Finally, as this war was entered on by England without consulting Ireland or in any way regarding Irish interests of opinion, the League is instituted to protect, so far as possible, the interests of Ireland from being sacrificed to English exigencies. Its creed and watchword, therefore, is Ireland for the Irish.

Source: Sinn Féin, 17 October, 1914


There were many different opinions amongst Irish radicals on the correct political stance to take over the war between Britain and Germany. Intense

debates took place in the press and at public meetings. Amongst the women’s movement, some suffragists denounced ‘Prussian militarism’ and gave support to soldiers fighting for womanhood in Belgium and elsewhere; others decried war as the negation of all that feminism stood for. The Irish Citizen, stating that ‘war is a denial of the sacredness of human life’, remarked that there were differences of opinion with regards the present war, citing the example of a ‘well known public man (who is incidentally a strong feminist) declare with the applause of a Dublin audience that the German nation was waging a righteous war in defence of civilisation in Europe and that he hopes the Germans would win.’ It added ‘This view is, in spite of its suppression by the official press, very widely held in Ireland’.1 Frank Sheehy Skeffington, editor of the Irish Citizen, writing in a personal capacity against those denouncing Prussianism, remarked that all nations in the war shared ‘the detestable Imperialistic ideal…accordingly I cannot see in this war any conflict of ideals; I regard it as a conflict of appetites. Those who hold the views for which...the Irish Citizen and myself stand should clearly remain neutral or intervene only for the termination of the struggle’.2 On the nationalist side Áine de Paor, daughter of Cumann na mBan President Jennie Wyse Power, had recently returned from Germany and she wrote to the press and spoke at meetings in support of German women, who did not all ‘conform to the hausfrau image’. Amongst the positive examples she gave was a meeting in Berlin on 13 February, protesting against the rejection of a bill allowing women judges in children’s courts, organised by thirty seven women’s organisation ‘of all classes

and opinions’. There was much, de Paor believed, that could be learnt from Germany.3

How does Constance Markievicz, a leading figure in feminist, nationalist and socialist circles, fit into these differing scenarios? By August 1914 she had been a political activist for six years. In that time she had moved from the feminist nationalism of Inghinidhe na hÉireann to the socialist republicanism of the Irish Citizen Army, while still retaining involvement in Fianna na hÉireann, the republican boy scout movement she had co-founded in 1909. She had also become involved with Cumann na mBan, the newly formed female counterpart to the Irish Volunteers. From 1914 onwards she was to share numerous platforms with James Connolly, who had, when he moved from Belfast to Dublin, become her lodger at Surrey House, paying ten shillings a week for his keep:

Constance de Markievicz and the

Irish Neutrality League

Constance Markievicz


‘when he began to organise the ICA he brought me along, treating me as he got to know me, as a comrade, giving me any work that I could do. This was his attitude towards women in general, we were never in his mind, classed for work as a sex, but taken individually and considered, just as every man considers men, and then allotted any work we could do’.4

The attitudes of Markievicz and Connolly regards the war and the position that should be taken by Irish radicals was markedly similar, rooted in their commitment to work for the freedom of the Irish people, although Greaves is dismissive of Markievicz’s ‘mechanical mind’, which ‘read into Connolly’s fear that war might end without revolution, a desire to protract the war long enough to provide the necessary opportunity’.5

In the frenzied atmosphere of world war and Irish political intrigue, Connolly was able to use the multiple political affiliations of Markievicz in order to claim additional support for his particular political agenda. While Seán O’Casey attempted to have her expelled from the Citizen Army on the grounds that her membership of Cumann na mBan conflicted with the socialist principles of the ICA, it was O’Casey, not Markievicz, who lost the vote. When Connolly met with the IRB to discuss making plans for an insurrection and ways to contact Germany to seek military support, two sub-committees were formed, one to make contact with the Germans and the other to establish an open, propagandist organisation called the Irish National League (INL). There is evidence that the first committee included Markievicz as well as Connolly, Clarke and MacDermott.6

Sheehy Skeffington and Markievicz were both committee members of the INL, and their presence enabled Connolly to list an impressive number of organisations in attendance at the inaugural meeting of 12 October:

‘They had Home Rulers and Republicans, Socialists and Sinn Féners (applause). They had members of the sane section of the Volunteers, members of the Citizen Army (applause), and representatives of Cumann na mBan, Inghinidhe na Éireann, and the various Franchise Leagues in Ireland…They wanted to emphasise the fact that

the enemies of England were not necessarily the enemies of Ireland. It was their duty to gather together the forces in Ireland so that they might place their country in the position it ought to occupy – a position of neutrality (applause)…their duty was to Ireland and to Ireland only (cheers).’7

The Manifesto of the INL declared its aims to be: ‘for the purpose of defining Ireland’s present attitude towards the Anglo-German war as one of neutrality, watching Ireland’s interests at every phase of the war, preventing employers from coercing men to enlist, inculcating the view that true patriotism requires Irishmen to remain at home, and taking steps to preserve the food supplies of Ireland for the people of Ireland’.8

Although the League had a short life, with only that one public meeting and was, said William O’Brien, ‘an organisation of leaders without members’, it did give some lectures under the INL’s auspices before British military restrictions made the organisation impossible. Markievicz delivered a lecture on the subject of neutrality on 18 October for the Irish Labour Party: ‘The burden and suffering that would fall on the common people as a result of the present war would be

Constance Markievicz attending a funeral, with James Connolly standing behind her (left)


greater than in any other war…The present duty of every Irish man is to stay at home and fight, if at all, for the welfare of his own country’.9

Neutrality was not the same as pacifism. Markievicz was not a pacifist. The first Fianna handbook was also published in 1914. In its introduction she wrote with prescience, ‘This year has felt the spirit of Cathleen ní Houlahan moving once more through the land. It will take the best and noblest of Ireland’s children to win Freedom, for the price of Freedom is suffering and pain’.10 The handbook, with its fifty pages of drill and rifle exercises, was used as a training manual by the Irish Volunteers, and was praised as the ‘best source of training information easily available’.11

By early December, when Prime Minister Asquith suppressed all open opposition to war, any prospect of the INL developing momentum disappeared. Political debate did, however, continue. In February 1916 Markievicz debated against Frank Sheehy Skeffington on the question ‘Do We Want Peace Now?’, declaring she did not want the war stopped until the British Empire was smashed. The suffragist Louie Bennett was in the audience:

‘The Countess had the meeting with her. Skeffington’s supporters numbered twenty six. Her supporters spoke in a bitter and sinister

vein. I gathered they were willing to watch the war continue, with all its dreadful losses and consequences, if only it led to the overthrow of England and consequent release of Ireland. I broke out at the cowardice of that. I spoke pretty strongly and was listened to with civility. Then Connolly stood up and spoke at some length, claiming extra time from the chairman. As well as I can remember he spoke strongly in favour of seizing the moment to fight now against England. I gathered he regretted that more were not ready to do it. ‘12

Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was also at the meeting. Succinctly, she reported that Skeffington was ‘pro-peace’ and Markievicz ‘for a longer war as she held Britain was being beaten’. Connolly’s intervention swung the meeting round. Afterwards, she reported he replied to his friend, who had reproved him for throwing his weight at the end, ‘I was afraid you might get the better of it, Skeffington. That would never do’.13 For many on the Irish left, ‘neutrality’ was an expression of opposition to all imperial power. By 1916 it had become a commitment to fight for the right of Ireland to be accepted as an independent small nation, in keeping with the declared aims of the Allies pursuing the war against Germany.

Margaret Ward

Return of I.R.A. prisoners, June, 1917 - Constance Markievicz arrives at Liberty Hall, Dublin


For understandable reasons, the commemoration of historical episodes involving catastrophic loss of life is more likely to focus on events leading to the

tragedy rather than attempts to ameliorate or prevent its occurrence. All too often this leads us towards an ‘inevitability analysis’ - that the triggering of carnage is all part of an inexplicable urge by humanity to be blindly destructive at times. In fact, there is almost always a more humane, rational force at play around these events which needs some focus if acts of war, and the misery they bring, are to be avoided.

Pacifism is not something that is historically apparent from accounts of the events surrounding the quest for Irish independence. Patriotism, nationalist idealism and martyrdom dominate our perspectives of that period, which includes the onset of the Great War and the 1916 Rebellion. In this age of aspiration and turmoil, Francis Sheehy Skeffington was a committed proponent of pacifism, always visible and ever ready to promote non-violence whether in the pursuit of a Republic, living wage for workers or equality for women. In the words of his wife Hanna, Sheehy Skeffington was ‘an anti-militarist, a fighting pacifist, a man gentle and kindly even to his bitterest opponents, who always ranged himself on the side of the weak against the strong whether the struggle was one of class, sex or race domination’. Francis Skeffington was born in Bailieborough, County Cavan in 1878. The son of a doctor, he was educated in University College Dublin (UCD) where he was a close companion of James Joyce and Tom Kettle, later to be his brother-in-law. Never coy about his appearance, he was a noticeable figure on the streets of Dublin with his short stature, knickerbockers,

knee-length stockings and free flowing beard. Joyce affectionately referred to him as ‘Hairy Jasus’. While fully committed to the causes he believed in, Sheehy Skeffington was not humourless, referring to charges he was a crank by responding: ‘A crank is a small instrument that makes revolutions’.

After graduation, he worked as a freelance journalist. He met Hanna Sheehy in UCD and they married in June 1903. In a gesture of equality, they took each other’s names. An early indication of Sheehy Skeffington’s resolute pacifism arose

Francis Sheehy Skeffington - A Pacifist in an Age of

Militarism

Francis Sheehy Skeffington


within the Sheehy house, in Belvedere Place, from where he was physically ejected by Dick Sheehy, Hanna’s brother, following a heated argument. Totally unperturbed after swiftly regaining entry, he told Sheehy ‘force solves nothing’ as he resumed the argument.

The Sheehy Skeffingtons were vociferous proponents of equal rights for woman and committed pacifists. They joined the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association and supported the Women’s Social and Political Union, which lobbied for women’s rights in Britain. They were co-founders in 1908 of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and regularly addressed meetings in the Phoenix Park. In 1912, they founded the influential paper the

Irish Citizen, aiming to promote the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for both sexes. Sheehy Skeffington was never averse to putting his body on the line, sometimes to the point of being foolhardy. During the 1913 Lock Out, he was badly beaten up by Hibernians for attempting to send starving children of strikers to foster families in Liverpool. During the early stages of the Easter Rebellion, he ran through a fusillade of bullets to assist a wounded British officer at Dublin Castle, paying scant attention to his own safety.

A confirmed socialist, Sheehy Skeffington was openly associated with James Connolly in the revolutionary Irish labour movement and was a founder of the Irish Socialist Party. He believed in independence insofar as it created the conditions for a Workers’ Republic. His opposition to using military methods to achieve that end eventually caused him problems as Vice-Chair of the Irish Citizen Army when it began to take a more militaristic path and he promptly resigned.

Never one to equivocate on his deeply held principles, he was critical of the Volunteers growing militarism, scorning their justification that rebellion was a way to end oppression with the truism no militarist had ever claimed otherwise. Sheehy Skeffington was also deeply opposed to Redmond’s recruitment call for the defence of small nations. Neither was he impressed by the argument that participation in the war was a means of achieving Home Rule. In 1915, he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for making a speech ‘calculated to prejudice recruiting’, promptly embarked on a hunger and thirst strike and was out after six days on licence under the Cat and Mouse Act.

During the 1916 Rising he attempted to organise a civilian defence force to prevent looting. Believing the British authorities were fully aware he was resolutely opposed to the use of force and therefore expecting no sanction, he spent much of 25April 1916 organising a meeting to restore order and prevent further damage to property. Between 7 and 8pm, when passing Portobello Bridge on his way home, a British Army Lieutenant leading a patrol recognised him from a circulated description, ordered his arrest as an enemy sympathizer and brought him to Portobello Barracks. Sheehy Skeffington was unfortunate to come under the charge of the psychotic Captain Bowen-Colthurst who later that evening took him as cover for a patrol whose deeds were to become infamous. Along with two journalists who were also arrested, Sheehy Skeffington was shot the following morning and buried in the barracks yard. His body was re-interred on 8 May 1916 in Glasnevin cemetery.

Francis and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington


Sheehy Skeffington died tragically following a series of random events which might have been avoided had he taken greater care in his activities but that was not his way. After his death, Hanna described his strong fighting spirit, great faith in humanity and belief in the inevitability of progress towards good. He was a severe loss at a period when different strategies might have been implemented and a different Republic created. Perhaps the best insight into the man comes from an open letter he wrote to Thomas MacDonagh in March 1916, some weeks before the Easter Rebellion. In this letter, Sheehy Skeffington clearly outlined his vision as a socialist, republican and a pacifist: ‘I want to see the age-long fight against injustice clothe itself in new forms, suited to a new age. I want to see the manhood of Ireland no longer hypnotised by the glamour of the glory of arms, no longer blind to the horrors of organised murder. . . . We are on the threshold of a new era in human history. After this war nothing can be as it was before’.

The great pity is he was not there to shape that change.

Aiden Lloyd

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a great Irish Suffragette.



Britain was a deeply divided country in 1914. The heady hopes of reform aroused by the Liberal electoral landslide of 1906 had dimmed. Four years of national

strikes by miners, railwaymen and dockers and transport workers – the ‘Great Unrest’ – had culminated in the forging of a Triple Alliance of industrial unions of immense potential power. The Suffragettes had elevated the struggle for women’s emancipation into a militant mass movement. A bitterly contested Home Rule Bill had brought Ireland – Britain’s oldest and nearest colony – to the brink of civil war.

British democracy was a hobbled creature. No women had the vote and only half of working-class men. State violence against trade unionists and Suffragettes was routine. Loyalist paramilitaries were mobilising in Ireland, and the British Army’s high command had mutinied when ordered to take action against them. The Liberal Government had been hijacked by a coterie of warmongers – the ‘Liberal Imperialists’. They had been working in secret – unaccountable to Parliament and without reference to Cabinet colleagues – to push Britain towards war with Germany. In early August 1914, they bounced the country into war, ostensibly in defence of Belgium, in reality to defend the British Empire.

In London no less than in other European capitals that summer, when war was declared, a tiny minority of warmongers was able to submerge mass movements of resistance under a tide of jingo and militarism. Millions who had opposed war were swept along. But a minority remained firm in their pacifism and internationalism, providing a pole of resistance around which others could rally as the madness of modern industrialised warfare was unleashed across Europe.

The Great War did not give rise to a unified anti-war movement in Britain. Rather, opposition to the war ran in five parallel currents. These occasionally merged, and, over time, gained in strength. First, Britain had a deeply embedded popular tradition of personal freedom and civil liberties. This had nothing to do with benevolence and enlightenment on the part of the British ruling class; it was a tradition rooted in the mass struggles of the common people dating back to the Middle Ages, recharged by the sixteenth century Reformation and the seventeenth century Revolution, and renewed by the rise of organised labour and mass movements for democracy during the nineteenth century. One consequence was a strong residue of groups opposed to war on principle.

Before the end of the war, more than 20,000 British men of military age would have refused to enter the armed forces for religious, political, or philosophical reasons. Many were Quakers, a Non-Conformist pacifist group founded during

War Resistance in Britain During the Great War

A member of the Suffragette movement is arrested near Buckingham Palace, 1914.


the English Revolution, but the most high profile pacifist was the philosopher, socialist, and activist Bertrand Russell. Some 6,000 war resisters were imprisoned, including Russell, as the authorities struggled to suppress anti-conscription rallies and protests. As early as 1916, 2,000 had attended a No-Conscription Fellowship rally, and 200,000 had signed a petition calling for a negotiated peace.

The peace groups and Conscientious Objectors formed one channel of opposition. A second was the socialist movement. Both Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, leading Labour Party figures, opposed the war. But they muted their opposition in a desperate effort to keep the labour movement united, as right-wing trade union leaders rallied behind the Liberal Imperialists. In the event, MacDonald was deposed as Party Leader, and Labour joined the wartime Coalition Government in May 1915. Thus did the trade union leaders, who were supposed to represent the interests of their members, turn themselves into recruiting sergeants for imperialist war and industrialised slaughter.

The war also split the Suffragettes, a third stream. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel became cheer-leaders for war, encouraging men to volunteer. ‘If you go to this war and give your life,’ Emmeline told the men of Plymouth, ‘you could not end your life in a better way.’ Sylvia Pankhurst, on the other hand, was not only a Suffragette, but also a socialist and anti-imperialist, and she threw herself and her small radical Suffragette group into vigorous anti-war campaigning, repeatedly braving the abuse and violence of jingo mobs.

Militant trade unionism was a fourth strand of opposition to war. Strong workplace organisation had developed in major industries during the 20-year boom before the war. There were rank-and-file networks of radical shop-stewards in coalmines and steelworks, shipyards and engineering plants, and on the docks and the railways. Many leading activists were syndicalists, who saw the industrial power of the working class as the primary mechanism of socialist revolution. Wartime wage controls, speed-ups, and profiteering faced a rising tide of unofficial strike action. The Irish national movement formed the fifth channel. It too was split by the war. While John Redmond called on Irish men to fight for the British Empire, other Nationalists saw Britain’s war as Ireland’s opportunity. The Irish had always been prominent in radical movements in Britain, and the Nationalist cause now fused with opposition to the war, conscription, and wartime austerity.

Thus, pacifists, socialists, Suffragettes, shop stewards, and Irish Nationalists constituted a diffuse but deep-rooted and increasingly powerful anti-war movement in Britain between 1914 and 1918. The war ended before this movement became a majority – before revolution against war of the kind that happened in Russia and Germany became possible. But it formed the basis of a massive upsurge of popular struggle in the immediate post-war period that was to bring Britain closer to revolution in 1919 than at any other time in the twentieth century.

Neil Faulkner

Ramsay MacDonald at his desk

Socialist and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst


It was as if someone would have tried ‘to fix a truck rolling into a precipice with a thread of silk’. This is how Otto Umfrid, a priest and peace activist from Stuttgart in southern Germany,

described the situation of the German peace movement in the summer of 1914. Umfrid was a member of the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (DFG, German Peace Society), the strongest and most important German peace organisation at this time. Founded in 1892 with the support of Bertha von Suttner, the famous Austrian pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize winner of 1905, the DFG had merely 10.000 members in the whole German Reich when the First World War began – really not many compared to the millions of Germans who were active in organisations like the Deutscher Flottenverein (German Navy League) or the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) which openly supported the war. Being weaker than peace organisations for example in France, United Kingdom, United States, the Scandinavian countries or Switzerland, the DFG was not in a position to effectively fight against the war. As if this was not bad enough, quite a number of its members, amongst them famous and well respected scientists, changed their mind in August 1914 and claimed the offensive actions of the German army was justified.

Things turned sour for the anti-militarists in the German labour movement as well. There had been quite a number of resolutions against war in the years before 1914. In 1907, German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was successful with a motion at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart.

The motion demanded that workers and socialist politicians in all countries should do everything to prevent a war. In the same year, Karl Liebknecht (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party of Germany) published his famous pamphlet Militarism and Antimilitarism. Still on 25 July 1914, the executive of the SPD called on its members to support anti-war demonstrations. In the following days, about half a million people joined mass protests against the impending war in more than 160 cities and small towns all over Germany. But when the war began, the resistance of the SPD immediately broke down. On 31 July, you could read in Vorwaerts (Forward), the central organ of the SPD: ‘When the fateful hour has come, the workers ... will do their duty and will not let the patriots surpass

‘Fixing a Truck Rolling Into a Precipice With a

Thread of Silk’:The German Peace

Movement, 1914-1918

Umfrid, Otto Ludwig


them’. On 4 August 1914, all representatives of the SPD in the German Reichstag (the national Parliament) voted in favour of war credits. Only a small minority dissented internally, but in the vote bowed to the will of the overwhelming majority.

German war propaganda was successful in weakening the peace movement and the anti-militarists in the labour movement especially by making two strong points. One was to claim that the war was a defensive war. In fact, it was not. The German Reich fought for territorial expansion and aimed at creating a kind of central European economic community under German hegemony. But this was not explained to the public, of course, and when the war began, many tended to believe that Germany had been attacked and had to defend herself. Another point was to claim that the war was a war against Russian Tsarism. Russia under the Tsar was being depicted as the most reactionary, most repressive country in Europe; especially the labour movement took the czar as a natural enemy. ‘Under Russian sceptre, there is not an ounce of right of self-determination of the people’, wrote the Volkszeitung, a newspaper from Koenigsberg close to the SPD, at the beginning of August 1914: ‘No social democratic newspaper is permitted there; social democratic organisations and meetings are forbidden. This is why no one of us would even think about taking a risk that Russia wins the war’. And whereas Germany itself could not be said to be a progressive state at all, this argument was helpful in winning over the German labour movement for Berlin’s war of aggression.

At the end of 1914, the peace movement and the anti-militarists in the labour movement were able to take their first consolidating steps. On 16 November 1914, activists founded the Bund Neues Vaterland (New Fatherland Association) which promoted an immediate peace agreement. On 2 December, Liebknecht voted against new war credits in the Reichstag; two more SPD representatives deliberately stayed away from the vote. In 1915, resentment against the war grew stronger within the labour movement, leading to heavy repression by German police. The reviving peace movement was also hit by repression. In 1915, pamphlets published by the Bund Neues Vaterland were banned; in 1916, the German authorities prohibited the association from any public

activity, and its secretary Lilli Jannasch was sent into prison. On 1 May 1916, Liebknecht led a demonstration speaking out against the war. When he started shouting, ‘Down with the war! Down with the government!’ he was arrested immediately, taken to court and sent into prison.

In the course of the war, atrocities at the front as well as hunger and repression at home changed the mood of increasing parts of the German population. In June 1916, workers in Berlin went on strike against Liebknecht’s imprisonment. In April 1917, there were again strikes in a number of German cities against food shortages and for peace. In January 1918, more than one million workers went on strike again, demanding an end to the war and a democratisation, finally not in Russia, but in Germany herself. And whereas the state continued to repress the relatively weak organisations of the German peace movement and the anti-militarists within the labour movement, quite a number of men fighting at the front became strong opponents of war. Not all of them, to be sure but a significant minority. Many soldiers drew a dark fascination from the dire combat and became ultra-right militarists, Adolf Hitler was the most infamous of them. But many others, especially writers like Erich Maria Remarque or Ernst Toller, left the trenches deeply shocked, exposing the cruelties of war in their writings to come.

The peace movement can derive strength from their work until today.

Horst Teubert

‘Militarism and Anti-militarism’ by Karl Liebknecht was originally published in Germany in 1907 and immediately banned by the German authorities. The author was imprisoned for treason.


The inaugural meeting of the Irish Neutrality League (INL) was held in the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, on 12 October, 1914, ‘for the purpose of defining

Ireland’s present attitude towards the Anglo-German War as one of neutrality, preventing employers from coercing men to enlist, and taking steps to preserve the food supplies of Ireland for the people of Ireland’. The INL believed that ‘England’s quarrel with Germany cannot involve Ireland and... steps should be taken to keep the nationalist position well defined’. The founders included not alone James Connolly, its President, but Tom Clarke, Éamonn Ceannt, Seán MacDermott, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Pádraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, all future signatories of the 1916 Proclamation.

While his comrades saw the war as an opportunity to strike a blow for Ireland’s freedom, Connolly saw its wider implications for the European working class. He realised that the failure of the Socialist International to successfully confront the rush to war by Europe’s ruling elite would lead to a conflagration that would set civilisation back decades, although even he did not realise that it would cost at least fifteen million lives and the destruction of whole countries. A few principled individuals such as Keir Hardie and George Lansbury in Britain, Jean Juarès in France, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, vigorously opposed the war, but too many of the other leaders of Europe’s working class

succumbed to nationalist hysteria with the most appalling consequences.

It behoves us to remember all those consigned to die from 1914 to 1918 in the light of today’s events, when once more Europe’s political elite, especially in Germany, obdurately refuses to stimulate the economy and consequently consigns tens of millions to idleness and poverty, while it encourages war mongers in Ukraine. We can anticipate that after the October elections in

No Doubt Where Connolly Would Stand Today

Padraig Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh, Sean MacDermott, Joseph Plunkett & Eamonn Ceannt

Keir Hardie

Jean Jaurès

George Lansbury

Rosa Luxemburg


that country it will apply to join NATO, a course experienced western diplomats such as Henry Kissinger, who is no dove, have counselled against and which President Obama shows no appetite to pursue.

The posturing by Merkel, Putin and their allies increasingly resembles the brinkmanship of the European political elites in the summer of 1914. In these circumstances, we must hold firm to our Union’s traditional policy of support for Irish neutrality, non-alignment and for international institutions such as the United Nations, as not alone the best but the only way of resolving armed conflicts.

The recrudescence of extreme nationalist movements across Central and Eastern Europe is the greatest threat to the peace of the Continent since 1945. If the First World War should never have been fought, the Second World War had to be won in order to save civilisation. We can no more afford to see another generation sacrificed to meet the short sighted and self-destructive aims of Europe’s current ruling elite, through renewed military adventures, than we can allow their current addiction to austerity to continue denying hope to our young people and feeding these atavistic political movements.

There is no doubt where Connolly and his co-founders of the INL would stand on these issues today.

Jack O’Connor,General President, SIPTU

James Connolly, 1910


We are in the process of commemorating the centenary outbreak of the First World War. This war was to destroy so-

called European civilisation as it then existed. It also destroyed the hopes, desires, dreams and ambitions of the thousands of Irish people who perished in the conflict.

The war shook the foundations of British rule in Ireland. One of the things that emerged during the First World War was the Irish commitment to neutrality. The idea of both an independent and neutral Ireland had, however, been present for a long time. Wolfe Tone – the founder of Irish Republicanism – when examining the role of Ireland in a conflict between Britain and Spain proposed the policy of using neutrality to avoid

supporting Britain. C. Desmond Greaves refers to Tone’s writing on this subject: ‘It will not pretend that we have immediately, for our own concerns, any grounds for interfering in the approaching war, on the contrary, peace with all the world

Irish Trade Unionism, Neutrality and the First World War

Connolly and Larkin with the National Executive of the Irish TUC and Labour Party, 1914

In the trenches looking at the enemy


and peace with Spain in particular is our object and interest. The quarrel is merely and purely English. A few individuals in China, members of a company which possess of the monopoly of the commerce in the east to the utter exclusion of this country, fitted out certain ships to trade in the North Western coast of America for furs. The Spaniards, actuated by pride or jealously or both, have it seems seized these vessels to the disgrace (not the Irish but the British flag) but unconnected with the interest in questions debarred of the gains of the commerce, what has Ireland to demand her interference more than if the debate arose between the emperor of Japan and the King of Korea’.

Applying this attitude to the world that they lived in, people like James Connolly and Pádraig Pearse were both determined to let England and the rest of Britain fight imperial Germany. They did not see it as being in the interest of the mass of the Irish people. There were, of course, contrasting views on this in Ireland. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, committed Ireland to support Britain in the War. Connolly’s analysis, however, was different to that of Pearse because in August 1899 – acting on behalf of the Irish Socialist Republican Party – Conolly organised a public protest on Britain’s role in the Transvaal.

He described the aim of the British Government in the Boer War as enabling an unscrupulous gang of capitalists to get their hands on the immense riches of the diamond fields. Roger Casement argued that when the Irish had an independent state they should embrace a policy of neutrality.

In other words, Connolly’s view was rooted in the economic analysis in which he hoped for a set of circumstances in which workers throughout Europe would resist war by direct action and refuse to do anything to aid the militarisation and conflict that was about to take place in Europe.

Connolly was the most advanced and coherent of the 1916 leaders. He saw the struggle against the British Empire as part of a world-wide struggle against the First World War. His ideas were given practical expression by the participation of the Irish Citizen Army in the 1916 Rebellion, which he saw as part of a struggle against international imperialism. Connolly’s ideas gave rise to the famous slogan outside of the Liberty Hall headquarters of the ITGWU on war’s outbreak: ‘We Serve Neither King Nor Kaiser But Ireland’. This ultimately led to an anti-Conscription campaign culminating in a General Strike against Conscription in 1918. In these campaigns, we see

Crowds gather outside Liberty Hall, headquarters of the ITGWU, 6th September 1913


the struggle for neutrality as a struggle for Irish independence.

Ireland had gone through a period of political, social and economic upheavals: the 1913 Lockout, the demand for Home Rule, Unionist opposition to Home Rule and the organised rebellion against the British Parliament which was led by Unionists to thwart Home Rule. At one stage, the Unionists went one stage further and asserted if the British government attempted to grant Home Rule to Redmond, they would seek the aid of Germany. In August 1913, Edward Carson had lunch with the Kaiser and discussed German aid to Ulster. The British Government became alarmed over the amount of arms that had been landed in Ulster. There were approximately 100,000 Ulster men under arms which were bought in Germany and landed illegally in Larne. Former British Home Secretary Winston Churchill wanted to carry out a raid on the headquarters of the Ulster Volunteer Force. However, Sir Arthur Paget, Commander of the British forces in Ireland, proclaimed that his officers would not serve against the ulster unionists. Ralph (R.M.) Fox, the British left wing historian, remarked: ‘With the Curragh Mutiny, the fiction that the army is above or beneath politics vanished. This has always been one of the English fictions, now however it was perceived that army officers where armed men with opinions, or at

least prejudices. In Ireland, where the veneer of constitutional ism is very thin, the lessons will not be lost upon the young men who took their inspirations from the Fenians, Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone’.

Into this tumultuous situation came the birth of the Irish Labour movement. Never before in Irish history had workers shown such a determination to form trade unions and to give expression to their demands not only for Irish independence but for a Socialist Republic. They were led by convinced Marxists revolutionaries like Connolly and Larkin who were determined to take Ireland out of the First World War by whatever means necessary. Their idea was not only Nationalist and Republican but also international in its character. Connolly – and indeed the Irish labour movement in general –had not only determined to keep Ireland out of the war but had participated in conferences of the Second International which had pledged that workers throughout Europe would resist war. So the involvement of the Irish Citizen Army in the 1916 Rising was part of that internationalist tradition.

When war broke out, Connolly announced emphatically that a blow for independence must be struck. This contrasts sharply with John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party,

The Dublin Lockout, 1913


who invited the British Government to withdraw troops from Ireland to defend the Empire. He went even further and suggested that Irish Volunteers could be used on the Western Front. Connolly in contrast wrote in the ITGWU’s Irish Worker: ‘What should be the attitude of working class democracy to the fact that the question is addressed to working class democracy because I believe that it would be worse than foolish to take council in this matter from any other source’. Connolly ended his article: ‘Should the working class of Europe, rather than slaughter one another for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport services that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a gloriously example, and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture class that rob and rule the world’.

Connolly still hoped for a socialist revolution in Europe by direct action of socialists and trade union forces as he battled with a dilemma of what happens if this theory failed to materialise in practice? He was prepared to contemplate the idea that the Citizen Army should participate in a rebellion against the British Empire whilst it was engaged in war. He said, ‘Ireland may yet set a torch to a European configuration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on a funeral pyre of the last war lord’.

wanted: the cutting off all trade with Dublin. He reflected on this in the Irish Worker when he wrote: ‘That we Irish workers must go down into hell, bow our backs to the lash of the slave driver, let our hearts be seared by the irony of this hatred and instead of the sacramental wafer of brotherhood and common sacrifice, we must eat the dust of defeat’. Connolly questioned the collapse of working class internationalism into the inferno of the First World War. According to his biographer Desmond Greaves, Connolly’s answer was sheer genius. It paralleled the thinking of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader in Russia, who advocated direct action against his own government in the First World War and brought about the Russian Revolution.

Connolly had a choice to make at this time. He could throw his weight behind persuading the British and the Irish movement to overthrow capitalism in both countries or he could work to end the war in Ireland with his Republican allies. The answer given by Connolly himself was the logical extension of his own theories and previous activities. It was to strike a blow for Irish independence and democracy. For Greaves, his brilliance was that in doing so he anticipated the answer arrived at by the advanced forces of the Second International in the Zimmerwile Conference on 21 September 1915 which declared: ‘Now you must stand up for your own cause, for the sacred aims of socialism, for the emancipation of the oppressed nations as well as the enslaved classes, by means of irreconcilable proletarian class struggle’.

Into the 1916 Rebellion

The outbreak of the war created the conditions for the 1916 rebellion. We now know that Connolly was in favour of taking action against the war at the earliest opportunity. We know that his participation along with the most advanced Republicans ultimately led to the War of Independence and to the establishment of the Free State in 1922. The repression brought about after the murder of the 1916 leaders by the British Government and the threat of conscription created an atmosphere which contributed to the Sinn Féin victory in the 1918 election and the establishment of the First Dáil.

Difficulties With British Labour

It must be remembered that the 1913 Lockout had just ended. Connolly witnessed amazing solidarity from workers in Britain including food ships, but the leadership of the British labour movement failed to give Connolly and Larkin what they


The British Government refused to recognize the Dáil and the War of Independence ensued.

During this period, the trade union movement and workers generally were asserting themselves. There were thousands of factory occupations. Workers were prepared to advance concepts like nationalisation and workers’ control. In fact on the 4 February 1918, a meeting supported by the Dublin Trades Council and the Socialist Party celebrated the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia. 10,000 people gathered in the Mansion House and passed the motion: ‘Ireland hails your resurrection

as the first and the greatest Socialist Republic. Ireland has faith in your saviour of the working class and in your revolutionary proletarian democracy’.

In this article, we have demonstrated that the concept of Irish neutrality was understood by the trade union and labour movement in Ireland. Its ideals manifested themselves in the concrete actions that they took during the First World War. That is why the Dublin Council of Trade Unions remains committed to PANA and the valuable work it carries out. That is why we are opposed to the militarisation of the EU and to events like the current attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza.

It is the contention of this article that Irish neutrality works best when it is part of a broad movement which is political, social and economic. The redistribution of wealth and the creation of greater equality must be seen as part of a challenge that can revive our neutrality and work for a peaceful Europe.

Mick O’Reilly,Dublin Council of Trade Unions

Citizen Army in Croydon Park

British mounted troops Dublin 1916



As the centenary of the First World War is marked it is important to point out that no-one should object to remembrance of the dead. However,

when remembrance is used to promote an imperialist view of Britain’s role in the world in general and in Ireland in particular, it must be challenged. In Britain itself there is no pretence about separating remembrance of the Great War from the British Army and its wars of today. BBC television’s live coverage of Armistice Day ceremonies in London in recent years has been inter-cut with footage of British Army operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is a false contention that the Irish who died in the First World War have been forgotten for a hundred years. Shane Hegarty, writing in The Irish Times in 2008 on the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the war, stated ‘It seems that we are only now beginning to remember’. It was contended that the surviving participants in the war had disappeared into a black hole when they returned to Ireland after the war. This ignores the fact that the experience of the Irish people in the First World War – those who joined the British Army and those who did not – was a national disaster that profoundly affected the relationship between Ireland and Britain and actually escalated the struggle for national self-determination.

The political leaders who helped to induce 200,000 Irishmen to join the British Army from autumn 1914 onwards did so for openly contradictory reasons. The Irish Party under John Redmond urged young Nationalists to join in order to ensure that Home Rule would be delivered after the war. The Unionists under Edward Carson urged young Unionists to join to help defeat Home Rule.

Redmond had tried to hijack the newly formed Irish Volunteers in 1914. When war came he had talks with the British War Office with a view to the Volunteers coming under the command of the British Army. The British would only accept individual Volunteers as recruits and rejected any notion of them serving exclusively in Ireland or having a separate Irish Brigade. Redmond capitulated and at Woodenbridge in September 1914 urged the Volunteers to join the British Army and fight overseas. A few months earlier Redmond had also capitulated to the proposed Partition of Ireland and the British Cabinet which declared war had, at its previous meeting, discussed the division of the country. The maps of Fermanagh and Tyrone were replaced with maps of Belgium and Serbia.

From the beginning there was opposition to Irish participation in the war. At first this was almost crushed by the hysteria which gripped the country. In October 1914, when Redmond spoke at a pro-war rally in the Bull Ring in Wexford, Republicans demonstrated against recruitment

Harnessing the People of Ireland to

England’s War Chariot

Edward Carson in 1912, signing Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant in opposition to the Irish Home Rule Bill.


to the British Army. They were violently attacked by the crowd. Republican feminist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was beaten up and narrowly escaped being thrown into the river.

There is a myth that the attitude of Republicans was one of unremitting hostility to those who joined the British Army. In fact they made efforts to show these men that the British Government, Redmond and Carson were using them as dupes and that they would become cannon fodder in the imperialist war. Many joined the British Army because of poverty. This was highlighted by James Connolly when he wrote: ‘The first step in the economic conscription of Irishmen was taken when the employers of Dublin locked their working people out in 1913 for daring to belong to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913 the employers of Dublin used the weapon of starvation to try and compel men and women to act against their conscience. In 1915 the employers of Dublin and Ireland in general are employing the weapon of starvation in order to compel men to act against their conscience’

Connolly also wrote: ‘There are widows in Belfast today whose husbands would still be with them if they had taken my advice; there are orphans in Belfast today whose father would still be able to work for them and love them if they had taken my advice; there are stricken mothers and fathers in Belfast today whose sons would still be smiling

and happy at the family hearth today if my advice had been listened to. And I am confident that it will not be long before these widows, orphans and bereaved parents with every sob and sigh will breathe a curse upon the conscienceless politician to whose advice they did listen’.

Connolly’s prediction was correct. Already by Easter 1916 recruitment into the British Army had declined and it ground to a halt as the senseless slaughter escalated. Over 30,000 Irish lives were lost in the war. They and their bereaved relatives were told that they were fighting for ‘the freedom of small nations’. The hypocrisy of this claim was repeatedly highlighted by Sinn Féin, with telling effect, as the movement drew increasing support throughout 1917 and 1918. Many people who had fought and were fighting in the British Army also reflected the change in public opinion. The poet Francis Ledwidge mourned the execution of his friends Thomas MacDonagh and Pádraig Pearse and told his brother he wouldn’t care if the Germans came over his back wall at home in Meath. Ledwidge was killed in Flanders in 1917.

As Britain ran out of cannon fodder in early 1918, the British Government prepared to impose conscription on Ireland. Conscription met with massive resistance which prevented the British from putting it into effect. This was the immediate prelude to the General Election called after the Armistice of November 1918. When the Sinn Féin election manifesto was published in the newspapers this passage on the war was censored by order of the British government:

‘Those who have harnessed the people of Ireland to England’s war-chariot, ignoring the fact that only a freely-elected government in a free Ireland has power to decide the question of peace and war, have forfeited the right to speak for the Irish people’.

Sinn Féin won an overwhelming victory in the General Election. Many former soldiers in the British Army, far from disappearing, joined the struggle for independence. Legendary IRA guerrilla commander Tom Barry was only the best known of them.

When the First Dáil Éireann assembled in the Mansion House on 21 January 1919 and declared

John Redmond, the Home Rule leader, urges Wexford men to join the British Army in 1914.


Ireland’s independence as a democratic Republic, a Message to the Free Nations of the World was issued. This document reflected the impact of the Great War on Ireland. It was an appeal for a hearing for Ireland at the Peace Conference in Versailles. That appeal was blocked by Britain and Dáil Éireann was suppressed, making armed conflict in Ireland inevitable.

The Dáil’s international message deserves to be recalled in the context of the debate on the First World War:

‘Ireland to-day reasserts her historic nationhood the more confidently before the new world emerging from the War, because she believes in freedom and justice as the fundamental principles

of international law, because she believes in a frank co-operation between the peoples for equal rights against the vested privileges of ancient tyrannies, because the permanent peace of Europe can never be secured by perpetuating military dominion for the profit of empire but only by establishing the control of government in every land upon the basis of the free will of a free people, and the existing state of war between Ireland and England can never be ended until Ireland is definitely evacuated by the armed forces of England.

“For these among other reasons, Ireland—resolutely and irrevocably determined at the dawn of the promised era of self-determination and liberty that she will suffer foreign dominion no longer—calls upon every free nation to uphold her national claim to complete independence as an Irish Republic against the arrogant pretensions of England founded in fraud and sustained only by an overwhelming military occupation, and demands to be confronted publicly with England at the Congress of the Nations, in order that the civilised world having judged between English wrong and Irish right may guarantee to Ireland its permanent support for the maintenance of her national independence.’

Míceál Mac DonnchaSinn Féin

Tom Barry

World War 1 British Army Recruitment at Shandon Street, Cork


In 1914, what was initially called the Great War broke out. Subsequently, it came to be known as the First World War or World War One (WW I). In fact, what occurred was the onset of the

first Global Inter-imperialist War (or GIW I). The second GIW (or GIW II) took place between 1939 & ‘45. In either instance, the assertion that what was entailed was a struggle for democracy is sheer humbug. However, GIW II is a subject for analysis on another occasion.

In 1914, the relevant chain of events began when the Austro-Hungarian Empire attacked Serbia in July following the assassination in Sarajevo the previous June of Arch Duke Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne in Vienna. The Russian Empire then sided with Serbia, and the German Empire supported the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The latter two entities came to be described as the Central Powers. Pursuant to the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the French Empire (legalistically styled in metropolitan terms as a ‘republic’) was next engaged in war with the Central Powers and the British Empire joined the French and Russians in August. (It had guaranteed Belgian neutrality in the Treaty of London of 1839 and had concluded

the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 and a Convention with Russia in 1907 - these overall developments are sometimes referred to as the Triple Entente.) When GIW I started, Russia, France and the UK were to be called the Allies. Thus far, the conflict was yet another European one. As for ‘poor, little catholic Belgium’, which was invaded by the Germans on 4th August 1914, it was also an imperialist state, although its subjugated territories lay outside Europe, mainly in Africa and, to a small extent, in China.

In 1914-16, other European countries were to become embroiled on one side or the other. Italy was the largest, while smaller states such as Montenegro, Bulgaria and Romania were also drawn in.

Outside of Europe, in the same period, the Ottoman Empire and the Japanese Empire joined in the conflict, again adopting different stances. In 1917, the most significant new participants were America and China, while, in that year and the next, a raft of countries from Southern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, simply jumped on the band wagon.

Of course, the War did not only involve sovereign states and their overseas dominions (such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand), it witnessed fighting in the overseas colonies of empires. It was also waged across the globe on the high seas.

But, within these parameters, the question arises as to the real geopolitical dynamics of the conflagration.

Austria-Hungary was concerned to strengthen and extend its control of the Balkans, while Russia, equally so concerned with that region, was

Imperialism &

Independence 1914-22

28 June 1914: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg


determined that it should not do so. France, still smarting from the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, continued to fear continuing German might, now enshrined in the Second Reich in Europe and increasingly evident in Africa and Asia. Britain was worried about the Reich as well in the same respects, but especially as regards the growth of German naval power. Italy later joined the fray with its sense of ‘Italia irredenta’ vis-à-vis Austria, while the Ottoman Empire was fearful of greedy Russian, British and French designs on its empire

and Japan was anxious to expand in the Pacific. Towards the end of GIW I, America entered the fray after Germany announced unrestricted marine warfare, in particular to isolate the UK - a major trading partner of the US - and sank a number of American ships. (America had already established its own imperialist character, as demonstrated in its seizure of Mexican territories in the 19th century, and its colonial interests in the Caribbean and the Philippines enduring into the 20th.) China joined the Allies with a view to regaining the Shantung peninsula, originally the site of a German colony, which had been seized by Britain and Japan; it also still had its eyes on Tibet.

The outgrowth of GIW I saw the emergence of several new, independent states: in Northern Europe - Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; in Eastern and Central Europe - Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary; in Southern Europe - Yugoslavia (i.e. South Slavia comprised chiefly of Slovenes, Croats and Serbians) and Albania. (However, independ-ence was not always matched by post-imperialist democracy.) In Western Europe, the most notable development was the estab-lishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.

The armed struggle for Irish independence had begun in 1916 with the Easter Rising. Several attempts have been made to denigrate it. Firstly, the question of mandate has been posed. The fact is that the mandate for national insurrection

French troops on the way to the front

Austro-Hungarian mountain corps


derives from foreign occupation. Even if some or many of one’s fellow nationals acquiesce in colonial bullying, that does not bind one to do so as well.1 Apart from that, it has to be remembered that the United Kingdom of 1916 was not a proper democracy as, in round terms, 70% of adults (i.e. persons aged 21 and more) did not have a vote for parliament. When the suffrage was extended to all adult males in 1918 and some adult females (the latter did not get the same suffrage as males until 1928), the First Dáil was elected and the War of Independence began.

Returning to 1916, a number of assertions have been made about the Rising that are du-bious, to say the least. To begin with, much is made of the derision to which captured rebels were subjected by some of the citizenry of Dublin as they were led off to prison. However, it does not take a genius to suspect that supporters of the Rising were afraid to come out on the streets in the face of the British army, while relatives of husbands and sons who had been lured into the service of British imperialism felt free to do so.

In fact, there is evidence to support this conclusion. A member of the Canadian press, sent to Dublin after the Rising broke out, wrote a book about his experiences. In this, he said: “I have read many accounts of public feeling in Dublin in

these days. They are all agreed that the open and strong sympathy of the mass of the population was with the British troops. That this was so in the better parts of the city, I have no doubt, but certainly what I myself saw in the poorer districts did not confirm this. It rather indicated that there was a vast amount of sympathy with the rebels, particularly after the rebels were defeated. The sentences of the Courts Martial deepened this sympathy.” And further on he stated: “People were leaning from their windows waving triangular flags and handkerchiefs. ‘They are cheering the soldiers,’ I said to my companion. ... As the main body approached I could see that the soldiers were escorting a large number of prisoners, men and women, several hundreds in all. The people were cheering not the sol-diers but the rebels.” 2

Another attempt to diminish the Rising (as touched on by the author just quoted) is by reference to General Maxwell, commander of British forces during the episode. It is often suggested that had it not been for his execution of rebel leaders, opinion in Ireland would not have swung behind them and their cause. Thus rebel heroism and popular patriotism is reduced to the stupidity of a British general.

1916 is of course also the year of the Somme where many Irishmen perished in battle with the

The ruins of Liberty Hall after the 1916 Easter Rising


Germans. Furthermore, the Somme is the symbol of the tens of thousands of Irishmen who fell throughout GIW I. An effort is increasingly made to equate the fate of these men with those who died in the Rising and the War of Independence. While it is a matter of human compassion and deep sadness that Irishmen met their end at the Somme, in Flanders and elsewhere between 1914 and ’18, the fact remains that they were imperialist cannon fodder rather than national freedom fighters. Their subjective drive may have varied from seeking to enhance their income, to a search for glory, to an idealistic belief that they were fighting for democracy in general or Irish home rule in particular. But the objective reality is that they were simply the instruments of British imperialism.

With regard to the promise of home rule at the war’s end, it was well short of national independence, both as regards partition and the

limited powers to be granted to two devolved administrations north and south.

While the Irish Revolution of 1916-22 did not lead to a desired all-Ireland republic, it brought much more than ‘home rule’ to 26 of the island’s 32 counties in the shape of the Irish Free State, and inspired anti-colonial movements throughout the world. In particu-lar, it began the end of the British Empire.

1. For example, although it can never be capable of proof, one way or the other, one wonders if a ma-jority of the French people actually supported the resistance between 1941 and ’44 rather than the Vichy regime. But no democrat thus calls into question the validity of that resistance.

2. F A McKenzie, The Irish Rebellion - What Happened and Why, (C Arthur Pearson Ltd, 1916).Daltún Ó Ceallaigh, Eagarthóir, INC NEWS

German troops firing from a trench

Gas casualties



Endnotes

i F.S.L. Lyons, ‘The revolution in train, 1914-1916’ in W.E. Vaughan, A New History of Ireland VI: Ireland Under the Union, 18790-1921, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010), p. 191.ii Cathal O’Shannon also recorded that Connolly asked him to contact the IRB’s Denis MacCullough in Belfast at the same time, ‘The Irish Rebels’, Empire News, 16 August, 1953.iii See O’Brien’s ‘Introduction’ to Desmond Ryan (ed), Labour & Easter Week 1916: A Selection From the Writings of James Connolly, (Three Candles, Dublin, 1949), pp. 1-7.iv Farren was Secretary, Stonecutters’ Union of Ireland; Treasurer, DTC; and Dublin Labour Party Councillor for Usher’s Quay, see Francis Devine, Organising History: A Centenary of SIPTU, 1909-2009, (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 2009), pp. 960-961.v Milroy was born in Maryport, Cumberland, England but moved to County Cork as a young man. He befriended Griffith, joined Sinn Féin, serving on its Executive, 1909-1912. He fought with the Volunteers in 1916 and was imprisoned in England. He unsuccessfully contested Tyrone East and Tyrone North East in 1918 but was arrested. With de Valera and Seán McGarry he escaped from Lincoln Prison February 1919, and helped form the Irish Self-Determination League in Britain, He was elected unopposed for Cavan, 1921, and for Fermanagh & Tyrone in the Northern Ireland Parliament although he did not take his Stormont seat nor seek re-election. He supported the Treaty and was elected in Cavan, 1922 before resigning in 1924 as part of Joe McGrath’s ‘National Group’. He twice unsuccessfully stood for election again in Dublin North and Cavan before election to the Senate and re-joining Cumann na nGaedheal, 1928-1936, Marie Coleman, ‘Milroy, John Ignatius (‘Seán’) (1877-1946) politician and revolutionary’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), Volume 6, (RIA/Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009). pp. 517-518. Milroy’s writings included Memories of Mountjoy (1917) and The Case for Ulster (1923).vi William O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, (Three Candles, Dublin, 1969), pp. 268-290. The ‘rump’ was Austen Morgan’s view: James Connolly: A Political Biography, (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988), pp. 146-148. John Joseph

Scollan, born South Shields, County Durham, 1876-died 1962, was the leading figure in the IAA after the split in the AOH in 1907, the other section being Board of Erin. He was central to the creation of the Hibernian Rifles. His Witness Statement, in which he makes no mention of the INL, outlines the Hibernian Rifles formation and action, Military History Bureau of Ireland, WS318, John Joseph Scollan, 3 November, 1949, www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0318.pdf#page=1 [retrieved 1 July, 2014).; and Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, ‘A short history of the Hibernian Rifles,m1912-1916’, http://www.theirishstory.com/2013/03/31/a-short-history-of-the-hibernian-rifles-1912-1916/#.U_IJYGOorw0 [retrieved 16 August, 2014]. Ó Snodaigh says Scollan was from Fermanagh. In 1911, Scollan resided with his mother and sister at 33 Creggan Road, Derry, the census confirming his Durham origins and giving his trade as printer-compositor, www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai002845417/ [retrieved 16 August, 2014]vii Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, Comhghuaillithe na Réabhlóide, (Clócomhar, Baile Átha Cliath, 1966), pp. 73-74, 80.viii National Library of Ireland (NLI), William O’Brien Papers, Ms 13,954, Circulars and letters of the INL.ix Connolly to O’Brien, 22 September, 1914 in Dónal Nevin, Between Comrades: James Connolly Letters & Correspondence, 1889-1916, (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 2007), pp. 521-522; C. Desmond Greaves, The Life & Times of James Connolly, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1972), pp.361-362.x O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, op. cit., pp. 272-273; Thomas J. Morrissey, William O’Brien, 1881-1969: Socialist, Republican, Dáil Deputy, Editor & Trade Union Leader, (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2007), pp. 89-92; Dónal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 2005), pp. 603-604. Mulcahy, 10 May, 1886-16 December, 1971, was active in Sinn Féin, 1918-1923; Cumann na Gaedheal, 1923-1933, and Fine Gael, 1933-1961, leading the party from 194-1948. He serves as IRA Chief of Staff, 1922-1924; Minister for Defence, 1922-1924; Minister for Local Government & Public Health, 1927-1932; Minister for Education, 1948-1951, 1954-1957 and for the Gaeltacht, 1956. McGrath, 1887-1 March, 1960, followed a similar political path and was Minister for Labour, 1922 and Minister for Industry & Commerce, 192-


1924. After becoming labour adviser to Siemens Schuckert in 1925, he founded Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes in 1930 ad developed a business career. He had briefly worked in the Insurance Section, ITGWU after 1918.xi See Peter Murray, ‘The First World War and a Dublin distillery workforce: recruitment and redundancy at John Power & Son, 1915-1917’, Saothar 15, 1990, pp. 48-56.xii NLI, William O’Brien Papers, Ms 13,954, Circulars and letters of the INL; .Irish Worker, 10 October, 1914.xiii Kelly or O’Kelly was Sinn Féin Councillor for Inn’s Quay, holding his sear until 1924. He was elected MP for College Green, 1918-1922; and tot eh Dáil in Mid Dublin, 1922-1923; North Dublin, 1923-1937; and Dublin North West, 1947-1945. He served as Vice President, Executive Council and Minister for Public Health & Local Government, 1932-1937, and as Tánaiste, 1937-1945, and Minister for Finance, 1939-1945. He was elected President of Ireland, 1945-1959: Patrick Maume, ‘O’Kelly, Seán Thomas (Ó Ceallaigh, Seán Tomás) (18882-1966), politician and President of Ireland’, DIB, 7, op. cit., pp. 615-619.xiv Macken, a painter, joined Sinn Féin in 1912 and, as an Irish Volunteer, was shot dead in Boland’s Mills on 27 April, 1916. He had been elected Alderman for Sinn Féin in North Dock, 1912-1914; Marie Coleman, ‘Macken, Peter Paul (‘Peader’) (1878-1916)’, DIB, 6, op. cit., pp. 30-31; and Charles Callan, ‘Peader Macken (1878-1916), Saothar 31, 2006, pp. 121-124.xv ‘Ireland and the war: the position of the Nation’, Irish Worker, 17 October, 1914.xvi Daly, 18 October, 1845-30 June ,1916, joined the IRB in 1863 and was imprisoned with his brother Edward in 1866. He led the IRB in Limerick during the 1867 Rising before fleeing to the United States. He returned in 1869 to work in the family timber yard, became a leading voice in the Amnesty Association, and active for tenant rights. He was convicted in Britain for carrying arms in 1883, befriending Tom Clarke in prison, He was elected unopposed as Irish National League MP for Limerick, 1895, although declared ineligible, and was elected as Lord Mayor, 1899-1901. With Patrick McCartan, he jointly financed the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom, 1910-1914.xvii NLI, William O’Brien Papers, Ms 13,954, Circulars and letters of the IN; Irish Worker, 10 October, 1914.xviii Freeman’s Journal, 13-16 October, 1914.xix Irish Independent, 13 October, 1914; Irish Times, 14 October, 1914.

xx Ó Snodaigh, Carn, op. cit.xxi rish Worker, 17 October, 1914; Sinn Féin, 31 October, 1914.xxii IRB man Ashe was a founding IV member and Irish National Teachers’ Organisation activist. He died after being forced fed in Mountjoy, C.J. Woods & William Murphy, ‘Ashe, Thomas (Tomás Ághas) (1885-1917), DIB, 1, op. cit., pp. 178-179.xxiii Wyse Power was active in the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association and Irish Women’s Franchise League, served on the Sinn Féin Executive from 1908, and was s founder of both Inghnidhe na hÉieann and Cumann na mBán, William Murphy & Lesa Ní Mhunghaill, DIB, 8, op. cit., pp. 256-257. The speech by ‘Miss Áine de Poer, MA’ was reproduced in full in Éire-Ireland, 2 November, 1914.xxiv Ashe had been ‘among the first’ to join the INL, reporting Irish-American disgust at Redmond’s Woodenbridge Speech 20, Pádraig Yeates, A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-1918, (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 2011), p. 40.xxv The speech by ‘Miss Áine de Poer, MA’ was reproduced in full in Éire-Ireland, 2 November, 1914.xxvi Pádraig Yeates, A City in Wartime, 19144-1918, (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 2011), pp. 70-71.xxvii Kieran Allen, The Politics of James Connolly, (Pluto Press, London, 1990), pp. 135-136. See O’Brien, Labour & Easter Week, op. cit., pp. 1-.7 xxviii O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, op. cit., p. 271.xxix Various letters to O’Brien, 3 June-10 October, 1915, NLI, William O’Brien Papers, Ma13,953, Circulars & Letters of INL.xxx O’Brien, Labour & Easter Week, op. cit., p. 4 and Forth the Banners, op. cit., p. 2714.xxxi See William Delany, The Green and the Red: Revolutionary republicanism and Socialism in Irish History, 1848-1923, (Writers’ Showcase, iUniverse, Lincoln, 2001), pp. 372-373.xxxii Lyons, op. cit. xxxiii Greaves, op. cit., pp. 116-123. For greater detail, Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891-1918, (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1999), pp. 28ff.xxxiv Ó Snodaigh, Carn, op. cit.xxxv ‘The Week’ begins with the INL Declaration, Sinn Féin, 17 October, 1914.xxxvi All cited in Catriona Pennell, ‘Going to War’ in John Horne (ed), Our War: Ireland & the Great War, (RTÉ/Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 2012), pp. 35-62.


xxxvii Maume, op. cit., p. 145 and Stephen Gwynn, p. 165 both cited in Christopher, Genesis of the Rising, 1912-1916: A Transformation of Nationalist Opinion, (Peter Lang, New York, 2010), p. 84.xxxviii Angell, 26 December, 1872-7 October, 1967, briefly served with the Ambulance Corps at Dunkirk; joined Liberal Government Minister C.P. Trevelyan, Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald and journalist E.D. Morel in forming the Union of Democratic Control; campaigned in the United States for them to maintain their neutrality; was Labour MP for Bradford North, 1929-1931; and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, 1933, ‘Sir Norman Angell, A Lifelong Proponent of Peace’, http://pw20c.mcmaster.ca/case-study/sir-norman-angell-lifelong-proponent-peace; www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1933/angell-bio.html [retrieved 3 July, 2014]xxxix Maartje Abbehuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), pp. 156-158. See also Angus Mitchell, ‘1914-18 and the war on peace’, History Ireland, vol. 22, no. 4, July/August, 2014, pp. 46-49xl NLI, Thomas Johnson Papers, Ms 17,112, Documents relating to ITUC Manifesto Workers & the War, August 1914.; Irish Worker, 22 August, 1914; J. Anthony Gaughan, Thomas Johnson, , 1872-1963, First Leader of the Labour Party in Dáil Éireann, (Kingdom Books, Dublin, 1980), pp. 43-45.xli In 1901, William Edward Hill, born in 1875, was the head of family although only 25, and lived at 30 Hollybank Road, Drumcondra, with his wife, Anne Lucinda, a daughter and son, his mother-in-law Jane Frazer Franklin, her sister and brother, and a lodger. The family were Church of Ireland. By 1911, Hill lived with his wife, their four children, his mother-in-law, and two brothers-in-law at 184.1 Clonliffe Road, Drumcondra, Dublin. While his in-laws were Episcopal Church of Ireland, Hill and his family were now Methodist. Secretary of the first RCA Dublin branch from 1908, he was first Secretary, RCA Irish Divisional Council from August 1910, and first Executive Council member for Ireland, 1910. Hill gave ‘valuable evidence’; to the Board of Trade Committee on Railway Amalgamations and wrote a ‘stirring pamphlet, Rouse Ye! The quality of his reports to the Railway Clerk drew attention and he joined the RCA Head Office as Assistant Secretary in 1911. At the ITUC in 1912, Hill supported the formation of a Labour Party and he moved a motion calling for the nationalisation of Irish railways. Hill was elected to the ITUC Parliamentary Committee in 1913. When J.P. Nannetti died in 1915, Hill was nominated by the RCA to contest the bye-election on as Nationalist rather than Labour

ticket. Once Thomas Farren was nominated by the DTC, Hill withdrew. Farren lost to Irish Party candidate John Nugent, despite the latter’s opposition to the workers during the 1913 Lockout. Hill became ‘considerably ill at ease with the politics’ of the ITUC Parliamentary Committee and resigned in June 1916When Hill retired through ill-health in 1931 he was the first RCA staff member to receive superannuation. Throughout Hill’s time as Assistant Secretary, A.G. Walkden was General Secretary Malcolm Wallace, Single or Return? The History of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, (TSSA, London, 1996), pp. 64-71; www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai003678568/; www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai000029132/xlii For a discussion of this economic recruitment see Peter Murray, ‘The First World War and a Dublin distillery workforce: recruiting and redundancy at John Power & Son, 1915-1917’, Saothar 15, 1990, pp 48-56.xliii Gaughan, op. cit., p. 861 Irish Citizen, 10 October, 1914.2 Irish Citizen, 28 September, 1914.3 Irish Citizen, 21 October, 1914.4 W.K. Anderson, James Connolly and the Irish Left, (Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1994), p.23.5 C. D. Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, (Lawremce & Wishart, London, 1972), p.85.6 Greaves, p.360; W. Delany The Green and the Red: Revolution, Republicanism and Socialism in Irish History 1848-1923, (iUniverse, 2001), p.372.7 Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh (ed), The Lost Writings by James Connolly, (Pluto Press, London, 1997), pp.144-5.8 P. Beresford Ellis, A History of the Irish Working Class, (Pluto Press, London, 1985), p.215.9 A. Marreco. The Rebel Countess: the Life and Times of Constance Markievicz, (Chilton Books, New York, 1967), pp. 185-6.10 J. van Voris, Constance de Markievicz in the Cause of Ireland, (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1967, p.144.11 van Voris, op. cit., p.145.12 R.M. Fox, Louie Bennett, Her Life & Times, (Talbot Press, Dublin, 1958, pp. 48-49.13 Jvan Voris, op. cit., p.160.


Roger Cole is a member of the Irish Labour Party since 1967, founder of its TCD branch and Chair of the Peace & Neutrality Alliance

Francis Devine is a former Tutor, SIPTU College; Executive member, Musicians Union of Ireland, Honorary President, Irish Labour History Society, Trustee, Working Class Movement Library, Manchester, and author of Organising History: A Centenary of SIPTU, 1909-2009

Margaret Ward was a Director of the Woman’s Resource and Development Agency, a regional organisation, based in Belfast, from 2005-2013. She is a feminist historian. Her publications include, ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries; Women and Irish Nationalism and biographies of Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. She is a Visiting Fellow in Irish History at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Aiden Lloyd is a member of the organising committee of the Sheehy Skeffington School of Human Rights and Social Justice. Information on the school is available on: www.sheehyskeffingtonschool.org

Dr. Neil Faulkner is a leading First World War archaeologist and a research Fellow at Bristol University. He co-directs field projects in Britain, Jordan, and Slovenia. He works as a lecturer, writer, editor, and occasional broadcaster. He is author of, ‘ A Marxist History of the World, from Neanderthals to Neoliberals’ and the popular pamphlet, ‘ No Glory: the real history of the First World War’.

Horst Teubert is a journalist working on foreign policy, topics mainly on the foreign policy of Germany. He is Editor of the internet platform: german-foreign-policy.com

Daltún Ó Ceallaigh is Chair of the Robert Emmet Cumann of Sinn Féin in the Rathgar-Rathmines area. Generally, he is an advisor to that party, with special reference to education. Among other things, he assisted in the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Michael O’Reilly is a former leader of the ATGWU and UNITE in Ireland. He is a past President of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions and a current member of its executive.

Cllr. Mícheál Mac Donncha has been a member of Sinn Féin for over 25 years, a member of its National Executive, Editor of An Phoblacht and author of, ‘Sinn Féin: A Century of Struggle=Céad Bliain Ar Son Na Saoirse’

Jack O’Connor has been General President of SIPTU since 2003, President of the ICTU from 2009-2011, and a long-time member of the Labour Party.

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The Irish Neutrality League and the Imperialist War 1914-1846


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