The Hunger-Strike of the Lord Mayor of Cork, 1920: Irish, English and Vatican Attitudes

Abstract

On 25 October 1920, a new name was added to the martyrology of Irish nationalism. On that date, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Alderman Terence MacSwiney, died in Brixton prison after a hunger-strike which had lasted 74 days. He had held office for little more than six months, his predecessor having been roused from sleep and shot, most Irish people believed, by plain clothed policemen. MacSwiney had succeeded not only to the symbolic positions of head of the municipality and titular chief magistrate, but also the less decorative but potentially more deadly positions of president of the Cork branch of Sinn Fein and commandant of the First Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. Brought up in the full flood of the Catholic spiritual and Gaelic cultural revivals, MacSwiney had a long record of active commitment to the struggle for Irish independence. He had been imprisoned by the British in 1916 in the aftermath of Dublin’s Easter Rising which he had watched from Cork in an agony of indecision, developing in one English historian’s view ‘a guilt complex which he was later to expiate in the grimmest possible way’. In August 1920, only days after the introduction of courts martial to replace civilian courts in Ireland, he was arrested in the City Hall, while presiding over a meeting of the Brigade Council. Proclaiming his allegiance to the Irish Republic, the Lord Mayor challenged the right of the British Army to detain him, and immediately commenced a hunger-strike.