Remembering ‘the Member for Ireland’ 100 years on

Laurence Ginnell, who died 100 years ago last week, was one of the best known political figures of his generation. But the ebb and flow of time chipped away at memory of his long career, writes DR PAUL HUGHES

On the morning of Tuesday April 17, 1923 – 100 years ago last week – Laurence Ginnell rose early in his room at Washington, DC’s Hotel Lafayette, where, for more than three months, he had established a makeshift Irish republican legation pitted against a mission established by the Irish Free State government.

He had been feeling unwell, which wasn’t unusual for a 71-year-old man who, since being imprisoned for the best part of two years (1918-20), battled arteriosclerosis and neurasthenia and never regained his old vigour. He attended a doctor’s appointment on that Tuesday morning and returned to his hotel on foot.

Ginnell went for a rest after his morning engagements, and after some time a bellhop called to his room to deliver message. Ginnell asked him to return later. Sometime between then and the afternoon, the old campaigner died in his sleep.

The sitting TD for Longford-Westmeath, after a 38-year career in politics, had given his last for Ireland. Years of on-and-off imprisonment, hard work and stress – some of it with its roots in his excitable and eccentric personality – finally took its toll on the walls of his heart.

Seven days before his death, Ginnell wrote to his wife Alice, and sorrow dripped from the page. For months, he had grappled with his colleagues in the United States, some of whom resented the fact that the anti-Treaty republican leader, Éamon de Valera, sent Ginnell to the US to, as they saw it, micro-manage their activities. Others disagreed with Ginnell’s various approaches to his ill-fated mission, and broke with him completely when he attempted to interfere with the running of republican fundraising drives.

On the latter point, de Valera ultimately sided with Ginnell’s opponents. This was a hammer blow for the Delvin native, as the two were close, and he always viewed de Valera as the embodiment of the ideals of republican political leadership. In a sad end to his final letter to Alice, in which he detailed the final nail in the coffin of his US mission, he wrote: “I am not yet in good form and will close.”

Laurence Ginnell was the consummate political outsider. In 1885, he started his political life as a functionary in Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish National League and made the extraordinary and perhaps unique journey to being one of the most uncompromising of anti-Treaty republicans.

Ginnell was used to falling out with mentors and bosses. He was introduced to politics in 1885 by Timothy Harrington, a key figure in the Irish Parliamentary Party. Within 15 years he had turned on Harrington, questioning the depth of his nationalism. He was private secretary to another Irish Party don, John Dillon, during the Plan of Campaign, but by the time Ginnell joined Sinn Féin in 1917, he was encouraging cattle drives in Mayo, Dillon’s constituency, and dancing on his former mentor’s political grave.

During the 1890s, Ginnell worked as a research assistant for the Liberal statesman John Morley during the latter’s authoring of a biography of the former British prime minister, WE Gladstone. He quit within months, insisting that Morley was not punctual, organised or honest as a biographer. During the same era, he worked for the anti-Parnellite wing of the nationalist movement, the Irish National Federation, and was at odds with the old Fenian JFX O’Brien.

When the movement reunited in 1899, he soon butted heads with the founder of the United Irish League, William O’Brien and his underling, John O’Donnell. But for the support of John Dillon, he might have lost his job as one of the secretaries of the UIL. The latter O’Brien was not sufficiently orthodox for Ginnell on the land question, and when ‘Larry’ became the MP for North Westmeath in 1906, he launched the ‘ranch war’ in repudiation of O’Brien’s conciliatory approaches to land reform. When this campaign of cattle-driving exposed contradictions within the Irish Party, he ultimately fell foul of its leader, John Redmond, and the party itself.

A man of many parts

Laurence Ginnell was a man of many parts: parliamentarian, agrarian radical, legal historian, orator, propagandist, diplomat, organiser, husband, brother. He was an autodidact, a man whose thirst for education was not inhibited by the difficulties he encountered in unlocking it. He was inspired in this regard by a neighbour, John Buck (1825-1875) of Crowenstown, who, like Ginnell, came from straitened circumstances but lifted himself into the teaching profession through self-education.

As Ginnell grew up in post-Famine Delvin, he was surrounded by conditions which fed into his lifelong goal of liberating the land of Ireland for the sustenance and enrichment of the people. The 1907-9 ranch war – which he led under the banner of ‘The land for the people, and the road for the bullock’ – is probably the event for which he is best known in Ireland. The British government’s attempts to deal with the campaign threw him into the international spotlight, particularly in the United States, where his pioneering of political cattle-driving was looked on with intrigue. In the period 1917-18, Ginnell revived the campaign in an attempt to advance the cause of the emerging Sinn Féin movement in rural Ireland.

The campaign eventually set him against powerful colleagues in the Irish Parliamentary Party – including his bitter rival, the MP and Westmeath Examiner owner John P Hayden – who did their best to oust him. Remarkably, he survived the 1910 general elections and established himself as an independent nationalist MP.

Until 1917, Ginnell refashioned the old tactic of obstructionism to become a solitary but loud dissenting nationalist voice which was heard around the world. His parliamentary contributions on Irish involvement in the First World War and British responses to the 1916 rising were especially notable in this regard.

The apogee of his career, arguably, came during the First World War. Ginnell was aggressively opposed to the idea of Irishmen being sent to western or eastern fronts to, as he put it so starkly, “manure the fields of Flanders” or “feed the fishes in Suvla Bay” in return for home rule within the British Empire. He was the only Irish voice in the House of Commons opposed to such an initiative.

Amid the war hysteria which followed the outbreak of fighting in August 1914, that was a risky enterprise, but Ginnell’s feet rested on more solid ground as the conflict dragged on. Throughout 1915, he probed the British government on its war policy, particularly as to how it affected Ireland via the ever-looming threat of conscription, or the imposition of the wartime Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). For those stands he became known as ‘the Member for Ireland’.

Ginnell’s line of questioning was versatile, pointed and voluminous. In addition, the Speaker of the House of Commons, James Lowther – whom Ginnell famously accused of partiality in 1911 – wanted to prove his magnanimity by giving the MP’s gravelly tones plenty of airing. On one occasion in 1915, he almost precipitated the resignation of a future British prime minister, then colonies secretary Andrew Bonar Law, by attempting to uncover scandal about Law’s connections to a firm that had been convicted of trading with the enemy, Germany.

As Ginnell racked up the parliamentary contributions, which dwarfed those of his erstwhile leader, the Irish Parliamentary Party chairman John Redmond or his lieutenants TP O’Connor and Joe Devlin, the foreign press listened, intrigued. He was eccentric, afflicted by a harsh voice but driven on by unwavering belief, and journalists across the world reported on what the British establishment dismissed as the exclamations of a madman. One British cabinet minister was left bemused in mid-1915 by Ginnell’s claim that Ireland was a “neutral” country.

However, his persistent rhetoric and his idiosyncratic ways made him as much a prominent figure in British politics as he was in Ireland. In the heart of the imperial parliament, he became a megaphone for the nationalist “other” in Ireland, as well as emerging nationalities in Egypt, Ceylon and India. In December 1915, he was fêted by Egyptian ex-patriots in London for resisting government attempts to tag them as enemy aliens.

The volume of Ginnell’s parliamentary contributions increased following the Easter rising in 1916, when, through his parliamentary platform, he effectively became the conduit between the surviving rebels and the wider world. Visiting those imprisoned after the rebellion, he became beloved among them and was nicknamed ‘the GPO’ for smuggling letters and cigarettes in and out of their cells. The British establishment, conscious of the potential ramifications for convincing America to join the war effort, became acutely concerned that Ginnell’s one-man publicity campaign was affecting public opinion. The Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, said as much in his daily briefing for King George V in early May 1916.

What’s more, Ginnell’s activities inside and outside Westminster began to take a toll on the Irish public’s perception of John Redmond’s Irish Party. The result was that one influential Irish-American newspaper, the San Francisco Leader, opined that by the autumn of 1916, Ginnell was the second most powerful man in Ireland after the Bishop of Limerick, Dr Edward O’Dwyer.

After the rising, he set about assisting Sinn Féin in its litany of by-election successes in 1917, before his revival of the cattle-driving campaign precipitated a series of staggered prison sentences. He fought the 1918 election from jail, and became the First Dáil’s director of propaganda, in keeping with the skill he had sharpened most effectively during his career.

By the time Ginnell served his final prison stint in 1920, however, the public defiance phase of the revolution in which he thrived ended and made way for guerrilla warfare and state-building. Neither suited Ginnell; in his late 60s, he was not then or ever a soldier, and while possessing plenty of vision, he was not equipped with the ability to compromise and negotiate, which is required of someone working out a framework for future Irish government.

Wisely, the Dáil sent him abroad to press its interest there. In America (1920-21), he built strong connections with the American labour movement and at one stage, sat in on a delegation that met US Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. From there he went to Argentina – a country littered with Westmeath connections – to raise funds for the Dáil, and won several propaganda battles against the British before his mission foundered on the rocks of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

He opposed that treaty vigorously, and after returning to Ireland, was ejected from the Dáil after questioning its legitimacy, becoming the only man to be thrown out of both a British and Irish parliament. He was reassigned to the United States as an anti-Treaty envoy and given responsibilities which, in reality, de Valera had little power to give.

Legacy

Despite his fame, 100 years after Laurence Ginnell’s death, there is little physical evidence – beyond whatever archival material remains – to account for his life and career. In 1933, Westmeath GAA county board discussed the naming of the proposed spectator stand at the new Cusack Park. Paddy Brett, a Fianna Fáil county councillor and a loyal lieutenant of Ginnell pre-1922, suggested that it be named after Ginnell. However, the chairman of the county, Captain Peadar Cowan – who was on the opposite side to Ginnell during the Irish Civil War – proposed that it be named for the Fenian poet John Keegan ‘Leo’ Casey, who was born in Mount Dalton near Rathconrath. Cowan’s proposal was accepted, and so memory of Ginnell’s career slipped further away amid the political enmities of the time.

Although his legacy cannot be definitively tied to Fianna Fáil in the way which that of Michael Collins has been linked to Fine Gael, there is ample evidence that Ginnell was a ‘de Valera man’ to the hilt. That ‘DeV’ had a reciprocal affection for the ageing campaigner is also clear. On 11 May 1922, when Ginnell was returning from Argentina, where his work on behalf of the Dáil left him in poor health, de Valera wrote to him, as the very real threat of civil war loomed on the horizon. “I am sure you are very troubled at the condition in which things are,” de Valera wrote, “but you, who faced almost alone your opponents in the trying period 1914-1917, are not likely to be dismayed.”

Remarkably though, while de Valera held two of the state’s highest offices for nearly 34 out of the 50 years that followed Ginnell’s death, nothing was done to arrest his old comrade’s slide into obscurity. Alice Ginnell, his widow who so actively seconded him throughout his career, curated his legacy the best she could but had her own disagreements with the state she had sacrificed much for after 1916.

For years, she struggled to obtain a dependant’s pension on foot of her husband’s service to the governments of the First and Second Dáils.

She was also overlooked for a Seanad seat when Fianna Fáil first came to power in 1932, though none other than the sister and mother of the 1916 leader, Patrick Pearse, had lobbied de Valera to nominate her.

Remembering

Mentioning Pearse brings us to the question of why individual participants of the Irish revolution are remembered, or not remembered.

In Ginnell’s case, a combination of factors is at play.

He was not among the “martyred” republican dead; he was not executed or killed in combat. He was not among those who died while serving in high office (eg, Arthur Griffith), nor was he among those revolutionaries who went on to enjoy a long political career (like de Valera). In addition, Ginnell’s career straddled the boundaries between the revolutionary period and the former days of constitutionalism; one gets the sense that his career has fallen between two stools.

“Importantly, there is a question as to whether it was desirable, on the part of the established political parties which went on to build the Irish state, to enthusiastically memorialise an individual who was so implacably opposed to the compromises that brought it about.”

From a Westmeath perspective, however, ‘the Member of Ireland’ is the county’s strongest connection to the tumultuous events which preceded the emergence of that state. His life and career deserve ongoing reflection and recognition, not least in the county of his birth.

A plaque to the memory of Laurence Ginnell will be unveiled in the centre of his native Delvin in the coming weeks, under the auspices of the Laurence Ginnell Commemoration Committee and Delvin Tidy Towns.