papers, and for everything contraband of war – contraband of peace, I may say. I stood in the drawing room under arrest. The sergeant-in-command was smashing the drawers of the chiffonier in search of documents. My wife rushed toward him, crying out not to break the drawers, as she would get the keys. He rudely shoved her away.34
A family friend, Tom O’Shea, had been staying in the house that evening and with O’Donovan Rossa was arrested on suspicion of being involved with the Phoenix Society. O’Shea had no involvement with the Phoenix Society, but was incredibly superstitious and held a great fear of fairies; he had been too afraid to go home that evening, for fear of a fairy puck at nearby Steam Mill Cross and so O’Donovan Rossa had allowed him to stay at his house for the night. O’Shea and Rossa were taken to the local police barracks where they were greeted by several Phoenix men including, John Stack, P. J. Dowling, Timothy Duggan, Morty Dowling, William O’Shea and Dan McCartie. McCartie had been due to leave Skibbereen the following day to start a new job in a brewery in Galway.35 Held in Skibbereen Barracks until mid-morning, they were then escorted by individual policemen through Roscarbery and Clonakilty to Bandon, County Cork. The Freeman’s Journal reported that on leaving Skibbereen by three train coaches, and under heavy police escort, the prisoners were cheered and applauded by spectators, with the prisoners themselves joining in the cheering and calling upon the crowd to be louder.36 Arriving in Bandon at 7 p.m., O’Donovan Rossa met Jerrie and Pat Cullinane, William O’Shea and Denis O’Sullivan, who had all been arrested at Bantry as part of the investigations into the Phoenix Society.37 O’Donovan Rossa despondently recalled how the conditions at Bantry, prior to their removal to Cork, were horrendous, and ‘arriving at nine in the evening we were huddled into cells flooded with water. Having travelled all day under rain, and having received neither food nor drink, we now would get neither bread nor a bed. Next morning we found ourselves in Cork Jail, awaiting prosecution on charges of conspiracy’.38 Following on from the Cork arrests, police raided the homes of several advanced nationalists in Killarney, arresting Denis O’Shea, Patrick Hennessy, Jeremiah Sullivan, Patrick Sullivan, Valentine Browne, Thomas Neary, Timothy Leary, Thomas Leahy and Thomas Sullivan. Two additional men in Killarney, Daniel O’Sullivan, a schoolteacher in possession of an incriminating letter, and Florence O’Sullivan, later consolidated these arrests. In Belfast a great stir was occasioned as a final batch of arrests was made against several Ribbonmen, whom the media wrongly believed were implicated in the Phoenix society.
In Cork Jail each of the Phoenix men were separated and treated as ordinary prisoners by being given menial tasks common to Victorian prison life. This included oakum picking, the rather laborious chore of unravelling old tarred rope in fibre. What made this work more odious to the Phoenix men was that they were not convicted prisoners. O’Donovan Rossa and his co-conspirators had been detained without trial and were yet to receive one. For two weeks of their imprisonment there had been no charges against any of the men and protesting to the prison authorities, their pronouncements were ignored – they were bluntly told that unless they could pay for their own maintenance within the prison, they would have to work. O’Donovan Rossa resolved to work and endure the rigours of life in Cork jail. Increasingly, however, as the mundane and lethargic hours of jail life crept by, he was growing evermore despondent and his resolution to ‘suffer and be strong’39 was weakening:
Some of the detained arranged to get their own food, but the rest of us thought that we would inure ourselves to hardship. But we could not eat the fare we got; and this, with the solitary confinement imposed, starved us out of our resolution ‘to suffer and be strong.’ The bread was made with rye/wheat flour; it had the appearance of brown turf and you could squeeze the water out of it. The porridge, about the same colour, was flavoured with leeks, which made it disgusting, for when you drew your spoon out of the bowl you would draw up one of those foot-long leeks, and unless you had gone through a course of starvation your stomach would refuse to receive the product as food.40
With the Phoenix men imprisoned at Cork Jail, George Fitzmaurice instructed police to co-operate with local post offices to intercept the mail of the imprisoned men. This order was compounded by a further dictate that the correspondence of their solicitor, Timothy McCarthy Dowling, was also to be secretly opened and copied by police. Fitzmaurice had evidently sought to establish a clandestine means of cumulative evidence to prove that the Phoenix prisoners were guilty of revolutionary conspiracy. All of this was inadmissible in court, however. To strengthen the case against the Phoenix prisoners, Fitzmaurice now extracted Dan O’Sullivan Goula from the conspiracy, and the informant emerged within a fortnight of the arrests in Cork Jail, accompanied by Sir
Matthew Barrington, Crown Solicitor. O’Sullivan Goula identified all of the prisoners as members of a secret society and claimed that they had been intent on leading a rebellion in Ireland against Britain. Recalling a visit to Skibbereen on the 5 December 1858, O’Sullivan Goula placed O’Donovan Rossa, Morty Dowling, Tim Duggan, Denis Downing, Morty Moynahan, Pat Dowling, Daniel McCarthy and William O’Shea at a Phoenix Society meeting in a back room in Morty Dowling’s pub. Furthering this accusation, O’Sullivan Goula told Barrington that he had personally witnessed the prisoners drilling in military formation with swords and canes, led by McCarthy and O’Donovan Rossa.41 Morty Moynahan was a regular driller of men, and with almost forensic precision, O’Sullivan Goula recalled how Moynahan would order the men to ‘fall in line’,42 and march like regular soldiers. O’Donovan Rossa was more of a strict drill master, and in O’Sullivan Goula’s narrative O’Donovan Rossa had, in his presence, drilled some 300 men in Skibbereen. Once again O’Sullivan Goula identified the Phoenix men as actively drilling in West Cork, and claimed to have taken and administered two oaths to several individuals, swearing them into the revolutionary movement. While not producing any written oath as evidence, he verbally cited the oath as:
I_____ do solemnly swear that I will, to the utmost of my power, endeavour to subvert and overthrow the British government; that I will join and assist any foreign army who may arrive in this country with that object, and that I will obey and carry out the orders of my superiors to the best of my ability.43
Each of the Phoenix prisoners denied this oath and continued to argue that O’Sullivan Goula was lying on behalf of the state to secure convictions. O’Sullivan Goula next swore of a meeting which took place on the rural border between Cork and Kerry, where he had heard talk of American and French intervention designed to make Ireland ‘an Independent Republic’.44 The prisoners, particularly O’Donovan Rossa, strenuously denied his claims to Barrington, insisting that the informer was lying. Recalling Sullivan Goula’s performance in his later years, O’Donovan Rossa angrily remembered:
O’Sullivan Goula was brought among us, and there he stood shivering, side by side with the man who had been honoured with England’s knighthood [Sir Matthew Barrington]. Tim Duggan was moving up close to the informer, the informer complained to Sir Matthew that the prisoner was looking threateningly at him and asked to be taken into another room till his evidence was required. Sir Matthew sent for extra police; they came and stood between Goula and the prisoners. No matter how bad and wicked a character I may be considered now, the adoration I received in youth was a moral and religious one. I had not till then realized the possibility that any man would go on a witness table, kiss the Book, invent a pack of lies and deliberately swear they were the truth, and do all this to put into jail and keep them there, men who never did him, or anyone belonging to him, hurt or harm. But there was that Goula before me, deliberately swearing that he saw me drilling three hundred men one night, and swearing to other things against me which he never saw and which I never did. All pure invention of his own; all false swearing. But no; it was not invention of his; the invention was Fitzmaurice’s and Sir Matthew Barrington’s. They had made up their minds to fasten their irons well on me, and they had made up the informer for the work.45
Under British law, however, despite what O’Donovan Rossa suggested, the word of an informer was not, strictly speaking, admissible in any future trials. Considering the informer was paid by the state and had offered to give information leading to the conviction of the Phoenix prisoners, witnesses were required to corroborate his narrative. Fitzmaurice now eagerly sought to elucidate a confession
