A 1916 diary....NOT in the news (February 22-27, 1916)

Some more of what we now know was being done 100 years ago this week by those planning — or who would play a role in — the 1916 Rising.

• Following the slap on the wrist of a one-shilling court fine for Irish Volunteers full-time organiser and publisher of Fianna Fáil newspaper Terence MacSwiney, concerns were raised in the mind of the RIC Inspector General Neville Chamberlain about the organisation’s growing influence. “Already, as exemplified by the action of Justices at Cork Police Court, who though no Sinn Féiners dismissed charges brought against Irish Volunteers under the Defence of the Realm Regulations, which were clearly proved, they appear to have acquired more influence,” he wrote in a report to Dublin Castle in March. MacSwiney had been charged with making a speech likely to cause disaffection to the King and hostility to His Majesty’s Government at Ballynoe, Co Cork, on January 2, and with having a cypher capable of conveying military or naval information at his home in the city’s Victoria Road when he was arrested 11 days later. Liam de Róiste, a Cork city Irish Volunteers activist and friend of MacSwiney recorded in his diary: “The ‘popular’ magistrates knew they dare not convict, if they would retain popularity.” The case against Thomas Kent of Castlelyons, Fermoy, relating to the event at Ballynoe was adjourned for a week.

• The shop of veteran Fenian Tom Clarke at Parnell St in Dublin was visited by Edward Daly, and Seán MacDiarmada, Clarke’s co-conspirator on the Irish Republican Brotherhood Military Council that had already set Easter Sunday on April 23 as the date for the Rising to start. The Irish Volunteers headquarters at 2 Dawson St, Dublin, were visited by four of the men who would be executed after the Rising: Eamonn Ceannt, Seán MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, and Michael O’Hanrahan. Also attending meetings there, according to Dublin Metropolitan Police detectives, were Volunteers founder Bulmer Hobson, James Whelan, Herbert Mellows, and Thomas McCarthy. McCarthy was an organiser for the growing armed militia, and had spent several weeks helping to set up and organise Volunteers companies in Co Cork in late 1915.