to above. On the one hand, Mulcahy’s distinguished intermediate certificate result made him more determined than heretofore to do well in life and, thereby, to take his place among a rising, self-confident and self-expressive Roman Catholic petit bourgeoisie. On the other hand, his spiritual training gave him an aura of gravitas and dignity, qualities which happened to meld harmoniously into emancipative patriotism, a further developing interest of his.
Another part of the answer, however, can be explained by the uniqueness of the Brothers’ textbooks, in that those publications ‘gave a much more Irish orientation to the content’, whereas the official texts (and the texts of religious orders, like the Presentation Brothers, who were affiliated to the National Board of Education) ‘were geared to the British cultural assimilation policy of the time’.23 Their Irish history books, in particular, portrayed events from the perspective that the majority of the Irish people and their Church suffered containment and neglect at the hands of perfidious Albion. Nonetheless, in offering a solution to that dilemma, more by presumption than by prescription, the books’ authors were careful not to wander into the domain of physical force republicanism. Instead, theirs was a message of national self-determination based upon ethno-cultural and moral persuasion, the uniqueness of the Irish language being the principal identifier here.24
And, in essence, in 1902, that was the message which Mulcahy and a small number of his classmates heeded when answering the call of an interested teacher to attend spoken Irish classes after school hours.25 An indication of the strength of that calling was the fact that, the year before, due to prolonged illness, he had been obliged to give up ‘troublesome’ grammatical Irish as one of his school subjects on account of performing very badly at it in his exams.26
In the meantime, as has just been mentioned, he underwent his apprenticeship at home. Then, six months later, having lately turned seventeen years of age, he formally commenced employment as a junior postal sorting clerk in Tralee.27 This work was badly paid, labour intensive, antiquated, monotonous, repetitive, hierarchical and regimental. For example, in the General Post Office (GPO) in Sackville [O’Connell] Street, Dublin in 1871, ‘Boys … did nothing but turn all the letters face up, stamps the one way, and pack them in oblong columns. Fourteen boys took these away and by means of a single stamp obliterated her Majesty’s face and impressed the circular date-mark.’28
In any event, after a few months, he was transferred to the telegraph section in Bantry post office.29 From the point of view of prestige, this was a good move because, in comparison to the job of sorting letters, the sending of cryptic messages by the electromagnetic, key tapping, Morse code system, then an almost global phenomenon, meant that a professional practitioner had to have a particular skill set, involving memory, concentration and dexterity: ‘The pace and continuity of attention in telegraph work in a large office is far greater than in any other Government Office. A telegraphist cannot pause at will in the middle of his work … and he constantly works in an atmosphere of high pressure.’30 Also, the telegraphist needed patience: ‘It [the key-tapping method] was very slow and admitted of frequent and serious errors.’31 And, because Bantry was a head office offering money order and savings bank facilities,32 there were the competitive interests of the business world to be aware of: ‘No cog in the wheel of industry fulfils a more vital function [because] … Transactions involving hundreds of thousands of pounds daily pass through the hands of the Telegraph Staff.’33 But, despite the relative sophistication of those demands, a telegraphist, similar to a sorting clerk with whom he was categorised, remained subject to the vagaries of shift work, divided duties, a half hour meal break and unscheduled overtime.34 This meant that ‘his social life is destroyed’.35
Little wonder then that Mulcahy made it his business to try to wriggle free once again. His escape was secured in 1907 when, having completed a correspondence course, he was promoted to the position of clerk in the engineering branch, Wexford.36 Finally, a year later, he was transferred, in the same capacity, to the sectional engineer’s office at Aldborough House, Portland Row, in the north-east of Dublin’s inner city.37
Therefore, the period, 1903–1908 shows Mulcahy – ambitious, speculative and industrious – making rapid progress in his career. But, more importantly perhaps, in terms of the man who would ultimately rise to prominence in the Irish freedom movement, he made progress in other areas as well. For instance, this was a time of exponential growth for the Gaelic League. Yet, due to the social aspect of the movement being so attractive, a lot of young people enrolled for less than noble reasons, with the result that linguistic standards suffered accordingly. (Besides, there was the complexity of the language itself, together with the advanced standard of the League’s teaching in a mixed-ability classroom environment.38)
Not so for Mulcahy, however; the moment he joined its classes in Bantry and Skibbereen, study was by far and away his primary consideration.39 Consequently, he became favourably known to teachers of the calibre of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, Conchubhar Ó Muimhneacháin and Éamonn Motherway.40 Ó hAnnracháin, in particular, was impressed by his tenacity – ‘He started speaking it [Irish] when he had only a small amount and he carried on until he mastered it. He was sincere from the start.’41 Similarly, his capacity for autonomous study42 came to the fore during his visits to the nearby Gaeltacht (a native Irish speaking area) of Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaigh. For example, in the house of Siobhán an tSagairt, a place he considered ‘his university’,43 he would write down verses and stories in order the better to commit them to memory.44
Still, at that time, he did not graduate into the more advanced section of the Irish–Ireland community. For example, he never participated in any of the protest campaigns of the Celtic Literary Society (CLS). There was an obvious reason for that: membership of Cork’s branch of the CLS,45 similar to the CLS’s main centres of activity in Dublin, London and Liverpool,46 came principally from within its own urban area, and its extramural organisational activities consisted of written fraternal communications with the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in the outlying towns. Nonetheless, whenever the opportunity arose during peer group discussions and conversations, Mulcahy was known to unapologetically stand up for his nationalist beliefs.47 Indeed, he would seem to have considered the championing of the philosophy of self-help and the ideology of national self-determination – arguments in favour of which were to be found in his then choice of political reading material, specifically The United Irishman, The Resurrection of Hungary and The Republic48 – to be as important a nationalist identifier as speaking the Irish language was, for example.
The United Irishman, a broadsheet, with the sub-title ‘A National Weekly Review’, sold for a penny and was published on Saturdays. It was founded in 1899 by Arthur Griffith after he returned from South Africa and, from the very outset, it struggled to survive: ‘Very few people – only one here and there – bought or read the “United Irishman”.’49 Even at its best, ironically just before a libel case forced its closure on 14 April 1906, its print run might have reached the relatively meagre figure of seven thousand copies per annum.50 (It depended for its survival upon the limited largesse of a few private donors who were strongly associated with the CLS.51) Hence, from a practical point of view, it was a difficult paper to get a hold of in any place outside its main Cumann na nGaedheal/Sinn Féin/CLS club outlets in Dublin and London especially. In that event, people forwarded second-hand copies to one another. For example, O’Donovan Rossa sent Liam de Róiste a copy from New York.52 And, having been first introduced to The United Irishman by his Thurles friend, Jim Kennedy,53 who was centre of the local Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (see Appendix 1), Mulcahy similarly received copies now and then from some of his work colleagues.54
Mulcahy was interested in The United Irishman because of Griffith’s political commentary, not because of the paper’s literary or historical pieces – ‘I had been reading the United Irishman from about 1903 … [and, as a result,] I was involved in Sinn Féin thought.’55 Propaganda was an obvious facet of Griffith’s discourse. For example, in 1903, in commenting upon the annual report of the inspector general of the British army, he praised Hungarian mothers for allegedly forbidding their sons to join the Austrian army, resulting in the army being
