Liam Mellows

Soldier of the Irish Republic ~ Selected Writings, 1914–1924

Conor McNamara

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788550802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This landmark new study of the life of Republican leader Liam Mellows gathers letters, speeches, articles and IRA documents from archives in Ireland, the UK and the United States together for the first time to form an insightful analysis of Mellows' short but dramatic life. It examines his beliefs, fraught personal relationships, political betrayals and intrigue, and his struggle in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

Mellows was at the forefront of the Republican movement from its inception. After the Easter Rebellion, he spent four years as the representative of the IRA in the United States, but his time there was deeply unhappy: jailed in the infamous Tombs Prison while his comrades dithered over his bail, he was also branded an informer by the Mayor of New York.

Back in Ireland in 1920, Mellows was responsible for buying and distributing arms during the War of Independence. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he was a key opponent of Michael Collins, and his role in occupying the Four Courts in June 1922 was central to the outbreak of the Civil War. His execution by the Free State in December 1922 was one of the most divisive moments in the foundation of the state, and he remains an enigmatic icon for Irish republicans to this day.

CHAPTER 1

Behold the Mysteries of Faith: Liam Mellows, A Life in Search of the Heroic

On a wet afternoon in October 1924, the body of Liam Mellows reposed alongside ten of his republican comrades in the Carmelite Church, Whitefriar Street, in Dublin’s south-inner city.1 He would shortly depart on his final journey to be laid to rest among the Jordans, his mother’s people in Castletown, Co. Wexford. Mellows would have appreciated the choice of location as the Carmelite Priory in New York had been his refuge during four years of turmoil while exiled in the United States.2 Over the previous days, with no advance notice, the bodies of the seventy-seven republicans executed by the Free State in 1922–3 were exhumed and handed over to their families to be laid to rest among those who loved them, the defeated of the Irish Civil War.3

Following Mass, the hearses formed up in front of the church while throngs of onlookers crammed the surrounding streets; similar scenes were being enacted in towns and villages across Ireland. A republican guard of honour flanked the coffins, followed by small groups of relatives, clergy and sympathisers. At 2.45 p.m. the motorcade began its silent procession through the rain-drenched streets and north to Glasnevin Cemetery, the scale of the crowds forcing the authorities to close the city to traffic.4 The hearse carrying Mellows’ remains broke off early from the procession and made its way through the south of the city and on towards the Wexford countryside. Countess Markievicz would later deliver the graveside eulogy while the National Army surrounded the mourners to prevent a final salute by the Irish Republican Army to their fallen commander.

Liam Mellows was a central figure in the republican movement in both Ireland and the United States from his first involvement with the Fianna Éireann republican boy scouts in 1911, until his execution at the height of the Civil War in December 1922. A full-time organiser for the Fianna, a movement that was to provide a coterie of officers for the republican movement, he championed the concept of national salvation through an insurrection of the young. A member of the first executive of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913, he was appointed a national organiser and was at the forefront of the organisation’s preparations for the 1916 Rebellion. Dispatched to Galway in October 1914, he was to lead over 500 Volunteers in the doomed Galway Rising, where he commanded an army bereft of desperately needed rifles from the ill-fated German steamship, the Aud. It was the first bitter disappointment among a litany of personal disasters that was to follow.

In the aftermath of the rebellion, Mellows spent four years as a representative of the Irish Volunteers in New York where he was tasked with helping secure money, arms and political support for revolution in Ireland. Styled ‘Commandant Mellows’, his time in the United States was unhappy and he suffered emotionally, confined to his bed and malnourished at one point; jailed in the infamous Tombs Prison while his comrades in Clan na Gael dithered over his bail; vilified and shunned by the American Fenians, and worst of all, labelled an informer in 1917 by no less than the Mayor of New York, John P. Mitchel, grandson of the famed nineteenth-century revolutionary and Young Ireland leader, John Mitchel.

Upon his return to Ireland in November 1920, Mellows became a member of the GHQ of the Irish Volunteers and was responsible for the procurement of arms during the War of Independence. The role entailed dangerous liaisons with European arms dealers and supporters in Britain. Distrustful of Michael Collins, who he felt was undermining him, the position demanded absolute secrecy and his activities during this period remain shrouded in mystery. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence, Mellows was one of the most influential opponents of the agreement. His role in occupying the Four Courts with the anti-Treaty IRA leadership in April 1922 was central to the events that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. Captured in the bombardment of the building in June, his execution in December, alongside Richard Barrett, Joseph McKelvey and Rory O’Connor in Mountjoy Jail, in retaliation for an attack on two pro-Treaty members of Parliament in which TD Sean Hales was killed, was among the most divisive acts of the new state. During the decades that followed the disastrous Civil War, Mellows and his comrades in the Four Courts Executive of the IRA were frequently singled out for blame for their role in instigating the conflict.5

Elected a member of Parliament for two constituencies in the 1918 general election, and again for Galway in the uncontested election of May 1921, Mellows never pretended to be a politician; he loathed politics and, above all else, espoused physical force as the engine of the Irish revolution.6 Like his idol, Patrick Pearse, Mellows was unmarried, puritanical in habits and ruminated profoundly over his own actions, putting the cause of the republic before all else. While he was a senior figure among the revolutionary elite, he remained an outsider within the coterie of leading militants. A gifted but reluctant public speaker, he published his writings anonymously, heaping credit upon his subordinates while privately suffering profound self-doubt.

Beginnings and Reinvention

Born in Hartshead Military Barracks in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1892, to Sergeant William Mellows of Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and his wife Sarah Jordan of Monalug, Co. Wexford, Liam Mellows’ life was a triumph of reinvention. Christened William Joseph, after both his father and grandfather, and known as Willie to his family, he adopted the Irish version of his Christian name in adolescence. Liam’s father, William, attested at the Curragh Camp with the 20th Regiment of Foot in 1871, spending thirty-two years in the army, seven of which he served overseas.7 William was also born in a military barracks, when Liam’s grandfather was serving overseas in Gonda, India, and it was his father’s hope that Liam would be the third generation of the family to serve in the British military.

The origins of the Mellows family are unclear and it is probable they were descended from Protestant English stock. The Mellows name originates in Nottinghamshire and at the turn of the twentieth century there were just two families with the surname in Ireland.8 In 1901, William, Sarah and their four children, Jane, Liam, Frederick and Herbert, were living in Cork City where William was stationed.9 Their eldest daughter Jane, aged fourteen, was considerably older than Liam, aged eight; with younger brothers, Herbert and Frederick, aged five and six respectively. Over the preceding years, the family had lived a transient existence as their father was transferred from Fermoy to Manchester and Glasgow. A sickly child, Liam was sent to stay for long periods with his maternal grandparents in North Wexford. His schooling was interrupted by the family’s constant uprooting and his formative education was gained at British military schools attached to Wellington Barracks, Cork, Portobello Barracks, Dublin, and the Royal Hibernian Military School, Dublin. By 1911, the family had moved again, this time to Fairview, a respectable northern suburb of Dublin.10 Aged eighteen, Liam had already turned his back on his father’s military aspirations, however, and rather than apply for a commission, he found work as a book-keeper, with his brother Fred, then aged sixteen, employed as a clerical worker.11

The two Mellows brothers, William and Herbert, reinvented themselves as Liam and Barney, republican revolutionaries, in adolescence through their involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fianna Éireann boy scouts. Despite the boys’ political conversion, there is no evidence of rancour within the family and the walls of their final family home on Mount Shannon Road in the south of the city were bedecked in photographs of their father’s and grandfather’s military adventures. Wexford republican Robert Brennan recalled a place of warmth, ‘we often stayed at the Mellows home in Dublin and, I must say, if ever there was ever a happy family, it was the Mellows in those days’.12

Tragedy struck the family in 1906 with the death of eldest daughter Jane from tuberculosis, compounded by the subsequent death of younger brother Frederick. The family had previously lost a third child, Patrick, as an infant, while living in England. The loss of his siblings had a profound effect on Liam and throughout his life, friends observed his sense of fatalism. Mellows’ close comrade Alfred White noted the contrast between Liam and his younger sibling, ‘his brother Barney, volatile, nimble-minded, was in sharp contrast to Liam, on whom the responsibilities of life as the elder brother were thrust at an early age’.13 Cumann na mBan member Annie Fanning, who helped Mellows escape to the United States, was warned by Liam that ‘people who helped him always got into trouble or died’.14 A comrade from the War of Independence concluded that Mellows ‘felt it was his duty to give himself for Ireland’15 and following the Truce with Crown Forces in July 1921, Mellows told senior IRA commander Sean Moylan, ‘many more of us will die before an Irish Republic is recognised’.16

‘The sword and its allies’: Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Volunteers

Fenian leader Tom Clarke became an influential early mentor for the young Mellows, who instinctively shared the older man’s admiration for physical force and contempt for politics. Clarke was revered by younger militants in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) for having spent fifteen years between 1883 and 1898 in English prisons for his role in the Fenian dynamite campaign.17 Clarke and Mellows shared a family heritage in the British army that consolidated an instinctive bond. Like the much younger Mellows, Clarke grew up in a British military garrison in South Africa where his father, who like William Mellows was also a sergeant, was stationed. Following his release from jail, Clarke spent almost ten years in New York where he purchased a small farm before returning to Ireland with his family in 1907 and establishing a tobacco shop on Parnell Street, which was to become a hub of activity for younger members of the IRB eager to earn his approval.

Under Clarke’s influence, Mellows joined the circle of young militants under his guidance who established the republican boy scouts, Na Fianna Éireann, in 1909, and began publishing the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom in November 1910. With Con Colbert, Pádraig Ó Riain and Eamon Martin, Mellows entered the company of like-minded, serious young men who had for several years, along with Denis McCullough, Patrick McCartan and Bulmer Hobson, been in the process of transforming the IRB from a drinking club for old Fenians to a conspiratorial anti-imperialist sect. The group shared an energy and commitment to direct action that shocked the romantic nationalists of older generations and in Patrick Pearse, Seán MacDiarmada and Clarke, they found leaders for whom abstract notions of Ireland’s destiny were to be distilled into a commitment to violent insurrection.

Mellows’ military background and education saw him take on a series of time-consuming roles within the emerging movement, first as a travelling organiser for Na Fianna in April 1913, and, subsequently, as regional organiser for the Irish Volunteers in 1914. His military bearing and sincere approach won him plaudits among sceptical activists, but it was his personality that won him the enduring friendship of republicans around the country. Athlone organiser Tomás Ó Maoileoin recalled, ‘I have rarely met anyone with such an attractive personality.’18 Mellows’ lifelong friend Fr Henry Feeney recalled, ‘Mellows was well below average height, frail looking with fair, almost white hair. He wore rimless glasses of the pince-nez type and did not, at first sight, inspire great respect or confidence. But the thin, frail body was tough and sinewy, immune to cold and hardship.’19 A compulsive worker, Mellows’ fondness for practical jokes and his penchant for rebel songs was the highlight of many evenings among comrades. Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Leary sought out his company after his release from jail in New York, as ‘Mellows was an accomplished bard with a repertoire of Irish folk songs, war and love songs which was inexhaustible which made me forget the shadow which the Tombs’ bars and the poison which its bad ventilation had cast upon my mind.’20 Mellows’ first taste of prison life came at the end of July 1915 when he served three months’ imprisonment in Mountjoy, under the Defence of the Realm Act, after speaking at a Volunteer meeting in Tuam, Co. Galway.

‘The desert of exile’: New York

Mellows, along with Ernest Blythe, was deported from Ireland under the Defence of the Realm Act at the beginning of April 1916 and forced to lodge in the town of Leek in Staffordshire, only to be smuggled back into Ireland, via Belfast, disguised as a priest by his brother Barney and Nora Connolly in the days before the Rising. In Galway, he was to lead a force of over five hundred rebels, without sufficient arms or ammunition, for one week in the Galway countryside attacking the police at Clainbridge, Oranmore and Carnmore. Following the rebellion, Mellows spent several months hiding out in the remote countryside on the Galway–Clare border before making his way to Cork and on to Liverpool from where, under Volunteer orders, he crossed the Atlantic for New York City. Upon arrival in America, he made an immediate impact on John Devoy, the leader of the American Fenian network, Clan na Gael, who regarded him as ‘the most...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Index of Writings
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1.   Behold the Mysteries of Faith: Liam Mellows, A Life in Search of the Heroic
• Chapter 2.   ‘Real live, earnest Irish rebel boys’, History of Na Fianna Éireann (1917)
• Chapter 3.   Re-imagining Insurrection, ‘The True Story of the Galway Insurrection’ (1917)
• Chapter 4.   ‘A cause that is as great as that of any race’, American Speeches, 1917–20
• Chapter 5.   ‘I have not fought for that Treaty’, Dáil Éireann Contributions, 1921–2
• Chapter 6.   ‘The Irish Republic is the People’s Republic’, Civil War Writings, 1922
• Chapter 7.   ‘I don’t care about myself. Work on and hope on’, Letters, 1917–22
• Chapter 8.   ‘I die for the truth. Life is only for a little while’, Final Letters, 1922
• Epilogue:   The Battle for the Soul of Liam Mellows
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Index