What's the Matter with Ireland?

by Ruth Russell

III

IRISH LABOR AND CLASS REVOLUTION

"A CHANGE OF FLAGS IS NOT ENOUGH."

In the sputtering flare of the arc lamp in front of Liberty hall stood squads of boys. Some of them wore brass-buttoned, green woolen waists, and some, ordinary cotton shirts. Some of them had on uniform knickers, and some, long, unpressed trousers. On the opposite side of the street were blocked similar squads of serious-eyed, high-chinned girls. Some of them were in green tweed suits, and others as they had come from work. They were companies of the Citizens' Army recruited by the Irish Labor party, and assembled in honor of the return of the Countess Markewicz from jail.

"Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here."

Young voices, impatient of the interim of waiting, sang the socialist song. The burden was taken up by the laborers, whose constant movement to keep a good view was attested by the hollow sound of their wooden-soled boots on the stone walks. And the refrain was hummed by the shawled, frayed-skirted creatures who were coming up from Talbot street, Gloucester street, Peterson's lane, and all the family-to-a-room districts in Dublin. On the skeletonish railroad crossing suspended over the Liffey, tin-hatted and bayonet-carrying British soldiers were silhouetted against the moon-whitened sky. Up to them floated the last oath of "The Red Flag":

"With heads uncovered swear we all,
To bear it onward till we fall.
Come dungeon dark or gallows grim,
This song shall be our parting hymn."

Clattered over the bridge the horse-dragged brake. In the light of a search lamp played on it from an automobile behind, a small figure in a slouch hat and a big black coat waved a bouquet of narcissus. There was a surge of the block-long crowds and people who could not see lifted their hands and shouted: "Up the countess!"

As we waited in the light of the dim yellow bulbs threaded from the ceiling of the big bare upper front room of Liberty Hall, Susan Mitchell told me of "the chivalrous woman." The countess is a daughter of the Gore-Booth family which owned its Sligo estate before America was discovered. As a girl the countess used to ride fast horses like mad along the rocky western coast. Then she became a three-feathered débutante bowing at Dublin Castle. Later she painted pictures in Paris and married her handsome Pole. But one day some one put an Irish history in her hands. In a sudden whole-hearted conversion to the cause of the people, the countess turned to aid the Irish labor organizers. She drilled boy scouts for the Citizens' Army. She fed starving strikers during the labor troubles of 1913 with sheep sent daily from her Sligo estate. In the rebellion of 1916 she fought and killed under Michael Mallin of the Citizens' Army. She was hardly out of jail for participation in the rebellion when she was clapped in again for alleged complicity in the never-to-be-proved German plot. While she was in jail, she was elected the first woman member of parliament.

White from imprisonment, her small round steel-rimmed glasses dropping away from her blue eyes, and her curly brown hair wisping out from under her black felt hat, the countess embraced a few of the women in the room and exchanged handclasps with the men. Below the crowd was clamoring for her appearance at the window.

"Fellow rebels!" she began as she leaned out into the mellow night. Then with the apparent desire to say everything at once that makes her public speech stuttery, she continued: "It's good to come out of jail to this. It is good to come out again to work for a republic. Let us all join hands to make the new republic a workers' republic. A change of flags is not enough!"

Two oil flares with orange flame throwing off red sparks on the crowd, were fastened to the brake below. It was the brake that was to carry "Madame" on her triumphal tour of Dublin. The boys of the Citizens' Army made a human rope about the conveyance. In it I climbed with the countess, the plump little Mrs. James Connolly, the magisterial Countess Plunkett, Commandant O'Neill of the Citizens' Army, Sean Milroy, who escaped from Lincoln jail with DeValera, and two or three others. Rows of constables were backed against the walls at irregular intervals. I asked Sean Milroy if he were not afraid that he would be re-taken, and he responded comfortably that the "peelers" would never attempt to take a political prisoner out of a gathering like that. As we neared the poverty-smelling Coombe district, the countess remarked that this, St. Patrick's, was her constituency. At the shaft of St. James fountain, the brake was halted. Shedding her long coat, and standing straight in her green tweed suit, with the plush seat of the brake for her floor, the countess told the cheering workers that she was going to come down to live in the Coombe. Heated with the energy of talking and throwing her body about so that her voice would carry over the crowd that circled her, the countess sank down on the seat. As the brake drove on, motherly little Mrs. Connolly tried to slip the big coat over the countess. But the countess, in one of those sudden meditative silences during which she seems to retain only a subconsciousness of her surroundings, refused the offer of warmth with a shrug of her shoulders. Then, emerging from her pre-occupation, she demanded of Sean Milroy:

"What have you planned for your constituency? I'm going to have a soviet."