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120 The attacks at Cork on American sailors were in part the result of a determination of the Irish manhood to protect Irish women. Éamon de Valera, November 19191 The streets of Cork experienced waves of protests and disturbances in 1917 and 1918. Police blamed young independence activists, labour radicals, and ordinary street rowdies for Cork’s numerous riots, brawls and assaults. However, the most surprising culprits for a separate round of Cork’s street violence were residents concerned about sexual immorality, who between 1917 and 1918 attacked local women consorting with American sailors. ‘The Irish Lead’ During the first two years of the war, Cork Catholic clergy largely stayed aloof from political controversy. This changed in December 1916, during the staging of a pro-recruiting play in Cork city, which was disrupted by a combination of Catholic activists and advanced nationalists. The abandonment of ‘The Irish Lead’ at the Palace Theatre provoked wild scenes and a subsequent public controversy.2 Capitalising on the celebrity of County Cork’s Victoria Cross winner Michael O’Leary, ‘The Irish Lead’ was a ham-fisted drama intended to encourage Catholics to join the British Army. It depicted a doomed west Cork love affair between Sergeant O’Leary of the Munster Fusiliers and his neighbour Norah MacCarthy. The upstanding O’Leary proposes marriage, but Norah’s family forbids the match due to their prejudice against Irishmen like O’Leary taking the king’s shilling. At the end of the second act, a distraught Norah escapes to a convent in France. Molly: In Hivin’s name where are ye going to? At this hour of night? VII. Cork Women, American Sailors and Catholic Vigilantes, 1917–18 Cork Women, American Sailors . . . 121 Norah: I’m going away to the Convent, Molly. I’m going there now, for my heart is broken. Molly: To the Convent! To be a nun! Norah: Yes, there is nothing else left me now.3 The third act opens years later in wartime France, where Norah is now the mother superior of her convent refuge. Rampaging German troops descend on the convent, desecrate its church, kill the parish priest, and shoot the mother superior (Norah). They are interrupted and routed by Sergeant Michael O’Leary and his hearty band of Munster Fusiliers, but the Irish have arrived too late to save Norah. Cradled by her beloved Michael, she uses her dying breaths to beseech Ireland: send more soldiers to protect the convents of Belgium and France. The play was staged in Cork on 9 December 1916 for the ‘Tipperary Club’, a benevolent organisation raising funds for dependents of British servicemen. A ‘large and fashionable audience’ attended, along with wounded soldiers and the Leinster Regimental Band. However, after the curtain was raised a section of 200 young men and women in the balcony broke into boos. By the opening of the third act, ‘there was bedlam’, despite the best efforts of director Mrs Nellie Standish Barry (a member of the Catholic gentry), who also played the part of Norah MacCarthy. As the crowd sang ‘Faith of our Fathers’ and ‘God Bless our Pope’, Standish Barry gamely continued with her lines, even when the rest of the cast fled the stage. Ultimately, Standish Barry recognised defeat and abandoned the play. The Cork Examiner wrote of the demonstrators : ‘They kept on singing until the screen was lowered and the people in the stalls got up to leave . . . The protest finished with “cheers for our Bishop” and “cheers for the Children of Mary”, and “cheers for the Mollies”.’4 The protesters concluded by marching out of the theatre and parading through the city streets until peacefully dispersing. The Cork Constitution denounced ‘the gratuitous blackguardism’ as the work of ‘a gang of pro-German Sinn Féiners’, who shouted ‘Up Dublin’ and ‘Up the Rebellion’ during the disruption.5 However, the Cork Examiner claimed, ‘The young men in the gallery were determined to stop a travestied presentation of the significance of religious communities for women.’6 AOH provincial chaplain Fr John Russell (Cork Cathedral) denied the Constitution’s charges, and exclaimed, ‘A good stroke has been struck for faith and religion.’7 An anonymous city priest wrote to the Examiner to protest at the play’s treatment of convent life as ‘grotesquely wrong from a Catholic point of view’, and claimed the protesters enjoyed ‘the support and countenance of the whole Catholic community of Cork’.8 Military authorities advised [3.133.108.241] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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