A key figure of the Gaelic revival, MacNeill was a co-founder of the Gaelic League, to preserve the Irish language and culture. He has been described as "the father of the modern study of early Irish medieval history".[2]
He established the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and served as Chief-of-Staff of the minority faction after it split in 1914 at the start of the World War. He held that position at the outbreak of the Easter Rising in 1916 but had no role in the Rising or its planning, which was carried out by his nominal subordinates, including Patrick Pearse, who were members of the secret society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. On learning of the plans to launch an uprising on Easter Sunday, and after confronting Pearse about it, MacNeill issued a countermanding order, placing a last-minute newspaper advertisement instructing Volunteers not to participate.
MacNeill was born John McNeill,[3] one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta (née McAuley) McNeill, also a Catholic.[4] He was raised in Glenarm, County Antrim, an area which "still retained some Irish-language traditions".[5] His niece was nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.[6]
MacNeill was educated at St Malachy's College (Belfast) and Queen's College, Belfast. He was interested in Irish history and immersed himself in its study. He achieved a BA degree in economics, jurisprudence and constitutional history in 1888, and then worked in the British Civil Service.[5]
He married Agnes Moore on 19 April 1898. The couple had eight children, four sons and four daughters[7] (though the 1911 census entry for Mac Neill noted 11 children, seven of whom were still alive).[8]
Irish Volunteers
The Gaelic League was from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal was put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation.[clarification needed] MacNeill strongly supported that and rallied to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigned immediately afterwards.[9]
MacNeill circa 1916
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill met members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O'Rahilly, ran the league's newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 they asked MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. MacNeill submitted a piece called "The North Began", encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier that year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland.[citation needed]
Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approached MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill became chair of the council that formed the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, MacNeill was opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.[citation needed]
The Irish Volunteers had been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which planned on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into the First World War was, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials planned a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they presented MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British were going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—was a forgery.[10]
When MacNeill learned about the IRB's plans, and when he was informed that Roger Casement was about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he was reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action was now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers would be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment had been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refused to relent, MacNeill countermanded the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned "manoeuvres".[11] That greatly reduced the number of volunteers who reported for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.[12]
Pearse, Connolly and the others agreed that the uprising would go ahead anyway, but it began one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities were taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, the Rising lasted less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill was arrested although he had taken no part in the insurrection.[13] The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warned her on the day before his execution, "I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him."[14]
In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, was also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversaw Ireland's entry to the League of Nations.[19]
MacNeill's family was split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, took the anti-Treaty side and was killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922.[20] Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, served as officers in the Free State Army.[21] One of Eoin's brothers, James McNeill, was the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
Irish Boundary Commission
In 1924 the three-man Irish Boundary Commission was set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State; MacNeill represented the Irish Free State. MacNeill was the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as having been “pathetically out of his depth”.[22] However, each of the Commissioners was selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On 7 November 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, published a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that was to be transferred to Northern Ireland; the opposite of the main aims of the Commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty,[23] MacNeill resigned from the Commission on 20 November.[24][25] On 24 November 1925 he also resigned as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the Commission.[26]
On 3 December 1925, the Free State government agreed with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom's "imperial debt" and, in exchange, agreed that the 1920 boundary would remain as it was, overriding the Commission. That angered many nationalists and MacNeill was the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the Commission had been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal was approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on 10 December 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour.[27] He lost his Dáil seat at the June 1927 election.
Academic
MacNeill was an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times were coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He was also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.[28]
He was a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy's Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island.[29] On 25 February 1911, he delivered the inaugural address on "Academic Education and Practical Politics" to the Legal and Economic Society of University College Dublin.[citation needed]. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter's book Ireland under the Normans, generated controversy.[citation needed]
He retired from politics completely and became Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devoted his life to scholarship, he published several books on Irish history. MacNeill died in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78 in 1945.[32] He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.[33]
^ abcMaume, Patrick; Charles-Edwards, Thomas (2009). "MacNeill, Eoin". In McGuire, James; Quinn, James (eds.). Dictionary of Irish Biography. UK: Cambridge University Press.
^Clarke, Frances; Murphy, William; Ó Ciosáin, Éamon; Beaumont, Caitríona (2016). "Beaumont (McGavock), Máirín (Mary)". In McGuire, James; Quinn, James (eds.). Dictionary of Irish Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
^Doran, Beatrice (2021). From the Grand Canal to the Dodder Illustrious Lives. History Press.
^For a comprehensive listing of journal articles by MacNeill, see F. X. Martin: 'The Writings of Eoin MacNeill', Irish Historical Studies 6 (21) (March 1948), pp. 44–62.
