forces, and his basic Irish nationalist emotions came into play. Emmet’s mother was also upset. Emmet managed to calm them down and they came to accept their son’s decision. Emmet duly set off for Cork and underwent a course for young trainee officers for about a month at the city’s Victoria Barracks. He received further training in Kilworth camp, near Fermoy, County Cork.
Military commissions were formally announced in the British government journal London Gazette. The supplement for the edition of 8 January 1916 recorded that, on the first of the month, James Emmet Dalton, had been appointed temporary Second Lieutenant (on probation) with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (RDF). He was one of many young men from his north Dublin neighbourhood who joined the RDF early in the Great War. One was Frank Malley, older brother of Dalton’s school contemporary, Ernie O’Malley. Frank later served with the King’s African Rifles, and died in what is now Tanzania.29
While Emmet was still undergoing training in Cork, a momentous event took place in Dublin. On Easter Monday 1916, the more militant element of the Irish Volunteers staged the Rising, which utterly transformed the Irish political situation for generations. Organized by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the 1916 Rising was the most significant insurrection against British rule since the 1798 rebellion. The fighting was mainly confined to Dublin where the Irish Volunteers and members of the smaller socialist organization, the Irish Citizen Army seized a number of key buildings, the most iconic being the General Post Office (GPO). Fighting continued for the next six days.
As soon as he learned of the rebellion, James F. Dalton’s practical instincts came into play. He instructed his wife to lay in provisions and to buy two hundredweight (101.6 kg) of flour as nobody knew how long the trouble would last. Knowing instinctively that his 13-year-old son Charlie would want to go into town and see what was happening, James F. forbade the boy to go anywhere near the fighting. All Charlie’s sympathies were with the rebels and as he recalled later, he would have loved to help with the fight. He was disgusted to see women coming out of their homes to give jugs of tea to British soldiers.30
Many Irishmen serving in the British Army were still in Ireland when the rebellion broke out. They must have found themselves in a dilemma, as they had joined to fight for the rights of small nations – not to fight their fellow Irishmen. Many families also found themselves in an equivocal situation – having one son in the British Army and another son involved with or sympathetic to the rebel forces. Charlie Dalton stated that during Easter Week, before going to bed, the family gathered as usual to say the Rosary and to ‘pray for the Volunteers’.31 At the same time it is clear that despite their nationalist proclivities, the Daltons would have remained steadfastly loyal to Charlie’s brother Emmet who was now with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
A few days after the start of the rebellion, Charlie was talking to his mother when the windows of the house shook with the sound of a deafening explosion – they later discovered that the British gunboat Helga had sailed up the River Liffey to shell buildings which were believed to be occupied by rebels. Towards the end of a week of fighting, Charlie was upstairs with his family saying the Rosary, when he saw a red glow in the sky in the direction of the city centre.32 A man passing by the house the following day said the GPO had caught fire and that the Volunteers had surrendered – he had seen them lined up on the street. Charlie was greatly disappointed at the news. Among the many captured insurgents was an extroverted young man from County Cork, named Michael Collins. All prisoners were released by June 1917.
After the fighting ended, Charlie went into Dublin city centre and walked amid the ruins. He later explained that in his patriotic fervor he wanted to make contact with others who felt the same as he did. He went to one of the Requiem Masses for the dead at the Church of St Mary of the Angels on Church Street, run by the Capuchin Franciscans. He found there what he was looking for. Outside the church he saw an older schoolmate from O’Connell’s, Ernie O’Malley, singing rebel songs.33 Like the Daltons, the O’Malleys had a foot in both camps – Ernie O’Malley had fought with the rebels in the Rising and would later become a prominent IRA leader, while, as previously indicated, his brother Frank was in the British Army. Charlie Dalton recalled that ‘we were horrified’ at the news of the execution of the Rising leaders.34 The shooting by firing squad of men such as Pádraig Pearse, his brother Willie and James Connolly, engendered great sympathy for the rebel cause. This accelerated the rise of the separatist Sinn Fein movement and helped to sound the death knell for John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party.
Emmet Dalton said in his RTÉ interview with Cathal O’Shannon that when he heard of the Rising his reaction was the same as most of the recruits who were with him in Kilworth Camp, he was surprised, annoyed, and thought it was madness. He felt the rebels represented only a ‘tiny minority’ at that time, ‘and we were the overwhelming majority represented by our people in Parliament…’ However, he made it clear that if he had been asked to oppose the rebels in arms, that would be a ‘different situation’, implying that he would not fight against his fellow-countrymen. In Dublin, Irish troops were among the British soldiers deployed against the rebels, and a number of Dublin Fusiliers were killed. There is no record of any mutiny among them when they were were sent in to suppress the rebellion.
It has been suggested that Emmet Dalton was one of the army cadets who formed part of the British forces that were mobilized for security duties in County Wexford at the time of the rebellion. Because of a shortage of garrison troops, trainee officers, part of the Young Officers Corps at Fermoy, were given rifles and full service kit. They were then sent to County Wexford to guard a munitions factory and other strategic points, and to round up suspects.35 Fortunately none of them was required to open fire on the insurgents. The Wexford Rising was, in fact, a rather ‘gentle’ rebellion; although a large number of Volunteers turned out, there was no fighting and nobody was killed. Colonel French, the local commander of the British forces, took a ‘softly softly’ approach and this helped to resolve the situation without bloodshed. A young man, Francis Carty (a future editor of the Sunday Press), lived in Wexford town at the time of the Rising. He later fought with the IRA in the War of Independence and Civil War. He remembered the arrival of a force of cadets in Wexford with a larger number of British troops. He added in his statement to the BMH: ‘I think that Emmet Dalton was one of these cadets.’36
Richard Mulcahy, IRA Chief of Staff during the War of Independence, claimed that Dalton took the rebel surrender at Enniscorthy in 1916. Mulcahy made the claim in 1927 at an election rally, as a way of praising Dalton for his transformation from a British Army officer who once confronted Irish rebels to a rebel hero of the War of Independence.37 However, Mulcahy’s account raises the question – would a cadet or trainee junior officer be the person deployed to take the surrender of a rebel leader? The leader of the Wexford insurgents, Robert Brennan, told the Bureau of Military History that he surrendered to the British commander, Colonel French.38
While brave and idealistic, the insurgents of 1916 did not have an electoral mandate. The party that Irish nationalists voted for in overwhelming numbers was John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party. As a result, Dalton and others who followed Redmond’s call to join the British Army in the First World War believed that in doing so they were expressing the will of the Irish people. The execution of the leaders of the rebellion helped to swing public sympathy towards the Volunteers’ separatist cause, and to divert support away from the Redmondites. In a 1977 interview, Dalton reflected that the general attitude of the Irish people at that time was changed by ‘the execution of the leaders perpetrated by the British for no valid reason’.39
Referring to the Rising itself, he considered the insurrection a hopeless gamble because it had no hope of success. He could not envision the leaders had ever believed in achieving military victory. He told how his contemporaries at the time looked askance at the Rising. ‘They did not see it the way one sees it now…’ Nevertheless, Dalton appeared to harbour a suspicion that the measure of independence Ireland ultimately achieved with the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty could have been secured peacefully had the 1916 Rising not occurred. In a telling quote, he remarked: ‘I think it [the Rising] should never have happened.
