Not The 1919 News

Welcome to the History of Ireland. First off, I must offer my sincerest apologies. The keen listeners amongst you may have noticed I didn’t get an episode out last week. Life outside the studio has become ever so slightly hectic and so for the time being I’ll be focusing on getting episodes out every fortnight. I’d rather get things right than rush them. With that in mind, let’s dive into this cracker of an episode.

By September 1919 things were really beginning to boil over. The IRA had started assassinating people, the British had banned the Dáil and as we discussed at the end of the last episode it felt like the war was really kicking off. Except it didn’t really kick off until 1920. The last few months of 1919 were actually relatively quiet. There were a few more assassinations and raids on Dáil-owned buildings but things didn’t really ramp up until the following year.

But that doesn’t mean nothing exciting happened and in this episode I want to explore the creation of the Irish Bulletin. As one Republican from the period put it, the Bulletin was one of the most important weapons of the Republican movement. It was worth several flying columns. High praise indeed. So let’s investigate.

As we know Sinn Féin were master propagandists. Born of 1916, which had been a British PR disaster above all else, they knew the power of good publicity. However, good publicity was proving harder and harder to come by. Dublin Castle were using censorship laws enacted during World War 1 to ensure that only their version of events reached the outside world. And once the IRA began assassinating people and raiding RIC barracks, it became easier and easier for the British to paint a pretty negative picture of Sinn Féin, the Dáil and the IRA. Through the British lens they were merely a murder gang wreaking havoc throughout the country.

And at the same time international interest in Ireland was increasing. Sinn Féin knew that they had to get their version of events out if they were going to gain the support they needed. Arthur Griffith, as much a savvy journalist as he was a politician, knew that the publicity war was a vital one. But that meant breaking through what Griffith described as the paper wall surrounding the country, i.e. British propaganda. The Dáil had to cut through the noise. Griffith would have probably loved Twitter, but instead he had to settle for a newspaper. And so we get the Irish Bulletin.

Now to tell the story of the Irish Bulletin we have to introduce a few people. First was TD Desmond Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was an Irish Protestant, an upper class posh type who joined the Republican movement. He’d been one of the lads leading the publicity campaign for Sinn Féin’s 1918 election. And after that insanely successful campaign he was made Dáil’s Director of Publicity.

So when there was talk of needing a newspaper, Fitzgerald was the guy kind of leading the charge. On the 7th of November he put the idea for a daily news bulletin to the Dáil. He proposed a paper that would provide coverage of the Irish government itself as well as a weekly list of atrocities committed by the British. A budget of £500 was agreed upon and Fitzgerald was given the go ahead to proceed, under Arthur Griffith’s personal supervision. So they had money and political backing. Now they just needed staff. Which brings us to the next person we have to introduce. Kathleen McKenna.

McKenna was from a nationalist family who had been friendly with the Griffiths. It was through him that she was brought into the Republican movement. On the 11th of November, four days after Fitzgerald received permission, McKenna sat down at her desk. Peering over her shoulder were three men. Griffith, Fitzgerald and a journalist named Robert Rennon.

She had this to say about the whole thing. I put a pencil into my typewriter. Typed the words, The Irish Bulletin. Volume 1. Number 1. 11th November, 1919. The three men stood near me. Three pairs of critical eyes were fixed upon my fingers as they danced unerringly over the keyboard. I fixed the stencil to the duplicator and rolled off the first clear copy. The men were delighted with it. And with themselves. The Irish Bulletin had been born.

They released about 30 copies that day. Which really isn’t a lot. But the trick was to get those copies in front of the right people. Newspapers, opinion makers and generally just big important people who might be sympathetic to the Irish cause were targeted. The Irish Bulletin would go on to publish five issues every week for the entirety of the war. McKenna single handedly typed out each issue. She was one of those people that history skirts over. I.e. a woman. But as well as being a key figure in the Irish Bulletin she would go on to work with several of Ireland’s leading politicians as they shaped the young nation in the years to come.

With McKenna’s help the paper was then primarily run by a group of Republican writers that Fitzgerald brought on board. Namely Robert Brennan, who we mentioned, Frank Gallagher and Erskine Childers. As the war carried on it was Frank Gallagher who wrote most of the articles for the Bulletin. A trained journalist Gallagher had been writing for a number of Irish newspapers when he joined the Volunteers in 1917. A very religious Catholic Gallagher was a full on idealist who believed fighting for a fully independent Ireland was every Irishman’s sacred duty. He was later described as the Irish Dr Goebbels. Which I guess when you’re running a propaganda newspaper is a pretty big compliment in a weirdly horrible kind of way.

Helping Gallagher was a friend of Fitzgerald. A man named Erskine Childers. Now Gallagher revered Childers and was seemingly completely and utterly in awe of him. Once you start learning about Childers you can kind of see why. Childers was another rich posh Protestant. He’d enrolled to fight the Germans in WWI but was also a staunch nationalist and deeply committed to the Irish cause.

And as well as fighting in WWI by 1919 he’d actually become quite famous for his best-selling novel. The book Riddle in the Sand is credited as one of the very first spy novels and it’s actually a really good read. It was written before the war and is full of international intrigue and paranoia about Germany. Plus a whole heap of discussion around small yacht sailing which I just kind of happened to love. You should check it out. Even though it’s totally irrelevant to this story.

Anyway, throughout 1919 he’d been helping Gallagher with Irish propaganda as well as pushing the Irish agenda abroad. It’s said that due to his English accent and his fame international listeners were way less likely to dismiss Childers. Though on the flip side other Irish Republicans were slow to trust him. But all in all he was pretty perfect to be working in the Irish Bulletin and you can see why Gallagher would have been ever so slightly in awe of his famous colleague. So that’s a quick overview of the main people working on the Bulletin.

So they’d receive reports from Republican networks throughout the country including the IRA’s intelligence department and would write up a Bulletin every single day. At its height they were sending around 600 copies per issue which is pretty impressive considering they were an illegal underground newspaper that had to keep changing offices due to British raids.

But despite getting very very close a number of times the British never actually managed to shut down the paper. On one occasion they’d received information that the Bulletin’s offices were in Molesworth Street. So they raided the area, smashing down doors and searching office after office after office. There was one building though shared by the British Crown prosecutors that they didn’t check. They figured the filthy Republican rag that was the Bulletin would never be put together in such a fancy and respectable office. No prizes to see where this is going. When the raids had begun the Bulletin staff fled their very fancy and respectable office with paper stuffed in their pockets fearing the worst. So when they returned to an untouched printing press and an unraided office they were pretty relieved and very surprised. The British never knew how close they came to catching the whole lot of them and it’s a prime example of completely and utterly underestimating your enemy. Something the British were prone to doing repeatedly during the War of Independence.

But despite that massive blunder the British did try other tactics. At one point they managed to confiscate one of the Bulletin’s printing presses and decided to use it to produce a fake version of the Bulletin. The idea was that they could confuse readers and discredit the paper. I think this might be as close as you can get to a literal definition of fake news. But it didn’t work. People copped on pretty quickly and the fake Bulletin never really had much of an effect.

So as you can see it’s clear the British took the threat of the Bulletin pretty seriously. They knew the damage it was doing. The Bulletin did a masterful job of getting the Irish perspective out into the world. And as British atrocities increased more and more international pressure was placed on Britain.

And not only did the Bulletin outline British wrongdoings it also managed to discredit British propaganda. At one point a story went out that death threats had been sent to prominent British officials on dull letterheads. The reporters at the Bulletin found this pretty hard to believe. And after a little bit of digging were able to prove that Dublin Castle had in fact forged the threats and sent them to their own officials. Yeah they were threatening their own officials. When the Bulletin released the story it was considered quite the scoop and was really kind of embarrassing for the British.

It was just further proof that the TDs were not the murderous gang of criminals that the British were trying to portray them as. And instead painted the Dáil as a right for the elected government leading a war against a sneaky occupying force. This was vital in helping legitimise the Dáil on an international stage while pressuring the British into eventual talks. Though woah woah woah that’s getting way ahead of ourselves.

But as we go into 1920 and hear more and more about different atrocities on both sides it’s important to remember the Irish Bulletin was there the entire time providing a much needed Irish perspective on what was happening. Was it an unbiased newspaper? No. Was it propaganda? Yeah look pretty much. But regardless it was hugely important and acted as a vital counterbalance to the censorship and abundance of pro-British newspapers. So keep all that in mind as we dive into 1920 and really get into the thick of the Irish War of Independence.

Thanks for listening. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and if you’re enjoying it tell your friends. It’ll really help. You can also get in touch with us through thehistoryofireland.com or follow us on Facebook. If I made a mistake let me know.

The History of Ireland was written and produced by me, Kevin Dolan. Additional research and fact checking by Robert Babington. Music by Liam Doyle and production help from Aoife Murphy. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded.