By Stephen Kelly
July 2024 marks the centenary of Gerald Boland’s release from prison, following his incarceration two years before for his involvement in the Battle of Blessington in the initial weeks of the Civil War. In fact, Boland was interned the longest of all anti-Treaty prisoners, initially in Mountjoy (8 July 1922–October 1923), then in Kilmainham (October 1923–January 1924) and lastly in the Curragh (January–July 1924). Yet his Civil War experience, specifically his time on hunger strike from October to November 1923, has been overlooked. In his own words, ‘I was glad [when the Civil War ended] … None of us wanted that.’
Apart from not wishing to fight against former comrades, Boland’s distaste for the Civil War (and thus his desire for it to end as quickly as possible) was also driven by a sense of pragmatism. Militarily, as he later conceded in his unpublished memoir, the anti-Treaty leadership ‘had neither policy, nor military leadership nor provisions nor proper clothing’ to maintain the campaign against the provisional government and the National Army.
THE BATTLE OF BLESSINGTON, JULY 1922
Militarily, Gerald Boland played a minor role in the Civil War; his involvement lasted less than a month, followed by his arrest and subsequent imprisonment in early July 1922. Boland’s Military Service Pension record informs us that, apart from his continued involvement with the 7th Dublin Battalion during the first week of July 1922, he also served as commandant of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Dublin Brigade, in Blessington, Co. Wicklow (which had an approximate strength of 328). At this time Boland and his family were living in Crooksling, around seven and a half miles from Blessington village.
Boland’s involvement during his brief stay in Blessington was to participate, in his own words, ‘in warfare against troops of the Provisional Government’, including carrying out ‘attacks on positions and armoured cars’. On 7 July 1922, along with approximately twenty others, he was captured by National Army troops under the command of Hugo McNeill, not far from Blessington. By this stage National Army troops were approaching the village from three different directions. McNeill’s party had travelled from Kilteel and thence to Hempstown before taking an anti-Treaty post at a farmhouse near Crosschapel, some two miles from Blessington. Soon afterwards, McNeill received information that three motor cars were approaching a seized farmhouse and guessed that the approaching entourage might be comprised of anti-Treaty forces. He was correct. Boland drove towards McNeill’s awaiting forces, ‘confident that they were approaching friends’. They were to be left disappointed. On arriving at the farmhouse, they were greeted by the order: ‘Hands up’.
THE DEATH OF HARRY BOLAND
Gerald Boland’s initial period of incarceration in Mountjoy coincided with one of the most traumatic episodes in his life—the death of his younger brother, Harry, on 1 August 1922 at 35 years of age. On receiving the news of his brother’s death Gerald Boland’s ‘heart was broken’, as his son Harry Boland Jr later noted. To his dismay, Boland was not permitted to visit his dying brother in hospital; to compound his grief, he was also refused permission to attend Harry’s funeral.
Significantly, with Harry’s death Boland became convinced of the futility of the anti-Treaty IRA’s campaign. In an extraordinary frank omission, he stated that anti-Treaty IRA forces should have ‘surrendered’ by the summer of 1922, following his own capture. ‘The only thing to do’, he surmised, ‘was to make the best of things and try to pull the country together’. The use of ‘guerrilla tactics’, he protested, had been ‘worse than useless’, as anti-Treaty IRA forces ‘were fighting against a native Government that had got a majority in the 1922 [Irish General] Election’. ‘Of course, I never let the Free State people know I felt like that, but often in talks with other prisoners I urged this view.’
TD FOR ROSCOMMON
Boland’s final months in Mountjoy, before his transfer to Kilmainham in October 1923, coincided with the ending of the Civil War. On 24 May Frank Aiken, chief-of-staff of the anti-Treaty IRA, issued a formal command to dump arms and return home. There were no negotiations, no truce terms, no formal surrender. Instead, to quote Charles Townshend, the ‘Republic simply melted back into the realm of the imagination’. Although Boland welcomed this decision, he remained incarcerated, along with an estimated 12,000 other anti-Treaty IRA prisoners.
Boland’s time in Mountjoy also overlapped with his election to Dáil Éireann in August 1923 as one of 44 anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs. This impressive general election result, to quote Brian Hanley, ‘demonstrated that a popular base for anti-Treaty politics existed’. With the death of Harry Boland, Gerald was put forward as his brother’s replacement to contest the constituency of Roscommon on behalf of Sinn Féin.
If Boland’s own account is to be believed, he was initially a reluctant politician, reportedly ‘not overly pleased’ that his name had been put forward without his prior knowledge or consent. It did not take him long, however, to embrace his new public role as an elected representative, making up his mind to ‘discharge the duties of the position to the best of his abilities’. In fact, he would continue to represent the constituency of Roscommon for almost the next 40 years, through the lifetime of thirteen consecutive Dáils from 1923 to 1961.
HUNGER STRIKE
Despite Sinn Féin’s electoral success, anti-Treaty republicans soon ‘faced a prison crisis’, to quote Brian Hanley. In mid-October 1923, six months after the cessation of armed hostilities, there was a mass hunger strike by an estimated 7,800 republican prisoners (including 50 women). The campaign first erupted in Mountjoy and quickly spread to ten or more prisons and internment camps, including Kilmainham, jails in Cork, Dundalk and Kilkenny, and the Curragh internment camp.
The central demands of the hunger strikers’ protests focused on prison conditions, as well as the ‘prolongation of internment’. Most hunger strikers ceased their fast, individually or in groups, within a month, but about 200 of them, including Boland, continued their campaign for approximately 40 days. The decision to go on hunger strike was not universally welcomed by anti-Treaty prisoners. In fact, there was ‘considerable unease’ within the prisons about the decision. The available figures bear this out. Of the approximately 12,000 anti-Treaty prisoners in custody, an estimated one third, some 4,200, did not participate. For example, Pax Whelan (Ó Faoláin) initially objected to the proposal to go on hunger strike but joined ‘rather than let down his companions’. Austin Stack also joined the hunger strike despite his ‘pessimism about the prospects of success’.
What of Gerald Boland’s attitude to the proposed hunger strike? Like Whelan and Stack, in principle Boland was wholly against the proposal. Contained within Boland’s personal papers is a refreshingly honest explanation of why he opposed it and why he eventually decided to join the campaign: ‘I was resolutely opposed to hunger striking, which I considered was not a weapon for soldiers to use’. In Boland’s thinking, by commencing their campaign, republican prisoners were falling into a trap set by the ‘Free State leaders … to get rid of us by hunger-strike’ and ‘we had plenty of fools ready to fall for this, amongst us’.
Despite his misgivings, Boland was one of the first batch to go on hunger strike at Mountjoy in mid-October 1923. He subsequently explained the rationale behind his decision: ‘If you don’t go on strike you cannot help to call it off when the time comes so you better go on it and I did so’. After the first week of their campaign, several of the hunger strikers based at Mountjoy, Boland included, were sent to Kilmainham, where ‘we continued the strike’. Looking back on events during the early 1960s, Boland claimed that his regular practice of yoga ‘disciplined him to withstand the rigours’, so that ‘it was hardly any trouble to me’. Indeed, in a letter to his wife Annie, dated 11 November 1923, he was at pains to emphasise his general good health and high spirits. ‘[W]e are going to win this fight, and I feel as sure as is humanly possible that I will have the unspeakable joy of being with you and my darling babies in a very short time.’
END OF THE HUNGER STRIKE
On the 39th day of his strike (c. 21 November 1923), convinced of the futility of the campaign, Boland decided to visit as many of his fellow hunger strikers in Kilmainham as possible. He pleaded with his comrades one by one to end their campaign (although he deliberately did not approach Frank Gallagher, the so-called ‘hunger strike king’, because there ‘was no use talking’ to him).
Boland remembered that in his conversations with his fellow hunger strikers he had ‘to use different arguments for coming off the strike, according to who I was dealing with’. ‘I started off my case by confessing that I was wondering what would happen if Seán Buckley died, as he was in a very bad state’, he recalled. For the ‘religious men’ on hunger strike, to use Boland’s own description, he also used the ‘unscrupulous’ argument that Christ had only fasted for 40 days and thus it would be ‘sacrilegious’ to strike for longer than that.
Boland’s intervention was not universally welcomed by all the hunger strikers in Kilmainham. On hearing the news of his meeting with Buckley, Frank Gallagher ‘came over to my cell and asked me was it true that we were going to call off the strike’. Boland confirmed that this was the case. In a revealing comment, perhaps hinting at his new-found political ambition as an elected representative for Roscommon, he said that he intended to ‘live’ in order ‘to put out the Free State crowd if I could’. If this strategy failed, and the hunger strikers decided to instead continue their campaign and die, he ‘would take my family away from a country which bred such lunatics’. Boland’s threat had the intended result. As he later wrote, ‘That shook Frank and he agreed to come off [the hunger strike]’.
Boland’s mediation was no doubt influenced by contemporary events. On 20 November 1923, Denis Barry died on hunger strike in the Curragh hospital. Two days later, Andrew O’Sullivan died on hunger strike in Mountjoy. The following day, 23 November, the hunger strike was officially called off.
In early January 1924 Boland was transferred from Kilmainham to the Curragh internment camp. Eventually, on 17 July 1924, he was released from prison ‘with the last batch of about a dozen’, as he phrased it. He had spent over two years behind bars and was proud of the fact that ‘I was by far the longest in internment’. Coincidentally, Eamon de Valera had been released from Arbour Hill the previous day, 16 July.
CONCLUSION
Boland’s prison experience and, more broadly, the events of the Civil War copper-fastened his resentment towards the pro-Treaty politicians of the Cumann na nGaedheal-led Free State government in Dublin. ‘My attitude towards the Free State crowd’, he later wrote, ‘was just one of complete contempt. I looked on them as a pack of careerists.’ At the same time, he detested almost every aspect of the Civil War, including his period on hunger strike. His experiences confirmed his preference for pragmatism over idealism from a military standpoint, and at the same time revealed a nascent politician (albeit vastly inexperienced) driven by a sense of realism rather than doctrinarian daydreaming.
Stephen Kelly is the author of Gerald Boland: a life (Eastwood Books, 2024).
Further reading
B. Hanley, ‘Frank Aiken and the IRA, 1923–1933’, in B. Evans & S. Kelly (eds), Frank Aiken: nationalist and internationalist (Newbridge, 2014), 103–22.|
C. Townshend, The Republic: the fight for Irish independence (London, 2014).