Postal censorship in Ireland, 1914–16

Abstract

When members of the Irish Volunteers shot dead a policeman and burst into the yard of Dublin Castle on 24 April 1916, Sir Matthew Nathan, the under-secretary, and Major Ivon H. Price, the head of military intelligence in Ireland, were upstairs in Nathan’s office discussing whether or not known agitators should be deported under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This somewhat ironic scenario, which raises questions about the state of British intelligence in Ireland, has proved very attractive to historians working on this period. Some, such as Leon Ó Broin in his classics Dublin Castle and the 1916 rising: the story of Sir Matthew Nathan (1966) and The chief secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (1969), have attempted to defend the actions of the civil government. Eunan O’Halpin, a more recent historian of political and military intelligence in Ireland, chooses to take the idea of British intelligence in Ireland as something of an oxymoron. Focusing on the fact that the Easter Rising was ‘permitted’ to occur, he lays the blame for such poor intelligence work on four factors: the political danger faced by British officials who risked alienating parliamentarians if they struck at advanced nationalists; legal difficulties in getting Irish juries to convict people for political crimes; failure of the intelligence branches of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police to collect effective information from suspects; and finally, the personality of Augustine Birrell, who, as his wife slowly went insane and began to die of a brain tumour between 1912 and 1915, rather understandably lost interest in his official duties as chief secretary.