Terence
MacSwiney

Terence MacSwiney was a playwright before he was a soldier, a thinker before he was a Lord Mayor. He wrote three plays, two of them staged in Cork before the war came to swallow everything else. The one that survives best is The Revolutionist, a drama about a man who believes the cause is worth any personal cost. He meant it literally.

He was born in Cork in 1879, the son of a Cork father and a Kerry mother. The family emigrated to Australia for a period, came back, and fell into poverty when his father died. MacSwiney worked in a counting house and studied at night, passing his accountancy exams while writing plays and joining the Gaelic League, the cultural movement that was quietly politicising a generation.

The Volunteer and the Lord Mayor

By 1913 he was co-founding the Irish Volunteers in Cork. When the Easter Rising happened in 1916 he was interned, as were hundreds of Irish activists. When he came out, the country had shifted. The executions of the Rising's leaders had turned cautious men into republicans. MacSwiney was already one.

In January 1920 his friend and comrade Tomás Mac Curtain was elected Lord Mayor of Cork, the first Republican to hold the office. Two months later, on the night of 19 March, Mac Curtain was shot dead in his home in front of his wife and children. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder against David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, and the Royal Irish Constabulary.

MacSwiney succeeded him as Lord Mayor in April. He served for four months.

Arrest and Brixton

In August 1920 MacSwiney was arrested at Cork City Hall, found with a police cipher and a revolver. He was court-martialled and sentenced to two years in prison. He was taken to Brixton Prison in London. On the day of his arrest he began a hunger strike.

He lasted 74 days. It remains one of the longest hunger strikes in recorded history. The world's press gathered outside Brixton. Letters arrived from India, from the United States, from Argentina. The Vatican sent a representative. The British government would not yield. Lloyd George said that to release MacSwiney would be to surrender to the IRA.

He died on 25 October 1920. He was 41 years old. His body was taken to Cork for burial, passing through London and Dublin in a procession that drew tens of thousands. The streets of Cork were lined.

What the death changed

The hunger strike did not end the war. But it changed how the world saw it. The image of a Lord Mayor, a civic figure and playwright, starving to death in a London prison generated a particular kind of revulsion that military dispatches could not. Ho Chi Minh cited MacSwiney. Gandhi is said to have followed the case closely. His line, that it is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most who will conquer, found its way into independence movements on four continents.

In Cork, the Black and Tans burned the city centre six weeks after his death. The War of Independence ended with a truce in July 1921. MacSwiney did not live to see either.

Where to find him in Cork

The walk passes Cork City Hall, where MacSwiney was arrested and where the city still keeps its civic functions. There is a plaque. We also stop at the Berwick Fountain on Grand Parade, which was the main gathering point for the republican processions of 1920. The streets around it look different now but the shape of them is the same.