The Arming of the Irish Volunteers

Abstract

In many respects, for the police in Ireland there was very little to distinguish July 26, 1914, from any other Sunday that summer. In County Armagh, they watched as orders were given by the Ulster Unionist Council for a general mobilization of the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.).1 On Captain James Craig’s estate at Craigavon, they witnessed two six-pounder field guns being taken into the main yard, where they were placed alongside the large quantity of arms and ammunition already there.2 In Londonderry, Sir Henry Hill spent the day commanding a contingent of the U.V.F. to arrange 1,000 sandbags in a barricade around his house, again observed by the police.3 Such events were by now commonplace in Ulster, and the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) had watched as the militancy in Ireland had become ever bolder and more open over the previous 18 months. Yet July 26 differed in one important respect. Whilst the police concentrated their efforts on the U.V.F. in the north, at the southern Irish harbor of Howth, just to the north of Dublin, the Irish Volunteers responded to the Ulster gunrunning with an arms shipment of their own.