I took the tram back to College Green, and found the paper boys raising a great clamour there. The first of the Cork hunger strikers had died. As I left the tram and threaded through the crowd towards Grafton Street, I felt that, like myself, all these people I was rubbing shoulders with were fearful this was an augury of more terrible events.
For more than two months the incredible fast of fifty Irishmen had been capturing the public imagination, and, according to the Nationalist Press, the imagination of half the world. Interest in the fasting men had lasted through eight weeks of fierce events—violent deed followed daily by violent reprisal.
On August 12th, Terence MacSwiney, who had succeeded to the office of Lord Mayor of Cork on the assassination of Lord Mayor MacCurtain, was arrested, and with other prisoners to the number of fifty-one, went on hunger strike.
This represented a definite battle—it had a beginning, it had an end—between the British Government and Sinn Fein; and as the Cabinet acted with a consistency it had seldom shown before and was not often to show after, Sinn Fein suffered a defeat. There had been many previous hunger strikes; and the authorities had invariably given way at the eleventh hour.
It is curious to look over Dublin newspapers of that date and see the black headlines, which announced, morning after morning, the straits of the Irish “martyrs.” Back come those gloomy weeks when days were shortening and cold and damp were returning to the land again.
I find what seems to be one of the first entries. “Lord Mayor, Terence MacSwiney, arrested Thursday night in the City Hall. The (Republican) Arbitration Courts were sitting, and about fifteen persons were arrested with the Lord Mayor.”
At his trial the Lord Mayor, as chief magistrate of the city, declared illegal a court martial which sat to try him in Cork, and those taking part in it were liable to arrest under the laws of the Irish Republic.
He was charged with (a) having a police cypher under his control; (b) having in his possession a document likely to cause disaffection; (c) having made a seditious speech on the occasion of his election as successor to the late Lord Mayor MacCurtain.
“A perfectly innocent man!” as Mrs. Slaney had declared.
Throughout his trial the Lord Mayor behaved with dignity, and at the end said, “I wish to state that I will put a limit to any term of imprisonment you may impose. I have taken no food since Thursday, therefore I shall be free in a month. I shall be free, dead or alive, within a month.”