October 04, 2004
Liam Mellows
I drove into Eyre Square late one Saturday night about five weeks ago to collect someone. It was around 2.30 in the morning, and I was parked at the top of the square, near where the taxis and buses gather. Bloody hell, it was like Sodom and Gomorrah. I realize that when you’re stone cold sober late at night, everybody else seems like raving alcoholics, but Galway at the weekend certainly runs on high octane spirits. One couple in particular caught my eye. A young fellow, unable to stand , was leaning against a statue giggling senselessly ,while his girlfriend was rolling around on the ground, roaring her head off laughing, blind drunk.
There’s less of Eyre Square to roll about in these days, due to the never-ending renovations, and last week, the afore-mentioned status was carted off to Headford for a clean-up. The statue in question, positioned so that it looks across at that of Padraig O Conaire’s (no stranger to a feed of porter himself) is that of Liam Mellows, who led the IRB in the Easter Rising in Galway.
The bland expression on the face of the statue looks nothing like the hard-faced man staring from the photograph in Spellissey’s History Of Galway, Mellows was as committed a socialist as he was a republican. Born in Lancashire in 1892, and raised in Wexford, he was reputed to have led a thousand men in the occupation of Athenry. However, another veteran (Tomas O Maoileoin) remembers the numbers as about 70 Volunteers and 10 Cumann na mBan (women volunteers). The rising petered out after a couple of days due to a lack of support and coordination, and the volunteers dispersed. Mellows spent some time in America fund-raising for the IRA and became Director of Purchases for the IRA at one point. Mellows is probably better know for his death during the Civil War than his activities during the War of Independence.
Mellows was profoundly anti-treaty [he didn‘t even turn up to watch Michael Collins take possession of Dublin Castle from the British in 1921] and ended up in Mountjoy prison in May 1922 as a result. As the Civil War deepened, the anti-Treaty side targeted the pro-Treaty members of the Dáil (which they didn’t recognize), and on December 7, 1922 they ambushed two pro-Treaty TDs, Sean Hayles and Padraig O Maille - Hayles was killed and O’Maille badly wounded. In reprisal, the Pro-Treaty government decided to execute four Anti-Treaty prisoners - one from each province. Mellows the Lancashireman was picked to represent Connacht. It was a controversial deed even at the time [though no further attacks on TDs occurred], since none of the prisoners had anything to do with the attack, and Hayles’s family publicly repudiated the deed.
Given that both pro- and anti- Treaty soldiers were brothers-in-arms just a year before, ironies abounded. Rory O’Connor was also one of the four, and his execution would have been approved by Kevin O’Higgins who was the best man at O’Connor’s wedding (and who would be murdered himself in 1927). Both Hayles and Mellows had been part of the Committee of Ten, formed during the summer of 1922 and consisting of five members of pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty republicans. It’s remit was to try to reconcile the two opposing positions - it’s failure would doom both Mellows and Hayles.
In our efforts now to win back public support to the Republic we are forced to recognise -whether we like it or not- that the commercial interest so-called money and gombeen men are on the side of the Treaty, because that Treaty means Imperialism and England. We are back to Tone -and it is just as well- relying on that great body, 'the men of now property'. The 'stake in the country' people were never with the Republic. (.) We should recognise that definitely now and base our appeals upon the understanding and needs of those who have always borne Ireland's fight.
So wrote Mellows from Mountjoy Prison in the late summer of 1922. For him, the Treaty was not just a fatal compromise of Republican ideals, but of socialist ideals too. I wonder what he would have made of the proposal to build low cost houses on land owned by the agricultural college that bears his name in Athenry (he probably wouldn‘t be too enamoured at the prospect of the capitalist running dogs that will no doubt profit from building them!). I have a book of photographs from the Civil War - two have a particular resonance. One is of Sean Hayles, in a carriage moments before he was shot and killed. The other is of a group of youngsters dressed like boy scouts in the Rotunda Gardens. The picture depicts a group of Fianna na hÉireann (probably taken in 1909) - a group founded by Countess Markievicz (nee Constance Gore-Booth) - and the unsmiling teenager on the left of the group is a young Liam Mellows.
Posted by Monasette at October 4, 2004 11:41 PM