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'It happened in the Phoenix Park all in the month of May'
dublin |
history and heritage |
feature
Saturday April 23, 2005 11:44 by Joe Black
The political history of the Phoenix Park I stared this piece intending it to be little more than an ad for this Maydays anarchist picnic in the Phoenix park (details follow) with perhaps a little bit of context thrown in. But suddenly I found myself carried away by the political geography of this park which was after all originally built as a Deer park for a discarded mistress of Charles II (hence the high wall). If you know even a little of that history the park becomes a different place and suddenly the events of Mayday 2004 fall into a greater context of political protest and the control of space. One year ago, on Mayday 2004, the summit of the EU heads of state took place in Farmleigh House in the Pheonix Park. The entire park was filled with surveillance cameras, ringed with fences, draped with barbed wire, buzzed by helicopters, rigged with motion detectors and surrounded with riot police. In the end water cannons were deployed to keep a protestors out of the park History is normally written by the winners and it is common to find each new generation of radicals having to rediscover the stories of those who went before them. Thus, it is not surprising that many of those who protested last year probably were unaware of the history of battles between radical movements and the state that the park played host to in the past. While the park hosts many of the symbols of power in Ireland - past and present - from the monument to the arch-reactionary Wellington, to the US-ambassador's residence and the Garda Headquarters, it has also seen its fair share of opposition. The invincibles assasinated the British Secretary there in 1882, it was the site of many early 20th century trade union ralies and the magazine fort in the park was captured at the start of the 1916 rising and was raided again by the IRA in 1939. The phoenix park is, in many ways, a symbolic battleground for the soul of Ireland.
In recent years radical movements in Ireland have re-energised Mayday in Dublin. This year, even without the pomp and grandeur of the EU heads of state, a series of radical events are planned to span the weekend. A festival of radical opposition that is once again bubbling to the surface. And once again the Phoenix Park is on the menu. Mayday Radical Events: Anarchist 1st of May picnic in Phoenix Park | DCTU May Day Demonstration - Solidarity with Migrant Workers including a Get up stand up block to help organise the unorganised | Reclaim the Streets
Did you spend Mayday last year trying to get into the Phoenix Park only to discover it filled with surveillance cameras, ringed with fences, draped with barbed wire, buzzed by helicopters, rigged with motion detectors and surrounded with riot police? Maybe you even got a blast from a water cannon. "Now's here's a proof of Irish sense This bit of the park also has quite a radical history as attempts to storm the magazine fort formed part of the plan of many republican insurrections. It's isolated position in the park made it quite vulnerable and soon after the IRA had managed to get in and get a few lorry loads of guns out in 1939 it was abandoned. Liam Brady described that raid in his unpublished biography 'A Libertarian in the Thirties'. Don't get too excited by the title - he is referring to have lived in the Liberties rather than to having been an anarchist in the 1930's! But there is another odd link here because Liam Brady was the grand nephew of Joe Brady, one of the Invincibles who was hanged in 1882 for his part in the Phoenix Park assassinations It happened in the Phoenix Park all in the month of May, The Invincibles were a working class republican group close to the Fenians who stabbed to death the British secretary and also the under-secretary for Ireland somewhere along the road opposite the Aras. In Europe and the USA 1882 was part of the 'propaganda by deed' period which parts of the anarchist movement had entered after the suppression of the Paris commune when some 30,000 communards were executed. Propaganda by deed consisted of assassinations of members of the ruling class; in particular those associated with oppression. Press reports at the time often referred to the Invincibles as anarchists and Engels even called the Invincibles 'Bakunists'. But there is no evidence of any links with anarchism either in Ireland or abroad. In London however the short-lived German anarchist paper Freiheit (worker) was shut down as a consequence of an article "applauding the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish by Fenians in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in May 1882". The Invincibles had formed of ex Fenian/IRB men in 1881 in the aftermath of the brutal suppression of the Land League and with the objective of "removing all the principal tyrants from the country". Meet with our history This and other references to the Invincibles has left me with a lasting curiosity about them. I've spent some time opposite the Aras looking for the possible site of the assassination. We know that as late as 1938 it was remembered and even marked out by some working class Dubliners because of another of the odd links that crop up in connection with the Park. In 1938 James T. Farrell came to Dublin to visit Jim Larkin. He relates that while there Larkin "asked me if I wanted to see the monument to the Invincibles ... I imagined that I was going to see a statue, but this did seem passingly curious. The idea that there would be a monument commemorating the Invincibles in Dublin didn't make sense. We stopped in Phoenix Park, just opposite the Archbishop's palace. ... We got out. Jim walked along a path, looking down at the grass. I was bewildered. Jim became nervous, and he stared on the ground with some concern. Then he pointed. There it was. I saw a little hole where grass had been torn up. A cross had been scratched in the earth with a stick. I gathered that many Dubliners did not know of this act commemorating the Invincibles. Jim's boys always went out to Phoenix Park, and marked this cross in the earth. No matter how often grass was planted over it, it was torn up. The cross was marked in the earth." I only found this account today - but I do remember when looking for the site coming across a cross scratched in the grass on the left hand side of the road. This evening perhaps I'll talk a walk up there to see if someone is really still carrying on that tradition. I should probably also ask my mother. Probably part of my interest in the Park comes from spending a lot of summer days there as a kid visiting my grandparents. They lived in Kirwan street but as a child she had lived in Neill st which is very close to the North Circular entrance to the park and so she spent a lot of time there. History gets forgotten if we don't retell it. [ Well she didn't know about the cross but she did say that a distant relative was meant to have been a maid in the Viceregal lodge at the time and was said to have come across the scene just after the murder. That side of her family later ended up in Liverpool - and there was more to tell there. ] Whatever the exact site the assassinations took place less that a kilometre as the crow flies from the magazine fort. Blowing up the entire fort was also supposed to be the signal for the start of the 1916 rising. If the main magazine had gone up the resulting explosion should have been heard all over Dublin. But although the fort was captured around noon on Easter Monday 1916 by volunteers Patrick Daly and Garry Holohan they were. "Unable to locate the key to the main store, the men were able only to set off a small charge with a cache of gelignite which did not make a sound to be heard all over Dublin as the rebels had planned." You can see why the state decided it was probably better to abandon the fort, today the dry moat is full of brambles and the gates are long padlocked shut. It's a quiet spot where you can easily believe you are deep in the country side rather than a short walk from Park Gate Street. Meet with each other So this Mayday lets return to the Park and celebrate resistance and struggle from Chicago to Dublin. And lets be at the trade union march the day before and the Reclaim the Streets the day after. May weekend events in Dublin * May Day Demonstration - Solidarity with Migrant Workers This years May Day trade union demonstration will take place on Saturday April 30th meeting at 2.30 at the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square. The demo will march to Liberty Hall and is on the theme of solidarity with migrant workers. The march has been called by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69176 Join The Get Up Stand Up Bloc And Help Organise The Unorganised This Mayday weekend, the Get Up Stand Up Campaign will be organizing a block on the Trades Council March In Dublin. After the march we will be returning to the roots of Mayday and parading through the city to distribute leaflets on basic workers' rights to people working in casualised labour. Join us in building the labour movement. http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69495 Anarchist 1st of May picnic in Phoenix Park This Mayday let us go back to the park and have ourselves a picnic free of all the state imposed hassle and madness of last year. This will be (at least) the fourth anarchist picnic held in the park. Meet up at the Wellington Monument at 1pm http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69488 Reclaim The Streets On Monday, May 2nd, starting from the Spike on O'Connell Street at 1.30pm, Reclaim The Streets and Dissent! Ireland, along with Critical Mass will be holding a free street party to help highlight the effects that the G8 leaders have on the world, and to help people mobolise to take action and travel to this years G8 Summit at Gleneagles, Scotland on July 6th. http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69141 More information The anarchist origins of Mayday in Chicago - http://struggle.ws/about/mayday.html The Peterloo massacre - http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/manchester/trails/TRA25555.html?trailpage=3 http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/c-eight/distress/peterloo.htm Original texts reporting on Peterloo http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/c-eight/distress/peter3.htm The 1820 revolt in Scotland http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/myths_legends/scotland/strathclyde/article_1.shtml Liam Brady and 1939 raid on the magazine fort http://www.searcs-web.com/brady.html The Invincibles http://lark.phoblacht.net/shadowgunman.html Larkin and the Invincible monument http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/farrell/works/1940s/lestweforget.htm History of the park http://www.obeirnefamily.mcmail.com/issue4/History%20of%20Phoeniex%20Park.htm About the park today http://mbm.dotnet11.hostbasket.com/iis/zajms/phoenix.htm A kids game based in the park http://www.araskids.ie/html/park/ This is the caption that goes with the cartoon of Wellington Wellington The pen and the sword "The cut depicts a set of scales with a quill pen in the left-side dish clearly outweighing ... representations of a repressive legal apparatus. ...The suggestion is ... a free press has been able to keep a repressive government in check. Further to the right, however, stands the figure of ... in the process of adding his sword (i.e. military force) to the legal documents in the right-side dish of the scales. The sword has not yet landed, and it thus remains to be seen whether or not the pen will continue to outweigh the combined force of legal and military repression. From http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/hone/deditext.htm copyright of images with orginal holders
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