Michael Mallin - remembering a forgotten leader from the 1916 Rising

Commander of Stephen’s Green garrison on Easter Monday – father of four and husband

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Mallin in his late twenties when he left the British army and began his trade as a silk weaver

Photo by Lorcan Collins.

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Like most of the other garrisons, as Mallin’s men were marched to Dublin Castle by British soldiers they were jeered by Dublin citizens outraged by this attack on their city in what was seen as a cowardly betrayal of Irish men fighting on the Western Front. (By 1918, over 200,000 Irish men would fight and almost 30,000 would lose their lives in the first World War.) On Grafton Street, an angry mob attacked Mallin’s garrison and a British officer threatened to shoot the protesters before they finally withdrew.

On May 5 1916, Michael Mallin’s field general court martial took place. His conduct during this is the second reason the Dubliner has been largely written out of Irish history. During his defence, Mallin claimed that he had no prior knowledge of the Rising; that, when he arrived at the Green, Countess Markievicz ordered him to take charge of the garrison.

This was a blatant fabrication: Markievicz was, in fact, Mallin’s deputy in the Green (she actually wore an old Citizen Army tunic of Mallin’s). In a desperate attempt to avoid the death sentence, Mallin probably reasoned that the British would not, because of her gender, shoot Markievicz but it was a very risky gamble and, as Hughes suggests, “particularly dishonourable”.

In September 1916, under the headline “Destitution Killing Irish”, the New York American newspaper published a letter written by Mallin, on the evening before his execution, to Alderman Thomas Kelly.

he article aimed to raise funds in the US for the dependants of those killed during the Rising and the letter places Mallin’s treacherous behavior during his court martial in context.

“I have left my wife and children absolutely destitute,” he writes inconsolably, and Hughes argues that this was Mallin’s primary motivation in seeking to mislead the jury. While the letters of more celebrated 1916 leaders, written as they awaited the firing squad, emphasize their commitment to die for Ireland, Mallin’s reek of a humanity and awareness informed by the burden of his imminent death on his family.

Before his execution at Kilmainham Gaol in the early morning of May 8th, Mallin wrote to his wife that “this is the end of all things earthly” and touchingly enclosed the buttons of his tunic. The letter profoundly shaped the lives of his young son and daughter. Mallin asked his wife to dedicate Joseph and Una to the church and they subsequently joined the Jesuit and Loreto order, respectively.

If you take a train through south Dublin, you’ll pass Dun Laoghaire railway station. The station is officially called ‘Mallin Station’ but, tellingly, this title is almost never used. In a compassionate biography, Brian Hughes helps bring an unfairly neglected figure of Irish history alive on the page.
‘Michael Mallin’ is available from the O’Brien Press website

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