In July 2002, Issue 13 published articles by James Connolly for the first time since their original appearance in 1898.
Home Rule Journalists and Patriotism
An Object Lesson
[Workers’ Republic, August 13 1898]
Most Irishmen who remember the early days of the Land League movement in this country will also remember how the present Home Rule politicians, then pushing their way into public life, contrived to ‘rig’ the Irish newspaper press and use it as an advertising agency in their own behalf. The middle-class adventurers who now style themselves our ‘National leaders’ were confronted with a problem which may be stated thus: Given an oppressed people, an alien government and an insolent aristocracy, how best out of their mutual conflicts to evolve fame and fortune. From the Government not much could be expected. Secure in its position, it cared not for the hungry hordes of office-seekers and civil service aspirants with which our Irish middle-class besiege the Government buildings at every examination: it knew the exact value of the patriotism of the middle-class Nationalist newspaper, which denounces the “Sacsanach” rule, and, at the same time, devotes whole columns of its space to explaining for the benefit of its readers how they may best sell themselves into the service of the Sacsanach, whether in the Army, Navy, Constabulary or Civil Service. Still less could be hoped for from the landlord class, the enemy’s garrison in Ireland. But there remained the people, the enthusiastic hot-headed, warm-hearted, patriotic people. And accordingly our patriot politicians, save the mark, set themselves to the task of gulling, cajoling and bewildering the people of Ireland in a manner absolutely unique in the history of any country. The method was simple. Our newspapers are not what their name would imply, merely chroniclers of news, they are, in Ireland at least, primarily political weapons in the hands of political parties. Accordingly the Irish public which delights to take its opinions from newspapers had its opinions on our ‘leaders’ formed somewhat in this manner:— Tim Healy, being appointed London letter-writer to a Dublin weekly, would, in the course of his letter, refer in terms of glowing admiration to the “matchless eloquence and statesmanlike speeches” of Mr Sexton; Mr Sexton, who wrote as lobby correspondent to another paper, in his turn could scarcely find terms eulogistic enough to describe the “brilliant sarcasm and legal acumen” of Tim Healy; Mr Harrington from the scene of the land war would, through the columns of the press, and like the others always under the cloak of anonymity, inform the tenants that the world was lost in admiration of Mr Redmond, and Mr Redmond would repay the compliment by half a column of gush over the “organising genius” of Tim Harrington; John Dillon would conclude his speeches by a quotation from the over-praised doggerel of T D Sullivan, and William O’Brien never lost a chance at home or abroad of calling Heaven to witness the love and esteem he cherished “from the depths of his heart” for the many high qualities of Mr T P O’Connor.1
How well the dodge worked the world knows. The Irish people worshipped those men with an enthusiastic self-sacrificing devotion. The Irish race at home and abroad poured in its hard-earned wealth to sustain those men in the fight, accepting them at their own estimation and bowing down before them, even when we saw some of them in prison making more clamour over the loss of their trousers than the United Irishmen or the Manchester Martyrs had evoked over the loss of their lives. But in due time the bubble burst. The Parnell crisis, and all the stormy scenes and base betrayals that accompanied it, showed us of what pitiful material our vaunted demigods were composed.2 Every effort now being made, or likely to be made, to rehabilitate those men in public esteem must be regarded with contempt by every right-minded Irishman. We have been permitted to look behind the scenes of politics for a brief moment while the actors quarrelled in front, and they who have once seen the mechanism of the stage will never again be frightened by its thunder.
And if the discredited journalists who trafficked on our credulity in the past can no longer command our respect what of the journalistic staff who man our papers today? Their patriotism and also their honesty can be gauged from the following incident which was recorded in all our Dublin daily papers at the time absolutely without comment. We extract from the Freeman’s Journal.
IRISH INSTITUTE OF JOURNALISTS
Annual Dinner
The annual dinner in connection with the annual general meeting of the Irish Association District Institute of Journalists was held on Saturday evening in the Grand Hotel, Malahide. In the evening at 6.30 over sixty members and guests sat down to dinner in the spacious supper room.
Mr J P Hayden MP (chairman) presided. To his right sat the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor, Mr W C Mills, chairman of the Dublin District; to his left Mr Geo. McSweeney BL, ex-chairman, and Mr Thos. Kennedy BL, Lord Mayor’s secretary. Those present included Mr F J Allan, C Ryan, J B Hall, J Sherlock BA; M F McGrenahan BL; W F Dennehy, J P Gaynor BL; John Magrath, M P Ryle, T R Harrington, E Tuohy, Cork; W Barrett, do.; J Geary, do.; James Murray, J Wyse Power, Edward Byrne FJI; M J Cosgrave, R O’Dwyer, C Lehane, A J Conway, V D Hughes, P J Meade, P J Hooper, M A Casey, Drogheda; R Donovan, J Linehan BL; J Jameson, R J O’Mulrennin MA; T Fitzpatrick, F C Wallis Healy, L Dennehy, solicitor; W M Seaver, M Wheeler, William Stewart, H McWeeney, P Delany, P J Griffith, V Kilbride, solicitor; G Sherlock, T D Fitzgerald, J McNerney, J W Bacon, T J Condon MP; R M Peter, Lionel Johnson, J Mooney, W Clarke, hon. sec., Dublin District; E H Kearney BL; Frank Manley, Edwin Hamilton MA; Dr Joze, John O’Connell, T O’Connor, W W O’Mahony (Naas), M Code (Wexford), P F Keenan (Enniscorthy).
The vice-chairs were occupied by Mr J B Hall and Mr T R Harrington.
Our readers will please perceive that from this list of names it appears that every newspaper in Dublin was there represented—Dillonite, Healyite, Parnellite, they are all there. All the men who write the furiously patriotic leading articles, all the literary guides of politics, all the men who in season and out of season are protesting their love for Ireland, their hatred of tyranny, their unquenchable determination to follow in the footsteps of Tone and Emmet. Well, these hot-headed, high-minded patriots (sic) met together and at a purely social, non-political function, where they were in an overwhelming majority, they commenced proceedings by drinking a toast, to what, think ye? To our martyred dead, no; to our motherland, no; to Freedom’s cause, no; perhaps to the 1,225,000 persons who died of famine in the present reign in Ireland, no. But to
Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen.
The sovereign under whose rule those countrymen and women of ours were starved to death, in a land as fertile as any in Europe, in obedience to a hellish system of political economy, and in accordance with the deliberate government policy sanctioned and approved of by Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen.
The very next Sunday most of those journalistic patriots were at the demonstration in Bodenstown,3 the greatest rebels of us all (mar dhea) and outvying each other in enthusiastic cheers for the great republican of ’98, protesting their admiration for his inflexible purpose and democratic virtues, even while the liquor they had consumed in drinking the ‘loyal’ toast had scarcely died out in their veins. And the day after the Wolfe Tone demonstration all our Dublin daily papers in the Home Rule interest contained long editorials written by these same versatile gentlemen, complimenting the Irish people for their fidelity to the cause of freedom. Could arrant knavery and hypocrisy go further?
Irish political history, written by such men as these, has represented our middle-class Home Rulers and their journalistic allies as the high-minded apostles of a distressed people; future history will more correctly stigmatise them as the most unscrupulous political charlatans who ever imposed upon a confiding race.
Before leaving this unsavoury subject we would like to ask a civil question. In the list of names given as being present at the loyal function spoken of, we see the name of Mr F J Allan. Mr Allan is manager of the Independent, is a member of the ’98 Executive, is reputed to be an advanced nationalist. If he was present at the banquet, why did he not protest? If he was not present, why did he not repudiate the name of those who used his name in that connection? Was it because he did not like to expose the lily-livered hypocrites who call themselves nationalist journalists? Or is he himself as great a hypocrite as any? Mr F J Allan is an official of the Irish Institute of Journalists who gave this dinner—Treasurer in fact—and as such directly responsible for this loyal toast. Let him answer.4 And let him and all others take notice that there is now entered into the journalistic world of Ireland a new force in the shape of a newspaper pledged to carry out the revolutionary principles of the United Irishmen, in accordance with the changed economical and political development of the time.5 In accordance with that pledge, which we here make to our readers, there devolves upon our shoulders the duty, which we accept with pleasure, of relentlessly exposing to the public gaze and trampling into the mire to which they belong all the horde of middle-class tricksters and political wirepullers who have so long emasculated and weakened our political faith. Let those “hirelings of England in the green livery of our country” take notice.
Setanta
Home Thrusts
[Workers’ Republic, August 27 1898]
Walk up, walk up. Here you are, here you are, the greatest show on earth. An unrivalled and unsurpassable collection of political monstrosities, journalistic fakirs, ‘patriotic’ slum owners, parliamentarian contortionists, et hoc genus omne.
The last few words are Latin. I sling them in here promiscuous like, just to show off my accomplishments, and impress the reader.
Nothing impresses the reader so much as what he does not understand. That is why we have so long admired the Home Rule leaders. They but needed to open their mouths and talk, and talk, and talk, and still to talk, and the more they talked the less we understood, and consequently the more we admired them.
We just stood around them with our mouths open like a Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in—
And gazed and gazed, and still the wonder grew
Where such mere men could learn all they knew.
But at last we got tired of waiting and gazing, and began to think, and the result of our thinking has been a little surprising to ourselves and will be, ere long, somewhat disastrous to somebody else.
I have been informed by some candid friends that my strictures on certain leading lights in Irish politics are too extreme, that we should be more moderate and not run full tilt against so many people.
I admit the soft impeachment. We are somewhat extreme. If we examine the positions of those who have already come under the lash of the Workers’ Republic, we will find that the writers in this paper are indeed at the extremest possible point removed from the position of those we criticise.
We are extreme. Like the man who would preach honesty among thieves or truthfulness among lawyers, we are extreme when we would insist upon consistency among politicians, or honour among journalists.
We are extreme. As the man who, upon taking his son to initiate him into the mysteries of Donnybrook Fair, gave him as his sole rule of conduct, “Whenever you see a head, hit it,” we only know one maxim whereby our public action should be guided, “wherever you see a lie expose it, crush it, stamp it out of existence, even although it came issuing softly from the lips or embodied in the actions of he who had been your greatest hero.”
We attack no one whose actions do not deserve to be attacked. The best proof of this lies in the fact that no one has yet been able to contradict a single assertion we have made.
But come along to the next caravan and see our unique collection of Home Rule editors, watch the antics of these gay and festive animals, imported at immense cost from the fertile soil of Flunkeydom.
Here you are, gentlemen. Observe the playful gyrations of these ‘leaders of public opinion’ and say have we not reason to be proud of their abilities.
On the 15th August, 1898, there was held at the Mansion House, Dublin, a Banquet in commemoration of the patriotic efforts of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. Toasts were drank and Nationalist speeches made in accordance with the spirit of the commemoration. Amongst those present were the editors of the Independent, Freeman and Nation.
On Saturday, 20th August, 1898, there was held a Banquet in connection with the Health Congress in Dublin. The toasts drank included the health of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, the Army, Navy and Police. Amongst those present were (uncompromising patriots) the editors of the Independent, Freeman and Nation.
They drank the health of Her Most Gracious Majesty. And every drink cost as much as would have fed for a day some of the starving Irish families under the rule of Her Majesty. They toasted the British Army, our gallant defenders who on the morrow would cut our throats if their masters, the British governing class, ordered them so to do. They toasted the Navy—because it supplies the gunboats which enable our Irish landlords to send their evicting parties to the islands off our coasts and so exterminate the inhabitants. They toasted the police, because they are Irishmen who have sold themselves into the service of our oppressors, and so perpetuate what Diarmuid McMurchadh began.6
And they are all honourable men, most honourable men.
I have long felt the need of a revision of our National poetry. The present collections are very good in their way, but on the whole somewhat antiquated. We need something more up to date.
And as a contribution to such a collection our office boy has just handed in the appended production of the muse. He assures me he perpetrated this atrocity in a moment of inspiration after reading the list of persons present at aforementioned banquet.
NATIONAL ANTHEM
(For the use of Home Rule Editors)
Who fears to speak of ’98,
Who blushes at the name,
God save our Gracious Queen,
Long may she reign.
He’s all a knave or half a slave
Who slights his country thus,
But we Home Rule men can fool men
Who put their trust in us.
(Refrain.)
Send her victorious, happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen.
Hiccup, hiccup, hooray.
If our journalists can gulp down liquor as easily as they swallow their principles, what an amount they must have consumed.
The Lord Mayor of Dublin, whose peculiar politics we have already referred to,7 in the course of his speech at this banquet expressed the hope “that the politics of Dublin would yet become of such a character that the Lord Mayor and the Lord Lieutenant8 might yet become more intimate.”
To which the Express adds, the “logical sequence of such an utterance is an invitation to the Lord Lieutenant to a banquet at the Mansion House.” These people are great on banquets.
But the Evening Herald (Redmondite) chimes in thusly: “The Daily Express is a little too previous… it will be time enough to talk of making up when the Lord Lieutenant—as Lord Lieutenants were wont to do before England robbed us of our rights—opens the Irish Parliament.”
Note that part I have italicised. If it means anything it means that England did not “rob us of our rights” until the Act of Union was passed. Shades of O’Moore, O’Byrne, O’Connor, of Hugh O’Neill, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Owen Roe, O’Sullivan Beare, of McCracken, Neilson, Napper Tandy, Wolfe Tone, all of who rose in rebellion against England, before the Act of Union, that is, before she had robbed us of our rights.
Lord Lieutenants were unknown in Ireland before the Norman invasion. They have ever represented a foreign dominion, and the fight for Irish “rights” does not date from the year 1800, but goes back a trifle of 600 years before that event.
As a matter of fact there never was such a thing as an Irish Parliament. The collection of exploiters who met in College Green were not Irish in any sense of the term. Their Parliament was no more than the council of a horde of foreign brigands deliberating as to the best and safest method of plundering the natives.
Will somebody please start a night school for the purpose of imparting to Home Rule journalists some knowledge of the elementary facts of Irish history.
The Evening Herald of Monday had a very sympathetic leaderette on the Dublin Metropolitan Police and their grievances. It hopes those grievances will be remedied and that the men will be better treated.
How nice. On the 22nd June, 1897, these same policemen broke the heads of some 300 Dublin men and women for daring to demonstrate their antipathy to the jubilee rejoicings.9
Now, the Herald hopes these poor dear policemen will be better treated by their superiors. Is it as a reward for their jubilee exertions?
I hope—
That the DMP will get—
Their wages reduced to 16s. per week.
Their hours increased to fifteen hours per day, and no holidays.
And that all promotion will be stopped or given entirely to negroes from the coast of Africa.
If the Herald gets its wish, the police force will be the most popular situation in Ireland, and our Government will always have a ready supply of young Irishmen to do its dirty work.
If I get my wish, the police force will become a most unpopular form of employment, and men who would otherwise be recruits will swell the army of discontented, and be ready and willing to lend a hand when the time comes to serve notice to quit on the British Empire.
Please give a copy of this paper to the first policeman you meet as a love token from a
Spailpín
Notes
- Healy, Thomas Sexton, Harrington, John Redmond, Dillon, O’Brien and O’Connor were Home Rule MPs. T D Sullivan was author of ‘God Save Ireland’ and other nationalist verses.
- After Charles Stewart Parnell’s relationship with a married woman was exposed in 1890, the Home Rule party turned against him and split into warring factions.
- Called by the ’98 Executive to commemorate the centenary of the United Irish rising.
- In the July 1 1899 issue of The Workers’ Republic (after Connolly had accused him of acquiescing in another royal toast) Allan claimed that he had left the room when the toast was announced. Connolly replied that his explanation resolved nothing.
- This was the first issue of The Workers’ Republic.
- Diarmaid Mac Murchadha, king of Leinster, notoriously supported the Normans in their invasion of Ireland.
- In the August 13 Workers’ Republic, Connolly referred to recent pro-British actions of Lord Mayor Tallon.
- Representative of the British crown in Ireland.
- The demonstration against Victoria’s diamond jubilee was baton charged by the police. Connolly played a central role in the demonstration and was arrested.
RED BANNER 