letters, deposited with the collections of fellow republicans; however, Mellows left no archive of private papers.
CHAPTER 2
‘Real live, earnest Irish rebel boys’, History of Na Fianna Éireann (1917)
We realise that Irish freedom must be won by one method by which it is won in every other part of the world – the sword and its allies.
Liam Mellows, History of the Irish Boyscouts (1917)
Youth, Masculinity and Redemption
Na Fianna Éireann was a republican boy scout movement that became associated with the Irish Volunteers in 1913. Founded in 1909 by Bulmer Hobson, Padraig Ó Riain, Countess Markievicz and other militant nationalists, the organisation was part of a wider European trend that saw the emergence of pseudo-military youth movements at the beginning of the twentieth century.1 The organisation was conceived as an alternative to Baden-Powell’s Anglo-centric Boy Scout movement, founded in 1908, and the Anglican Boys Brigades, founded in Glasgow in 1883. The movement, Mellows wrote, aimed to ‘inspire chivalrous ideals and manly sentiments’ in its young members, as, ultimately, the Fianna claimed, ‘to those of us who are growing up boys and girls will probably fall the task of finally settling the Irish Question. Now is the time therefore for us to consider the course we are to follow and the methods to be adopted to ensure success.’
Bulmer Hobson had originally formed a unit of Na Fianna in Belfast in 1902 and the group was re-established in Dublin in 1909.2 A number of Fianna members, including Seán Heuston, Con Colbert, Seán McLoughlin, Gerard Holohan and Leo Henderson were to display a courage and leadership that belied their youth during the 1916 Rebellion. Seán Heuston, executed for his defence of the Mendicity Institute, was vice-commandant of the Dublin brigade of Na Fianna, and Con Colbert, executed for his role at Marrowbone Lane, was a Fianna officer.
Mellows became a travelling organiser for the Fianna in May 1913, a role, one member recalled, that ‘attracted much derision, but recruits, newsboys, schoolboys, sons of old Fenians, came in slowly’.3 Young boy scout Seamus Pounch remembered Mellows with affection, recalling ‘Liam was a very fatherly type.’4 Gerard Holohan recalled that in his branch, ‘some were very tough lads, while others were of a fine type’.5 ‘We were taught to be aggressive to the RIC and the boys in Camden Street would avail of every opportunity to attack the Protestant Boys Brigade, who were at that time very strong and would carry a union jack’.6 Senior organiser Eamon Martin claimed that Markievicz was duped by Hobson and Mellows, who allowed her to believe that she controlled the movement while they recruited its members into the IRB and manipulated the organisation for their own purposes.7
Mellows shared Patrick Pearse’s faith in the youth of Ireland, and his despair at the constitutional nationalism of older generations led him to invest his energy in the young. To be a republican militant was to be in a small minority, however, and as Mellows recalled, the dream of revolution was only kept alive by the endeavours of a small hardcore of activists, ‘the National ideal had a hard struggle to live and it was only by superhuman efforts on the part of “the few” that it was not utterly swamped’. For the ‘faithful few’ the price of faith was ridicule and Mellows could not help but take a few shots at the unbelievers in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising:
Some of the would be nationalists whom the organiser interviewed and appealed to for help, spoke of the movement with sarcasm and pointed out how, in their worldly wisdom, it was doomed to failure. ‘What can a handful of boys do against the great British Empire?’ was the question frequently put. Oh! Ye of little faith, did ye dream then that a time would come when you would eat your words and talk instead of the decadence of the Empire, not because you believed in Ireland but because it was the popular thing to do.
The theme of masculinity and salvation features throughout Mellows’ writing with the perceived degradation of Irish public life necessitating a shock treatment that was to be administered by a rising generation of young militants. For Mellows, the enemy garrison was inculcated in the forces of conservative nationalism and the cultural inferiority of the Irish middle classes, including ‘the rotten Dublin press’, ‘Parliamentarianism and the corruption that follows closely in its wake’, ‘the Anglicising influence of the so-called National Schools’, ‘respectable people’ and ‘the seoinin [West British] element, who sported this emblem [the union jack] of their enslavement’. The task before Mellows and the boys of the Fianna represented the ‘holy work of keeping the young manhood of Ireland out of the clutches of the government that ground them down’. The boys of the Fianna, on the other hand, ‘knew that in a very short time boys became men, and if when men they lived up to the teachings and ambitions of their boyhood, why, the work and plotting of centuries to reduce and subdue Ireland was undone’.
Mellows envisaged a generational revolution and the boys of Na Fianna represented nothing less than the resurrection of the lost soul of Ireland, mired, as he saw it, in effete, west-British inauthenticity. Through the work of the movement, Mellows claimed, ‘the country was being roused from the lethargic and disorganised state into which constitutionalism had thrown it. The tide was beginning to turn.’ The task facing the organisation was no less than reviving ‘the spirit of nationality which foreign government and its offspring, constitutional nationalism, had done so much to destroy’. Death is a theme throughout Mellows’ writing and his history of the Fianna discusses the deaths of four boys in separate incidents. Martyrdom brought hope of salvation, however, and in paying tribute to the Fianna who fought in the 1916 Rising, ‘It is to these’, Mellows wrote, ‘that Ireland is indebted for her salvation as a Nation.’
While the Fianna was one of the harbingers of the militarism of Irish youth that was to follow the 1916 Rising, Mellows is, at times, guilty of overstating the influence and role of the organisation. While he maintains that the boys of the Fianna helped ‘save the soul’ of Ireland, he fails to acknowledge the success of the Gaelic Athletic Association in constructing a genuinely national movement that mobilised tens of thousands of young people. The Fianna was not the first Irish republican youth movement and Mellows omits any mention of the significant contribution and achievements of the pioneering girls’ republican movement, Inghinidhe na h-Éireann, founded by Maude Gonne, Helena Molony and others in 1900. This was a significant omission on Mellows’ part and he would have been aware of, though not personally involved, in the girls’ movement, which was in decline by the time the Fianna was organised.
Mellows’ history of the Fianna was serialised in the Gaelic American newspaper in New York in eight instalments between April and August 1917. The articles appeared irregularly and were published anonymously under the pseudonym ‘Irish Volunteer Officer’.8 The extracts reproduced in this chapter do not represent Mellows’ text in its entirety and omit several lengthy sections that deal with internal procedures and structures, including training exercises, internal discipline, etc., that are described in considerable detail in the original text. The purpose of reproducing an abridged version is to explore the essence of Mellows’ early political philosophy. The account provides a keen insight into Mellows’ early activities, his commitment to militarism and his contempt for constitutional nationalism and the perceived materialism of Irish public life before the Easter Rebellion. It is far from Mellows’ best writing, however, and he indulges in much bluff and exaggeration. His claim, for instance, that the British Army killings carried out at Batchelor’s Walk on the day of the Howth gun running on 26 July 1914 ‘sounded the death-knell of the British Empire, for it kept Dublin nationally right’ ignores the reality that recruitment figures for the British Army in the early years of the War were particularly high in Dublin City. Mellows’ defence of the shooting of an unarmed man, George Alexander Playfair, a 23-year-old clerk, killed by members of Na Fianna at Park Place, next to the Phoenix Park during the Easter Rebellion, represents an understandable attempt to defend the actions of his young acolytes, but is far from convincing.
1. The History of the Irish Boy Scouts (1917)
The
