Recruiting Meetings for Volunteers

 

Newspaper article from 7 April 1916

The following article appeared in the Dublin Evening paper dated 7 April 1916 under a column headed: ‘The Sinn Feiners’.

Further “Recruiting” Meetings.  City Priest’s Anti-British Tirade.  Military Interrupter Roughly Handled.

Two further meetings to protest against the deportation of the Sinn Fein Volunteer organisers, Ernest Blythe and Liam Mellowes, and to obtain recruits, were held last night at the Fountain, James’s street and at Dolphin’s Barn. A piper’s band and large contingent of Volunteers, armed with rifles, were in attendance.  Councillor Cosgrave presided at the meeting in James’s street. He declared that England, by deporting these two young Volunteers, had usurped the last right of Irishmen – namely, the right to live in their own country. There was only one reply to such an act of tyranny, for no other would have any effect, and that was for the young men of Ireland to train and arm themselves in their own defense. Rev Father Eugene Nevin, C.P. Mount Argus, said there were many sham movements in Ireland, directing the people in the wrong way, leading them to illusory and spurious ends, but the only movement in Ireland that directed them in the right way, that was sincere and honest and uncorrupted was the Irish Volunteer movement. They had no personal ends to gain they were actuated by the purest motives, the undying principles of Irish nationality. Proceeding he said he deplored the action of a small section of his brethren in standing upon recruiting platforms and asking young Irishmen to lay down their lives for – what – the rottenest and most unscrupulous Empire that ever existed. That would never be said of him, and England would never get a recruit through him. His forefathers had died for his national principles, and he also if need be, would die for them.  “Commandants” McDonagh, Sheehan, Fitzgibbon and others addressed the meeting.  The crowd, about two thousand strong, then proceeded to Dolphin’s Barn where another meeting was held. Here a soldier, who declared that he was from Tipperary, interrupted one of the speakers. He was seized and forcibly ejected from the crowd.