Terence MacSwiney

Terence MacSwiney was a playwright before he was a soldier and a thinker before he was a Lord Mayor. He wrote plays and poems, two of them staged in Cork before the war swallowed everything else, and the one that survives best is called The Revolutionist, about a man who believes the cause is worth any personal cost. He meant it literally. In 1920 he starved himself to death in a London prison over seventy-four days while the world watched, and Cork has never been quite the same city since.

The accountant who wrote plays

He was born on North Main Street in 1879, the son of a Cork father and a Kerry mother. The family tried Australia, came back, and slid into poverty when his father died. MacSwiney went to work in a counting house at fifteen and studied at night, passing his accountancy exams while writing plays, learning Irish and joining the Gaelic League, the cultural movement that was quietly turning a whole generation political. By 1913 he was helping to found the Irish Volunteers in Cork. He was interned after the Rising in 1916, and when he came out the country had shifted under him. The executions had turned cautious men into republicans. He was already one.

The chain of office

In January 1920 his friend Tomás Mac Curtain became the first republican Lord Mayor of Cork. Ten weeks later, in the early hours of 20 March, police in disguise shot Mac Curtain dead in his home in front of his family. MacSwiney took the chain in his place on 30 March and used his first speech to say what everyone in the room was thinking: that the office was now a target, and that it was not those who could inflict the most but those who could endure the most who would win. He served four and a half months.

Arrest and Brixton

On 12 August 1920 the army raided City Hall during a brigade meeting and arrested him with a police cipher and seditious papers in his possession. He was court-martialled inside the week, sentenced to two years, and shipped to Brixton Prison in London. He had refused food from the moment of his arrest. He kept refusing it for seventy-four days, one of the longest hunger strikes ever recorded, while the world's press camped outside the prison gate. Letters and telegrams came from India, the United States, Argentina and Australia. Dockers in New York refused to unload British ships. The Vatican pleaded. Lloyd George said that to release him would be to surrender to the IRA, and would not move. MacSwiney died on 25 October 1920, aged forty-one.

His body lay in state in Southwark Cathedral and tens of thousands followed the coffin through London. The government, terrified of what a Dublin funeral would look like, seized the coffin at Holyhead and put it on a ship straight to Cork. The city met it on the quays. He was buried in the Republican Plot at St Finbarr's Cemetery on 31 October, beside Mac Curtain, with the streets lined the whole way out.

What the death changed

The hunger strike did not end the war, but it changed how the world saw it. A Lord Mayor, a playwright and an accountant starving to death in an English prison produced a kind of revulsion that no ambush could. Ho Chi Minh, working in a London kitchen at the time, said a nation with citizens like that would never surrender. Gandhi followed the case. His line about enduring the most found its way into independence movements on four continents, and the Brixton strike became the model for every republican hunger strike that followed, right down to 1981. In Cork the Black and Tans burned the city centre seven weeks after his death. The truce came the following July. He saw neither.

On the walk

The walk passes Cork City Hall, rebuilt after the burning, where MacSwiney was arrested and where the city still does its business. There is a plaque, and the two Lord Mayors look down from the walls inside. We also stop on the Grand Parade, the gathering point for the great republican processions of 1920. The streets around it look different now, but the shape of them is the same.