REPUBLICAN RESURGENCE FOR EASTER

Following the fall of Fianna Fáil from power on February 18 and the release of the remaining Republican prisoner from Portlaoise in early March, there was a general air of relaxation and freedom from harassment.

Easter Lilies were sold openly and without hindrance. Easter commemorations in areas where the Movement had been reorganised were well regulated events. There was an air of optimism after the dark years of the early and mid 1940s.

Commemorations picked up again in unorganised areas. Some Clann na Poblachta members who had Republican backgrounds helped out in such areas; they felt their organisation deserved credit for the absence of coercion and menace from the 26-County State.

In all areas Clann na Poblachta members were among the attendance, often remarking “changed times” to each other. A single car-load of Special Branch would generally be present at forming-up points.

They would remain in their car, windows tightly shut and looking straight ahead behaving as innocuously as possible. Easter Sunday 1948 was certainly not their day.

In places Clann na Poblachta members were heard to remark of the Branch: “Why don’t they get out of their car and help to direct the traffic; earn their keep.” From the foregoing remarks it was obvious that there were large turn-outs.

At Drumboe, Co Donegal a local Republican, Frank Canning, Donnyloup, Castlefinn gave the oration to an enthusiastic crowd.

But in the Six Counties the clamps were on as usual. No relaxation there or with the sentenced Republicans in A-Wing, Crumlin Road Jail, Belfast or in Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight, England. During April the redoubtable Count Plunkett died at the great age of 97. Mary Mac Swiney had passed on in 1942 and Professor Stockley in 1943.

The Count’s death left just four survivors of the Executive Council of the Second (All-Ireland) Dáil which had delegated its executive powers of government to the Army Council of the IRA in 1938.

The booklet Orange Terror was reprinted from the Capuchin Annual of 1943 and published in the same year. It was banned by Stormont from circulating in the Six Counties and it contains among the comments solicited by its editor the following letter from Count Plunkett:

“George Noble Count Plunkett, born 1851; father of Joseph Mary Plunkett; Vice-President of Royal Irish Academy etc, etc; author of standard book on Botticelli; represented Plunkett family at Beatification of Oliver.
“17 December 1942.
“My Dear Father Senan,
“I have read that finely documented and finely reasoned statement of the case of the Partition, and I feel that it only needs printing, publication, and wide circulation, and largely in England and the English press, and indeed in Europe and America, not only among our own people, but foreign diplomats and thinkers.
Yours sincerely
GN Plunkett.”

George Noble Count Plunkett was Dublin-born and lived at 40 Elgin Road, Ballsbridge. He was educated in Nice in the South of France, at Clongowes Wood College with the Jesuits and at Trinity College, Dublin.

An antiquarian, he was Vice-President of the Irish Literary Society founded by WB Yeats and Douglas Hyde in 1892. This body eventually resulted in the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Earlier he had been President of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language founded in 1876. It was a forerunner of the Gaelic League — Conradh na Gaeilge.

The Count was active in a number of Irish cultural societies and was founder and editor of the journal Hibernia (1882-83).

His title was a papal award, being a Count of the Papal Court. He was Director of the National Museum from 1907 to 1916 and Vice-President of the Royal Irish Academy 1908-09 and 1911-14, which he represented on the Nobel Committee for Literature. He was also president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

Count Plunkett contributed to many Irish and Irish American newspapers and periodicals. He lost his position as Director of the National Museum following his arrest and detention in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising. The RDS — an Ascendancy body — erased his name from the roll of members. His son, Joseph Mary, had been military organiser of the Rising and a signatory of the Proclamation of the All-Ireland Republic. As such he was executed.

Two other sons, George and Jack, were also sentenced to death for their part in the Rising but were reprieved. A daughter, Fíona also participated in Easter Week.

George’s subsequent activity has been outlined in this series (March 1994) while Fíona’s public interruption of de Valera at Arbour Hill in 1940 has also been written up.

INTERNED WITHOUT TRIAL

Jack was arrested in 1939 when operating the IRA radio at Highfield Road, Rathgar, Dublin. He endured the 56-day hunger-strike in which Tony Darcy of Galway and Seán Mac Neela of Mayo died. He himself passed on in the 1960s.

Count Plunkett was elected as an abstentionist Republican candidate in the historic North Roscommon by-election of February 1917, the “election of the snows”. His victory gave a tremendous boost to the Republican Movement in the aftermath of 1916.

The Count, who had organised Liberty Clubs that were subsumed into Sinn Féin, was a possible choice for President at the Ard-Fheis of October 1917 along with Griffith and de Valera. The latter due to his 1916 record was chosen.

In 1918 Count Plunkett was again elected for North Roscommon and became Minister for Foreign Affairs in the First Dáil Cabinet. Before the Dáil assembled he had been Chairman of the Republican Deputies elected in December 1918.

At the inaugural meeting of the Dáil on January 21, 1919 the Count read the Message to the Free Nations of the World in French. He was appointed one of three delegates from the 32-County Dáil to the Paris Peace Conference then sitting at Versailles. The report of his Departments work read at the conclusion of the First Dáil’s work on August 17, 1921 is impressive.

Eight representatives were functioning in foreign capitals. Work done was detailed from Argentina, Chile, USA, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Denmark, Canada, Russia, France, Australia and London. Arrangements were in hand for a World Conference of the Irish Race.

The formal proposer of adoption of the report, Seán Mulroy, TD said Deputies “must be impressed by the enormous work accomplished by their Department”.

However, in the Second Dáil of 1921 Count Plunkett was replaced as Minister for Foreign Affairs by Arthur Griffith. The Count was appointed Minister for Fine Arts which was not a cabinet position.

He held this post until after the Treaty of Surrender was approved in January 1922 when de Valera and his entire ministry resigned. Re-elected as a Deputy in June 1922 he was appointed a member of the Council of State of the Republic in October of that year.

When he and Mary Mac Swiney TD attended the funeral of General Liam Lynch, Chief-of-Staff IRA in Fermoy, Co Cork in April 1923 they were both arrested afterwards and imprisoned.

The Republican prisoners in Mountjoy, who were forced to double up due to overcrowding in the jail, vacated a cell so that the distinguished gentleman now aged 72 could have a cell to himself.

In August 1923 Count Plunkett was once more returned in the 26-County general election. This time the constituency was Co Roscommon while in 1921 and ’22 it was Co Leitrim and North Roscommon-multi-seat constituencies under PR.

Count Plunkett rejected the Fianna Fáil breakaway from Sinn Féin in 1926 and when he contested the Co Roscommon constituency again in 1927 he lost out — the first time in six elections.

He continued to sit as a member of the Second (All-Ireland) Dáil which had never been dissolved and still kept meeting and functioning.

When the Executive Council of the Dáil replaced the office of President of the Republic in December 1927, Count Plunkett was elected a member. He held that position until the last meeting on December 8, 1938 when the Dáil delegated its executive powers to the IRA.

The Count acted as a member of Comhairle na Poblachta which represented Sinn Féin, the Second Dáil, the IRA, Cumann na mBan and the Republican left as a co-ordinating body in 1929.

In August 1936, at the age of 85 he contested a by-election in Co. Galway, nominated jointly by Sinn Féin and by Cumann Poblachta na h-Éireann, the recently established political arm of the IRA. The Republicans were defeated in a memorable contest.

Count Plunkett’s election manifesto addressed once more to “The Man of the West” was circulated on a single A4 size sheet bearing his photograph.

In 1950, fourteen years later it was possible to read on the walls near Tullyra Castle gate in South Galway the legend “Vote No 1 Count Plunkett”. Slogans, sometimes like memories die hard.

Two families out of the seven which gave signatories to the 1916 Proclamation stood loyally by the Republican Movement down the decades; these were the Plunketts of Dublin and the Mac Dermotts of Leitrim.

The Plunketts were people of property yet they did not hesitate to endanger their assets by deep involvement in revolutionary struggle. They were the honourable exceptions to what their class invariably does as a group.

When Volunteers from England and Scotland came to Dublin to avoid conscription into the British Army and to prepare to take part in the 1916 Rising, Count Plunkett put a premises and grounds at their disposal in Kimmage. There they were billeted and were able to engage in military training.

Similarly, right through the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s, his wife Countess Plunkett made Hardwicke Street Hall available on a continuous basis to Fianna Éireann and Óglaigh na h-Éireann for organisation and training. This premises on the northside of Dublin’s inner city was demolished in the early 1950s to make way for the present Hardwicke St Flats.

Up to 1978 when Fíona Plunkett died the link between her family and the Movement persisted. Frank Driver of Kildare maintained the connection in later years.

When the Galway Jubilee celebrations of the 1916 took place in 1966, the Dublin Administration arranged for honorary degrees to be conferred by the National University of Ireland on one member of each Signatories’ families.

No one could be found to accept on behalf of either the Mac Dermots or the Plunketts and much pressure was used in both cases. Finally the eldest daughter of Count Plunkett, Geraldine who had married Tomás Dillon, a professor of Chemistry in UCG and a Free State supporter from 1922, acquiesced and co-operated.

No member of the McDermot family could be found to do so. Seán Mac Diarmada’s surviving sister Margaret and her daughter Katie B. Keany participated instead in the All-Ireland commemoration to Glasnevin cemetery’s 1916 Plot sponsored by the Republican Movement.

Although both were frail — and in Margaret’s’ case with only months to live — these two valiant Irishwomen withstood the baton charges of the parade by 26-County police and attended the protest meeting outside the GPO that evening.

Katie B was a familiar figure at the annual Kiltyclogher commemoration of her uncle Seán and on the platform at the annual Bundoran hunger-strike march.

Aged eleven years when her uncle was executed, she lived to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Rising in 1991. When she died a year or two later, the same speaker gave the oration over her grave as spoke at her mother’s burial in 1966. That was Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, a close friend of Katie B down the years.

The McDermots were not people who had assets to put at risk as had the Plunketts, but both families were faithful and true to the end. Dílís go h-éag sums their stand for the All-Ireland Republic.

Fifty years ago the patriarch of the Plunkett family was laid to rest in the Republican Plot, Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Count Plunkett was beloved of the people of Roscommon ever since that epoch-making election victory in 1917 of which they are immensely proud.

It was fitting then that a Roscommon man was among those who carried his coffin. Sylvester Fitzsimons was a young Volunteer of 18 years in 1927 when he listened to Count Plunkett speak at his local Dangan church gate during the general election of that year.

The Irish Independent photo carried on this page pictures Sylvester and other Volunteers fulfilling their duty to one who had given service, family and means so willingly over the decades of a long life.

CORRECTION: Last month’s article on Portlaoise prisoners of the 1940s who are still living should have read Liam Rice of Belfast and not Liam Burke, who of course passed away in 1997.

(More next month. Refs. The IRA in the Twilight Years 1923-’48 by Uinseann Mac Eoin (1997) and A Dictionary of Irish History 1800-1980 by DG Hickey and JE Doherty.)