In any event, after a few months, he was transferred to the telegraph section in Bantry post office.29 From the point of view of prestige, this was a good move because, in comparison to the job of sorting letters, the sending of cryptic messages by the electromagnetic, key tapping, Morse code system, then an almost global phenomenon, meant that a professional practitioner had to have a particular skill set, involving memory, concentration and dexterity: ‘The pace and continuity of attention in telegraph work in a large office is far greater than in any other Government Office. A telegraphist cannot pause at will in the middle of his work … and he constantly works in an atmosphere of high pressure.’30 Also, the telegraphist needed patience: ‘It [the key-tapping method] was very slow and admitted of frequent and serious errors.’31 And, because Bantry was a head office offering money order and savings bank facilities,32 there were the competitive interests of the business world to be aware of: ‘No cog in the wheel of industry fulfils a more vital function [because] … Transactions involving hundreds of thousands of pounds daily pass through the hands of the Telegraph Staff.’33 But, despite the relative sophistication of those demands, a telegraphist, similar to a sorting clerk with whom he was categorised, remained subject to the vagaries of shift work, divided duties, a half hour meal break and unscheduled overtime.34 This meant that ‘his social life is destroyed’.35
Little wonder then that Mulcahy made it his business to try to wriggle free once again. His escape was secured in 1907 when, having completed a correspondence course, he was promoted to the position of clerk in the engineering branch, Wexford.36 Finally, a year later, he was transferred, in the same capacity, to the sectional engineer’s office at Aldborough House, Portland Row, in the north-east of Dublin’s inner city.37
Therefore, the period, 1903–1908 shows Mulcahy – ambitious, speculative and industrious – making rapid progress in his career. But, more importantly perhaps, in terms of the man who would ultimately rise to prominence in the Irish freedom movement, he made progress in other areas as well. For instance, this was a time of exponential growth for the Gaelic League. Yet, due to the social aspect of the movement being so attractive, a lot of young people enrolled for less than noble reasons, with the result that linguistic standards suffered accordingly. (Besides, there was the complexity of the language itself, together with the advanced standard of the League’s teaching in a mixed-ability classroom environment.38)
Not so for Mulcahy, however; the moment he joined its classes in Bantry and Skibbereen, study was by far and away his primary consideration.39 Consequently, he became favourably known to teachers of the calibre of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, Conchubhar Ó Muimhneacháin and Éamonn Motherway.40 Ó hAnnracháin, in particular, was impressed by his tenacity – ‘He started speaking it [Irish] when he had only a small amount and he carried on until he mastered it. He was sincere from the start.’41 Similarly, his capacity for autonomous study42 came to the fore during his visits to the nearby Gaeltacht (a native Irish speaking area) of Béal Átha’n Ghaorthaigh. For example, in the house of Siobhán an tSagairt, a place he considered ‘his university’,43 he would write down verses and stories in order the better to commit them to memory.44
Still, at that time, he did not graduate into the more advanced section of the Irish–Ireland community. For example, he never participated in any of the protest campaigns of the Celtic Literary Society (CLS). There was an obvious reason for that: membership of Cork’s branch of the CLS,45 similar to the CLS’s main centres of activity in Dublin, London and Liverpool,46 came principally from within its own urban area, and its extramural organisational activities consisted of written fraternal communications with the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in the outlying towns. Nonetheless, whenever the opportunity arose during peer group discussions and conversations, Mulcahy was known to unapologetically stand up for his nationalist beliefs.47 Indeed, he would seem to have considered the championing of the philosophy of self-help and the ideology of national self-determination – arguments in favour of which were to be found in his then choice of political reading material, specifically The United Irishman, The Resurrection of Hungary and The Republic48 – to be as important a nationalist identifier as speaking the Irish language was, for example.
The United Irishman, a broadsheet, with the sub-title ‘A National Weekly Review’, sold for a penny and was published on Saturdays. It was founded in 1899 by Arthur Griffith after he returned from South Africa and, from the very outset, it struggled to survive: ‘Very few people – only one here and there – bought or read the “United Irishman”.’49 Even at its best, ironically just before a libel case forced its closure on 14 April 1906, its print run might have reached the relatively meagre figure of seven thousand copies per annum.50 (It depended for its survival upon the limited largesse of a few private donors who were strongly associated with the CLS.51) Hence, from a practical point of view, it was a difficult paper to get a hold of in any place outside its main Cumann na nGaedheal/Sinn Féin/CLS club outlets in Dublin and London especially. In that event, people forwarded second-hand copies to one another. For example, O’Donovan Rossa sent Liam de Róiste a copy from New York.52 And, having been first introduced to The United Irishman by his Thurles friend, Jim Kennedy,53 who was centre of the local Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (see Appendix 1), Mulcahy similarly received copies now and then from some of his work colleagues.54
Mulcahy was interested in The United Irishman because of Griffith’s political commentary, not because of the paper’s literary or historical pieces – ‘I had been reading the United Irishman from about 1903 … [and, as a result,] I was involved in Sinn Féin thought.’55 Propaganda was an obvious facet of Griffith’s discourse. For example, in 1903, in commenting upon the annual report of the inspector general of the British army, he praised Hungarian mothers for allegedly forbidding their sons to join the Austrian army, resulting in the army being so weakened as to be ‘unable to stand before either France or Prussia’.56 But, also, he could turn a baleful eye on what he called the ‘national character’: ‘The carelessness, thoughtlessness, lack of principle and general apathy in Ireland are often stunning.’ Likewise, he detested what he considered was mean-spirited capitalism. For example, he was vehemently opposed to William Martin Murphy’s proposal that an international rather than a national exhibition be staged in Dublin in 1905: ‘The French, German, and American manufacturers enjoy protection. The Irish don’t … and that is why we have advocated as Swift advocated, as the [eighteenth-century militia] Volunteers advocated, and as the Young Irelanders advocated … that … preference … be given in all cases by the Irish people to Irish products and Irish manufactures.’57
Nevertheless, by far the most important piece of political writing ever to appear in The United Irishman was Griffith’s series of twenty-seven articles, which he published during the period, 2 January–2 July 1904. Mulcahy made no claim to have read all of those. But later he did read them, indeed studied them – ‘Griffith was our great teacher … the interpreter of the past … the pointer out of our resources … our guide’58 – when they were published as a penny pamphlet (in reality, a book, it being ninety-nine pages in length) on 26 November 1904 under their full title, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland.59
In this seminal publication, which was instantly and broadly so popular that, within three weeks, a second print-run was ordered in order to keep up with the ‘profound’ demand,60 Griffith first drew the reader’s attention to the evolution of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich (compromise) of 186761 and then proceeded to select examples from Irish history which were capable of being linked to it. For instance, he chose Daniel O’Connell’s brief dalliance with the concept of ‘a council of 300’ (an entity which, by the way, never met) as worthy of mention in the context of Deák’s gradualist initiative, deducing therefrom that a similar body of local representatives could be established in Dublin in order to formulate policies and laws for the Irish people. Also, allegedly similar to the 1848 bloodless revolt in Buda and Pesth (sic), the 1782 initiative of Ulster’s ‘300 Irish Protestants representing the 200,000 armed defenders [alias Volunteers]’, whereby ‘the independence of their country must ever be maintained, and that