Hunger Strike and Ireland, 1920
By Dr William Murphy
For just a few days, in mid-May 1920, the name Francis A. Gleeson made the papers. It became increasingly common in Ireland that spring for unknown young men to become of sudden public interest due to the manner of their dying. In the case of 25-year-old Gleeson, the end had come on 9 May at the Mater Hospital, Dublin. The immediate cause was not usually the stuff of fame, nor even brief recognition: ‘toxaemia, following nephritis and acute appendicitis’. It was not the fatal cocktail of ‘-aemia’ and ‘-itis’, however, that made Francis Gleeson news. It was the 10 words the coroner’s jury appended to their verdict: ‘accelerated by his hunger strike in defence of his principles.’
Gleeson is forgotten now, but in May 1920 those 10 words drew the crowds, and the uniformed Irish Volunteers to steward them, as his body was removed to Fairview Church on 11 May. They came again to the funeral Mass and burial (at Glasnevin) on 12 May, while that weekend, at least according to the advertisements, the Phoenix Picture House showed the funeral procession to ‘packed houses’.
A month earlier, Gleeson was resident at Mountjoy Gaol. There the authorities knew him as Aidan Redmond, recording that he had been sentenced to two months’ hard labour for unlawful possession of four revolvers and ammunition. If, like Gleeson, you were an IRA prisoner in the spring of 1920, then it was very likely that you would be faced with a decision, to hunger strike or not, because a great wave of strikes reached its peak then.
It was the second such wave. The first began in the summer of 1917, is remembered for the death of Thomas Ashe that September, and continued till March 1918. Then, having endured several months of ‘hunger strike mania’, during which group after group of Irish Volunteer prisoners forced their release, the authorities in Dublin Castle changed policy. They conceded a clearly articulated ameliorated regime for Irish Volunteers who had been convicted, under the Defence of the Realm Act, of offences that were not ‘criminal per se’ while threatening to allow any new strikers to starve.
This combination of conciliation and coercion did not bring peace to the prisons. Sporadic campaigns of disobedience, escapes, riots, and racket strikes (keeping the whole prison awake at night by constant banging, slamming and singing) continued between April 1918 and July 1919, but the new approach did stop the hunger strikes. In the autumn of 1919, however, first individuals, and then groups, began to hunger strike again. Crucially, once more, the authorities tended to relent. As one prisoner wrote in his diary, ‘you will find they will climb down’. After a strike in October 1919, 47 men were released from Mountjoy. And so, the second wave gathered pace.
It should be no surprise then that, in early 1920, the most aggressive prisoners calculated the risk to life sufficiently low as to make hunger strike worthwhile if concessions could be won and the authorities humiliated. Todd Andrews joined the same strike as Gleeson at Mountjoy on 5 April. When Andrews looked back, he was not so sure that many of them made a choice. It was, he wrote, ‘an error to think that hunger strikers participated voluntarily. The moral pressure deriving from the wish and the need to show solidarity with one’s comrades is so powerful as to amount to an order.’ Frank Gallagher, who was also on that strike, preferred to remember ‘a fierce joy, a sacrificial glory, a feeling of spiritual pride . . . an ecstasy’.
Dr William Murphy joins Myles Dungan on RTÉ Radio 1's History Show to discuss the 1920 hunger strikes
That April hunger strike was, without doubt, a success. Led by Peadar Clancy, a senior officer in the Dublin Brigade, 65 prisoners (some on remand, some convicted) began the protest, demanding that ‘prisoner-of-war’ treatment be extended to all. In the days that followed, the number on strike climbed, the press coverage grew, the crowds at the gates gathered in ever greater numbers, the Catholic hierarchy demanded ‘fairplay’, and the Trades Union Congress called a general strike, stating ‘To-day, though many are at the point of death, their titled jailers venomously shriek: “Let them die.” We workers, dare not allow this tragedy to come to pass.’
The authorities were poorly placed to resist such pressure. Sir Nevil Macready, who had just arrived as the new General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the British Army in Ireland, was astonished to discover ‘the chaos that prevailed’. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Ian Macpherson, had recently resigned and had not yet been replaced. Dublin Castle was deeply divided between coercion and conciliation camps. At Mountjoy the prison doctors, in contradiction of their superiors’ stance, urged release. Their duty was to preserve life and, with ‘artificial feeding’ abandoned since the death of Ashe, the safest way to achieve this, for the strikers and themselves, was to bring a quick end to the strike. Complicating matters further for the authorities, this was not the ideal cohort of prisoners upon which to make a stand. About two-thirds of them had not yet been convicted while, it transpired, some had been placed on an incorrect (harsh) regime.
Despite his hard-line views Sir John French, the Lord Lieutenant, buckled, deciding to release, on parole, those on remand and in danger. Through further bungling, the convicted were released alongside those on remand, while the great majority refused to give parole. Between 14 and 16 April 90 were freed; 31 of them convicts, including Francis Gleeson.
Mountjoy was a disaster from the government’s point of view. The ensuing demonstrations across Ireland infuriated elements of the crown forces. A combined patrol of army and police opened fire on a celebrating crowd at Miltown Malbay, County Clare, killing three men. If the shambles did hasten radical reform of Dublin Castle in the months that followed, then it also encouraged further hunger strikes. The first, and most unambiguously successful from the point of view of the prisoners, involved more than 200 internees at Wormwood Scrubs prison, London. Once more, faced with a cohort of unconvicted men, the authorities decided against allowing any to starve and, over a week in May, released them to recuperate in hospitals across London.
Mountjoy and Wormwood Scrubs proved an end of sorts. Taken alone, these were humiliations which the government could not indefinitely endure and retain either authority or the capacity to use imprisonment as an effective weapon against the IRA. More than that, over the summer of 1920 British policy in Ireland hardened, exemplified by the arrival of the Auxiliaries, the deployment of more troops, and the passing of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act. In the prisons this was matched by a determination to hold the line against hunger strike.
When another hunger strike began in Cork prison on 11 August the participating men could not have known that this time would be different. Neither could Terence MacSwiney when he joined upon his arrest on 12 August. A few days later, following his conviction, MacSwiney was transferred to Brixton prison, London, where he continued to strike in parallel to 11 men at Cork. As they persisted, and the government refused to concede (despite a private intervention from the King), a ghoulish, fatal contest unfolded. Anguished families, anxious doctors, an angry Irish nationalist public, and an amplifying press (Irish, British and international) were drawn in by the terrible drama. On 21 September, Annie MacSwiney wrote to a friend that Terence had told her: ‘I never thought it could drag on so long – I am just dying by inches.’
Yet on it went. On 17 October, Michael Fitzgerald was the first to die at Cork prison. MacSwiney, and another of the Cork prisoners, Joseph Murphy, died on 25 October. Soon after, Arthur Griffith ordered the others in Cork prison off the strike. This not only ended that strike but the second wave. It would be the Civil War before there would be another lengthy, fatal, strike. Seán McConville has perceptively noted that while many admired MacSwiney’s ‘doctrine of triumph through endurance’, it attracted few followers’. In their history of the ‘rebellion’, the general staff of the Sixth Division of the British army wrote that the ‘“breaking” of the Hunger-Strike weapon was the most important success gained by the forces of Law and Order up to that time.’
If it was a victory for the new British policy, then it was a pyrrhic one. The propaganda costs (during the strikes, because of the funerals, and for a long time afterward), as well as the further radicalisation of Irish opinion, were heavy prices to pay. On the nationalist side too, the cost was dreadful. Martyrs were valuable, but they were bought with lives. Rosamond Jacob probably put on the page the private thoughts of many Irish nationalists when, on hearing news of MacSwiney’s death, she wrote in her diary: ‘I can hardly think of anything braver that was ever done, but I’m not sure about the rightness of hunger strike always.’
William Murphy is an associate professor at Dublin City University. He is the author of Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921, which is available in paperback and ebook from Oxford University Press.
