go on a spiritual retreat during Holy Week and subsequently to visit his family in Clare. Consequently, in the light of his plans for Easter, he postponed making any decision. In the meantime, he utilised the solitude of the retreat to mull over his future, emerging after three days, determined to play an active part.37
The possibility of losing his life at close on thirty years of age, or taking the life of another, should have occupied Mulcahy’s thoughts during the retreat. But actually, that was a dilemma which, in part, he had already encountered a number of years previously, not that this substantially lessened the magnitude of his final decision. In the first instance, even if he never actually took the IRB oath, he would seem not to have suffered any scruples about disobeying his Church’s prohibition, under the pain of excommunication, on active membership of secret oath-bound societies.
Yet others were not so sanguine. For example, whenever the Catholic clergy, particularly the bishops, condemned the IRB, there were obvious repercussions among the membership in the form of a drop in enrolments and a rise in resignations.38 Indeed, so depleted did the numbers become during the period, 1909–10, that Clarke was forced to take an audacious gamble. He called the entire Dublin membership together for an open meeting in Clontarf Town Hall, where the Rev. Denis O’Sullivan, a member of Clan na Gael, tried to reassure everyone, rather unconvincingly it seems, that there was nothing to worry about.39
There is no direct evidence to indicate that Mulcahy was present at that event. His fastidious nature would imply that he was, however. Also, he would have been interested in attending because, as was common enough at the time, he was an ardent Catholic. For example, he attended the sacrament of mass on a daily basis.40 Also, he generally did not use swearwords and was abstemious: ‘Mulcahy never said anything stronger than “bloody”; he did not smoke or drink.’41 Little wonder that some people considered him pious.42 (Indeed, piety was a feature of his family, what with four of his sisters becoming nuns and a brother becoming a Cistercian monk.43) Furthermore, he practiced his religion in a contemplative way. For example, he liked to go on religious retreats, the specific purpose of which was the achievement of spiritual intimacy between himself, as supplicant, and God, as saviour. More so, he favoured the three-day retreats of Christmas and Easter over the weekend ones, all of which, at any rate, were conducted under the auspices of the Jesuits at Milltown Park, where the deeply and minutely contemplative spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola were practiced in complete silence and without distractions. By the same token, whenever possible, he would visit any nearby church for ‘quite a restful and reverend [sic] note’, a description which records the effect which benediction had upon him.44
Therefore, for men like Mulcahy (Eoin O’Duffy45 and Thomas Ashe,46 for instance) who became conditioned to a mystical type of formula, an intuitive fault line existed between their private and public activities. Besides, from another perspective, as J.H. White observed, ‘The majority of Fenians, Parnellites and Republicans considered themselves good Catholics. They were prepared to accept the claims of the church in other matters, such as education. But the Fenians felt so intensely that the British government was tyrannical that on this point, they rejected the judgment of the church.’47
Hence, whether he attended the Clontarf meeting or not, it is unlikely that Mulcahy was much bothered by the hierarchy’s attitude to the IRB and its oath. And, in a similar manner, he might have perceived his pending involvement in a physical force rebellion as a secular decision or, if at a higher level of experience, as a holy war of sorts. Of course, there is the added point that, because of his integration into Volunteering during the previous three years, but particularly during the bellicose previous two years, he must have understood and accepted that all the while he was being trained to kill. Therefore, the overall conclusion must be that his serene, ritualistic religious practices; his strong proactive sense of patriotism; his training as an enthusiastic and ‘good Volunteer’;48 and his well thought out, determined perspective on life, collectively dispelled any doubts he might have entertained about joining the rebellion.
Consequently, as arranged, he again met MacDiarmada in the office of Irish Freedom on the following Thursday. MacDiarmada told him to meet Lynch at the Keating Branch later that night. There, he received his orders to take charge of some of the Baldoyle Citizen Army and the Sutton Volunteers with the purpose of destroying the northern Howth junction telegraph and radio lines, after which, according to a letter from Willie Pearse, he should report to Pádraig Pearse at the GPO. But MacNeill’s countermanding order and the resulting confusion put an end to those orders. So, it was not until Easter Monday morning that, upon meeting MacDonagh at Liberty Hall, he learned of the new order to ‘strike at twelve’.49
CHAPTER 3
Committed
Rebellion and Reorientation, 1916–17
Shortly after noon on bank holiday Monday, 24 April 1916, James Connolly ordered a contingent of about 150 men, composed principally of Joseph Plunkett’s Kimmage group and a section of the Irish Citizen Army, to forcibly enter the GPO. Then, outside and in front of a nonplussed group of onlookers, Pádraig Pearse read aloud from a document which proclaimed the existence forthwith of an ‘Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State’. At the same time, other groups positioned themselves in a number of strategically important locations throughout the city, principally at the Four Courts (the First Battalion under Ned Daly), Jacob’s Biscuit Factory (most of the Second Battalion under Thomas MacDonagh), Boland’s Mills (the Third Battalion under Eamon de Valera) and the South Dublin Union Workhouse (the Fourth Battalion under Éamonn Ceannt).1
Plunkett’s and Connolly’s shared aspiration2 was that those positions, once fortified, would defensively hold out for as long as possible.3 Therefore, by the time of Pearse’s order of unconditional surrender at 3.45 pm on Saturday, 29 April, the ensuing amount of physical destruction was immense. So also were the number of injuries and deaths, namely two and a half thousand of the former and over five hundred of the latter, the most prominent of which were those fifteen insurgents who were executed by firing squad during the period, 3–12 May.4
For his part, on Easter Monday, after he, Paddy Grant and Tom Maxwell had cut the telegraph and telephone lines at Howth, Mulcahy was meant to proceed back into the city and join up with some of his ‘C’ Company colleagues at the GPO. However, by then the city had been encircled by the military. This effectively meant that a day was wasted wandering around in north county Dublin before he and his two fellow travellers fortuitously bumped into Thomas Ashe and the Fingal Brigade. Ashe immediately appointed Mulcahy as his second in command.5 Then, during the next two days, following upon Connolly’s order to divert enemy attention away from the city, Ashe, Mulcahy and their 45-man column, all mounted on bicycles, made as much of a nuisance of themselves as possible by raiding Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks and disrupting communication lines. But it was not until Friday morning that they saw serious action for the first time, when they initiated a guerrilla-like attack on Ashbourne’s RIC barracks in County Meath, resulting in the deaths of eight RIC officers and two Volunteers.6
Mulcahy came to the fore during that unrelenting, five-and-a-half-hour struggle: ‘it was soon apparent to everyone that his was the mind necessary to plan and direct operations; cool, clear-minded and practical, and with a personality and tact that enabled him virtually to control the situation without in any way undermining Ashe’s prestige as the commander.’7 Equally, he displayed a range of field officer leadership skills, some of which were the direct result of MacDonagh’s training courses, e.g. using the lie of the land to one’s best advantage; deploying outflanking movements; moving about in order to organise and give confidence to his men; and undermining the morale of the enemy: ‘I could hear Mulcahy’s voice in the intermittent fire. “Will you surrender [?] By … [sic] if you don’t we will give you a dog’s death”.’8
Understandably, then, two days later, after such a successful engagement, Ashe, Mulcahy and the depleted Fingal Brigade were most reluctant to give up their arms without first ascertaining the bona fides of Pearse’s surrender order.
