The Irish State is 100 years old. Why is nobody celebrating?

The Republic of Ireland is unique among the nation states which emerged after the first World War in that it has no independence day.

The Irish State is 100 years old today yet there is no bank holiday, no bunting, no indoor gatherings and no celebrations of any description. Most people will go about their day oblivious to its significance.

By coincidence, December 6th, the date in which is the Free State came into being, is also the day of the year that Finland declared independence. In Ireland’s case it was 1922; in Finland 1917.

December 6th is an annual holiday in Finland every year. The 100th anniversary in 2017 was celebrated with a year-long festival called Together. Public buildings around the world were lit up, including Dublin’s Mansion House.

Former RIC members had varying experiences in the newly formed Irish Free State, historian tells conference

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Irish League of Nations entry 100 years ago marked its independence on world stage

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Diarmaid Ferriter: Kerry recovered from the carnage of the Civil War but never forgot

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There will be no public buildings lit up for the Irish State’s centenary in Ireland or elsewhere. There has always been an ambiguity about December 6th which marks both the anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 and the coming into being of the Irish Free State a year later on December 6th, 1922.

This is reflected in the absence of any State ceremony on Tuesday. Giving the opening address to a UCD conference on the centenary of the State on Friday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin outlined two key reasons why December 6th has never been a “focus for national celebration”.

One of the first acts of the Free State government was to execute four republican prisoners in retaliation for the murder of pro-Treaty TD Sean Hales. Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joseph McKelvey were summarily shot without even the pretence of a trial on the morning of December 8th, 1922. This shocking act caused the Labour leader Tom Johnson, who was also the leader of the opposition, to tell the government that it had almost “killed the State at its birth”.

The Civil War led to a substantial section of the population not recognising the State when it was established, though Fianna Fáil would eventually de facto recognise it by participating in the Dáil from 1927, albeit under duress.

Nevertheless, Finland too had a bloody civil war, in their case in 1918 which killed 30,000 people, and yet they have managed to overcome their differences to coalesce around a national day.

The other reason for the lack of euphoria was the reality of partition. Nationalist Ireland assumed the 26 country State was a temporary entity and that unity would eventually happen. “While partition had been imposed in 1920, the new State was founded on the premise that it was unlikely to continue. It is completely unfair to the leaders of the time to claim that they were not concerned with Northern Ireland,” Mr Martin explained.

Author Mark Henry, whose book In Fact, An Optimists Guide to Ireland at 100 chronicles the many successes of the Republic in its first century, thinks Irish people are brought up to believe that “self-praise is no praise” and that extends to the nation State too. “That’s a strength on one side, but it stops us celebrating what needs to be celebrated, hence my book,” he states.

Fine Gael, whose descendants were the pro-Treaty government that formed Cumann na nGaedheal, will hold an event on Tuesday evening which will be addressed by Tánaiste Leo Varadkar among other speakers. Backbench TD John Paul Phelan, who will chair the event, said he wished more could have been done to celebrate the centenary of the State coming into being, but it is in keeping with the low-key nature of the original event which happened during the Civil War.

Members of the party were recently briefed by historian Prof Michael Laffan on the importance of the centenary to mark the coming into being of the State and also the ratification of the Treaty by the Dáil in January 1922.

Even Fine Gael is ambiguous about certain aspects of the State’s creations. Not only is the centenary of the State not being officially marked, but there has been no commemoration to honour the 750 National Army soldiers who died defending that State at its inception.

The absence of a Defence Forces’ flag party at a national commemoration for the National Army dead in Glasnevin Cemetery was raised by Mr Phelan at the recent Fine Gael parliamentary party. The Minister for Defence Simon Coveney said he received no invitation to the event, and that the National Army will be remembered next year which will be the centenary year for the Irish Army.

The Government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations recommended that the centenary of the State be marked by an academic conference, and that advice was acted upon with more than 50 speakers at the event in UCD on Friday and Saturday.

Chairman Maurice Manning said the group has advised that an event marking the State’s independence should be held, but next year and not this year. The relevant centenary is the Irish Free State’s admission into the League of Nations which occurred in September 1923.

The advisory group believed that the centenary of the State should not be mixed in with the commemorations to mark the Civil War. “The League of Nations is the high point of Ireland taking its place among the nations of the world, to quote Robert Emmet. We thought from the beginning it was the appropriate end date for the Decade of Centenaries.”

Afterword: ‘A special kind of courage’

During the summer of 1967 Jimmy Kelly was a lowly paid apprentice electrician whose mode of transport was a 50cc Honda motorbike. Jimmy would fill it up a little at a time – often sixpence would be enough to get him from home to work – at the Spawell service station, which is still there on the southern outskirts of Dublin. There, he made the acquaintance of the forecourts supervisor Martin Wallace. Wallace had a pronounced English accent and was a gregarious fellow He was sixty-seven then, a retired teacher who supplemented his pension by working in the station.

It was the summer when the bodies of Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan were brought from the grounds of Wandsworth Prison and reburied in Deansgrange cemetery in Dublin. Wallace and the younger man began to chat, and Wallace had an extraordinary story to tell.

Wallace was born on 10 February 1900 in Manchester. His grandparents, the Wallaces and the Burkes, were from Borrisoleigh, County Tipperary. Wallace’s interest in Irish affairs began early. He was a junior member of the Gaelic League from 1908 to 1916. He saw service in the Royal Flying Corps (which became the Royal Air Force in 1918). He claimed his rear gunner was shot in the chest while being attacked over France by the Red Baron’s squadron, and that he incurred a wound to the leg. In 1919 he joined the IRA in London, with Reginald Dunne as his commanding officer and Pat O’Sullivan, Joe O’Sullivan’s brother, as second-in-command. He went on to marry a woman from County Clare and retired to Dublin in 1960 to live with his children and grandchildren.

Wallace began to relate to Jimmy the tale of his service with the IRA in Britain during the War of Independence. He had written an exhaustive account of the Wilson shooting for the Easter 1963 edition of An tÓglách, the news-sheet for IRA veterans. In it he stated that the order to shoot Wilson had been given prior to the Truce of July 1921, which ended the War of Independence, but critically was confirmed again after the Treaty was signed in December 1921 because of the pogroms in the North. As we have seen, Wilson was blamed by many in nationalist Ireland for these pogroms. As for the haphazard nature of the shooting, Wallace commented in that article: ‘The opportunity to carry out the order came at very short notice and left practically no time for any planning or rehearsal. Joseph O’Sullivan volunteered to carry out the order and Reginald Dunn [sic], his commanding officer, decided to go with him.’

He began to recount the story of the Wilson shooting to Jimmy, who in turn told his seventeen-year-old brother, Eamonn. [IB1] Eamonn was familiar with the bare outlines of the Wilson story as a result of the publicity which had surrounded the reburial of Dunne and O’Sullivan. He would go on to become one of the most respected archaeologists in Ireland, serving as the keeper of Irish antiquities for twelve years and as acting director of the National Museum of Ireland for a time. He had done his Leaving Certificate at the age of sixteen, the minimum age for attendance at university was seventeen and he intended to study archaeology and history. [IB2] [RM3] Eamonn recalled:

I remember Wallace as a slight, bespectacled, soft-spoken old man, with an English accent, who was far removed from anyone’s image of a hardened IRA activist. In my recollection of him, he looked not unlike the actor Alec Guinness. I recall also that Martin had a heart condition and that he had suffered a heart attack prior to us having met.

Eamonn had been given a diary at the start of the year and began to jot down Wallace’s memories.[IB4] [RM5] Wallace had joined the IRA after the First World War as he believed Britain was not treating Ireland well and the country would be better off as an independent nation. He was a friend of Reggie Dunne, with whom he’d attended teacher training school at St Mary’s College in Hammersmith. In his testimony Wallace corroborates Mary MacGeehin’s recollection that it was the Gaelic League which sparked Dunne’s interest in Irish affairs. She had found Dunne loitering outside the door of a hall where Irish music was being played and assumed he was a police spy. ‘If Miss MacGeehin had not opened the door and had he not come in, he would not have been hanged for murder,’ Wallace told Eamonn.

Though only 17 at the time and yet to embark on his chosen career, Eamonn Kelly was aware of the significance of what he was being told.

. I was consciously making an historical record and it was with this in mind that I was taking the time to visit and interview Wallace in the Spawell Service Station. From around the age of ten I had a keen interest in bird-watching and in Natural History generally and it was my habit to make detailed written records in my field notebooks of things I observed or encountered. My recording of Wallace can be seen as an extension of these activities.

Wallace’s testimony is interesting as it was taken in 1967. The Bureau of Military History testimony[IB6] , which MacGeehin recorded, was not made public until 2003.

Wallace claimed it was he who supplied the Webley revolvers that Dunne and O’Sullivan used to shoot Wilson. He had swapped his own Webley for O’Sullivan’s ‘beautiful little Spanish automatic’. Wallace did not feel comfortable having such a powerful weapon as a Webley in his possession, having seen the damage one could do during the First World War.

If it hit you in the shoulder, it would leave a small hole where it entered, but at the back, my God, you couldn’t cover it with a dinner plate. It would probably tear your arm off. It really was a terrible weapon. I know – I used one in France.

Wallace witnessed the spy Vincent Fovargue being picked up outside a ceilidh house [IB7] in Fulham in April 1920 and shot dead on a golf course in Ashford, Middlesex. Dunne was there to escort Fovargue to the car, which contained three men; Joe O’Sullivan was one of them. Wallace did not envy them their task:

It was one of the most unpleasant moments of my life. I thought I would have to shoot him. I don’t really think I could have killed him in cold blood like that. I don’t think I could have shot Sir Henry Wilson for that matter. To shoot a man in cold blood like that takes a special kind of courage. I don’t have it.

Wallace claimed he knew the real circumstances behind the shooting of Wilson and dismissed the view that Dunne and O’Sullivan acted alone as ‘patent nonsense’. The two men were extremely loyal to Michael Collins and supported him on the question of the Treaty (as did Wallace), while most London republicans opposed it. Therefore, they would have acted against Wilson only if given an explicit order from Collins.

Wallace’s account of the Wilson shooting is similar to the one in this book. According to him, Collins’s order to shoot Wilson had been conveyed to London by a female courier. Sam Maguire received the order and revealed it in Mooney’s pub on the night before the assassination, after it became apparent that Wilson would be unveiling a memorial at Liverpool Street Station the following day. O’Sullivan was the first to volunteer to shoot Wilson, and Dunne followed him. Denis Kelleher was detailed to turn up with the car. Wallace named Michael McInerney as the regular IRA driver in London, but he had been killed the previous July in an explosion at a bomb factory in Greenwich.

Dunne told Kelleher to await a phone call the following morning. This corresponds with Kelleher’s recollection of events. He never provided an explanation as to why he did not turn up, but Wallace did:

The fact that there was no regular driver was the only reason why Denis Kelleher was asked to drive on that fateful morning. Kelleher was a coward. Not one of the survivors of the London or even the entire British IRA ever remember him going on a job.

Critically, Wallace naming Kelleher as the third man reflects inside knowledge of what happened. Kelleher never admitted publicly that he had been involved. That information came to light only after Kelleher’s military service pension file was released in 2020.

Wallace addressed the allegation that Dunne had written a letter to Kelleher from prison stating that when he and O’Sullivan went to 36 Eaton Place, they went there to barrack him, not kill him. As noted previously, the letter, which features in Rex Taylor’s book, Assassination: The Death of Sir Henry Wilson and the Tragedy of Ireland, was never produced by Taylor, despite him being asked to do so by O’Sullivan’s friends and family.

Wallace dismissed the letter as a ‘fraudulent’ claim on the part of Kelleher, invented to deflect attention from his own failure to support the two men. The letter would appear to suggest that Dunne and O’Sullivan had no need for a third man as they had not intended to kill Wilson but merely to call him names. Such a claim was ‘ridiculous’, Wallace told Eamonn Kelly:

Why get the number one man in London (Dunne) and a useful man like O’Sullivan for so menial a task?. . . If Dunne and O’Sullivan were going to call Wilson names, why did they go with revolvers under their coats? IRA rules specifically stated that the guns should be taken when going on a job. Then only at the last moment and returned as fast as possible to the dump[IB8] . Anyway if they were going to call him names they would probably be arrested for causing a public disturbance. The guns would probably be found and they would face very serious charges (possibly a death sentence[IB9] ).

As all letters are read by the prison authorities, Kelleher would have been arrested by the police as an accessory to the murder, Wallace believed.

Wallace’s file in the Irish Military Archives shows that in November 1968 he received a medal for his service with the IRA during the War of Independence. The correspondence contains a letter of support from Pat O’Sullivan. Wallace, he told the medal board, was ‘honest and truthful and those qualities remain with him to the present day’. He confirmed Wallace’s close friendship with Reggie Dunne: ‘Comdt Dunne thought very highly of him and placed the greatest trust in him.’ Frank Lee, who also appears in this book and was a staunch supporter of Dunne and O’Sullivan, vouched for Wallace too. He confirmed that Wallace had been present when Fovargue was taken from the ceilidh in Fulham to be shot.

It should be stated that Wallace bore a personal grudge against Kelleher and also Seamus Moran, another IRA volunteer, who was arrested while attempting to burn an oil depot. Wallace believed Kelleher and Moran conspired to ensure that he did not get the recognition he deserved for his activities during the War of Independence. He maintained, without evidence, that Kelleher was chiefly responsible. Though Wallace received an IRA medal, it did not come with the bar which he felt would more accurately have reflected his service. His anger is contained in a letter to the medals board written in 1972, shortly before he died:

We are growing older and evidence is rapidly disappearing. I am in a very bad state of health and my doctors all advise against upsetting myself with affairs of this nature. I gave voluntarily, freely and irrefutably, my services to the country from 1919 to 1922 and I regret having been treated so shabbily.

Eamonn Kelly believes Wallace was telling him the truth when he recounted his knowledge of the Wilson shooting: [IB10]

Wallace was evidently bitter that persons he perceived of as enemies had been placed in positions where they could sabotage his application for his medal and pension. He was also bitter that the perception of the actions of Dunn and O’Sullivan had been misrepresented; deliberately so in some quarters, he alleged. I considered Wallace to be man of integrity and attached credibility to what he told me, which is why I made a written record at the time of what he told me.

I became aware of the Wallace testimony when Jimmy Kelly turned up to a talk I gave in Longford. A short time earlier he had been given a copy of his brother Eamonn’s account of Wallace’s recollections. Jimmy had not read my book yet, but he stood up and told me that he hoped I had not traduced the reputations of Dunne and O’Sullivan by suggesting that the pair had acted alone. His account of what really happened was similar to what I have written in this book. He put me in touch with his brother Eamonn who has given me the account he took from Wallace in 1967.

Taken in isolation Wallace’s account is an interesting perspective on the shooting of Wilson, but it corroborates the thesis I have advanced in this book from other sources that Collins was ultimately responsible for the assassination and that he conveyed that information via a female courier to London.

I also received testimony from James McCormack, an Irish-American historian who had read my book. In the early 1970s he had travelled to Ireland to record the experiences of IRA veterans of the War of Independence. There he met Vinny Byrne, who had been a member of Collins’s squad. Byrne referred him to Jimmy Conroy, who had emigrated to the US after the war. Conroy claimed that he and another IRA veteran, Jimmy Slattery, had been sent from Dublin to assassinate Wilson, but they had been delayed on the Liverpool ferry. They read about the shooting in the morning newspapers. McCormack continued:

When I asked Jimmy who gave the order for the shooting, he replied: ‘Somebody – I don’t want to mention any names.’ When I later asked him in an off-the-record conversation (i.e. not tape-recorded) [IB11] if Michael Collins was the ‘somebody’, he answered in the affirmative. I believe his story to be factual – what would be the point of fabricating it? Clearly it was of a very ‘hush-hush’ nature, the exact details of which probably died with Collins at Béal na mBláth.

A threatening letter from Reggie Dunne’s mother Mary to the Free State’s first leader Willam T Cosgrave surfaced at a conference in Cork to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Civil War. The letter was sent in 1923, a year after the shooting, in which she acknowledged that two Free State officers (most like Tobin and Cullen) had “put it about that you have bought me a beautiful house and beautifully furnished it in a satisfactory manner. I intend making it known whether you like it or whether you don’t.” She was referring to the role of Free State officers in the assassination of Wilson.

On 22 June 2022, one hundred years to the day after the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP, a shield was unveiled in his name in the House of Commons chamber. It features the Wilson family crest: a wolf and three stars, which are known in heraldry as mullets. In the corner is an addition: the red hand of Ulster, which signifies the family’s association with the Irish province.

The primary instigator of the shield was the journalist Henry Hill, who is the deputy editor of the website Conservativehome.com, which supports but is independent of the Conservative Party. In July 2021 Hill wrote an article for The Critic magazine, in which he noted that every MP who died in the line of duty has a shield in the House of Commons chamber, with one exception. Nineteen died in the First World War and twenty-three in the Second; nine others were assassinated in office. The one omission was Wilson.

Hill wrote that the Conservative Party had a ‘proud tradition of fierce resistance to republican terrorism’, as witnessed by the deaths of the MPs Airey Neave, Sir Anthony Berry and Ian Gow during the Troubles. Wilson was another. In 1922 Ulster Unionist MPs had sat on the same benches as the Conservative Party in parliament. Hill continued:

He deserves a few square inches of paint, and to be called to mind, even briefly, by those who sit in or visit the Commons. The centenary of his assassination falls on the 22 June, 2022. Let the memorial be up by then.

He contacted the Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP Ian Paisley Jr about this parliamentary lacuna. Both contacted the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, separately. Hoyle readily agreed to the proposal, and that the shield should be unveiled on the centenary of Wilson’s assassination.

He was true to this word. Speaking in the chamber before a parliamentary session, Hoyle recalled that Wilson had spent only a short time as an MP and made just a few contributions, but those contributions ‘were well received even by opponents’. He had spoken ‘very well and shortly’ [IB12] during his maiden speech. Wilson’s military credentials had made him ‘something of a celebrity’ who had been showered with honorary degrees and invited to unveil provincial war memorials. It was after returning from the unveiling of one at Liverpool Street Station that he had been assassinated, and his death had caused ‘shockwaves across the country’. Hoyle concluded:

So today, exactly one century later, we remember him. The shield in his memory joins the plaques of other fallen members, including Airey Neave, Robert Bradford, Sir Anthony Berry, Ian Gow and, more recently, Jo Cox.

Paisley said the lack of a shield honouring Wilson in the chamber of the House of Commons was a ‘very obvious gap’, and he thanked Hoyle for immediately agreeing that one should be displayed. ‘Your timing is impeccable,’ he told the Speaker, and he complimented Henry Hill for beginning the process which would lead to the unveiling. The Speaker’s chaplain, Reverend Tricia Hillas, remembered Wilson’s life and his service to Britain.

The unveiling was done by Rees-Mogg. Among those present in the chamber were the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, Alliance Party MP Stephen Farry, who represents Wilson’s old constituency of North Down, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, DUP MP Carla Lockhart and Conservative MP Maria Caulfield, whose father, John Caulfield, came from Dring in County Longford, just ten kilometres from Ballinalee. The plaque is directly behind the Speaker’s chair and can be seen during debates in the chamber. From being the most invisible of the MPs who died in office, Wilson is now the most visible.

On 10 August 2022 Dunne and O’Sullivan were remembered on the centenary of their executions by a group of volunteers from the National Graves Association, which looks after their graves in Deansgrange Cemetery, and by Giles Bailey, whose late wife Catherine was a relative of O’Sullivan. Among the wreaths was one from the O’Sullivan family in England. Bailey showed me two letters written by O’Sullivan to his cousin Peggie [sic] before he died. [IB13] One was written on 14 July 1922, four days before he and Dunne were sentenced to be hanged. Writing from Brixton Prison, he confirms that he had undergone a ‘worse mauling’ inside the police station than from the crowd which had surrounded them after the shooting. He is grateful to be in the same prison where ‘Terry Mac [Terence MacSwiney] died for old Ireland and God be merciful to him although I hardly think it is necessary to say that as I’m sure he’s in heaven this long time’. He also mentions Thomas Ashe – who, like MacSwiney, had died on hunger strike – and his poem ‘Let Me Carry Your Cross for Ireland, Lord’.

In the other (undated) letter, O’Sullivan notes that he is going to die on the feast of St Laurence. ‘I never see Reg, but I’m sure he is quite as happy as I. He is indeed a fine character and one with whom I am very proud to die.’

The letters have now been handed over to the Michael Collins Museum in Clonakilty, County Cork, along with a tiny photograph purporting to be that of Reggie Dunne and Joe O’Sullivan together.

Three days later, Wilson was remembered in his home county of Longford. I unveiled a plaque on the wall of the home of Noel and Patricia Brady, who now own the site on which the Currygrane estate once stood. The plaque states that Currygrane House was the seat of the Wilson family. It remembers Wilson and his brother James (Jemmy), and records that Currygrane House was burned to the ground on 16 August 1922. The chairman of Longford County Council, Councillor Turlough McGovern, and the chairman of Granard Municipal District, Councillor Colin Dalton, attended, along with the local TD Joe Flaherty and Senator Micheál Carrigy, as did Wilson’s closest living relative in Ireland, Robert Wright-Wilson. I spoke at the event:

We are gathered today at Currygrane to remember Henry Wilson and to unveil this plaque. This plaque does not convey approval of Wilson’s imperialist world view or support for his policies on Ireland. Very few people in this part of Ireland admired or supported Henry Wilson’s take on Irish affairs. It is for the visitor to take meaning from it. You don’t have to approve of the actions of a historical figure to recognise their importance, and in his lifetime Henry Wilson was a very important person. He has some claim to be the most famous person who ever came out of this county, but he has been mostly forgotten about, especially in Britain. As I point out in my book, Wilson was an Irish-born British imperialist killed by two British-born Irish nationalists. The three of them died for countries that were really not their own. They all loved Ireland, or at least the idea of Ireland. They all lived by the sword and died by the sword. It is right we remember them without fear or favour. They are part of the tragic tapestry of Irish history.

On the same day the plaque was unveiled in Currygrane, Wilson’s killers were honoured in a ceremony outside Wandsworth Prison in London, where they had been hanged one hundred years previously. The event was held by the Terence MacSwiney Commemoration Committee, which was set up to remember the former Lord Mayor of Cork. The guest speaker at the Wandsworth event was Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh.

One of the speakers, Jim Curran[IB14] , said he was ashamed to say that Wilson had come from the same county as himself. Wilson was a ‘British state terrorist. The British had a primitive instinct for violence and for killing. He was contaminated with that instinct.’

Joe O’Sullivan’s relatives Paul Raffield and Michael Boulton, who helped me to research this book, laid a wreath at the entrance to Wandsworth Prison on behalf of the families of Dunne and O’Sullivan. A century on, the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP continues to provoke powerful emotions in many people.

[IB1]See next q but one

[IB2]Del? Doesn’t seem that relevant

[RM3]OK

[IB4]Above it says his brother related Wallace’s tale but now it seems like he heard it from horse’s mouth!

Also, I’ve swapped first 2 lines in this para around. OK?

[RM5]Both.

[IB6]Confusing. Better as “The testimony MacGeehin provided to the Bureau of Military History was not made…”?

And I’m not really clear why Wallace’s testimony is ‘interesting’ when compared to MacGeehin’s. Del para?

[IB7]’Hall’ not ‘house’ (as later)?

[IB8]’The arms dump’?

[IB9]Your addition - ie square brackets?

[IB10]Odd place for this para? Move? Or add a line space above?

[IB11]Are these his words? Or yours?

[IB12]Is this verbatim? An odd word in context

[IB13]So it’s Peggy? Just change Peggie to Peggy? Or:

…before he died to his cousin ‘Peggie’ (a misspelling of Peggy).

[IB14]Who is he exactly?