PARTIES OR POLITICS: Wellington's I.R.A. 1922-1928
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Parties or Politics: Wellington’s I.R.A. 1922-28 PARTIES OR POLITICS: Wellington's I.R.A. 1922-1928. The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in London in December 1921 and ratified in Dublin in January 1922, was a watershed for Irish communities abroad, albeit in a different sense than for those in Ireland. For the New Zealand Irish the Treaty creating the Irish Free State represented a satisfactory outcome to a struggle which for six years had drawn them into conflict with the wider New Zealand community. Espousing the cause of Ireland had been at a cost to domestic harmony in New Zealand but with ‘freedom’ for the homeland won, the colonial Irish1 could be satisfied that they done their bit and stood up for Ireland. The Treaty was an end point to the Irish issue for most Irish New Zealanders. Now it was time for those ‘at home’ to sort out the details of Ireland’s political arrangements as they saw fit. Political energies in New Zealand would henceforth be expended instead on local causes. For many Irish New Zealanders by 1922 this meant the socialist platform of the rising Labour Party. But not every local Irish patriot was satisfied with the Treaty or prepared to abandon the Republican ideal. Die-hard Republicans – and New Zealand had a few - saw the Treaty as a disgraceful sell-out of the Republic established in blood in Easter 1916. Between 1922 and 1928 therefore, a tiny band of Irish Republicans carried on a propaganda struggle in New Zealand, which vainly sought to rekindle the patriotic fervour of 1921 among the New Zealand Irish in support of the Republican faction in Ireland. This essay is a post-script to “Shaming the Shoneens: the Green Ray and the Maoriland Irish Society in Dunedin, 1916-1922”2. There it was argued that between 1916 and 1922 an established leadership strata among the New Zealand Irish, the ‘lace curtain’ or ‘shoneen’ Catholic bourgeoisie, had been upstaged by a small group of emigré Irish Republicans.3 The latter’s greater familiarity with recent developments in Ireland allowed them to seize the initiative in a crisis provoked by the 1916 Easter Rising. The Rising suddenly undermined the dominant colonial Irish position, which had long pushed for ‘Home Rule’ for Ireland citing the successful model of the Australasian colonies’ independence within an Imperial framework. The influence of the hard-core Republicans, expressed through a monthly newspaper the Green Ray and a new Irish organisation under the banner of Sinn Féin, was greatly advanced when the Catholic newspaper The New Zealand Tablet adopted a similar platform. As a result, and with a counterblast from Protestant ‘loyalists’, sectarian sensitivities were stirred up in New Zealand as never before. A succession of controversial incidents and issues helped fuel the fires and culminated in 1922 with the prosecution of Bishop Liston of Auckland over a St Patrick’s Day speech critical of British policy in Ireland. These struggles put the New Zealand Irish on the spot over their advocacy of Irish independence. Meanwhile the emerging Labour Party made the Irish issue its own during this period, reflecting and stimulating a coherence of Irish advocacy and socialism within the New Zealand Irish community. 1 For the purposes of this paper ‘Irish’ in New Zealand is being used as virtually synonymous with ‘Catholic Irish’. Clearly this distorts the historical reality in which Irish Protestants also played a part. 2 Seán G. Brosnahan, “Shaming the Shoneens: the ‘Green Ray’ and the ‘Maoriland Irish Society in Dunedin, 1916-1922” in Lyndon Fraser (Ed.) A Distant Shore: Irish Emigration and New Zealand Settlement, University of Otago Press, 2000. 3 At the Stout Research Centre’s conference “The Irish in New Zealand” (July 21-23, 2000) Professor Donald Akenson cautioned against the indiscriminate use of this word – “shoneen” – as one which is loaded with powerful contemporary political weight. It is a term, which has similar meaning in Irish history to ‘Uncle Toms’ in black American history. Irish aspirants to middle class respectability in Protestant majority societies like those of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and America were always open to an accusation of ‘selling out’ to fit in with the dominant establishment. There was an added dimension with the materialistic ethos of ‘getting on’, often contrasted unfavourably with the spiritual purity of the poorer Irish. It was an epithet widely used among the Irish in all of these societies and seems to me of key significance in understanding the Irish colonial definition of self. It was certainly caste about with gay abandon by many of the participants in New Zealand Irish affairs in this period, as a term of derision and thereby a marker of communal boundaries. 1 Parties or Politics: Wellington’s I.R.A. 1922-28 From 1916 to 1918 Dunedin had been the ‘hotbed’ of radical Irish activity in New Zealand. This reflected the coincidental presence in the city of a small number of ‘advanced’ Irish nationalists determined to move the Irish community on to support for Sinn Féin.4 These men laid claim to significant connections with the leaders of the 1916 Rising and some may well have been oath-bound members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Their involvement in the Irish struggle against the British Crown extended beyond the propaganda work of the Green Ray and the Maoriland Irish Society. They also actively supported Irish military service evaders through the development of an ‘underground railway’, which provided safe havens within New Zealand and escape routes to Australia and America. With the arrest and dispersal of this leadership after the suppression of the Green Ray in mid-1918, similarly disposed comrades in Wellington took over the lead. Foremost among them were Dave Griffin and John Troy, recent arrivals from Ireland with strong ‘Fenian’ connections.5 As founding President and Secretary respectively of the Maoriland Irish Society in Wellington they had marshalled the defence of the Dunedin men in 1918 and narrowly avoided conviction for sedition themselves. They are also assumed to have helped organise the flight of Irish conscientious objectors through Wellington. After the war, however, there was no longer any scope for such cloak and dagger ‘Fenian’ activities. The ideological struggle for the sympathy of New Zealand’s Irish community on behalf of ‘Sinn Féin’ had also been won. After the initial shock of 1916 the traditional ‘shoneen’ Irish leadership in New Zealand had gradually been won over to its cause. By 1921, Irish New Zealand had developed a united front, demonstrated by the proliferation of Irish Self-Determination Leagues up and down the country. These organisations presented an apparent coalition of the old ‘shoneen’ leadership strata, which had always been hand in glove with the Catholic clerical establishment, and the young upstarts of the wartime period, who were now legitimised by clerical approval, in Dunedin at least. Another sign of the taming of the ‘wild men’ can be seen in the establishment of successor organisations to the Maoriland Irish Society in Dunedin and Wellington, but this time with the blessing of local church leaders. Dunedin’s new Irish Society for instance, established in July 1920, made the new Dunedin Bishop James Whyte its patron as soon as he arrived in the city from Sydney at the end of that year. Like its predecessor it was to be a “Literary, Musical and Social Society” but this time its lecture programme was dominated by local Irish priests, who had been notably absent from the Maoriland Irish Society.6 While the Anglo-Irish war raged the new organisation retained a political edge alongside its cultural activities, “combating calumnies against Ireland” amidst a fevered sectarian 4 See “Shaming the Shoneens” for biographical details of these men who included Thomas Cummins, Sean Tohill, James and Ben Bradley as well as the New Zealand-born A J Ryan and members of the Cody family of Riversdale. 5 For an account of John Troy’s Irish connections see “Shaming the Shoneens”. Dave Griffin had similar ‘Fenian’ roots and is supposed to have come to New Zealand following death threats against him in Cork [Michael Bellam, personal communication to author, 29 April 2000] 6 Clerics were also active in Wellington’s new Irish Society. Rev E J Carmine was on its inaugural committee (Cumann Na nGaedeal Constitution, 1922, GP 3/18), priests spoke at C.N.G. meetings (P.J. O’Regan diary September 1, 1922, O’Regan Papers, Ms Group 0273, Alexander Turnbull Library) and the organisation hosted a special welcome for Archbishop Mannix during his visit to Wellington in 1924 (O’Regan Scrapbook 1924-27, Ms Group 0273, ATL). The contrast between the almost anti-clerical stance of the Maoriland Irish Society branches and these new groups can be gauged from the fawning tone of an address of welcome presented to Bishop Whyte by the Dunedin Irish Society on his return from a trip to Ireland in 1924. This document, beautifully decorated with embossed harps and shamrocks, reveals the sentimental ‘Irishness’ typical of the Irish diaspora everywhere. “We, The Irish Society of New Zealand, extend a hearty welcome home to you, our revered Patron. We followed with interest your visits to the various centres of the Old World, with pride and joy we shared the happiness you felt on reaching Ireland – the land of your birth – and we rejoiced with you in that happy reunion of dear friends, the fulness of which is only understood in the land where warm hearts beat and where the memory of the absent is green …” (Undated, Catholic Archives, Dunedin). 2 Parties or Politics: Wellington’s I.R.A.