On Sunday 24th July, republicans gathered at Howth Pier in Dublin for a commemoration to remember the ‘Landing of the Asgard’ and launch the newly-formed Asgard Society Howth. Monaghan ex-POW and member of the James Connelly Society Monaghan. John Crawley (above) gave the main oration and has kindly forwarded the text of his speech.

The Howth gun running operation on 26th July 1914 was, along with the founding of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913, one of the crucial enabling factors which permitted the Rising to take place and the Irish Republic to be declared at Easter 1916.

On a sunny July Sunday 102 years ago, Erskine Childer’s yacht ‘The Asgard’ arrived here in Howth harbour carrying 900 German Mauser rifles and 29,000 rounds of ammunition. Waiting anxiously to receive them were 800 members of the Irish Volunteers and the lads of Na Fianna Éireann. Among the hundreds present on this pier that historic day was a founding member of the Volunteers, The O’Rahilly, Peadar Kearney, author of the Soldier’s Song, Thomas MacDonagh, a future signatory of The Proclamation, and Cathal Brugha, a future TD, who five years later would preside over the inaugural meeting of the the First Dáil and become its Minister of Defence. Although not present on the day, Roger Casement had been central to the organisation and finance of the operation.

Less than two years later The O’Rahilly would be killed in action leading a charge against a British army machine gun post on Moore Street, Roger Casement would be hanged in Pentonville Prison after organising a much larger and unsuccessful gun-running operation at Banna Strand, Thomas MacDonagh would be executed by the British army for signing the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and in 1922 Erskine Childers and Cathal Brugha would both be shot dead by the Free State army, for defending that Republic and resisting British attempts to impose a treaty which partitioned Ireland and re-defined Irish democracy in British Imperial interests.

But all that lay unknown and in the future as the jubilant Volunteers and Fianna unloaded the Asgard in less than 45 minutes. This was some feat considering it had taken five hours to load the guns onto her from a German tugboat in the North Sea. A Cumann na mBan activist recalled later that, at the sight of the arms being taken off the Asgard, ‘we cheered and cheered and cheered and waved anything that we had and cheered again’. A smaller part of the shipment, 600 rifles and 19,000 rounds of ammunition, were landed from the Chotah by Sir Thomas Myles, Tom Kettle and James Meredith at Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow, on the 1st of August.

As the Volunteers and Fianna made their way back to Dublin from Howth with their cargo, they were challenged at Clontarf by British soldiers and the Irishmen of the Dublin Metropolitan police. Scuffles broke out and the arms and ammunition were spirited across hedges, fields and lanes and dispersed to various hides. Only 19 rifles were lost. As a section of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were returning to the Royal Barracks (now Collins Barracks and the National Museum), they were met by jeering crowds along Sackville Street (now O’Connell street). It was not lost on the citizens of Dublin that the Ulster Volunteers, with the active connivance and collaboration of elements of the English Tory party and senior British military officers, had been allowed the previous April to bring in 25,000 German rifles and up to 5 million rounds of ammunition without interference.

In March British officers in the Curragh, in what was effectively a mutiny, had without sanctions or consequences, threatened to resign en masse if called upon to move against the Ulster Volunteers. Yet, when Irish nationalists and republicans attempted to arm themselves, in the words of the Irish Volunteers’ manifesto ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland,’ they were met with the active opposition of the British state.

As the soldiers turned right at O’Connell Bridge to march down the Quays to their barracks, they opened fire on protesters at Bachelor’s Walk. Shot dead were 50-year-old Mary Duffy (the mother of a British soldier serving in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers), 46-year-old Patrick Quinn, a married man with six children and 17-year-old James Brennan. Another man, Sylvester Pidgeon, married with five children and bayoneted during the British army assault on the crowd died, on the 24th of September.  Among the thirty-two wounded included a young boy called Luke Kelly who would recover from his injury and one day become the father of Luke Kelly of the Dubliner’s.

The Howth guns arrived just in time. Nine days later on August 4th Britain declared war on Germany. The Asgard would never had made it through the formidable cordon that the Royal Navy was to establish around Britain and Ireland as a result of the outbreak of the First World War.

The political and historical context for these events run deep and continues to this day. As a result of the 1910 UK elections, John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power, permitting Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s Liberal Party to govern in return for a promise to publish a Home Rule bill. The Tories, or, as the current UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently reminded us, the Conservative and Unionist party, were deeply opposed to Home Rule but also wished to cynically exploit the issue and deliberately stoked sectarian tensions in Ireland in order to undermine the Asquith government and seize power for themselves.

Unionist leaders Edward Carson and James Craig were aided and abetted by prominent Tories such as Andrew Bonar Law and FE Smith (later to become Lord Birkenhead). Speaking in Liverpool in January 1912, Smith told his audience that there was, ‘no length to which Ulster will not be entitled to go – however desperate and unconstitutional – in carrying the quarrel if the quarrel is wickedly fixed upon them’. He told a UVF rally in Antrim that they were ‘dealing with a Government which understands one argument – the argument of force’.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the Home Rule Bill was put on the statute book, but ‘no steps’ would be taken to put it into practical operation ‘till the end of the war’, when an Amending Bill would be passed to ‘alter, modify and qualify its provision’. Thousands of Irishmen would be lured to their deaths on the Western front by this scam. James Connolly wrote at that time, ‘our leaders are prepared to sacrifice all the sons of the poor, and all the soul and honour of their nation for the deferred promise of a shadow of liberty’.

Home Rule it must be remembered, was merely a form of local autonomy in which an Irish legislature, subordinate to the Westminster parliament, would be given responsibility for domestic affairs. Home Rule was designed principally to reconcile Irish nationalism with British sovereignty. Home Rule, it was hoped by its English supporters, would nurture a loyal nationalist opposition and remove Ireland as an issue from Britain’s political radar. Ireland would be pacified and remain a dependable provider of food and soldiers for the British empire. James Connolly wrote that the problem for the British ‘was not how to defeat a nation in arms battling for all that makes life worth living, but how to fool a nation without arms into becoming the accomplice of its oppressor’.

The degree to which Britain succeeded in fostering a loyal nationalist opposition can be seen in John Redmond’s description of the 1916 Rising as treason against the Irish people and the Irish Parliamentary Party’s call for Irishmen to fight and die, not for Ireland, but for the British Empire in the belief that unity between Nationalists and Unionists could be fostered by bayoneting German boys in Flanders.

Incredibly, to this day some Nationalists still believe that alliances with Unionism should be nurtured through attendance at British army war memorial services and sentimentalising joint-First World War service in the very army that executed the 1916 leadership and continues to occupy our country. In this scenario, Wolfe Tone’s belief that Protestant and Catholic unity should come about through the forging of a common national citizenship free from England is superseded by a twisted concept of unity through celebrating joint debasement as levies and mercenaries for the enemy.

The Howth gun-running was more a nationalist operation in response to the arming of the Ulster Volunteers than it was a republican operation with a specific intent to supply weapons for the 1916 Rising. Of course, some IRB members such as Thomas MacDonagh and Cathal Brugha were involved but only in their dual capacity as members of the Irish Volunteers.

Subsequent events would flag up the differences between nationalism and republicanism and illustrates what happens when an organisation made up of a broad spectrum of opinion, with no agreed consensus or bottom line on crucial constitutional issues, comes through a period of intense struggle and is then offered an opportunity by the enemy to acquire pay, pensions and power in return for conceding what were once core principals.

Few countries have had greater experience, or success, at countering an insurgency than the United Kingdom. According to one British historian, of 196 countries in the world today, the British have invaded or established a military presence in 171 of them. So it is not surprising that they have evolved a multi-layered and coordinated approach to achieving British strategic objectives through the focused use of applied violence and the manipulation and co-option of indigenous leaderships, groups and movements.

One of the first things the Brits do when gathering intelligence and psychologically profiling an insurgent leadership is to try to determine for whom the priority is to win the struggle and for whom the priority is to survive the struggle. For whom is the ideology espoused by the rebels sacrosanct and non-negotiable and who, despite articulate and virulent posturing may be open to persuasion. Who is determined to end British rule and who, in return for a slice of the pie, is willing to negotiate adjustments to it.

Once the Brits get a handle on this they attempt to nurture an insurgent leadership fit for purpose, based on Lenin’s dictum that ‘the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves’. To do this they must kill the right people, jail the right people, buy the right people and enhance the credibility, status and prestige within the insurgent movement of the right people. The Brits are masters at sniffing out the divisions and cleavages in an organisation and know how to exploit them to their best advantage.

During the Tan War, all TDs in Dáil Éireann subscribed to the 1916 Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence and the Democratic Programme. They had all sworn an oath to ‘support and defend the Irish Republic and the Government of the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Eireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic’. This oath was to the 32-County government declared in 1916 and ratified in the 1918 Election.

The Brits knew well that not all of them were committed to these ideals. Some were simply advanced Home Rulers, some Catholic Nationalists and, as the Treaty debates would reveal, many were simply 26-County Nationalists. It became clear during the Treaty debates who were the republicans committed to the ideals of the Proclamation and who could become counter-revolutionaries trusted with the loan of British artillery.

Pro-Treaty delegates such as Eoin MacNeill, who was the founder of the Irish Volunteers and took part in the Howth gun-running operation had stated years earlier, ‘in theory I suppose I am a separatist, in practice I would accept any settlement that would enable Irishmen to freely control their own affairs, and I would object to any theoretical upsetting of such a settlement’. Desmond Fitzgerald, father of the late Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, glibly implied that what they said and what they meant were two different things stating, ‘I have always understood by a Free Irish Republic that we meant an independent Ireland’.

Arthur Griffith, who served as acting President of the Republic while De Valera was in America and Chairman of the Irish delegation during the Treaty negotiations, was certainly no republican. The Brits sidelined him during the negotiations as much as they could and worked on him knowing his weaknesses. He eventually promised Prime Minister Lloyd George he would sign the Treaty even if every other member of the delegation refused.

Robert Barton, an Irish Treaty delegate, a first cousin of Asgard skipper Erskine Childers who was Chief Secretary of the Delegation, did not want to sign the Treaty. Reflecting on Arthur Griffith Barton wrote, ‘a situation had now arisen which they had never visualised, Griffith had gone over to the English… He’d been outmaneuvered, outwitted and smashed. And he now proceeded to smash us’. When informed to his astonishment that Michael Collins and Eamonn Duggan would also sign Robert Barton commented, ‘my dilemma was that whilst I knew the cabinet and Ireland would face war on a united leadership I had no idea what they would do when three of the principal leaders had ratted.’

During the Treaty Debates in the Dáil, arguments arose which many former members of the Provisional Movement who attended briefings on the Good Friday Agreement would recognise. Those who would become Free Staters and accept British guns and artillery to destroy the Republic argued along the lines of, ‘if it’s good enough for Mick Collins it’s good enough for me’. ‘We have the freedom to achieve freedom.’ ‘What’s the alternative?’ ‘Sure, you knew we were never going to drive the Brits into the sea.’ ‘What does it matter about a republic as long as we have legislative independence?’ ‘What’s so special about republicanism, didn’t Cromwell want a republic?’ ‘We won the war lets win the peace’, and so on.

Republicans such as Liam Mellows, later executed by the Free State, argued that constitutional authority resided exclusively within the Irish people. That England has always sought democratic title in Ireland, Irish approval and an Irish mandate for their continued presence which this treaty with its oath to the King provided them. Padraig Pearse’s literary executor, Desmond Ryan, wrote, ‘the spirit of the Irish revolution was buried. It was the hour of reaction, of the place-hunter, the intriguer, the hopeless, the mediocre, the superstitious… Never had the pride and self-respect of a nation been so deeply wounded.’

Republicans today are faced with similar issues and arguments as many former comrades now assert the path to an Irish national democracy is signposted by British legislation. They have conceded the Unionist Veto, revived the Six-County Home Rule parliament at Stormont, endorsed Her Majesty’s constabulary as lawful authority and internalised British constitutional constraints such as the triple-locked border poll. Twenty years ago, we were assured by the Provisional leadership that by 2016 there would be no border in Ireland. Now there are two.

These debates are not ephemeral irrelevancies, significant only to a legalistic, pedantic or contentious mind. They cut right to the heart of the concept of Irish citizenship and which government – English or Irish – lawfully defines the parameters of Irish democracy. In the words of Bobby Sands, written in his own context, ‘what’s lost here is lost for the Republic’. By the Republic Bobby didn’t mean the 26-County Republic of Ireland declared in 1949, which announced to the the world Ireland is Ireland without the Six Counties, but the 32-County Irish Republic declared in 1916 and which proclaimed ‘a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women’.

One hundred years later, Ireland still does not have a national government and Britain still works assiduously to ensure that UK parliamentary sovereignty in the Six Counties is not superseded or eclipsed by 32-County popular sovereignty. Britain remains determined to defend the political and territorial integrity of the United Kingdom and to underwrite and subsidise its contrived vanguard the Unionist Veto.

We have recently witnessed the arrival of a new British Secretary of State for the North. No Irish citizen elected James Brokenshire to any office whatsoever. Yet the signatories to the Good Friday Agreement confer upon this English politician the statutory authority to decide whether a border poll may be called, the very wording of the poll and who among the Irish electorate qualifies to vote. And just on the off-chance England should leave a single stone unturned in ring fencing their Irish national gerrymander, the final result of that poll must be ratified by the parliament of the United Kingdom in London.

The 1916 Societies advocate an all-Ireland referendum on Irish Unity, testing the national will on a national as opposed to a partitionist basis – a ‘One Ireland One Vote’ referendum as opposed to the six-county border poll negotiated under the Good Friday Agreement promoting Two Irelands Two Votes.

There are those who try to tell you that Irish Republicanism is defeated. Republicanism is not defeated. Republican leaderships have been defeated, co-opted, corrupted but not Republicanism. Those claiming to be Republican may well advocate a compromised authority in which Irish constitutional prerogatives are relegated to notional aspirations subject to UK parliamentary endorsement, but no genuine republican would do so and to my knowledge none has.

On this spot 102 year ago arms were landed by Erskine Childers and his core group of Irish Protestant patriots. Despite the seeming unity of purpose on the day, those waiting on the rifles and ammunition had very different conceptions of Irish freedom. Some, like Thomas MacDonagh and Cathal Brugha, were uncompromising in their determination to forge a united sovereign Republic. Others, like Eoin MacNeill, were not concerned so much with the form of government but with acquiring managerial control of a state and could accept England determining the democratic parameters of that state.

Some there that day went along with Redmond’s advice and joined the British war effort on the Western Front. Some died there, some came back and joined the IRA and stayed the course. Others deserted the Republic and joined the Free State army. Some went Free State simply because a state can buy loyalty, some out of personal devotion to a pro-Treaty leader, and some welcoming the opportunity to get stuck into republicans to avenge the stab in the back they felt they received from the 1916 rebels while in the trenches. At least half the Free State army in the Civil War was comprised of ex-British soldiers of Irish provenance.

Partition and the Good Friday Agreement are essentially tribal settlements rooted in difference. Irish Republicanism is inspired by a proposition. That proposition was enunciated by Wolfe Tone and further refined and articulated in the Proclamation of 1916. The proposition that Britain can be dispensed with and Irishmen and women of whatever persuasion and none could forge a common national citizenship based upon democracy, equality and fraternity.  That’s the vision. That is Irish Republicanism.

On Easter Monday 1916, as British Lancers charged down O’Connell Street, the Howth guns fired the first shots that attempted to make that vision a reality…