candidate has passed the necessary test, and his retention as a “selected man” depends altogether on his proficiency in his work’.9
On those grounds, having been promoted quickly to the engineering section of the postal service and having learned Morse code and now also semaphore, Mulcahy became company signaller.10 (That he started in a low position is also a result of the meritocratic nature of the selection process whereby, in comparison, someone like Eamon, alias Bob, Price, five years younger than Mulcahy but having attained the position of high court clerk by open competitive examination at sixteen years of age, became second lieutenant.11)
It is easy to recognise MacDonagh’s hand in the development of those procedures. Being a well-liked and much respected Director of Training (DT)12 – ‘our principal guid[e] and inspiration in our early days’13 – as well as coming from a teaching and academic background, he devoted himself selflessly and scrupulously to the attainment of the highest possible standards of performance among the men in general, but among the officers in particular. Under his watch, even when voting replaced the selection phase, only the best, as attested to by objective standards, would be given his nihil obstat: ‘the various Companies shall elect … Company Commanders and Half Company Commanders … and at the end of two months the men elected must pass a preliminary examination, and their appointments will not be ratified until they pass the final examination six months after election.’14
However, throughout the summer of 1914, extraneous circumstances adversely affected MacDonagh’s work.15 On 9 June, John Redmond, who, as leader of the IPP, was not prepared to countenance the rise to prominence within his hegemony of an autonomous army, issued a press statement which, by suggesting, under the threat of closure, the expansion of the provisional committee to include twenty-five of his nominees, effectively signalled his takeover of the Volunteers. Then, on 20 September, he proceeded to make his famous ‘wherever the firing lines extend’ British army enlistment speech at Woodenbridge, County Wicklow, namely twelve weeks after the First World War had started and two days after the Home Rule Bill had been signed into law.
Four days later, the die was cast when the non-Redmondite members of the provisional committee publicly retorted that ‘Ireland cannot, with honour or safety, take part in foreign quarrels.’16 This meant that the vast majority of the membership – approximately 96 per cent out of a maximum membership of 185,09317 – backed Redmond and enrolled in his newly formed force, the National Volunteers, with most of them again expressing their intention to proceed therefrom into the ranks of the British army.18
After all of that, from the perspective of the remaining Irish Volunteers, what initially appeared to be a disaster – as variously manifested by a precipitous drop in recruiting; little organisational activity; no drilling; and few public political meetings due to heckling and violence19 – was actually a bonus in the long term because a complete change of direction and emphasis in military training ensued. Evidence of the change is available in the pages of the Irish Volunteer, the organisation’s weekly newspaper which was both its mouthpiece and its vade mecum. Before August 1914, it was routine to have articles published on first aid; the technology of modern military rifles; the application of the semaphore alphabet to military usage; body choreography in rapid-fire shooting; and the organisational mechanics of drill practice.
But after August 1914, the norm was the following: field practices; defending positions in open terrain; reconnoitring; and skirmishing.20 Also, vis-à-vis the content of the officer test syllabi, the rubrics of a display army, originally fashioned for propagandist purposes at the height of the Home Rule crisis, were replaced by the rubrics of a guerrilla army, now fashioned for fighting purposes should enforced conscription be introduced.21 In this instance, the norm was the following: drill, skirmishing and outposts; physical drill, bayonet and rifle fighting; scouting and communications; entrenchments and cover; engineering; camping, sanitation, hygiene; ambulance and first aid; musketry; tactics; and mechanical instruments, tools and street fighting.22
By then, come what may, Mulcahy’s battalion was considered to be the best of the four city battalions, i.e. from the evidence of the officer examinations during the period, February–March 1914, ‘owing to the large number of good NCO’s [Non-Commissioned Officers, Mulcahy included]’.23 Also, ‘C’ Company, otherwise known as ‘the City Company’,24 was bidding fair to be ‘the smartest Co. in Dublin’,25 with public praise along the lines of: ‘This Company is now beyond ordinary company strength and a skeleton half company is now in course of formation’,26 and ‘Number of men on parade 103 – a record muster … Contributions to general funds; rifle and uniform funds far exceed all previous records. The delegates held a committee meeting with fifteen selected of the company, and steps were taken to at once form a cycling section and a first aid section.’27
By the same token, at the end of what one might call the Home Rule period, Mulcahy became a more active IRB member. For example, during the evening after the Howth gunrunning episode of 26 July 1914, ostensibly taking a lead from Maurice Moore, then chief inspector of the Irish Volunteers, but in reality under the guidance of Hobson, he helped retrieve some of the German Mausers28 which had been hidden in the grounds of a local Christian Brothers’ school, probably at Marino during the previous day, and to deposit them safely in Parnell Square.29
Approximately two months later, on 24 September, he attended a ‘revolutionary style meeting’ at 41 Parnell Square, with James Connolly, Tom Clarke and MacDiarmada present. The intention of the eighty men who turned up was to proceed therefrom to the Mansion House and to forcibly occupy it in order to prevent a recruitment rally taking place the following day under the auspices of Asquith and Redmond. Mulcahy and other members of the Keating Branch did actually set out with that purpose in mind, only to discover that the building had already been secured against such an eventuality.30
Nonetheless, despite evidence of an overall hardening of attitudes, as indicated by the cumulative effect of a more hawkish IRB and a sharpening of Volunteer training, Mulcahy, like the vast majority of the membership, was unaware that his part-time soldiering would suddenly escalate into a full baptism of fire.31 The atmosphere at the officers’ course at Coosan Point, Athlone, September 1915, a summer holiday for Mulcahy, is illustrative of that point: ‘all our comrade-like contact and the atmosphere that surrounded us was that of persons engaged at Volunteer work in the same way that we might have been engaged at learning Irish in Ballingeary with the various trimmings that went with that – talks and meetings in houses and excursions, walks in the hills.’32
Indeed, Mulcahy’s mental unpreparedness was such that when he got wind of the existence of the Military Council, he did not take it seriously for a while.33 (The Military Council was a secret clique, formed by Clarke, along with his closest colleague, MacDiarmada, during the summer of 1915. It originated from within the IRB’s Supreme Council (SC) and, ignoring the current evolutionary philosophy of the Organisation, was determined to lead out the Volunteers in a surprise rebellion as soon as practicable.34)
Diarmuid Lynch dated Mulcahy’s involvement in the military preparations from 1 April 1916. He alleged that, because Mulcahy in the course of his work, which may then have been located above Crane’s piano shop in Lower O’Connell Street, had responsibility for all the maps and plans of the telegraph and telephone system of the city and its environs, he, along with Andy Fitzpatrick, Seán Byrne and Lynch compiled a report on the city’s manholes. (Mulcahy downplayed that claim, saying that he merely put Lynch in contact with some IRB men from the post office gangs.) Their report, together with a set of keys and demolition tools, was delivered, probably by Lynch, to MacDiarmada on the Monday of Holy Week, 17 April.35
Either way, on Saturday, 15 April, Mulcahy was fully drawn into the web of intrigue after he had attended at an officers’ meeting which was addressed by Pádraig Pearse on the topic of the manoeuvres planned for the Easter weekend and had then bumped into MacDiarmada at a social event in Banba Hall, Parnell Square.36 MacDiarmada quizzed him about the manholes. He told him that the rebellion would commence on Easter Sunday using the cover of the Volunteer parade.
