I

The disastrous impact of the secret executions following the Rising has been frequently underlined; what is less noted is that this public disquiet rapidly found an organizational outlet. The Irish National Aid Association (INAA) was established towards the end of May 1916, and on 27 May an early appeal for public support was published. Drafted by the well-known physician and author George Sigerson, it asked for contributions to support the families of 300 men killed during the Rising,Footnote ⁸ of 15 men executed thereafter, of 134 men sentenced to penal servitude, and of 2,654 men deported:

The INAA's first committee was a mixed bunch, combining well-known figures somewhat associated with the Irish Parliamentary Party – ex-lord mayor of Dublin Lorcan Sherlock, Alderman Patrick Corrigan, and former National Volunteer John Gore – with advanced nationalists of varying shades – long-standing Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) member Fred Allan, Louise Gavan Duffy, daughter of 1848 rebel and imperial statesman Charles, and Dr Michael Davitt, son and namesake of the radical socialist. Father Richard Bowden, administrator of the Pro-Cathedral was named honorary chairman, such that while the INAA was unable to persuade the ailing Archbishop Walsh to lend his name to the appeal, the presence of Bowden on the executive committee was a clear marker of approval from the Dublin archdiocese.Footnote ¹⁰

Well known as some of these figures were, neither they nor the INAA were operating in a vacuum. The distress visited upon Dublin in particular was the focus of widespread comment, and the ruined part of the capital likened to the devastation wrought upon Ypres and Louvain.Footnote ¹¹ The damage did not merely extend to buildings ‘blown into smithereens and burned to ashes’; the knock-on effect on trade and commerce within the city, exacerbated by the looting which had taken place, was severe. The public response, in financial terms at least, was rooted in the immense popularity of philanthropic associations in the early decades of the twentieth century, given renewed impetus in the charitable activities associated with the ongoing war effort. A short-lived Lord Mayor's Fund was established in May 1916 to provide assistance for those who were unemployed as a result of the destruction of business premises during the shelling of Dublin. Furthermore, the Irish Independent argued strongly that the London-based Prince of Wales Fund should be used to compensate both those who found themselves unemployed and the dependents of non-combatants killed or wounded during Easter Week, thus carefully excluding the dependents of insurgents. Noting pointedly that the people of Dublin had contributed £25,000 to the Prince of Wales Fund and that so far only £6,000 had been expended in the city, the newspaper insisted that ‘the distress now prevailing must be regarded as arising from the war’, and urged that ‘without delay a grant from the fund should be made to Dublin’.Footnote ¹² This suggestion caused some ripples: the London Times reported that in the House of Commons there was ‘an unpleasant impression’ on foot of the rumour that a substantial sum from the Prince of Wales Fund had already been granted to alleviate distress in Dublin. The Independent's suggestion also provoked a response from the INAA, who on 8 June declared that

Thus, playing on national sentiment, and adopting a more inclusive approach than the fixed categories of the Lord Mayor's Fund, the INAA operated a very broad-based appeal from the outset, with highly successful results.

On 10 June, the first in a regular series of accounts appeared in Irish newspapers, detailing the £1,315 13s 0d that had been subscribed in the previous weeks. These publicly available accounts provide striking evidence of how the business of the INAA was conducted: nation-wide subscriptions were published in the Irish Independent and the Freemen's Journal on successive Saturdays, while local contributions were recorded in the provincial press.Footnote ¹⁴ By 8 July, some £5,636 had been subscribed – in today's money about £243,000.Footnote ¹⁵ A number of important developments had also taken place by this point, which significantly shaped the future direction and character of the organization. Most importantly, local branches began to feature heavily among the list of subscriptions, gradually replacing individual contributors. In the week preceding 8 July alone, some thirty-four branches had been established, in sixteen scattered counties.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, the mechanisms for a vibrant local organization had clearly been established very early on in the INAA's lifespan, and these would assume an even more important character as the organization began to embed itself into the fabric of Irish life in the autumn of 1916. For the remainder of its existence, local branches were at the heart of fund-raising and other activities, contributing substantially to the organizational vigour of the movement. The intense localism of Irish life had been a distinguishing feature of the country's political structures since the O'Connellite era, even more successfully harnessed by Parnell into the Land and National Leagues. Although the United Irish League (UIL) had initially recaptured the local dynamism of the Parnellite party under Redmond's leadership, as Michael Wheatley has demonstrated these structures were rotting away by Easter 1916.Footnote ¹⁷ The proliferation of INAA branches through the summer, in at least some areas where the UIL was in terminal decline, suggests that the organization offered an alternate vehicle of political expression for some sections of nationalist Ireland, never wholly comfortable with the political philosophy of Redmondism.Footnote ¹⁸ Considered in this manner, the INAA branches can be interpreted as a median point between the old party structures of the UIL and the resurgent Sinn Féin of 1917; to adopt David Fitzpatrick's analogy, a funnel to decant the ‘old wine into new bottles’.Footnote ¹⁹

A second, and probably even more crucial, development was the arrival of American money. As early as 12 May, the Irish tenor John McCormack had begun to arrange a benefit concert to alleviate distress in Ireland; by the time this concert took place, an Irish Relief Fund Committee had been established in New York, under the patronage of Cardinals Farley, Gibbon, and O'Connell. During the week preceding 1 July 1916, £1,000 was sent from New York to Dublin, channelled via Archbishop Walsh in Dublin, indicating a further level of hierarchical approval for the initiative outside the already healthy donations of individual clergy and bishops.Footnote ²⁰ The steady flow of money from the United States provided the INAA with its real financial muscle, and helped to mask the drying-up of subscriptions from within Ireland itself by early 1917.

But the American dimension also resulted in another important development. The competition which the INAA faced was not confined to the Lord Mayor's Fund, which appears to have disappeared fairly rapidly; almost from its beginnings there was a rival organization from within the nationalist bloc. The Volunteer Dependents' Fund (VDF) was established in May 1916 by Kathleen Clarke, widow of the executed Thomas J. Clarke, and she reconsecrated herself to its work in June after an out-of-body experience when she was ‘sent back’ from heaven by her husband and Seán MacDermott ‘to do the work we left her to do’.Footnote ²¹ Its committee was comprised primarily of the female relatives of the executed men of the Rising: among them Kathleen Clarke herself, Áine Ceannt, Mrs Pearse, Muriel MacDonagh, Madge Daly, and Lila Colbert – chosen ‘knowing that John Redmond and his party dared not say boo to us’Footnote ²² – although the real organizational vigour appears to have come from Sorcha McMahon and Kitty O'Doherty of the republican women's organization, Cumann na mBan.Footnote ²³ The VDF played unashamedly on these connections to the dead rebels, emphasizing that their committee was ‘acting as their dead husbands, sons and brothers would desire’.Footnote ²⁴ The bulk of the VDF's money – £3,000 – had been entrusted by Tom Clarke to his wife, and had apparently originated in the Clan-na-Gael gold sent over to fund the Rising. A further £300 was left to the agency by the Fenian John Daly on his death; but aside from these two bequests, the VDF failed to make the same impact nationally as the INAA. The sporadic returns published by the VDF do not demonstrate the same mushrooming of branches as evident in the rival association, and the level of individual donations was at a strikingly lower level than that of the INAA.Footnote ²⁵

From the beginning, the VDF was aware of the problems posed by the existence of two organizations with ostensibly the same purpose, as an early appeal underlines:

This determinedly diplomatic statement obscures the hostility with which the VDF regarded the INAA; Kathleen Clarke, in particular, viewed the committee as the instrument of the Irish Party, and steadfastly refused to consider any union so long as what she termed ‘enemies of the executed men’ remained in place.Footnote ²⁷ Clarke's opinion, however, radically overstates the extent to which the National Aid Association could be viewed as the creature of the Irish Party; individual MPs contributed, certainly, and individual branches of the National Volunteers and the UIL made collections in support of the INAA.Footnote ²⁸ But while police reports from the summer of 1916 indicate as much alarm at the activities of the ostensibly more moderate INAA as at those of the VDF – expressing particular concern that the INAA were able to build a support base beyond the traditionally ‘disloyal’ sections of Irish nationalist opinion – the authorities did not envisage that the Irish Parliamentary Party would benefit from the highly charged political and public atmosphere. Rather, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) correctly forecast the eventual political repercussions of the various aid collections:

Whatever Kathleen Clarke's misgivings, the American benefactors were unhappy at the existence of two rival organizations. After a tedious series of negotiations, and, as Nancy Wyse Power commented tartly, when the VDF's money ran out, a visiting American delegation managed to broker an amalgamation into one association, the INAAVDF.Footnote ³⁰ The new executive committee brought together members of the two previous organizations in a fairly equitable mix: Father Bowden remained as chairman, while the remaining official positions were divided between National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependents' Fund officers.Footnote ³¹ The honorary treasurers, for instance, were comprised of Father Bowden and Alderman Corrigan on the one hand, and Sorcha MacMahon of Cumann na mBan and J. J. O'Kelly on the other. The committee was similarly balanced, in name at least, although the figures representing the advanced nationalist interest were formidable characters: Pat Keohane, Kathleen Clarke, Mrs Pearse, Kitty O'Doherty, Miss O'Rahilly, Pat Belton, Diarmuid O'Hegarty, John MacDonagh, and Father Pádraig de Brún. Fred Allan, as secretary, seems to have occupied a median position: although his republican activism dated back to the 1880s, he had become increasingly estranged from the centre of advanced nationalist power through the early 1910s and was viewed with a degree of suspicion by the republican clique responsible for staging the Rising. His appointment, therefore, was something of a counter-balance to the republican-dominated committee, although latent hostility towards Allan might explain some of the internal tensions which later emerged.Footnote ³² The authorities were sensitive to this shift in the balance of power over what was becoming vast sums of money. The inspector general of the RIC penned a series of reports on public opinion in Ireland over the summer of 1916, tracing the spread of disaffection and the resultant boost in the reputation of Sinn Féin.Footnote ³³ By August, he concluded resignedly that ‘the Joint Secretaries [of the INAAVDF] are extremists, so are three of the four Joint Treasurers. Therefore it may be assumed that it is under S[inn] F[éin] control.’Footnote ³⁴ The same report also contained a sobering assessment of what the Rising had so quickly come to mean to nationalist Ireland:

This was a significant development, and as David Fitzpatrick has argued, represented the real effect of the Rising: to demonstrate that Redmond's wartime logic was obsolete.Footnote ³⁶

The union of the two organizations under one banner was enormously successful and money continued to arrive in even greater quantities. The American funds showed no signs of abating: in the first list of subscriptions after amalgamation, the Irish Relief Fund in New York sent £4,650 and a similar sum a week later.Footnote ³⁷ In total, £59,348 was raised in the US for the Irish Relief Fund between 1916 and 1919.Footnote ³⁸ While impressive, these figures need to be contextualized alongside the very substantial sums raised in the US for the relief of distress elsewhere in Europe. A snapshot of humanitarian collections detailed in the New York Times in September 1917, when the Belgian Relief Fund raised $1.1 m, the Serbian Relief Fund $356,000, and the Polish Victims Fund $840,000, underlines that while the Irish Relief Fund did tap into a sizeable constituency willing to make subscriptions, its efforts were dwarfed by the overwhelming success of fund-raising efforts associated with the Great War.Footnote ³⁹ Conversely, the ability of the Irish Relief Fund to attract donations precisely at a time when so many alternative appeals were being made, and for a cause which was, politically, fundamentally at odds with the rationale of the various Great War relief appeals, should be underlined.

The American funds were supplemented by subscriptions from Australia and New Zealand, collected under the auspices of the Catholic hierarchy. In the months that followed, smaller subscriptions were also received from South Africa, China, Canada, South America, Egypt, India, France, and Spain. The notable absence of Britain from the subscription lists is explained by the establishment of the Irish National Relief Fund in London during Easter Week itself under the direction of Art Ó Briain, long associated with Gaelic League circles in the city. It was agreed at an early stage that the London organization, in association with similar branches in Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, should assume responsibility for the welfare of republican prisoners and internees in Reading and Frongoch.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, monies collected in Britain were not routinely forwarded to the INAAVDF head office in Dublin. However, it is clear that subscriptions in Britain fell far short of the standards set in Ireland and the United States; by 30 November 1916, only £820 2s 9d had been collected; with the release of the internees a month later, the impetus for subscriptions fell quickly away.Footnote ⁴¹ Despite the relative paucity of fund-raising in Britain, the Irish National Aid and Volunteers Dependents' Fund raised in total £137,808 before it was initially wound up at the end of 1919. The vast majority of these funds were expended on relieving distress in various forms, while a small amount went to expenses and overheads in the main office on Exchequer Street in Dublin.Footnote ⁴²

II

From the outset, the INAAVDF, in keeping with both its predecessors, operated along heavily formalized lines, reflecting the administrative and bureaucratic obsessions of many Irish nationalist organizations.Footnote ⁴³ Below the executive committee sat fourteen sub-committees, whose number had gradually increased as the INAAVDF's remit expanded.Footnote ⁴⁴ These sub-committees had a primarily distributive character, although some structures existed to regulate important secondary functions: the weekly collections sub-committee, the entertainments committee and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) committee acted to maintain the profile of the Association and publicize its objectives. These objectives were slanted overwhelmingly towards providing for the families of those Volunteers executed, killed in action, imprisoned, and interned in the aftermath of the Rising. And it was along these lines that a definite hierarchical structure emerged. The dependents of the executed leaders and those killed in action were immediately identified in most cases as requiring long-term provision. Indeed, any lull in the public response to the appeal (and it is clear that subscriptions began to decrease during 1917) was met with an immediate admonition that when the ‘urgent and temporary calls’ for support were finally closed – that is, the surge in claims made to the INAAVDF after the release of the internees in December 1916 – the long-term cases would remain in need of permanent assistance, including the ‘sacred duty of the educating and starting in life of the numerous orphaned children’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The task of providing for these families fell to a number of committees. The American grants sub-committee, which administered the US funds, seems to have been the distributor of immediate, emergency grants; the schools sub-committee was created to oversee the education of the ‘orphaned children’; and the executive committee invested £20,000 early in 1917 to cover their long-term needs.Footnote ⁴⁶

There was much variation in the grants made to these families, presumably owing to the scrupulousness with which the committees considered the circumstances of each case and the conditions in which they previously had been living. Investments of £1,500 were generally made on behalf of the wives and young children of the executed men, thereby providing a regular income, and the widows of Tom Clarke, James Connolly, Eamonn Ceannt, and Thomas MacDonagh received one-off grants of between £250 and £350 pounds.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the prestige of the executed men also seems to have influenced the amount assigned to some of the families: while the highest investment – £1,750 – was made on behalf of Patrick Pearse's mother and sister, Seán Heuston's sisters were allocated £800 and Con Colbert's invalid sister only £300. Some of the executed men's families were somewhat overlooked: the ledger entry for Seán MacDermott's family reads that ‘Sean never helped any of his relatives and never received help from any of them’;Footnote ⁴⁸ it does appear that learning of MacDermott's wish in his last days that ‘the education of his little nephew should be looked after’, a sum of £100 was paid to the MacDermott family in late 1917.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although Roger Casement's nieces received a grant of £100, John MacBride's family, his estranged wife Maud Gonne and his son Seán, seem to have been entirely excluded.Footnote ⁵⁰ This hierarchy of victimhood also seems to have operated when it came to the families of the sixty-four men killed in action. These families received much smaller sums in the form of immediate relief grants, even though in the cases of Richard O'Carroll and Philip Clarke there were seven and eight dependent children, and the final investment or payments made were generally to the tune of £75 or £100.Footnote ⁵¹

But whereas Madame O'Rahilly could loftily return the monies sent to her, declaring blithely that her income was the same as when her husband was alive, some widows were in a more precarious financial position.Footnote ⁵² Principal among them, at least it seemed to her, was Grace Gifford Plunkett, who married Joseph Plunkett on the eve of his execution. She caused the INAAVDF great difficulties from the outset, resenting that the Association appeared to place her in a different category from the other widows. This sense of injustice was heightened by the fact that she was estranged from her parents following her wedding and had a difficult relationship with her mother-in-law, in whose home she temporarily resided.Footnote ⁵³ Her husband's will, in which he left everything to her, was declared invalid, and so his estate passed to his parents – a 1934 suit eventually resulted in her being awarded £700 – and so Grace Plunkett was dependent on the money she received from the INAAVDF to supplement the very meagre income she earned as an artist.Footnote ⁵⁴ She regularly became frantic when the weekly remittances were late, wrote furious letters demanding that the money be forwarded immediately, and threatened to go public if her demands were not met. A letter dated 7 May 1917 demanded that she be informed ‘before 10 o'clock tomorrow if there is or is not any money. I think my having to go into the workhouse on the anniversary week of my husband's sacrifice and my own, will hardly fail to shock the American delegates.’Footnote ⁵⁵ A month later, she stipulated that her weekly remittances be lodged to her bank account instead of sent to her by cheque, ‘because the idea of receiving doles of money is highly distasteful … I must demand complete control of my finances.’Footnote ⁵⁶ After much communication of this nature, the Association made a final settlement of £100 to Grace Plunkett in May 1919, which she was entitled to draw at a rate of £8 per month.Footnote ⁵⁷

Apart from the widows, provision for the ‘orphaned children’ was seen as a ‘sacred duty’ from the start, and the schools sub-committee took their work very seriously. An offer by one Daniel O'Donoghue of Middlesex to adopt ‘one of the children of any man who lost his life during the Rising’ did not meet with a favourable response: ‘The Committee was unanimous in stating that to send any child to be adopted, especially to England, was altogether out of the question.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Notwithstanding the education of three of James Connolly's daughters at a convent in County Mayo and a day school in Dublin, the sons of the dead Volunteers were the primary focus of the sub-committee, and Patrick Pearse's school at St Enda's was considered the natural home for these boys. Rónán Ceannt, Daly Clarke, two of the Mallin boys, the sons of Frank Lawless were all educated there, their fees paid by the INAAVDF.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although recent scholarship has argued that Lillie Connolly refused to send her son Roddy to St Enda's, it seems that he attended for a brief period, and his fees were paid.Footnote ⁶⁰ Apart from school fees, the INAAVDF also covered the associated costs for kitting the children out for school, transport costs home during the school holidays, and regular pocket-money.Footnote ⁶¹ Sending pupils to St Enda's was, obviously, also a roundabout way of providing income to Mrs Pearse and her daughter and keeping the school going, an imperative which became all the more pressing after the summer of 1917, when the Association purchased Cullenswood House, anxious to maintain ‘the provision of a school of high national character for the boys for whom the Executive has certain responsibilities as well as for the boys of other families’.Footnote ⁶² This type of circular, mutually beneficial support was a recurrent feature of how the INAAVDF operated: for instance, after Harry Boland had been granted £200 to establish his drapery shop, further grant or loan recipients who had applied for expenses to cover the cost of lost clothing were directed to spend their money at Boland's on Middle Abbey Street.Footnote ⁶³ The fitting-out of funded school-children was also carried out at this and other National Aid-funded premises.

But while for the most part, care of the ‘orphaned’ children consisted of paying their school fees and sending a few shillings pocket money once a term, a very real problem arose with the MacDonagh children, Donagh and Bairbre, who were truly orphaned in July 1917. A special fund had been established in June 1917 to provide a seaside holiday for the children of the executed, killed, or imprisoned men, and a large house at Skerries was rented for two months. The first tranche of guests included Grace Plunkett, Lillie Connolly and three of her children, Áine and Rónán Ceannt, Mrs Mallin and her five children, and Muriel and Bairbre MacDonagh – her four-year-old son, Donagh, suffering from tuberculosis contracted earlier that year through a live vaccination, was hospitalized.Footnote ⁶⁴ Although the holiday got off to a good start – Lily O'Brennan, also present, wrote contentedly to Fred Allan that ‘the weather is glorious and everyone is in the best of form’Footnote ⁶⁵ – tragedy struck when Muriel MacDonagh suffered a heart attack while swimming in the sea on 9 July; the frantic search for her body came to an end when Rory O'Connor discovered it a mile down the coast the next day.Footnote ⁶⁶ The INAAVDF took over and paid for all the funeral arrangements – presaging a similar, more overtly political financing of Thomas Ashe's funeral later that year – with the purchase of a prominent plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, a plum spot close to O'Donovan Rossa.Footnote ⁶⁷

Despite recent claims to the contrary, the INAAVDF took a proprietary interest in the future of the MacDonagh children.Footnote ⁶⁸ After the death of Muriel MacDonagh, an ugly dispute erupted over the future of the two MacDonagh children, exacerbated by religious differences: the MacDonagh family were devout Catholics, while the Gifford women had been raised in the Church of Ireland after their parents' Palatine pact.Footnote ⁶⁹ This unfortunate family dispute was worsened by the sanctimonious attitude of the sub-committee appointed to enquire into the question of the MacDonagh minors. This sub-committee appeared to interpret quite literally Thomas MacDonagh's recorded wish that the country would treat his children like wards, writing pointedly to Katherine Wilson, Muriel's sister, that ‘the Executive Committee represents the country in this matter, and your Sub Committee feel assured that the ladies and the gentlemen constituting that committee will not fail in their duty nor shirk their responsibility in the matter’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Protracted negotiations and threatened legal action followed, and the case was complicated further by the death of Frederick Gifford, the children's grandfather, in September 1917; the Association wished to wait until Gifford's estate was granted probate, and the MacDonagh children's eventual bequest determined, until deciding on making permanent arrangements for their upkeep.Footnote ⁷¹ A final compromise was reached in 1920, when two uncles, John MacDonagh and Joseph Donnelly, acted as trustees for the children, and administered the trust established on their behalf, amounting to £1,500 in late 1921 when the tawdry matter was finally drawn to a close.Footnote ⁷²

But financial support for widows and orphans was only one feature of the activities of the Association. The bulk of the time and energy expended by the various committees was concerned with provision for the dependents of interned and imprisoned men. Dublin cases were dealt with by the city distribution committee, under Louise Gavan Duffy, while cases in the rest of Ireland – Galway forming a large part of the claims met – were looked after by the country grants committee under Michael Davitt and later Liam Clarke and Michael Staines. Applications for assistance were customarily subject to assessment: a team of ‘lady visitors’ operated in Dublin, calling on prospective claimants to determine need and to investigate their credentials, while written references from local grandees and parish priests were sought in provincial cases. With the responsibilities of the ‘lady visitors’ gradually expanding to include assessment of the general well-being of each household alongside financial need, the INAAVDF thus developed along quite sophisticated structures as an administrator of political – or politicized – welfare. This became even more apparent with the widespread release of interned and imprisoned men in December 1916 and June 1917. Previous to this, the Irish National Relief Fund in Great Britain had assumed responsibility for prisoner welfare: the Glasgow branch sent in papers, books, and games, Manchester sent a weekly supply of fruit, rice, and sugar, London sent in the cash with which the Frongoch men purchased food in the camp canteen, Liverpool sent in gloves, mittens, and other clothing, while the Cork committee insisted on sole responsibility for the internees’ tobacco supply.Footnote ⁷³ The British branches also assisted with facilitating visits to Frongoch, monitored conditions there, provided information to Dublin colleagues across the republican movement who were mobilizing public opinion on the prisoner issue, and liaised with MPs Laurence Ginnell and Alfie King, who were conducting a very effective parliamentary campaign highlighting inadequacies in the treatment of Irish prisoners.Footnote ⁷⁴ The impending Christmas of 1916 was of great concern, and much energy was devoted to planning a proper celebratory meal for the Frongoch men; the release of the internees on Christmas Eve meant that huge quantities of geese, turkeys, hams, corned beef, and butter languished at Frongoch post office for a month.Footnote ⁷⁵

Although a welcome development in terms of the wider goals of the movement, their release created a very real challenge for the INAAVDF, whose books were flooded with unemployed republicans seeking assistance. The employment sub-committee was established to secure positions for these men and an unemployment allowance was allocated to most of those seeking work. Those in receipt of this allowance were obliged to present themselves at the William Street office of the sub-committee on a weekly basis, and demonstrate that they had in fact been seeking work – in effect, signing on.Footnote ⁷⁶ Assistance grants were unilaterally voted to the more eminent of the released men: Eamon de Valera received almost £600 in the summer of 1916, while Seán McEntee and Austin Stack received payments of £300 and £200.Footnote ⁷⁷ Not everyone accepted the assistance; Eoin MacNeill declined a grant of £1,000, while W. T. Cosgrave, having initially returned cheques amounting to £600, stating that ‘there are cases of much greater losses than mine’, was obliged to come cap in hand seven months later and apply for a loan.Footnote ⁷⁸ Business loans also fell under the remit of the employment sub-committee, and republicans, including Harry Boland and Domhnall Ó Buachalla, applied for and received loans enabling them to set up in business.Footnote ⁷⁹ But these unemployed men – 550 at the beginning of 1917 – were a severe drain on the Association's resources, and various attempts were made to reduce their numbers. In February 1917, a resolution was passed stopping the grants of all single men without dependents who had been in receipt of unemployment grants since August 1916, reducing the grants of men with dependents by 25 per cent, and similarly reducing the grants of men who had returned at Christmas, prompting a slew of distressed letters.Footnote ⁸⁰ There was also a determination within the Association to root out fraudulent claims, leading to the establishment of an investigation sub-committee, to which suspect claimants were summoned – they did not always turn up. Scams were certainly operating: one Timothy Finn, resident in Belfast, was in receipt of a grant from the Belfast branch, while his family were being supported by the city grants committee in Dublin. Moreover, it was discovered that he had previously tapped up the Volunteer Dependents’ Fund in the last days of its existence. James Farrelly of Ardee seems to have forgotten to inform the Association that he had in fact secured work, continuing to claim an unemployment allowance for some months.Footnote ⁸¹ Michael Colbert, brother of the executed Con, claimed that he had lost his job as a jockey and horse trainer in Athea, County Limerick, through discrimination after the Rising. An investigation revealed that Colbert had in fact had his licence suspended before the Rising for foul riding, and recommended that no further assistance should be given.Footnote ⁸²

Given that money was concerned, internal friction was a recurrent feature of INAAVDF business. While simmering tension between the two wings of the united organization were generally kept in check, the Cork branch, whose chief republicans had so bungled their participation in the Rising, soon began complaining.Footnote ⁸³ Their unhappiness ostensibly centred around inconsistencies in the allocation of grants, Edward Sheehan writing angrily to Fred Allan that ‘there is both extravagance in some cases and serious neglect in others while there is also an amount of muddling arising from inexperience and want of thought’. More seriously, the Cork branch threatened to withhold the substantial contributions being raised in the city until their complaints had been addressed.Footnote ⁸⁴ In reality, it seems provincial chippiness was to blame: Cork republicans, sensitive to perceived slights to their honour since their less than impressive showing at Easter week, resented their people getting dole-outs from Dublin. When an arrangement was reached whereby cheques were sent directly to the Cork branch for distribution, they quickly settled down.Footnote ⁸⁵ Problems also occurred when the flood of ex-prisoners and ex-internees began to get restless, complaining at the curtailment of allowances in early 1917 and that deserving cases had been neglected. Organizing themselves into a Deportees Association and an Employment Registry Office, headed by Barney Mellows and Helena Molony, ex-prisoners attempted to exert more control over the allocation of funds, proposing that they should elect a special sub-committee ‘to carry out the preliminary investigation of all cases of unemployment, allowances, claims and complaints … in the honest hope that they may shift some of your burdens to their own shoulders and give a helping hand along the path of duty which stretches ribbon-like before you’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The INAAVDF was not swayed by this flowery language and resisted this attempt, pointing to the co-option of three ex-internees on to the executive committee as a gesture of good faith.Footnote ⁸⁷ A more serious incident occurred when Vincent Poole of the Irish Citizen Army, furious that his comrades were not getting ‘fair play’, burst into the committee room with a pistol; William O'Brien coolly stood him down.Footnote ⁸⁸ These types of resentments, petty jealousies, and over-zealous territoriality continued to bubble away sporadically throughout the INAAVDF's existence, but did not disrupt either the collection of subscriptions or their distribution in any serious manner. They do, however, along with the priorities evident in the allocation of assistance, underscore the hierarchies inherent even at this early stage of the regeneration of the republican movement. It might have been a movement predicated on equality, but some were clearly more equal than others.

III

The expansion of the INAAVDF's activities, and its growing success in mobilizing nationalist Ireland, did not occur in a vacuum, of course, but in the context of the rapid sacralization of the Easter rebellion and especially of the rebels themselves. The template for this modern fusion of Catholic martyrology with political Anglophobia was forged with the execution of the ‘Manchester martyrs’ in November 1867 and their subsequent commemoration. As Gary Owens has argued, these events formed ‘part of the mental furniture of Catholic nationalist Ireland, serving as convenient and well-used reference points for constructing the myth of martyrs’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Building on this trope, activists and survivors of the Rising consciously sought to inscribe the Easter rebels and especially the executed men, into the pantheon of nationalist Ireland. The religious angle was particularly important in this regard, and as Fearghal McGarry has underlined, the Catholic church provided the medium through which public sympathy for the Easter rebels was initially channelled.Footnote ⁹⁰ The ‘month's mind’ masses, and subsequent requiem and memorial masses, were large-scale affairs, with churches bursting with sympathizers.Footnote ⁹¹ As Ernie O'Malley recalled, the religious ceremonies also provided a focus for collections, and the copper and silver poured into hats and caps at the church doors and chapel gates were a recurrent feature of the monies forwarded to the Association from the summer of 1916 onwards.Footnote ⁹² These religious ceremonies – and the attendant fund-raising – were also important mechanisms in the awakening of republican sentiment among some of those who later participated in the violence after 1919: Ernie O'Malley, as mentioned above, was an early collector at these church doors, while Todd Andrews and Charlie Dalton, both later members of the Squad, largely dated their radicalization to the Requiem Masses which took place in Dublin in June 1916.Footnote ⁹³

Central to this process of sanctification was, of course, the Catholic Bulletin, the periodical edited by J. J. O'Kelly, committee member of the amalgamated INAAVDF and author of the final general report on the fund. Writing approvingly of the religious services in memory of the executed men, O'Kelly proclaimed that they constituted ‘a general union of prayer for Ireland, amounting almost to exaltation’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Bulletin was immensely popular in the post-Rising period – its July issue sold out within a week – and in focusing primarily on hagiographical portraits of the executed and killed of 1916, as well as providing details of those sentenced to penal servitude, it inscribed itself into the sanctification of the Rising.Footnote ⁹⁵ Owing to O'Kelly's position on the INAAVDF, the Bulletin was also an important publicist of the activities of the organization. The Bulletin called stentoriously for donations to the fund, and in December 1916, printed a series of evocative photographs of the widows and children of the men executed or killed in action in an attempt to stir public sympathy further and prompt a resurgence in donations from within Ireland.Footnote ⁹⁶ Alongside the Bulletin ran the proliferation of flags, mourning badges, and mortuary cards. These provided an initial focus for this surge of popular sentiment which remained an abiding feature of the post-Rising period, echoing the similar explosion of commemorative material around the vainquers in the months following the French Revolution.Footnote ⁹⁷ Clair Wills has noted the fetishization of such symbols of support for the Easter rebels in the weeks after the Rising, but what has often gone unnoticed is that most of these activities – especially flag selling and the printing of mortuary cards – were done under the auspices of the INAAVDF. It was, undoubtedly, tapping into an existing sense of public radicalization, but it is clear that the INAAVDF sought to mould popular sentiment to its own ends.Footnote ⁹⁸

Alongside the solemnity of religious and memorial activities, there was a lighter aspect to the public engagement with the INAAVDF. An entertainments sub-committee was tasked with raising money through a variety of means: these ranged from concerts and recitals to whist drives, dances, aeríochtaí, and sporting occasions. Although the entertainments sub-committee was available for advice and assistance, the bulk of these occasions were very much local initiatives, in some instances organized under the auspices of local branches but often arranged by enterprising individuals; in the localities, events like these provided a useful way of maintaining public engagement with the INAAVDF when subscriptions had slowed from within Ireland itself. Public activities ran the risk of unwanted police attention, however: a number of court-martials were held after a benefit concert in Forester's Hall, when Patrick Holohan, Vincent O'Doherty, and John Milroy were charged with causing disaffection by singing songs entitled ‘The Felons Of Our Land’, ‘Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week’, and ‘The Grand Old Dame Britannia’, and by reciting poems ‘Vengeance’ and ‘Reading Jail’ – apparently inspired by the Oscar Wilde verse of the same name.Footnote ⁹⁹ This concert had attracted some 400 people, and the widespread popularity of these special events was perhaps the most tangible public evidence of the shift in the political temperature. Best known among this range of fund-raising activities are a number of GAA benefit tournaments; the proceeds of all-Ireland competitions staged through 1917 and 1918 were allocated to the INAAVDF, as well as individual matches providing the focus for ad hoc collections.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Unwanted attention from the authorities was not, however, the only potential difficulty; on one occasion, an INAAVDF dance provoked numerous letters of complaints due to the ‘American-style dancing’ which took place there, prompting a swift apology.Footnote ¹⁰¹ American events, however, provided their own controversy, as evidenced by the Irish Relief Fund Bazaar held in Madison Square Garden in October 1916. The subject of a hostile report in the New York Times, attention was drawn to the low turnout – no more than 3,000 – and the high representation of German-Americans among the visitors. This Teutonic turn – the Bazaar being ‘a pro-German as well as a pro-Irish affair’ – was reflected in the items on sale: pictures of the Kaiser conferring with his generals, multiple pictures of Casement, bronze plaques of the German coat of arms, reproductions of German shells, and a model of a German U-Boat.Footnote ¹⁰² In contrast, the most widely covered Irish cultural event, the flagship Irish Gift Sale in the Mansion House, avoided any excessively Germanic overtones. Advertised as imminent since June 1916, it finally took place in April 1917. Alongside blank canvases by William Orpen and John Lavery, on which they promised to paint the portrait of the purchaser, much of the items presented for sale tapped into the fascination for relics of the Easter rebels: they included James Connolly's gloves, ‘Edward’ de Valera's pocket flask; Richard Kent's silver-plated biscuit box, a pikehead formerly owned by the O'Rahilly, Éamonn Ceannt's gold fountain pen, and Emmet memorabilia collected by Patrick Pearse.Footnote ¹⁰³

As indicated above, the INAAVDF did attract widespread official attention and was the subject of alarm within Dublin Castle from as early as June 1916. General Maxwell took particularly against the VDF, proscribing their flag days under martial law regulations, and in 1917, with the rising star of Sinn Féin clear, Chief Secretary Henry Duke issued orders to ‘keep note of any information bearing on the origin and use of [INAAVDF] funds, and to ascertain if possible whether they are being used for charity or for purposes of the Sinn Féin agitation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Similar suspicions were evidently harboured by at least some of the Redmondites, who during the by-election campaigns of 1917 muttered darkly about where the funding for Sinn Féin's extensive campaigns was emanating from. These allegations were finally given light of day during the South Longford by-election, when Longford Leader editorial, owned by Irish Party MP James Farrell, mused whether the funds were coming from ‘German gold or – more cruel still – the Irish National Aid Association’. The National Aid reacted strongly to this allegation and issued a writ for libel; on the advice of John Redmond, Farrell printed a grovelling retraction.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A lengthy British investigation into the fund in 1920, following the seizure of all the accounts and minute books, concluded, somewhat regretfully, that ‘a careful examination … fails to disclose any prima facie evidence that the funds were used for purposes other than those for which the subscriptions were invited’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Despite the care taken by the INAAVDF of monies received and dispersed, as well as rigorous accounting procedures, official suspicions were not without justification. The INAAVDF was intimately linked to the re-organization of the republican movement. This achievement has often wrongly been ascribed solely to Michael Collins, secretary from February 1917; as Hart has commented, it was during this period that ‘the legend of Michael Collins, Superclerk, was born’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Collins was undoubtedly breathtakingly efficient in his handling of the association's bureaucracy, but the assumption that he used the cover of the INAAVDF effectively to reorganize the IRB around the country is incorrect. It is clear that Collins was very much desk-bound in Dublin, while the countrywide project was carried out initially by Liam Clarke and then by Michael Staines, both IRB men of long standing. Despite the many hours and miles put in by Clarke and Staines across the length and breadth of the country, using the pretext of investigating provincial claims as a cover for reviving both IRB and Volunteer activities, both men were ultimately alienated by the excessive bureaucracy of the INAAVDF; Staines, in particular, was infuriated by the denial of his application to set up his own business, while Clarke grew frustrated at his excessive workload.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nevertheless, as Hart has also noted, Collins was the face of the association in Dublin, the ‘go to’ man for the growing separatist movement, boosting immeasurably his profile across nationalist Ireland. The INAAVDF was, therefore, a crucial factor in the construction of the Collins legend.

IV

This examination of the INAAVDF reveals a number of features of the public response to the Easter Rising and the structures and development of Irish nationalism in the post-Rising period. While this article has emphasized the importance of the INAAVDF as a unique welfarist organization operating in extraordinary political circumstances, it is important to situate the INAAVDF, and its two predecessor organizations, within a number of contexts. The first is that of a longer tradition of significant public concern for the welfare of political prisoners. The amnesty campaigns of the nineteenth century had established a powerful template whereby public sympathy for the plight of prisoners could be channelled into a fully fledged campaign for release; the INAADVF built upon this tradition and, importantly, preserved both its activities and the mobilized public sentiment from the vampirist tendencies of the constitutional nationalist mainstream.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the 1860s and 1890s, constitutional nationalism participated in these amnesty campaigns: anxious either to construct or to safeguard its hegemony within mainstream Irish opinion, the conceptualization of sympathy for political prisoners was sufficiently flexible enough to encompass a broad church of nationalist opinion.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the aftermath of the Rising, political identity in Ireland became much more exclusivist; although individual branches of the INAAVDF certainly encompassed a spectrum of nationalist outlook, and the act of subscribing and collecting may have drawn mainstream constitutional nationalists into the slipstream of radicalism, at an executive level the INAAVDF was emphatically republican in its outlook. Moreover, the failure of the Irish Parliamentary Party to establish control over the INAAVDF – and the lack of a coherent effort to do so – underlines the rapid disestablishment of that party's position at the heart of Irish nationalist life.

However, as indicated earlier, the success of the INAAVDF can also be fruitfully understood within the context of the proliferation of fund-raising activities associated to varying degrees with the war effort. As Caitriona Clear has recently pointed out, this largely entailed the ‘massive mobilisation of the charitable activity that had become the particular domain of upper- and middle-class women.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Clear's observation also raises another question: that of gender. Clearly, the INAAVDF could not have operated without the extremely hard work of a number of dedicated women: Louise Gavan Duffy, Áine O'Rahilly, Kitty O'Doherty, Sorcha McMahon, and Elizabeth Corr. It is also clear that women did much of the ground work for the INAAVDF, visiting the houses of claimants, completing routine clerical and secretarial duties within the office, and co-ordinating the production of care packages for republican prisoners.Footnote ¹¹² The VDF had been a female-dominated affair, and when the two associations merged, this ensured that female voices were present on the new executive committee. But it would be incorrect to consider the INAAVDF as an early victory for female political participation; as suggested, women did predominantly lower-level work, and the sense remains that decision-making was very much a male preserve. As local branches began to flourish and as the ex-prisoners resumed their place in political life, women were marginalized, to the extent that the ladies distribution committee – which carried out the majority of work relating to Dublin claims – was excluded from the 1917 annual convention, to their bitter and vocal disgust.Footnote ¹¹³

Most importantly, the INAAVDF provided a vital link between the earlier and later phases of advanced nationalism. In this regard, as William Murphy has observed, its significance to the development of the republican campaign after 1917 has been utterly underestimated.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Its activities maintained the morale of the separatist movement at its lowest point, and kept together activists who might otherwise have drifted away. The list of men who received grants or loans of the INAAVDF is a republican who's who, while the women associated with the organization – Rosamond Jacob, Lily O'Brennan, Áine Ceannt, Máire Comerford, Kathleen Clarke, and Áine O'Rahilly – would form the core of feminist republicanism. The INAAVDF served to lock individuals more firmly into the republican network, both those who benefited from and those who contributed time and money to the organization. It also demonstrated to the prisoners and internees that their families would be cared for in their absence, and eased the reintegration of ex-prisoners and ex-internees into nationalist and ordinary life. The INAAVDF fitted neatly with the existing structures of nationalist Ireland – into Gaelic League and GAA activities, for example – and provided a focus for public sympathy and attention in the aftermath of the Rising. As argued above, it effectively channelled this sense of public sympathy, and its flag days, mourning badges, and appeals for subscriptions encouraged and solidified the sanctification of the executed leaders. The records of the Association also demonstrate the continued importance of the American dollar to nationalism in Ireland; Irish America was a seemingly inexhaustible well of financial support for a variety of nationalist projects from the 1880s to the 1990s, and in this instance was crucial in sustaining the activities and the support offered by the Association after the flow of subscriptions from within Ireland began to slow towards the end of 1916. The most important features of the INAAVDF arguably lie in its links to the later development of a broad-based republican campaign after 1919. Equally, the example set by the INAAVDF segued into the more overtly politicized Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependents Fund – often with the same personnel, particularly republican women. Republican prisoner support organizations have continued to play a significant role in generating awareness and broad-based support for the Irish republican project, strikingly so in the case of the ‘H-Block’ prisoners in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland and the subsequent growth of Provisional Sinn Féin as an electoral force.Footnote ¹¹⁵

As a highly efficient welfare agency with genuine humanitarian credentials, the INAAVDF presented itself as the beginnings of an alternate civil government between 1916 and 1918, presaging the establishment of the Dáil Éireann departments in 1919; its numerous branches offered a ready-made infrastructure on to which Sinn Féin could later graft itself. More broadly, the history of the INAAVDF offers a more nuanced reading of the radicalization of public opinion in Ireland after the Easter Rising. Popular sentiment did not drift, inchoate and aimless, after the executions until the by-elections of 1917 and the general election of 1918 gave voice to the hardening of political outlooks; rather, the INAAVDF channelled, coaxed, and marshalled sympathy for the executed men into a wider advanced nationalist project. In this regard, while David Fitzpatrick has suggested that on the spectrum of nationalist activity, participation in violence lies at one extreme and voting at the other with organizational membership somewhere in between, contributing to a fund like the INAAVDF might be another median point, and mapping the social geography of subscriptions can offer an alternate picture of nationalist activism from 1916 to 1919.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In this regard, the INAAVDF is an important example of the bridging of revolt and revolution, as well as counting among the most effective instances of political welfarism in twentieth-century Ireland.