Ireland in Travail

by Joice NanKivell Loch; Sydney Loch

The delegates came back from the preliminary London conference, and the first of the public meetings of the Dail was held in the Dublin Mansion House. Fitzgerald, the Minister of Propaganda, gave us tickets.

Long before the hour all Dublin was outside. All Dublin wanted to be inside; but there was not room for a tenth part of Dublin. The morning was wet; but the crowd kept its spirits and cheered at every excuse. A multitude of Republican police kept order. These people wore no uniform, and were very young; but arrangements inside and outside the Mansion House were admirable. The Republican police were still amateur policemen, and if a question was asked half a dozen of them sprang forward to answer it. One was overwhelmed with information.

The great round room was choked with people, except for a roped-off space, full of easy seats, waiting the coming of the Dail deputies. The Speaker’s chair stood beyond and above, and to one side was the Press gallery, and to the other places for distinguished visitors. An Indian in a pugaree was among those people.

A gallery, packed with more people, circled the room; higher than this, against the walls, were coats of arms of all past Lord Mayors. In Ireland, that land of imagination, all Lord Mayors have armorial bearings. A man with a flashlight camera was getting his apparatus ready.

There was a burst of cheering, and we rose to our feet. The applause lasted for a couple of minutes, and then died down like a wind subsiding, and behold all the empty seats were filled. All over the place people were digging and tapping one another, and pointing and whispering, and staring and asking. Many of the Dail deputies had been nobodies before they went on the run; but after the day of their disappearance from among common men, their names had flowered like plants in a forcing house.

Eamonn De Valera, the President of the Republic, sat at the end of the front bench. A tall man with a good figure, and a speed of movement that told of his foreign blood. After years of storm had he brought his ship safely into harbour? Never had he been placed higher in popular affection than then, and perhaps never would be placed so high again.

On his right, so close that their elbows touched, was a greater than he, Arthur Griffith, the father of Sinn Fein. They had asked him in the beginning to be the first President of the Republic; but he had refused the laurel wreath, seeing greater freedom in a secondary position, for the man placed in the higher seat must dance at the bidding of the crowd. A man nearly as broad as he was high, a cold man, a man with a great head, he sat motionless all that morning, never speaking, twisting his moustache now and then, oblivious of the public eye, seeming content to be overlooked, satisfied to see about him this meeting, which his eloquent pen and his devotion had done so much to bring about.

On his right, touching elbows again, was the man whom public imagination had lifted highest of all. The man was Michael Collins, on whose head had been a reward of four thousand pounds, the Minister of Finance, as he was now called, “a certain minister” as he had been referred to in conversation during the terror; Mike, as he was affectionately known to his followers, Michael the Mild as the Ulster Press bitterly described him.

He was a young man on the way to corpulence. His skin had a deadly pallor. His face was large and handsome, and yet one fell into a muse, wondering was it a cruel face, or was it a sensual face, or was it a feminine face in spite of its strength, for something was wrong with it. Now and again he tossed his head back with all the charm of a boy. There were legends that he had gone about as a woman, that he had passed into officers’ clubs disguised as an officer, worming secrets out of people. He would have made a giant woman. I think these tales were legends and no more.

There may have been men present who had worked as hard and suffered as much as those three; but those names meant most to the public. The remainder of the deputies looked what they were, several score of men, mostly young, mostly from the lower middle class, some few elected for their ability, the majority chosen because they were in prison or on the run at the time of the elections, and their election was a gesture of defiance to the British authority. When presently they spoke, some of them were inarticulate, and, no doubt, in good time the same popular feeling that raised them up will set them down from their seats, and put others more fitted in their places.