Free 1916 by Gabriel Doherty

Ireland remain relatively unstudied. It is simply not known how far the bulk of the Irish party endorsed Redmond’s outright condemnation of the rebels, Dillon’s seething defiance of British stupidity and brutality, or both. Study at the local level may also shed some light on the more fundamental issue of just how much Irish party activists identified with the rebels and, ultimately, of how much they were tuned to the same militant, nationalist, anglophobe wavelength as the movement which would very soon displace them, Sinn Féin.
    As in my previous work on pre-Rising nationalist public opinion, this study is based primarily on an analysis of weekly, provincial newspapers published in five politically-linked counties in the Irish midlands and east Connacht – Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo and Westmeath. 5 The political affiliations of these papers were clearly flagged – twelve were nationalist, two independent and two unionist. 6 At the time of the Rising, eight of the nationalist papers were consistent supporters of the Irish party and four were opponents. Competition between these local titles remained intense, which meant that while owners and editors still saw themselves as the vanguard of opinion, they could never move so far ahead of their readers as to risk losing circulation, printing contracts and advertisers. The provincial press remained just as much the mirror as the leader of local opinion.
    Admittedly, the provincial press was past its pre-war prime. Local newspapers were severely constrained in size by the wartime scarcity of newsprint. Their reporting after the Rising was curtailed by military censorship, albeit a censorship that was distinctly patchy and inconsistent in its effect. They also faced intensifying competition from the daily Irish Independent, which had sustained an increase in circulation of some 60 per cent, to well over 90,000 copies, since the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, they remained the most important forum for the dissemination of the views of the intertwined commercial, professional and political elites of ‘small town’ Ireland and, in particular, for the expression of local Irish party opinion.
    II
    The immediate responses of the provincial press to the Easter Rising were formed in a climate of profound shock and confusion. Information was sparse and rumours were abundant. Train and postal services to Dublin were disconnected for over a week and nearly all of the Dublin press was temporarily out of action. However, certain elements of hard news did feature consistently across the provincial press as it went to print ahead of the first weekend of the Rising. There had been an armed ‘Sinn Féin’ rebellion in Dublin in which numerous prominent buildings had been occupied, but which had been contained by substantial troop reinforcements. There had been heavy shooting, looting and many deaths. Both the Irish Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers had taken part. There had not been a general uprising across Ireland and most other major towns and cities in Ireland were ‘quiet’. There had been German involvement – the arrest of Sir Roger Casement, having landed in Ireland from a ‘German ship’, was reported across the local press.
    The local nationalist press was swift to condemn. This applied to both pro- and anti-party papers. In Roscommon town, the anti-party Roscommon Journal pronounced the Rising to be ‘an outrage and a crime against the teachings of the Church’. In Boyle, the pro-party Western Nationalist wrote of ‘revolution, desolation and horror’ stating that untold calamity would bring infamy on the instigators and drive the country back a generation. The Sligo Nationalist declared that whoever hoped for intervention by a foreign despot was not a patriotic Irishman. ‘He must be marked as an enemy of his country, and the brand of criminality will sear his soul.’ For the Westmeath Examiner , owned by Redmond’s friend, John Hayden MP, it was a dark