'VOLUNTEERS COMPLETELY DECEIVED' EOIN MacNEILL's MANUSCRIPT COUNTERMANDING ORDER, 22nd APRIL 1916. A single sheet of folded notepaper, 6 7/8 x 4 ¼ ins [175 mm x 108 mm], embossed at head with...

'VOLUNTEERS COMPLETELY DECEIVED' EOIN MacNEILL's MANUSCRIPT COUNTERMANDING ORDER, 22nd APRIL 1916. A single sheet of folded notepaper, 6 7/8 x 4 ¼ ins [175 mm x 108 mm], embossed at head with address, Woodtown Park / Rathfarnham / Co. Dublin, bearing the words in ink, '22 April 1916 / Volunteers completely / deceived. All orders / for to-morrow Sunday / are entirely cancelled. / Eoin MacNeill' The text is that of the celebrated notice circulated country-wide by couriers acting on MacNeill's instructions on the evening of Easter Saturday and the morning of Easter Sunday 1916, with the aim of forcing cancellation of plans for a Rising of Volunteers on Sunday, of which MacNeill - nominally Chief of Staff of the Volunteers - had become aware only a few days previously. After some prevarication, and after receiving news of the failure of the Kerry arms landing organised by Roger Casement, MacNeill finally decided on the morning of Easter Saturday that it was his duty to seek to prevent the planned Rising, by all means short of informing the authorities. He drafted the short statement above and sent for men whom he trusted, instructing them to deliver the countermanding order to as many as possible of the local commanders, travelling where necessary through the night. He himself brought an expanded version of the notice to the Sunday Independent, where it was inserted as an advertisement. The countermand was partly successful. It caused a good deal of confusion, especially in areas remote from Dublin, where local commanders could not establish what was going on. Consequently there was no Rising in Cork or Limerick; a few weeks later the local Volunteer officers were shipped off to Reading, Wakefield, Lewes and Frongoch without having fired a shot. In Dublin, the I.R.B. group led by Pearse, Connolly and Tom Clarke made the bold decision to delay by 24 hours, and to strike on Easter Monday with whatever forces they could muster, come what may. Much of the British garrison went to the races at Fairyhouse, and the rest is history. It is not known how many copies of MacNeill's document were prepared. There must have been at least a dozen, perhaps as many as twenty but very few copies of the order have survived. There is one in the National Museum and another in the National Library with slightly different phrasing. We have been unable to trace any other. Presumably most copies were discarded as irrelevant once the Rising actually began, or were lost in the confusion of battle. It is certainly extremely rare. The present copy has an impeccable provenance, by family descent from Volunteer Edward Moran of South Kildare, a Gaelic League and Volunteer activist, later Commander of the 6th Battalion of the I.R.A.'s Carlow Brigade, three times imprisoned in the 1916-23 period (including Frongoch after the Rising). There are references to his activities in witness statements recently released by the Bureau of Military History, see BMH.WS0320, Thomas Harris TD; BMH.WS0850, Major Patrick Colgan (pp. 7, 8, 10); BMH.WS0564, Comdt Thomas F. Byrne (pp.17-19). BMH.WS1497 (pp. 72, 76, 77) refers to Moran's activities in Frongoch. A document of the highest significance and rarity, which changed the immediate course of Irish history to a significant degree. Its effects in the longer term are still open to debate, and with the exception of the Proclamation itself, it is probably the most important and influential document of the period of the Rising. Eoin MacNeill and His Countermand Order Written by Diarmaid Ferriter, February 2014 The decision of Eoin Mac Neill, as commander of the Irish Volunteers, to issue a countermand to the order for Volunteers to mobilise on Easter Sunday 1916 was a crucial intervention born of anger at a serious deception. It was a pivotal decision in modern Irish history and a defining event in MacNeill's career and in relation to his legacy. It was his reaction to the deceit of those in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) who were intent on using planned mobilisation of the Volunteers for normal drilling purposes that Sunday in order to launch a rebellion to declare an Irish republic. Mac Neill's countermand led to the postponement of what became the Easter Rising until Monday, and ensured that a lot less Volunteers mobilised than was hoped and that the Rising was heavily concentrated in Dublin. By issuing this countermand MacNeill prevented the IRB having cover for a nationwide rising. Two and a half years earlier, on 1 November 1913, MacNeill had writtien an article entitled ''The North began'' in An Claideamh Soluis, the newspaper of the Gaelic League. It called for the formation of an Irish Volunteer force to emulate the Ulster Volunteer Force established in January 1913. MacNeill was subsequently approached by Irish separatists associated with the IRB and asked to take the lead in forming the Irish Volunteers. It was launched in Dublin on 25 November 1913, with MacNeill as commander-in-chief. The formation of the Volunteers marked a significant increase in political temperature, but there was also vagueness about its aims and disagreements about its methods and who should control it. The third home rule bill had been introduced in April 1912 and was expected to come into force in the summer of 1914 and the Irish Volunteers was ostensibly formed to ensure it would be implemented, but what did that mean in practice? MacNeill characterised the Volunteers as a defensive rather than defiant organisation: '' the Irish Volunteers, if they are a military force, are not a militarist force, and their object is to secure Ireland's rights and liberties and nothing else''. This was interpreted in different ways, and the Volunteers, eventually numbering roughly 150,000, was a catch-all group; of the 30 men selected to form its Provisional Committee, most were affiliated to other organisations and 12 belonged to the IRB. With the outbreak of the Great War, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond appealed to individual Irish Volunteers to join the war effort as a moral imperative and MacNeill accused him of mental and moral corruption and insisted British parties were conspiring to defeat home rule which only the Irish Volunteers could prevent. A split ensued, with Redmond supported by a majority of Volunteers, by a ratio of 15 to one, now termed the National Volunteers, while MacNeill retained command of the minority, keeping the original title. For all his anger and accusations at the time of this split, and despite the postponement of the implementation of home rule due to the war, MacNeill, though not a pacifist, did not believe an Irish Volunteer uprising was feasible or justified, as it would lead to suppression of the organisation and abandonment of home rule. His logic, as enunciated in February 1916, was clear; the only justification for rebellion would be ''deep and widespread popular discontent'', but ''no such condition exists in Ireland''. As far as he was concerned any rebellion by the Volunteers should be as a result of a British act of aggression or because a rebellion would have a reasonable chance of success. His opponents believed the defensive strategy left Britain in the driving seat; the IRB operated surreptitiously under the cloak of the Volunteers, laying plans for a rebellion, and MacNeill was reluctant to confront them for fear of more splits. While it was the case that the longer the war went on the more dissatisfied nationalist Ireland became, the IRB was still a dedicated elite and the Irish Volunteer movement on the eve of the 1916 Rising was still only 15,000 strong. Early in April 1916 the IRB group convinced MacNeill that a crackdown on the Volunteers by the British was imminent by producing a ''Castle document'', which though based on genuine contingency plans, had been altered by Joseph Plunkett to make the situation appear urgent. Only on Maundy Thursday, 20 April, did MacNeill discover that the IRB group was using preparations for a general mobilisation on Easter weekend to bring about a rising on Easter Sunday. MacNeill initially acquiesced, but after discovering that an arms ship sent from Germany to assist the rebels had been sunk, and that the Castle document had been forged, he had a stormy meeting with the rebel planners and then sent out messengers around the country, including Edward Moran in Kildare, ordering a general demobilisation, following this up with an advertisement to that effect in the Sunday Independent. As a result of MacNeill's countermand, the 1916 Rising was almost entirely confined to Dublin; even there, the numbers were only about a quarter of what they might otherwise have been. The countermand order was one reason why the Rising commenced in confused circumstances; crucially, it was also a reflection of disagreement about the Rising's validity. MacNeill's reputation has been dominated by his role in issuing the countermand order. By the 1960s and 1970s, sympathisers sought to rehabilitate his reputation; historian F.X.Martin insisted he was not just a figurehead or ''front'' behind which the radicals plotted. There was a tendency to portray him as a rational man of peace in contrast to extremist messianic republicans. Such a simplistic interpretation fails to do justice to the complexity of the background to the 1916 Rising. Regardless of the effectiveness of his leadership, MacNeill's decisive role in the formation of the Volunteers is a significant legacy and given that the Volunteers metamorphosed into the IRA that fought the war of independence, his stance on violence is particularly worthy of assessment. He insisted in February 1916 ''what we call our country is not a poetical abstraction?it is our duty to get our country on side and not be content with the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong''. That contention went to the heart of the controversies of nationalist Ireland almost a century ago and MacNeill's countermand and what followed need to be seen in the context of different and evolving concepts of Irish nationalism. Definitions of loyalty and legitimate violence were contested during this period of multiple allegiances and the outbreak of the Great War had complicated them further MacNeill took no part in the Rising but was tried by court-martial and sentenced to penal servitude for life; he was released under amnesty in June 1917. Despite recriminations, he took an active role in the reconstituted Sinn Féin party. In 1918 he was elected to the first Dáil for Sinn Féin as agreed nationalist candidate for Derry City and as representative of the National University of Ireland. In May 1921 he was re-elected for both constituencies in the elections for the northern parliament and southern parliament (second Dáil) respectively. A supporter of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, he subsequently served as the Free State's minister for Education from 1922-5. He lost his Dáil seat in 1927 and returned to academia as Professor of Early Irish history at UCD where he remained until retirement in 1941.

View more View less