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PREFACE (2009)

AS WE APPROACH the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence/Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921), interest among scholars and the general public in these historic events gathers unrelenting pace. Recent years have witnessed a slew of books, articles, documentaries and films, emerge at home and abroad all dealing with the events and controversies involved in the struggle for political independence in the period 1916–1922. While many of these projects have re-evaluated and challenged the standard nationalist narrative that dominated for so long, and indeed have contributed to a more nuanced and complex appreciation of the events in question, the absence of the famous Fighting Story series – initially published by The Kerryman newspaper and subsequently republished by Anvil Books – is a notable and regrettable absence. First published in Christmas and special editions of The Kerryman newspaper in the years before the Second World War, the articles subsequently appeared in four independent collections entitled Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, Kerry’s Fighting Story, Limerick’s Fighting Story and Dublin’s Fighting Story between 1947–49. The choice of counties reflects the geographical intensity of the campaign as Dr Peter Hart explains in his new introduction to Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story: ‘The Munster IRA … was much more active than anywhere else except Longford, Roscommon and Dublin city.’ Marketed as authentic accounts and as ‘gripping episodes’ by ‘the men who made it’, the series was dramatically described as ‘more graphic than anything written of late war zones’, with ‘astonishing pictures’ and sold ‘at the very moderate price of two shillings’. Benefiting from The Kerryman’s wide distribution network and a competitive price, the books proved immediately popular at home and abroad, so much so that many, if not most, of the books were purchased by, and for, the Irish Diaspora. This competitive price resulted in part from the fact that ‘the producers were content to reduce their own profit and to produce the booklet at little above the mere cost of production’. Consequently, however, the volumes quickly disappeared from general circulation. Dr Ruán O’Donnell explains in the new introduction to Limerick’s Fighting Story, ‘The shelf life … was reduced by the poor production values they shared. This was a by-product of the stringent economies of their day when pricing, paper quality, binding and distribution costs had to be considered [which] rendered copies vulnerable to deterioration and unsuited to library utilisation.’

The books targeted not only the younger generation who knew about those times by hearsay only, but also the older generation who ‘will recall vividly a memorable era and the men who made it’. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter notes in the new introduction to Dublin’s Fighting Story that these volumes answered the perceived need for Volunteers to record their stories in their own words, in addition to ensuring the proper education and appreciation of a new generation for their predecessors’ sacrifices. The narrative, he writes ‘captures the excitement and the immediacy of the Irish War of Independence and the belief that the leaders of the revolution did not urge people to take dangerous courses they were not themselves prepared to take’. These four books deserve reprinting, therefore, not only for the important factual information they contain, and the resource they offer scholars of various disciplines, but also because of the valuable window they open on the mentality of the period. As Professor J.J. Lee observes in the introduction to Kerry’s Fighting Story, for anyone ‘trying to reconstruct in very different times the historical reality of what it felt like at the time, there is no substitute for contemporary accounts, however many questions these accounts may raise. We know what was to come. Contemporaries did not.’ The insight these books offer on IRA organisation at local level suggest to Dr Peter Hart ‘why IRA units were so resilient under pressure, and how untrained, inexperienced men could be such formidable soldiers … Irish guerrillas fought alongside their brothers, cousins, school and teammates, and childhood friends – often in the very lanes, fields and streets where they had spent their lives together’. In addition these texts reveal the vital roles, both active and passive, women played in the struggle of Irish independence.

The establishment of Anvil Books in 1962 saw a reissuing of certain volumes, Cork and Limerick in particular. The link between The Kerryman and Anvil Books was Dan Nolan (1910–1989). Son of Thomas Nolan, and nephew of Daniel Nolan and Maurice Griffin, he was related to all three founders of The Kerryman newspaper that commenced publishing in 1904. His obituary in that newspaper describes how he ‘was only a nipper when he looked down the barrels of British guns as His Majesty’s soldiers tried to arrest the proprietors of The Kerryman for refusing to publish recruitment advertisements. And he saw the paper and its employees being harassed by the Black and Tans.’ On graduating from Castleknock College, he joined the paper’s staff in 1928 replacing his recently deceased uncle, Maurice Griffin. His father’s death in 1939 saw Dan Nolan become the paper’s managing director and his tenure would, in due course, see a marked improvement in its commercial performance: circulation increased and ultimately exceeded 40,000 copies per week, and advertisement revenue also increased significantly. Under his stewardship The Kerryman, according to Séamus McConville in an obituary in the paper, ‘became solidly established as the unchallenged leader in sales and stature among provincial newspapers’. Recognising his talent, the Provincial Newspaper Association elected him president in 1951. Among his projects were the Rose of Tralee Festival, Tralee Racecourse and Anvil Books. Founded in 1962 with Nolan and Rena Dardis as co-directors, Anvil Books established itself as the pre-eminent publishers of memoirs and accounts dealing with the Irish War of Independence. Indeed the first book published by Anvil Books was a 1962 reprint of Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story in a print run of 10,000 copies.

Conscious, no doubt, of the potential for controversy, the original preface was careful not to present the Fighting Stories as ‘a detailed or chronological history of the fight for independence’, and acknowledged ‘that in the collection of data about such a period errors and omissions can easily occur and so they will welcome the help of readers who may be able to throw more light upon the various episodes related in the series. Such additional information will be incorporated into the second edition of the booklets which the present rate of orders would seem to indicate will be called for in the very near future.’ Subsequent editions of Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story and Limerick’s Fighting Story did appear in print with additional material as O’Donnell discusses in his enlightening introduction to Limerick’s Fighting Story, but the proposed Tipperary’s Fighting Story, as advertised in the Limerick volume with a suggested publication date of 1948 and a plea for relevant information or pictures, never materialised. This 2009 edition adheres to the original texts as first published by The Kerryman rather than the later editions by Anvil Books. A new preface, introduction and index frame the original texts that remain as first presented other than the silent correction of obvious typographical errors.

The preface to the final book, Dublin’s Fighting Story, concluded by noting that the publishers ‘would be satisfied if the series serves to preserve in the hearts of the younger generation that love of country and devotion to its interests which distinguished the men whose doings are related therein’. The overall story narrated in these four books is neither provincial nor insular, nor indeed limited to Ireland, but as Lee remarks in Kerry’s Fighting Story, it is rather ‘like that of kindred spirits elsewhere, at home and abroad, an example of the refusal of the human spirit to submit to arbitrary power’. The hasty and almost premature endings of several chapters may be attributed to the legacy of the Irish Civil War whose shadow constantly hovers at the edges, threatening to break into the narrative, and in fact does intrude in a few instances. Lee opines that writers avoided the Civil War as it ‘was still too divisive, still too harrowing, a nightmare to be recalled into public memory. Hence the somewhat abrupt ending of several chapters at a moment when hopes were still high and the horrors to come yet unimagined.’

Ireland at the start of the twenty-first century is a very different place than it was when these books were first published. Irish historiography has undergone no less a transformation and to bridge the gap four eminent historians have written new introductions that set the four Fighting Stories in the context of recent research and shifts in Irish historiography. Yet Lee’s assessment in reference to Kerry holds true for each of the four volumes: ‘Whatever would happen subsequently, and however perspectives would inevitably be affected by hindsight, for better and for worse, Kerry’s Fighting Story lays the foundation for all subsequent studies of these foundation years of an independent Irish state.’ As we move toward the centenary of 1916, the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Civil War, it is appropriate and fitting that these key texts be once again part of the public debate of those events and it is sincerely hoped that as Ruán O’Donnell states: ‘This new life of a classic of its genre will facilitate a fresh evaluation of its unique perspectives on the genesis of the modern Irish state.’

DR BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR
SERIES EDITOR
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
EASTER 2009

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I AM GRATEFUL not only to the scholars who penned the new introductions for their time and expertise but also to the following who assisted in numerous ways: Beth Bland, Angela Carothers, Aedín Ní Bhroithe-Clements (Hesburgh Library), Professor Mike Cronin, Rena Dardis, Ken Garcia, Alan Hayes, Dr Diarmaid Ferriter, Mick O’Farrell, Dyann Mawhorr, Don and Patrica Nolan, Tara MacLeod, Seán Seosamh Ó Conchubhair, Interlibrary Loans at the Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, and Eoin Purcell, Wendy Logue and the staff at Mercier Press. Táim an-bhuíoch do gach éinne atá luaite thuas, m’athair ach go háirithe as a chuid foighne agus as a chuid saineolais a roinnt liom go fial agus do Thara uair amháin eile a d’fhulaing go foighneach agus an obair seo ar bun agam.

DR BRIAN Ó CONCHUBHAIR

INTRODUCTION (2009)

IN 1913, CONSTANCE Markievicz, a member of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, the Gore Booths of Lissadell in County Sligo, identified three ‘great movements’ in Ireland: the nationalist, women’s and labour movements. She was just one example of an individual, whose background would suggest little sympathy for Irish separatism, caught up in the intense political awakening and excitement of the early twentieth century. Markievicz identified three strands of the newly politicised Ireland, but there were others, including the intense Ulster unionist resistance movement to Home Rule, the secret revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the proponents of a distinctly Irish culture, history and education system. Nonetheless, it did not seem that a pre-revolutionary situation existed in Ireland in the few years before the 1916 Rising. Ireland had one hundred and three constituency seats at Westminster, seventy-five of which were held by the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), led by John Redmond. The early twentieth century had witnessed this political party recovering from the fall-out of the political demise and death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891. Re-unified in 1900, it was dedicated to achieving Home Rule for Ireland through constitutional means, a commitment it succeeded in extracting from the British government in 1912. When the First World War broke out, the implementation of Home Rule was postponed until the conflict was over, and the nationalists were biding their time and hoping unionist opposition would be overruled.

Irish people generally enjoyed the right to free speech, free assembly, free organisation, and a varied and (mostly) uncensored media. Many initiatives had been taken by the British government to satisfy different sections of the population; old age pensions gave a weekly payment to those aged over seventy, and the National University of Ireland Act of 1908 seemed to reflect an increasingly confident Catholic Church that had succeeded in achieving its demands in the area of education. Most Irish farmers owned their own land, some eleven million acres having been purchased as a result of the Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the First World War commenced, Irish agriculturalists benefited from the extra demand in Britain for Irish foodstuffs. Conscription to the armed forces was not imposed in Ireland, but many Irish men volunteered for service in the British army, with over 200,000 serving during the First World War. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), mostly Catholic, and a respected force, was policing an island relatively free of serious crime.

On the surface therefore, the years before the Rising seemed some of the more peaceful and prosperous in Ireland’s history. In many respects, it is necessary to go below the surface in order to locate what has sometimes been referred to as ‘the legion of the excluded’ that declared war on the British Empire in April 1916. Whatever about its stability, and the determination of most to take advantage of the opportunities provided by their citizenship of the United Kingdom, early twentieth-century Ireland also had its full share of petty resentments, snobberies, hypocrisies and frustrated expectations. Many felt excluded from the prevailing political establishment. John Redmond had many noble traits, but he also represented a generation of Irish nationalists who were arrogant and removed from the concerns of those who felt aggrieved. The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) tended to rely on pliant henchmen and it rarely had to contest hard-fought elections, many MPs being returned unopposed for decades.

The many small organisations and agitators, including the disgruntled working-class victims of the 1913 Lockout who formed the Irish Citizens Army (ICA), the women demanding the vote and a role in Irish nationalism, and those in the IRB intent on reviving the tradition of Irish defiance of British rule, were working hard to undermine what they identified as a prevailing smugness within the status quo. The extraordinarily prolific journalist, Arthur Griffith, was struggling to make his small Sinn Féin party relevant or attractive to the electorate; but it seemed to be in permanent decline by 1914. Like Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh – both teachers, language enthusiasts and poets – many were involved in the cultural revival, notably through membership of the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), but some wanted to move beyond that, and came to believe in the necessity of a military as well as a cultural struggle. Eoin MacNeill was an academic and chief-of-staff of the Irish Volunteers, an organisation dedicated to ensuring the implementation of Home Rule, which had been established in the aftermath of the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913, a group dedicated to resisting Home Rule. After the outbreak of the First World War the Irish Volunteers split as a result of John Redmond’s decision to back the British war effort, with 150,000 remaining loyal to Redmond (now calling themselves the National Volunteers) and in the region of 2,500 opposing Redmond, retaining the organisation’s original title.

The reason for MacNeill and his followers’ decision not to back Redmond can be found in a book MacNeill published in 1915 in which he expressed a hatred for the way ‘Ireland’s representatives wheedled, fawned, begged, bargained and truckled for a provincial legislature’. Many wanted far more independence than was being provided for in the Home Rule Bill. Those who organised the Rising worked in MacNeill’s shadow and found the Irish Volunteers a useful cover organisation. The IRB, originally established in 1858 and dedicated to achieving its aims through rebellion, had been revitalised in the early twentieth century by a new generation, with the help of the older Tom Clarke, determined since 1907 to see a rebellion launched in his lifetime. Denis McCullough, a future president of the IRB Supreme Council, put it bluntly: ‘I cleared out most of the older men (including my father) most of whom I considered of no further use to us.’ The eager youth were tired of the veteran Fenians’ tendency to sit around drinking and reminiscing about past glorious failures. They were also pleased that the UVF had led the way in the north, recruiting, arming, parading and creating a mass movement that could be replicated in the south.

The prologue to the Rising of 1916 was thus an Ireland with a variety of organisations and movements, sometimes with conflicting aims, personalities and visions of the future. This was why deception and secrecy played such an important role in the organisation of the Rising. IRB treasurer Tom Clarke and secretary Seán MacDiarmada fomented the plans for a rebellion, and they persuaded others, including Éamonn Ceannt, the increasingly militant Patrick Pearse, and eventually labour leader James Connolly, that the First World War gave them an opportunity, due to England’s obvious preoccupations elsewhere. In the summer of 1915 they established a military council of the IRB to secretly plan a rising. They were not preparing for failure, but those who eventually became involved in the events of 1916 did not all think alike or share the same philosophies, which is why there was so much confusion in the lead-up to the Rising. Eoin MacNeill did not believe a rising was justified unless there was an attempt by the British to disarm the Volunteers or significant help forthcoming from outside Ireland. He was conscious that public opinion would not be in favour of an unprovoked rebellion, but most of the leaders of the Rising were not concerned with public opinion. The essayist Robert Lynd made the point in 1917 that James Connolly, as leader of the Irish Citizen Army, believed it was necessary to align the labour and republican movements because in looking at Irish history, ‘he saw insurrection following insurrection apparently in vain, like wave following wave, but he still had faith in the hour when the tide would be full’. In that sense, it was a certain mood of despair mixed with vague optimism within Irish republicanism and socialism that led to the Rising.

The original plan was to mobilise the Volunteers on Easter Sunday and then inform them a rising was about to take place. The idea was that this would be a nationwide rebellion, not just confined to Dublin. On Holy Thursday, when they had got wind of the secret plans, IRB member Bulmer Hobson and Eoin MacNeill confronted Patrick Pearse in his capacity as director of military organisation for the Volunteers. Pearse convinced them military aid was imminent from Germany, as was the Volunteers’ suppression by the British government. MacNeill relented, but the rebels’ plans subsequently collapsed. The German supply ship, the Aud, was captured, as was Roger Casement who had sought German support. The British government wrongly believed they now had the main leader. MacNeill discovered that the document purporting to provide evidence of the Volunteers’ imminent suppression was a forgery. He countermanded the order for the Volunteers to mobilise, while the British authorities decided to wait until after the Easter holiday to round up the suspects. On Monday, the rebels, numbering about seven hundred, decided to mobilise, by seizing prominent Dublin city-centre buildings, with the General Post Office (GPO) as headquarters. The stage was set. But nobody knew how long the drama would last or how the audience would react.

What happened in the five years after the Rising, until July 1921 when a ceasefire was called between the British crown forces and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the successor organisation to the Irish Volunteers, is often referred to as ‘the Irish Revolution’. In the most recent history of the Rising, historian Charles Townshend acknowledges that those who struck against the British Empire in 1916 were ready to act without majority support; in this ‘they were hardly different from any revolutionary insurrectionist of the nineteenth or twentieth century’. He labels them rebels ‘because it carries a charge of romantic glamour which was wholly appropriate to their minds’. Michael Laffan, in his definitive history of the rise of the Sinn Féin movement after 1916, makes the point that its greatest achievement in 1917 was ‘the emergence of a sense of cohesion and common purpose among a disparate group of people who, until then, had often suspected or disapproved of each other’.

The Sinn Féin revolution brought down the quest for Home Rule that the constitutional nationalists had promoted since the nineteenth century; in its place the demand was now for an Irish Republic. Although the Easter Rising was crushed and its leaders executed, it led to a change in public opinion that saw Sinn Féin triumph in the general election of 1918, with Éamon de Valera, the sole surviving commandant from the Rising, as its president, and the commencement of a War of Independence in 1919.

The military conflict between British armed forces and the IRA consisted of sporadic guerrilla fighting overseen by the IRA’s director of intelligence, Michael Collins. It was paralleled by the efforts of the self-proclaimed government of the Irish republic – the first Dáil (Irish parliament) assembled in January 1919 – to achieve an independent Irish Republic. In the midst of this, the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 created a separate parliament for the six counties of Northern Ireland, partitioning the island. The War of Independence witnessed assassination, reprisal and counter-reprisal. There was an attempt by Sinn Féin and the IRA to supplant the British administration in Ireland in the areas of local government and the administration of justice, with mixed results. There was also an intelligence war fought and a crusade to undermine the RIC, the country’s armed police force since 1822. This war involved psychological, political and propaganda battles.

By the end of 1919, there were over 40,000 British army troops in Ireland. The British chief secretary, Hamar Greenwood, insisted that Britain had Ireland under control. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, disingenuously referred to the IRA as ‘a small murder gang’, and in November 1920 announced ‘we have murder by the throat’. The truth was that law and order had long ceased in Ireland and the conduct of the war from the British side was a disaster. Dublin Castle, the headquarters of British rule in Ireland, could not put together an effective, unified security command. As previously classified documents have become available, they have revealed a vast accumulation of frustration, error and confusion within the administration and its police force, and also within the British cabinet and army. In March 1920, the RIC was reinforced by the recruitment of British ex-soldiers and sailors, known as the Black and Tans due to their distinctive uniforms. By November 1921 there were almost 10,000 of them in Ireland. Although it is difficult to be precise about the numerical strength of the IRA, it is unlikely that more than 3,000 members were active as combatants.

But there were tensions within the IRA also, and differences of opinion. Despite the IRA’s often effective use of guerrilla warfare tactics, historians in recent years have been more sceptical about the scale of the damage it inflicted and have highlighted some of the murkier aspects of the war, including the killing and intimidation of innocent civilians. There was often a pitiful shortage of weapons and communications problems between IRA headquarters and the regional brigades. There were chilling executions, anger about alleged spies and informers, and sometimes a resistance to the IRA when it was deemed not to be acting in the interests of the communities it claimed to represent. Many of the contentions in this book, originally published in 1948, about ‘the unflinching support of a civilian population’, about republican Volunteers coming through the ordeal ‘with immaculate hands’, will be disputed by professional historians as not withstanding objective historical research. It is a period of Irish history still much disputed, but a lot of the research to date has excluded the voices of the general population.

It was, like all wars, complicated and difficult, and the certainty expressed by so many in its aftermath was rarely evident at the time. There is much defiance and resoluteness on display in this book. There was a temptation after the events to simplify or romanticise what was a painful period for many, marked by pride, but also suffering and conflicting allegiances. This was overwhelmingly a revolution of the young and the inexperienced. Nonetheless, this book humanises the period and underlines the bravery and idealism that was evident. Many of those who fought in Dublin, as elsewhere, took huge risks for little or no reward, but the bonds of friendship and common purpose that they shared helped them in their quest. There were many resourceful women in Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary to the IRA, whose structures proved efficient and reliable and whose role in transporting dispatches was indispensable; they receive due recognition in this book as women who ‘left their names indelibly’ on the story of the Irish revolution.

This book, and others like it, also fulfilled a need in the 1930s and 1940s not just to allow the Volunteers to record their story in their own words, but to ensure a younger generation would be aware of their actions and of a time when, according to the book’s contributors, there was a ‘militant national insurrectionary spirit’. Dublin’s Fighting Story captures the excitement and the immediacy of the Irish War of Independence and the belief that the leaders of the revolution did not urge people to take dangerous courses they were not themselves prepared to take. Many of their tragic ends are recorded here, and the book is also a reminder that some leaders are better remembered than others. Arthur Griffith, for example, the founder of the original Sinn Féin movement, and often neglected, is recalled here by Liam Ó Briain as ‘the profoundest thinker of them all and one of the greatest men that Ireland ever produced’. There is also a concern expressed about what Seán McGarry referred to as ‘a generation so lamentably ignorant’ of the achievements of Michael Collins. This was an echo of a fear that had been highlighted in the 1930s by Fianna Fáil Minister for Education Thomas Derrig, who expressed his concern at a ‘lack of knowledge of the 1916 leaders and of the events subsequent to 1916 displayed by boys with the leaving certificate’. With the passage of time, the certainties and emphatic assertions in this book about ‘the destiny of an ancient people’ and the righteousness of their course of action may appear to some as exaggerated, simplistic or even disingenuous. What cannot be disputed, however, is the contention that the source of their strength during the years 1916–21 ‘lay in their faith in their cause’. This moving and absorbing book allows the reader to understand why.

PROFESSOR DIARMAID FERRITER
BOSTON COLLEGE
MARCH 2009

FOREWORD

ALMOST THIRTY YEARS ago a small body of men engaged in combat with the armed forces of an empire. Militarily they were weak. Their strength lay in their faith in their cause and in the unflinching support of a civilian population which refused to be cowed by threats or by violence.

For almost two years these men successfully maintained the unequal struggle and finally compelled their powerful adversary to seek a truce. The battles in which they fought were neither large nor spectacular: they were the little clashes of guerrilla warfare – the sudden meeting, the flash of guns, a getaway, or the long wait of an ambush, then the explosive action, and death or a successful decision. And the stake at issue was the destiny of an ancient people.

Before the war years imposed a restriction upon newsprint, as upon other commodities, The Kerryman, in its various Christmas and other special numbers, told much of the story of these men, the men of the flying columns, the active service units of the Irish Republican Army. It now gathers these stories into book form together with others hitherto unpublished. First in the series was Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story; the fighting stories of Kerry and Limerick followed, and now Dublin’s Fighting Story is presented.

All the stories in these Fighting Series booklets are either told by the men who took part in the actions described, or else they are written from the personal narrative of survivors. The booklets do not purport to be a detailed or chronological history of the fight for independence, but every effort has been made to obtain the fullest and most accurate information about the incidents described. The publishers are conscious, however, that in the collection of data about such a period errors and omissions can easily occur and so they will welcome the help of readers who may be able to throw more light upon the various episodes related in the series. Such additional information will be incorporated into the second edition of the booklets which the present rate of orders would seem to indicate will be called for in the very near future.

The publishers believe that the younger generation who know about those times by hearsay only will find these survivors’ tales of the fight of absorbing interest, while to the older generation they will recall vividly a memorable era and the men who made it. In short, they feel that Fighting Story series, the story of the Anglo-Irish War county by county, is a series that will be welcomed by Irish people everywhere. For that reason, so that the booklets may have the widest possible circulation, they are being sold at a price within the reach of everyone. To sell these booklets, with their lavish collection of illustrations of unique historical interest, at the very moderate price of two shillings, the publishers were content to reduce their own profit and to produce the booklet at little above the mere cost of production. They will be satisfied if the series serves to preserve in the hearts of the younger generation that love of country and devotion to its interests which distinguished the men whose doings are related therein.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sceilg’s stories of 1916 as given in this volume, are largely taken from his own articles published in the Catholic Bulletin soon after the Rising, when the Catholic Bulletin gave all the details that the military censor would allow. To Messrs M.H. Gill and Son Ltd., proprietors of the Catholic Bulletin, the editor of Dublin’s Fighting Story expresses his thanks for permission to use the material; also to the directors of the Irish Press Ltd., for permission to republish material from the Evening Telegraph.

The Editor