The Rebels of Ireland (130 page)

Yet somehow this lack of sympathy made Caitlin admire the rising even more. The gesture, the bravery—and who knew, if Willy was right, the necessity of it—were to be admired. The people in the buildings, surrounded by ever more British troops, were her countrymen and her friends. She wished she could talk to Willy O'Byrne about it. But she hadn't seen him since Monday. She believed he had gone to the Four Courts.

On Monday night, she had slept at the GPO. On Tuesday night, she had returned to sleep at her home, and found an urgent note from Sheridan Smith demanding to know where she was. At dawn the next day, she dropped a reply through his letter box telling him that she was well and busy with her studies, and that she'd come to see him in a few days. He mightn't believe it, but at least she'd replied, and he'd know she was alive. She spent the next night at the biscuit factory with Rita. By Thursday, it was becoming clear that the GPO couldn't hold out much longer. Some of the women there were sent to their homes. On Friday morning, much of the area was in flames, and a fire broke out in the building.

For Caitlin, the rising ended at noon on Friday. She had been up all the night before and gone home to rest. Entering the house in Fitzwilliam Square, she had experienced a sense that something was amiss. The maid had given her a strange look. Then, turning, she had realised that Sheridan Smith was standing between her and the door. He was looking very grave.

“You will not be going out again,” he said quietly. “If necessary, Caitlin, I will prevent you.”

She said nothing, but started up the stairs to her room. The door was open. On the floor, she saw the suitcase into which she had thrust her green uniform on Monday. The case was empty now.

“I have burned it,” Sheridan said. “Your mother, by the way, is on her way home.”

Still she made no reply. There wasn't much point. She had to sleep anyway. She made to close the door, but Sheridan shook his head. “I shall keep you in my sight,” he said, not unkindly. She sat down on the bed, and then smiled to herself.

“You must give me a moment's privacy Uncle Sherry,” she said.

She needed to hide her revolver.

By the time she awoke, it was clear that there was nothing left for her to do. The GPO could no longer be held. Its gallant defenders, including Pearse, had to abandon it. By Sunday, the last of the Volunteer garrisons had surrendered.

It was on Sunday morning that the soldiers came to Fitzwilliam Square. They went from door to door. They announced that they were checking every house for “Sinn Feiners.” Caitlin had already noticed this confusion on the part of the British troops, and even the British newspapers. Perhaps, hearing the IRB men referred to as Fenians—which derived from the army of Irish legend—they supposed this to be the same as Griffith's nonviolent nationalist movement, Sinn Fein, which hadn't joined the rising at all. It was typical, she thought, that the British authorities should even have misunderstood who their enemy was.

Sheridan Smith, anticipating a visitation of this kind, had decided it was better for them both to remain in the house; and she had to admit, he handled the situation very well. His own well-known respectability was a help, no doubt. There were no “Sinn Feiners” in the house, he assured them, only his great niece, a student, and he himself, who was staying in the house until the girl's mother returned from abroad. He encouraged them to search thoroughly, all the same. They only had the most cursory glance around and politely left. They did not find her Webley.

Meanwhile, the tough British General, Maxwell, who had been sent to sort the place out, was moving swiftly to court-martial the
leaders of the rising. By midweek, Sheridan told her: “I believe about a hundred and eighty men are selected, and one woman, Countess Markievicz.” The trials went swiftly. The next day, he came to the house looking grim.

“I have sad news. Did you know an employee of mine, Willy O'Byrne? I had guessed he was mixed up in this when he didn't appear, but it seems he must have been further in than I thought. Anyway, he was one of those court-martialled today.” He shook his head sadly. “I'm afraid he's to be shot.”

The fools! The fools! She might have echoed it then. But it was during the coming months that she really came to think it.

One couldn't say that, by the standards of the day, the British had been harsh. Indeed, they had probably been kinder than any other country would have been. But they had not been clever.

Before the garrisons surrendered, several of them made the women leave. Most of these, after being questioned by the British officers they encountered, were told to go home. The truth was, the British hardly knew what to do with them. Seventy-nine women were arrested. Seventy-three of these, also, were soon released. Caitlin was glad to hear that Rita was one of those set free. A handful were held in Kilmainham, then sent to the Mountjoy prison, then deported to serve time in England. Only Countess Markievicz, who had made such play with her revolver and encouraged others to do the same, was sentenced to be shot.

Nearly three and a half thousand men were taken. Almost fifteen hundred were released. The rest were interned in England, except for the hundred and eighty-six selected for court-martial. Of these, eighty-eight, including de Valera, were sentenced to the firing squad.

And most of the sentences were not carried out. The Countess was interned, because she was a woman. De Valera got off, perhaps because he was deemed an American citizen. All but fifteen of the
sentences were also commuted to life sentences—including, Caitlin was delighted to discover, that of Willy O'Byrne. Under amnesty, most of these were also to be freed within a year or so.

But the fifteen men shot served their cause better than they could have imagined. Pearse, the poetic soul, greatly loved. He'd led the men into the GPO and proclaimed a republic. He had to know he'd be shot. But his little brother? Singled out, so far as anyone could see, just for being a brother. Joseph Plunkett, dying of sickness anyway, married his sweetheart hours before the firing squad, and became a figure of romance. James Connolly, the union man: he'd been so badly wounded already that they tied him to a chair to shoot him. For ten days these executions went on, and by the end, few though they were, nobody saw any justice in it.

And public sentiment began to turn. When one of the heroes of the rising went on a hunger strike the next year, the prison men managed to kill him during force feeding. It was not meant to happen. But it did.

By late 1917, the moderates of the Sinn Fein organisation, whom the British mistook for the Fenians, and the more militant nationalists came together to form a political party, and chose de Valera to be their leader. “We want an Irish Republic,” they frankly declared, “and we'll contest seats in local and parliamentary elections.” The next year, the British government arrested all its leaders.

And then, locked in its desperate struggle with Germany, and hungry for troops, instead of thanking Ireland for her many volunteers, the British government suddenly threatened the Irish with conscription. “You see,” Willy O'Byrne and others like him could say, “the British make agreements, but they cannot be trusted.”

The fools: even Sheridan Smith said it now. “If the British wanted to prove that the men of the rising were right,” he remarked, “they could hardly have set about it better.” As the Great War reached its end in 1918, a General Election was called. Redmond's old party had only six seats. The Unionists, meaning Protestant Ulster really, had twenty-six. The new Sinn Fein amalgam had seventy-
three. “The world has changed,” Sheridan Smith concluded. “Changed utterly.”

But it had changed even more than people had expected. For having been elected, all the Irish Members of Parliament, with the exception of the Unionist and Redmond's handful of men, did what they thought was the only logical thing to do for men with their beliefs. Not only did they refuse to take their seats in the British Parliament at Westminster, they went one better than that. They set up their own Assembly of Ireland, the Dail Eireann, in Dublin. “We are the true government of Ireland now, they said.” By the spring, they had constituted ministries headed by Griffith, Countess Markievicz, Count Plunkett, Mac Neill, of the former Volunteers, Collins, a vigorous young IRB man, and others. De Valera was President. “We are a republic,” they said. “We refuse to recognise English rule any longer.” And so, in the spring of 1919, Ireland was in the strange state of having a British government, with rules, regulations, and administrators at Dublin Castle, and a second, shadow state, far more popular, claiming legitimacy even if it lacked the power to impose itself. The moral and political victory, as far as the Sinn Fein members were concerned, was already theirs. It was up to England to recognise the fact. Nobody quite knew what to do.

It had changed for Caitlin, too, in an unexpected way. When her mother had returned to Dublin after the rising in 1916, she had seemed quite content to stay there. Whether, in the event, she would have done better to spend her winters in France, one could never know for certain. But when a huge influenza epidemic spread across Europe just after the ending of the Great War, she succumbed to it. In the spring of 1919, Countess Caitlin Birne suddenly found herself twenty years old, soon to be twenty-one, and a rich young woman. She resolved, very sensibly, to do nothing at all and complete her studies.

She had not seen Willy O'Byrne for a long time. She was quite
surprised, in the summer, to receive a message that he would like to call for her one Saturday and take her out for the day.

She knew a little of his activities. After he had returned from jail, she had not seen him, but Sheridan Smith had told her: “He no longer works for me. He has gone into partnership with Father MacGowan's brother, that runs the bookshop.” He paused. “Part of his business, I believe, is to go to America to collect funds for political purposes. “And he gave her a wry smile. “He gets some of his funds, I believe, from the hands of my own Madden relations.”

Willy turned up in a car. He was quite unchanged, but he looked well, she thought, and happy. “I thought,” he announced, “that I'd drive up to Rathconan, if you'd like to come.”

It was a beautiful day. The road up into the Wicklow Mountains was narrow. Stone walls sometimes shut out the view. At other times she could see huge sweeps down towards the sea. He seemed delighted to be going up to his childhood home.

“The old lady's not there. I already checked,” he said with a smile. “But there's someone else I'd like you to meet.”

“Your mother?”

“No, she died I'm afraid. But my father is still living.” He seemed to find this thought amusing for some reason.

She was pleased to find, when they got to the long, white-walled cottage where the old man lived, that old Fintan O'Byrne was a tall, fine-looking man, with sparse grey hair and a long white moustache. He welcomed her to his cottage courteously, told her that his son had spoken of her, and offered them both a simple meal. Bacon, black pudding, potato. “I live very simply,” he said with a smile, “but I hope to live a good while yet. I think,” he added, “that the air up here must be good. People live a long time. And perhaps if you belong to a place, that helps, too. Or so I believe.”