Patrick Comerford
Throughout the First World War, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, Protestants of all denominations throughout Limerick city and county kept their churches open, maintained their church and social life, and proclaimed constantly their goodwill towards their neighbours and, after the Treaty, their loyalty to the new Irish Free State. Throughout the Civil War, cathedral services continued in St Mary’s, together with ordinations and Holy Week addresses, Sunday services continued in parish churches, and diocesan organisations, including the diocesan synod and council, sought to maintain a semblance of normal church life.1 But this period was also marked by a number of attacks and killings that were inevitably perceived as sectarian.
Members of the Church of Ireland, Methodists, and Presbyterians in Limerick identified overwhelmingly with the British cause in the First World War, and few showed any open sympathy with Irish nationalism and independence. Those members of the Church of Ireland who identified with nationalism at the time stand out as exceptional, although none could be regarded as a marginal member of the Church of Ireland. Conor O’Brien (1880−1952), skipper of the Kelpie during the Kilcoole gun running in August 1914, was a grandson of William Smith O’Brien and a nephew of both Lucius Henry O’Brien, who was the dean of Limerick from 1905 to 1913, and the Revd Robert Malcolm Gwynn (1877−1962), who gave the Irish Citizen Army its name. His cousin Mary Spring Rice (1888−1924), a crew member of the Asgard, was a bishop’s granddaughter. Sir Thomas Myles (1857−1937), who skippered the Chotah in the Kilcoole gun running, was a brother of the dean of Dromore, the Very Revd Edward Albert Myles (1865−1951).2
However, as war memorials in churches throughout Limerick attest, during the revolutionary decade the vast majority of ordinary Protestant churchgoers identified not with independence but with family members who enlisted during the First World War.
Experience of the First World War
The experience of war blighted the lives of almost every Protestant family in these years and in the decades that followed. The men who signed up and fought in the main fields of battle, such as Flanders, the Somme, the Gallipoli landings, and Thessaloniki, included about one hundred former members of the Church Lads’ Brigade, a church-based youth organisation in the Limerick city parishes. It is difficult to overstate the impact of the war on Protestant family life in Limerick. The Heaphy family, for example, paid a heavy price with the deaths of three brothers: Private William Heaphy (28) died of his wounds on 7 May 1916; Gunner Frederick Heaphy (17) was killed on 3 May 1917; and Lance Corporal John Eyre Heaphy (33) was killed on 7 April 1918. A fourth brother, George Heaphy, survived the war. All three Heaphy brothers who died are named on the war memorial in St Mary’s Cathedral, along with two Fogerty brothers, two Hackett brothers, and two brothers from the Wills family. When injured men died at home, their families and churches went to great lengths in organising their funerals. Lieutenant William Brabazon Owens died of his wounds at the age of twenty on 25 June 1916, and received a military funeral in St Mary’s Cathedral. The funeral cortege was headed by a firing party and an army band; his coffin, covered with the union fag and his sword, belt, and cap, was borne on a gun carriage.3
After the First World War, war memorials were erected in St Mary’s Cathedral and in ordinary churches throughout Limerick. The cathedral war memorial was unveiled in 1922 and dedicated ‘In memory of the Men of Thomond fallen in the War: 1914–18.’ The forty-three names are listed alphabetically, without class division or separate categories for ‘officers’ and ‘men’. Lord Glentworth (Captain Edmond William Claude Gerard de Vere Pery), the twenty-three-year-old heir of the Earl of Limerick, was killed in action on 18 May 1918; on the monument, he takes his place alphabetically between a Gabbett and a Gore. In contrast, the war memorial in Holy Trinity Church, Rathkeale, has only seven names, but separates the officers from the men. Their deaths are seen as heroic and are imbued with religious significance, emphasised in the heading and the Biblical citation: ‘1914−1918, To the Glory of God and in loving memory of the following officers and men from this parish who laid down their lives in the Great War … Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.’
Fear among parishioners: The revolutionary years
After the First World War, and as the War of Independence intensified, the Church of Ireland faced difficulties in maintaining diocesan activities. The 1920 diocesan report, for example, refers to ‘the difficulties of travelling, and the early hour at which people must be in their houses.’4 Peter Switzer, an elderly, seventy-five-year-old bachelor, was shot and fatally wounded on 10 January 1922 while he was attending the funeral of his sister in Castletown Church near Pallaskenry.5 When a memorial service for Mrs Maria Lindsay (whose murder as an informer by the Cork No. 1 Brigade IRA on 11 March 1921 caused outrage) was held in St Mary’s Cathedral on 28 January 1922, 450 military of all ranks and ninety Royal Irish Constabulary members attended. In many ways, this service also served to express public anguish in the immediate aftermath of the death of Peter Switzer.6 A week later, on Sunday 5 February 1922, the war memorial in St Mary’s Cathedral was unveiled at a service attended by 800 people. It was unveiled by Brigadier General Louis Wyatt and was dedicated by the newly-elected Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe, Harry Vere White.7 Wyatt was the commanding officer of the troops in Limerick, but was probably invited to unveil the monument because he had become a popular public figure as the general who brought the ‘Unknown Warrior’ from France for burial in Westminster Abbey the previous November.
As the conditions for civil war unfolded across the land in spring 1922, the British Army in Limerick was confined to barracks, and the Church of Ireland Gazette described ‘a strange and dangerous condition of affairs’ in the city.8 Yet, throughout the 1922−23 period, religious services continued in St Mary’s and in parish churches, while the diocesan organisations such as the synod and council worked to maintain the normal routines of church life.9 But on 28 March 1922, an attempt was made to burn Kilpeacon Rectory. Canon Charles Atkinson, who was also precentor of Limerick, may have been singled out because he had been an army chaplain during the First World War. Bishop White visited Kilpeacon the following Sunday and urged calm, saying that Church of Ireland members were ‘law-respecting, God-fearing’ people who showed their patriotism in ‘their frank and loyal acceptance of a new form of Government.’10 In the days that followed, the pavilion of the Limerick Protestant Young Men’s Association (LPYMA) in Farranshone was burnt to the ground, bullets were fired through the windows of its premises on O’Connell Street, and an attempt was made to bomb the building.11 Protestants in Limerick called a public meeting on 4 April 1922 to express their disgust at sectarian outrages in Belfast. The meeting was chaired by Sir Charles Barrington, who – despite the earlier murder of his daughter in May 1921 – praised the toleration shown to Protestants in Limerick and insisted that they ‘had thrived’ in a Catholic community. William Waller declared that Protestants – ‘a small, a very small, minority’ − carried on their daily lives without interference. Their sentiments were echoed by Captain James O’Grady Delmege, who declared that Protestants in Limerick had ‘received nothing but kindness, courtesy and goodwill at the hands of their fellow-countrymen.’12
Brave efforts were made to continue, not only with church-going, but also with the social life of church members. The LPYMA felt confident enough to hold a sports day at its Ennis Road grounds on 27 April 1922 ‘after the lapse of some years.’13 That weekend, however, the diocesan curate, the Revd Ralph Harbord, was shot and seriously wounded on the steps of his father’s rectory in west Cork. In a sermon the following Sunday, White referred to this shooting, and the related murders of thirteen Protestants in the Dunmanway area, as a ‘grim reminder’ of the helplessness of ‘scattered, disarmed members of the Church of Ireland in the South of Ireland.’14
As the new state found its feet, the Diocese of Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe reflected the general mood throughout southern dioceses, eager to express loyalty to the new Irish Free State, yet anxious to see an end to violence. In the diocesan report of 19 June 1922, the diocesan auditor, C.H. Fitt, noted that ‘Nation and Church’ had been ‘passing through’ a ‘great crisis and change’, but his report pledged the loyalty of the church to ‘the new state’ and its commitment to ‘the welfare of all the people in our beloved native land.’15 When the diocesan synod met in the Diocesan Hall in Pery Square on 5 July 1922, disruptions to transport prevented a full attendance and the synod struggled to find a quorum. In his address, Bishop White declared: ‘We meet today in great anxiety about public affairs and in a city which is in the hands of opposing bands of armed men.’ White claimed that the Church of Ireland in Limerick had lost up to 60 per cent of its members ‘and many churches are now half empty.’ As a consequence, parishes were amalgamated and fewer curates were employed. ‘Ireland is losing many of her best, most patriotic, and most progressive citizens, who are forced to leave their native land by economic causes or by political and religious intolerance.’ The financial reports showed that collections and subscriptions were falling off, reflecting that economic and numerical decline.16
War and memory
In the aftermath of the War of Independence and the Civil War, the diocesan report for 1923 noted that the year ‘began in strife and disorder’, but ‘happily ended in peace’ and with a ‘general improvement of the civic life of the country.’17 By 1924, the Diocesan Council was giving ‘thanks to Almighty God for His providential guidance’ and the ‘quietness and peace’ that allowed church life to continue.18
At his diocesan synod in 1923, White lamented the ‘hundreds of industrious Protestant Irish men and women’ who had left ‘because they felt that they were not welcome here, and that satisfactory careers could not be secured for their boys and girls in their own country’. If this hinted at sectarian undertones, White also added that ‘anything like a Protestant exodus would be deplored by our present rulers’.19 But the Protestant exodus continued. Prominent among those who left was Sir Charles Barrington, who never returned; he sold Glenstal Castle in 1926 and died in Hampshire in 1943, aged ninety-three. Ordinary families suffered the greatest haemorrhage: by 1926, the Church of Ireland population in Limerick city had dropped by 55.4 per cent from the figure in 1911, the Methodist population had declined by 51 per cent, and the Presbyterians had fallen by 82.6 per cent.
The sufferings of laity and clergy alike were seldom spoken of. Noone was ever charged with Peter Switzer’s murder, and his youngest sister Eliza died in 1927 at the age of seventy-five, bringing to an end their branch of the Switzer family. The sectarian undercurrents remained for a decade or more after independence. During a wave of sectarian attacks that swept across Ireland in the summer of 1935, an estimated crowd of 200−300 young men attacked churches and Protestant-owned shops and homes in Limerick on Saturday night, 20 July 1935, including Trinity Episcopal Church on Catherine Street and St Michael’s Church of Ireland on Pery Square, the homes of Canon Thomas Abbot and Archdeacon John Waller, the LPYMA building, the Gospel Hall, the Diocesan Hall, and the Masonic Club, and they attempted to set fire to the Presbyterian Church on Henry Street.20 St Peter and St Paul Church, the Church of Ireland parish church in Kilmallock, was destroyed in an arson attack the following night, while the windows of the local rector’s home were smashed along with those of a Protestant-owned shop. No-one was ever convicted or jailed for the attacks.21
Mary Spring Rice died in a sanatorium in Wales in 1924. When her body was brought back for burial in the Church of Ireland churchyard in Foynes, she was given a guard of honour by the local IRA, the Gaelic League, and trade unionists.22 But the role played by a few other members of the Church of Ireland in the War of Independence was forgotten by their co-religionists and their neighbours alike. Conor O’Brien failed to get elected to the Senate in 1925 and spent his later years in semi-isolation on Foynes Island, where he died in 1952. Sir Thomas Myles had become a colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps on the outbreak of the First World War and an honorary surgeon to King George V; he died in 1937 in the Richmond Hospital, Dublin, where he spent much of his career.
In the decades that followed, as churches continued to close, every effort was made to ensure that their war memorials were not lost. The memorials in Christ Church Methodist Church, Limerick, for example, include a war memorial with six names salvaged from the Presbyterian Church on Henry Street when it closed. When Rathkeale Methodist Church closed, the war memorial was moved to Ballingrane Methodist Church near Adare.
To this day, the war memorials in many churches in all three denominations remain the focus for Remembrance Sunday services each November. Yet, only one Church of Ireland churchyard in County Limerick has memorials to members of the Church of Ireland who supported the nationalist cause. A plaque on the gate leading into Mount Trenchard churchyard near Foynes was unveiled in 2014: ‘In memory of Conor O’Brien, Kitty O’Brien, George Cahill, Mary Spring Rice, Thomas Fitzsimons, Sir Thomas Myles. Go ndéana Dia trócaire orthú. Limerick men and women who imported rifles for the Irish Volunteers, July 1914.’ The church at Mount Trenchard had been long closed by 2014, however, and all that remained standing was the church tower. Perhaps the determination to keep open other churches in places such as Castletown and Kilmallock reflects, not only the piety and commitment of their parishioners, but an inherited and inbuilt yet unspoken determination not to concede to the sectarian attacks of previous decades.
Notes
1. See, for example, Church of Ireland Gazette, 10 March, 16 June 1922.
2. Valerie Jones, Rebel Prods: The forgotten story of Protestant radical nationalists and the 1916 Rising (Dublin, 2016), passim.
3. Limerick Chronicle, 27 June 1916.
4. Representative Church Body Library, Dublin (RCB Library), D13 Limerick, Ardfert & Killaloe Diocesan Records, 1693–2008: 13/6, Diocesan Report, 1920, p 33.
5. John Lucey, ‘The shooting of Peter Switzer’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal, 53 (2013), pp 237-240.
6. Church of Ireland Gazette, 3 February 1922.
7. Ibid., 10 February 1922.
8. Ibid., 10 March 1922.
9. See Ibid., 10 March, 16 June 1922.
10. Ibid., 7 April 1922.
11. Thomas Keane, ‘Class, religion and society in Limerick city, 1922–1939’ (PhD thesis, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2015), pp 54-6.
12. Ibid, pp 54-55; Brian Hughes, ‘Unionists and loyalists in Limerick, 1922–23’ in Seán William Gannon (ed.), The inevitable conflict: Essays on the Civil War in County Limerick (Limerick, 2022), p. 94; Limerick Chronicle, 5 April 1922; Irish Times, 5 April 1922.
13. Church of Ireland Gazette, 5 May 1922.
14. Ibid., 10 May 1922.
15. RCB Library, D13/13/6, Diocesan Report, 1921, p 4.
16. Church of Ireland Gazette, 28 July 1922.
17. RCB Library, D13/13/6, Diocesan Report, 1923, pp 3-4.
18. RCB Library, D13/13/6, Diocesan Report, 1924, p 4.
19. Church of Ireland Gazette, 22 June 1923.
20. Limerick Leader, 9 January 2010. The primary context for these attacks was an outbreak of sectarian attacks against Catholics in Northern Ireland following that year’s 12 July celebrations.
21. Irish Times, 22 July 1935; Limerick Leader, 27 July 1935.
22. Jones, Rebel Prods, p. 90.
Contributor’s Note:
The Revd Canon Professor Patrick Comerford was Precentor of St Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, and priest-in-charge of the Rathkeale Group of Parishes (2017–22), including Rathkeale, Askeaton, Castletown, and Tarbert. He is a former adjunct assistant professor in Trinity College, Dublin and a former Irish Times journalist. He now lives in retirement in England. www.patrickcomerford. Com
• ‘Church-goers in Limerick During War and Revolution’ is Chapter 6 (pp 83-89) in Dr Seán William Gannon and Dr Brian Hughes (eds), Histories of Protestant Limerick, 1912–1923 (Limerick: Limerick City and County Council, 2023, ISBN 978-1-999-6911-6)
