A city under maximum pressure

IRISH HISTORY: Pádraig Yeates's latest book in his series about Dublin during its most turbulent decade is absorbing and beautifully written

City in Turmoil: Dublin 1919-21 By Pádraig Yeates Gill & Macmillan, 340pp, €20

On November 10th, 1919, a Dublin newspaper vendor, James Hurley, was wrongly identified by an ex-serviceman as the person who had attempted to murder a detective from G division, the intelligence branch of the Dublin Castle administration, on Cuffe Street. Hurley had no involvement with Sinn Féin and was himself a veteran of the first World War. Nonetheless, he was convicted on the evidence of his identifier, and he would have been hanged if his alleged victim had died. He was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, released during the truce in 1921 and killed during the Civil War while helping a wounded soldier to Jervis Street Hospital.

This is one of the many stories of ordinary lives disrupted by violence in Pádraig Yeates’s absorbing and beautifully written new book in his series about Dublin city during its most turbulent decade. The series began with Lockout, the definitive history of Ireland’s biggest labour dispute, and continued with A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-1918, which illuminated the city during the period when more than 25,000 of its inhabitants served in the first World War, and the 1916 Rising and its aftermath began to change everything for the city and the country.

The new volume begins in the wake of the 1918 election, in which some women could vote for the first time and which gave Sinn Féin a clear majority.

We are now in the territory of practical change from one administration to another, as Dáil Éireann was established in the city in 1919 and began to demand allegiance from local authorities, including Dublin Corporation, and to set up a shadow administration to run the country in opposition to the old regime. The three years covered were marked by considerable violence, as the authorities made the disastrous mistake of drafting in the Auxiliaries to help the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police counteract the increasingly sophisticated violence perpetrated by the IRA under the command of Dick McKee and later Oscar Traynor in Dublin, and ultimately overseen by Michael Collins.

Yeates covers the big, violent events, such as Bloody Sunday and the burning of the Custom House, in some detail, but the real focus of the book is on the difficult day-to-day business of keeping the city operating in the face of strikes, the withholding of funding from the local government board for essential services, a curfew that put extreme strain on the city’s lighting system, disputes with higher officials in the corporation and, not least, enormous claims for damages inflicted by both the IRA and the Auxiliaries (responsible for many more than the IRA).

Yeates has fruitfully mined the contemporary minute books of Dublin Corporation for the period, and presents a fresh, interesting account of how revolutionaries actually deal with government when the rhetoric has to stop and hard facts must be faced.

After the 1920 municipal elections, Sinn Féin and Republican Labour held a majority of the seats on Dublin Corporation. The rest were held by the Municipal Reform Association (a combination of unionists and some former Irish Parliamentary Party members) and Independents, as well as PT Daly’s Trades Council Labour Group, which , presaging things to come, had split with William O’Brien’s Republican Labour Group. This meant that O’Brien and Daly, two of the ablest people on the corporation, were at each other’s throats for most of this period.

One of the most interesting characters to emerge from the book is Laurence O’Neill, Independent Nationalist and lord mayor of Dublin from 1917 to 1923. O’Neill was involved in every major event in the city and a good few national events also. He seems to have had enormous skills as a negotiator and mediator, and deserves a biography.

Postwar problems

The corporation, which began with high-minded cultural exercises, such as trying to get the roll book signed in Irish (vehemently resisted by the town clerk, Henry Campbell), soon found itself up against the serious problems that beset Dublin with or without regular violence on the streets: extensive decrepit tenement housing, high child mortality, fuel shortages, poor health (with high levels of TB in particular) and increasing unemployment as the war boom ended and demobilised soldiers poured back into the city.

One particular clash sums up the gap between high idealism and necessary pragmatism: the dispute over funding of the Richmond Lunatic Asylum. In 1921 the Richmond held an astonishing total of 3,252 patients. Dublin Corporation had asked the board of guardians, responsible for funding the asylum, to boycott the local government board, which until then had provided its funding, and to seek other sources, such as banks and private individuals. The guardians ignored this instructions, submitted the asylum’s books to the local government board for audit, and duly got funded, thus saving the patients from discharge and the 160 jobs of the asylum’s employees.

The resident medical superintendent, Dr Donelan, told his board he dreaded the thought “that unfortunate patients would be left without dinner, tea or fire” and insisted that councillors “could not carry on high-falutin’ language and indulge in heroics at the expense of the most unfortunate people” in the community.

Others followed the Richmond’s example. Until such time as Dáil Éireann was able to fund public institutions, those responsible for them would take the money to maintain them from wherever they could get it.

Yeates’s formidable knowledge of labour history enables him to track the importance of the trade unions in Dublin to the unfolding new regime, providing offices to government departments, premises for IRA meetings and tactical strike support to Sinn Féin. Labour history is often under-represented in survey histories and studies of the revolutionary period. This book and its predecessors amply redress that balance and bring to life the many ordinary union members who played their parts in the many facets of this extraordinary time. It is to be hoped that Yeates will finish the series with a book on Dublin during the Civil War, thus providing an unparallelled social, economic and administrative study of a city under extreme pressure from 1913 to 1923.