recruiting; little organisational activity; no drilling; and few public political meetings due to heckling and violence19 – was actually a bonus in the long term because a complete change of direction and emphasis in military training ensued. Evidence of the change is available in the pages of the Irish Volunteer, the organisation’s weekly newspaper which was both its mouthpiece and its vade mecum. Before August 1914, it was routine to have articles published on first aid; the technology of modern military rifles; the application of the semaphore alphabet to military usage; body choreography in rapid-fire shooting; and the organisational mechanics of drill practice.
But after August 1914, the norm was the following: field practices; defending positions in open terrain; reconnoitring; and skirmishing.20 Also, vis-à-vis the content of the officer test syllabi, the rubrics of a display army, originally fashioned for propagandist purposes at the height of the Home Rule crisis, were replaced by the rubrics of a guerrilla army, now fashioned for fighting purposes should enforced conscription be introduced.21 In this instance, the norm was the following: drill, skirmishing and outposts; physical drill, bayonet and rifle fighting; scouting and communications; entrenchments and cover; engineering; camping, sanitation, hygiene; ambulance and first aid; musketry; tactics; and mechanical instruments, tools and street fighting.22
By then, come what may, Mulcahy’s battalion was considered to be the best of the four city battalions, i.e. from the evidence of the officer examinations during the period, February–March 1914, ‘owing to the large number of good NCO’s [Non-Commissioned Officers, Mulcahy included]’.23 Also, ‘C’ Company, otherwise known as ‘the City Company’,24 was bidding fair to be ‘the smartest Co. in Dublin’,25 with public praise along the lines of: ‘This Company is now beyond ordinary company strength and a skeleton half company is now in course of formation’,26 and ‘Number of men on parade 103 – a record muster … Contributions to general funds; rifle and uniform funds far exceed all previous records. The delegates held a committee meeting with fifteen selected of the company, and steps were taken to at once form a cycling section and a first aid section.’27
By the same token, at the end of what one might call the Home Rule period, Mulcahy became a more active IRB member. For example, during the evening after the Howth gunrunning episode of 26 July 1914, ostensibly taking a lead from Maurice Moore, then chief inspector of the Irish Volunteers, but in reality under the guidance of Hobson, he helped retrieve some of the German Mausers28 which had been hidden in the grounds of a local Christian Brothers’ school, probably at Marino during the previous day, and to deposit them safely in Parnell Square.29
Approximately two months later, on 24 September, he attended a ‘revolutionary style meeting’ at 41 Parnell Square, with James Connolly, Tom Clarke and MacDiarmada present. The intention of the eighty men who turned up was to proceed therefrom to the Mansion House and to forcibly occupy it in order to prevent a recruitment rally taking place the following day under the auspices of Asquith and Redmond. Mulcahy and other members of the Keating Branch did actually set out with that purpose in mind, only to discover that the building had already been secured against such an eventuality.30
Nonetheless, despite evidence of an overall hardening of attitudes, as indicated by the cumulative effect of a more hawkish IRB and a sharpening of Volunteer training, Mulcahy, like the vast majority of the membership, was unaware that his part-time soldiering would suddenly escalate into a full baptism of fire.31 The atmosphere at the officers’ course at Coosan Point, Athlone, September 1915, a summer holiday for Mulcahy, is illustrative of that point: ‘all our comrade-like contact and the atmosphere that surrounded us was that of persons engaged at Volunteer work in the same way that we might have been engaged at learning Irish in Ballingeary with the various trimmings that went with that – talks and meetings in houses and excursions, walks in the hills.’32
Indeed, Mulcahy’s mental unpreparedness was such that when he got wind of the existence of the Military Council, he did not take it seriously for a while.33 (The Military Council was a secret clique, formed by Clarke, along with his closest colleague, MacDiarmada, during the summer of 1915. It originated from within the IRB’s Supreme Council (SC) and, ignoring the current evolutionary philosophy of the Organisation, was determined to lead out the Volunteers in a surprise rebellion as soon as practicable.34)
Diarmuid Lynch dated Mulcahy’s involvement in the military preparations from 1 April 1916. He alleged that, because Mulcahy in the course of his work, which may then have been located above Crane’s piano shop in Lower O’Connell Street, had responsibility for all the maps and plans of the telegraph and telephone system of the city and its environs, he, along with Andy Fitzpatrick, Seán Byrne and Lynch compiled a report on the city’s manholes. (Mulcahy downplayed that claim, saying that he merely put Lynch in contact with some IRB men from the post office gangs.) Their report, together with a set of keys and demolition tools, was delivered, probably by Lynch, to MacDiarmada on the Monday of Holy Week, 17 April.35
Either way, on Saturday, 15 April, Mulcahy was fully drawn into the web of intrigue after he had attended at an officers’ meeting which was addressed by Pádraig Pearse on the topic of the manoeuvres planned for the Easter weekend and had then bumped into MacDiarmada at a social event in Banba Hall, Parnell Square.36 MacDiarmada quizzed him about the manholes. He told him that the rebellion would commence on Easter Sunday using the cover of the Volunteer parade. Mulcahy was surprised, being so ignorant of those developments that he had already decided to go on a spiritual retreat during Holy Week and subsequently to visit his family in Clare. Consequently, in the light of his plans for Easter, he postponed making any decision. In the meantime, he utilised the solitude of the retreat to mull over his future, emerging after three days, determined to play an active part.37
The possibility of losing his life at close on thirty years of age, or taking the life of another, should have occupied Mulcahy’s thoughts during the retreat. But actually, that was a dilemma which, in part, he had already encountered a number of years previously, not that this substantially lessened the magnitude of his final decision. In the first instance, even if he never actually took the IRB oath, he would seem not to have suffered any scruples about disobeying his Church’s prohibition, under the pain of excommunication, on active membership of secret oath-bound societies.
Yet others were not so sanguine. For example, whenever the Catholic clergy, particularly the bishops, condemned the IRB, there were obvious repercussions among the membership in the form of a drop in enrolments and a rise in resignations.38 Indeed, so depleted did the numbers become during the period, 1909–10, that Clarke was forced to take an audacious gamble. He called the entire Dublin membership together for an open meeting in Clontarf Town Hall, where the Rev. Denis O’Sullivan, a member of Clan na Gael, tried to reassure everyone, rather unconvincingly it seems, that there was nothing to worry about.39
There is no direct evidence to indicate that Mulcahy was present at that event. His fastidious nature would imply that he was, however. Also, he would have been interested in attending because, as was common enough at the time, he was an ardent Catholic. For example, he attended the sacrament of mass on a daily basis.40 Also, he generally did not use swearwords and was abstemious: ‘Mulcahy never said anything stronger than “bloody”; he did not smoke or drink.’41 Little wonder that some people considered him pious.42 (Indeed, piety was a feature of his family, what with four of his sisters becoming nuns and a brother becoming a Cistercian monk.43) Furthermore, he practiced his religion in a contemplative way. For example, he liked to go on religious retreats, the specific purpose of which was the achievement of spiritual intimacy between himself, as supplicant, and God, as saviour. More so, he favoured the three-day retreats of Christmas and Easter over the weekend ones, all of which, at any rate, were conducted under the auspices of the Jesuits at Milltown Park, where the deeply and minutely contemplative spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola were practiced in complete silence and without distractions. By the same token, whenever possible, he would visit any nearby church for ‘quite a restful and reverend [sic] note’, a description which records the effect which benediction had upon him.44
Therefore, for men like Mulcahy (Eoin O’Duffy45 and Thomas Ashe,46 for instance) who became conditioned to a mystical type of formula, an intuitive fault line existed between their private and public activities. Besides, from another perspective, as J.H. White observed, ‘The majority of Fenians, Parnellites