Cuimhní cinn a breacadh 1918-19 : an tríú cuid

(Scríofa agus mé i mo leaba aibreán 1918. Baile Átha Cliath)

When the Oireachtas of 1915 came together in Dundalk the European war had been raging for a year. A great number of the delegates were volunteers. At the Ardfheis it was obvious that politics were more or less every-where in the air. There were many signs that I would have a disagreeable year of it, several items in the agenda being apparently more or less [directed at] levelled against myself personally. I presided for two or three days, effect-ively enough and prevented a spoilt taking place between the League and some excellent priests of the North, Father Mat[?] Maguire and others who could not express themselves in Irish, and who were going to leave the League, and actually got up to walk out of the room with their adherents when the Ardfheis refused to hear them [saying] speaking what they wanted to say in English. (botún) I convinced them to remain as a split of that kind would be the beginning

of the end of the Gaelic League, and I stopped them from going out and got leave with extreme difficulty for Father Mat[?] to speak in English.

Padraig O Máille of Oughterard had in name of some Connemara branch a resolution on the agenda that the objects of the G. League should be extended by adding to them this [?] object, to make Ireland independent of [all] any foreign rule, “Gall-smacht”, was the word. Up to this the G. League had had only two aims, one was to revive the language, the other to encourage native industries. This third aim, if carried, would make the League into a [purely] political body, and I could not have stood over it. I had again and again said in public that the League was non-political and that I would never while I was president allow it to be made a political body. By speaking thus I had won a great deal of support in time past, Horace Plunkett and others. In fact I was pledged to the neck [in the eyes of] before the country against a political Gaelic League, (botún), and I had often said

on the Coiste Gnotha that if the League became polit-ical I would be the first man to leave it. Pádraig O Máille’s motion as it stood was a plain challenge, and I had made up my mind irrevocably that if it was passed I [sh] would gather up my papers, vacate the chair, and walk out of the Ardfheis. Unfortunately Colonel Moore who knew nothing of all this he not having come near the Gaelic League for years proposed that instead of the words saor ó Ghallsmacht “free from foreign domination” the simple word “free” should be substituted. (botún) Over and over again I pressed him and the others to say what kind of freedom they meant, for if it was freedom from English rule they meant, I said the resolution [it] was political. But Col-onel Moore insisted on saying that Asquith had said that we were a free people, when he talked in

[D] Dublin about “a free gift from a free people”. Nobody would define the word free, and I said I would in-terpret it during the year in a non-political sense. O Máilles resolution was then passed by a large major-ity, and after that (botún) the election to the Coiste Gnotha took place. Now I was told by several people that Seán O Murthuile had got 50 proxies which instead of distributing to various Irish speakers as he was meant to do, he had handed over in one bunch to the secretary of the Sinn Fein society in Dundalk, who handed them over to fifty Sinn Feiners, who did not know Irish, did not care for the language, had never even joined a branch of the Gaelic League, but who now got their orders to walk in as delegates with these [tickets] papers in their hands and vote on a pre-arranged ticket for all the Sinn Feiners and politicians and followers of Arthur Griffith

who were candidates for (botún) membership of the Coiste Gnotha. These men walked in, voted, and were never seen again at the proceedings, but they assured the election of a (botún) political Coiste Gnotha, or one preponderantly political – though indeed I think that even without their help [that would have been so] things would not have been very much different. That night I did some furious thinking. About 12 o clock at night I ascertained from O’Daly how the voting was going, and it was far enough advanced by that time to show me that there would not be more than a dozen men on the new Coiste Gnotha who would support any consistently non-political attitude, and that at least two men who were tried or convicted for treason felony were being put [on] high up in the voting. That decided me finally. I wrote out a letter addressed