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Windle began 1917 more in hope than in the expectation of the British government returning to a sane and sensible Irish policy. He had a low opinion of Lloyd George and an even more disparaging view of many members of his cabinet and their press baron entourage.1 Windle was witnessing – whether he was fully aware of it or not – the passing of the old Irish Parliamentary Party order.Windle believed that the pro-unionist policies of the British government, which were undercutting Redmond’s popular roots and that of his party, were liable to end in disaster and that, for him, meant the victory of Sinn Féin – a radical nationalist coalition forged out of the rising and out of its brutal repression. Éamon deValera, turned down for a professorial post in UCC in 1913, was one of the main rising stars of a new Irish politics. Windle, who had disliked him in 1913, did not have cause to change his mind during his remaining two years in Ireland. The old order was indeed passing and Windle, now so much a part of the British establishment in Ireland, was very late in seeing Sinn Féin’s potential for ultimate victory. Besides his loss of faith in the Irish policies of the government – and even at times in British democracy itself – Windle had also become alienated from the overwhelming majority of the Irish episcopate and their nationalistic brand of Catholicism. By the end of 1917 he held the Irish Catholic Church and its leadership in even less esteem. For example, two unfortunate episodes in early 1917 destroyed his tentative friendship with Bishop Cohalan of Cork. He wrote on 6 January: ‘Mass – letters. Accompanying one from Bishop Cohalan respecting recognition of technical school as to which he knows nothing yet objects. Why is it that when a man becomes a Bishop he at once ceases to use all sense of decency. A weak man afraid to have it thought that he is being led by others. How these fools are throwing away their inheritance and how CHAPTER 6 The Rise of Sinn Féin and the Irish Convention 172 The Rise of Sinn Féin and the Irish Convention 173 anti-clericalism is swamping this country.’ Windle also had a personal reason for disliking the local bishop. His close friend, Canon Patrick Roche, had – against his will – been moved from the centre-city parish of SS Peter and Paul to Ballincollig in the countryside. Roche found the unnecessary move ‘very distressing’, according to Windle, and ‘I think a rotten stroke. Probably doesn’t want strong man near the throne.’On 9 January, Windle met Cohalan outside the college, and noted: ‘a curious, mean obstinate man of a very narrow type.’He called on Roche who was ‘seething with annoyance’. ‘What a gang our clerics are’, Windle wrote on 20 January. Windle’s dislike for Cohalan was surpassed only by his detestation of Bishop O’Dwyer of Limerick. On 24 January he recorded the victory of the Unionist Sir Stephen Quinn in the contest for the Lord Mayor of Limerick by twenty-three to ten – ‘I hope a slap for the lousy Limerick bishop.’ Noting on 18 February that he had issued a pastoral, Windle commented that it was ‘so base, so lying, so dishonest as to outdo anything ever done even by those dregs of humanity – the Irish bishops’. He added: ‘why a miserable pimped up little peasant should be allowed to do these things is a mystery. For me it determines me not to go near Catholic things (outside personal religion).’ Windle’s opinion of Bishop O’Dwyer did not mellow before his death on 19 August 1917. He remained quite unforgiving. On 29 January, he noted that it was the Kaiser’s birthday: ‘May he spend his next in that part of the other world where alone he could be happy viz in Hell or the most inflamed part of Purgatory.’2 Sinn Féin enjoyed its first major political breakthrough on 5 February 1917 when, in a by-election, the voters of North Roscommon returned George Noble Count Plunkett to Westminster. The father of one of the executed leaders of the rising, he declined to take the seat in accordance with Sinn Féin policy. Meanwhile, Windle noted the same day about the British ‘yellow press’, with particular emphasis on ‘the lies’ of the Daily Mail: ‘What a land England is to be swayed by such...

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