The Cork mayor who starved himself to death in 1920 to shake an empire

At 5.40am on October 25, 1920, the Lord Mayor of Cork died on a cot in Brixton Prison with his brother Sean and his chaplain, Fr Dominic O’Connor, kneeling beside him. His last words to the priest, quoted ever since on ballad sheets and memorial cards, were, “I want you to bear witness that I die as a soldier of the Irish Republic.”

Terence MacSwiney was 41 years old and had been Lord Mayor for barely five months. He had taken the chain of office in March 1920 after his friend and predecessor, Tomás Mac Curtain, was shot dead in front of his family by disguised members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

In his inaugural address, delivered eight days after that killing, MacSwiney set out the idea that would define him, saying that victory would belong not to those who could inflict the most but to those who could endure the most.

British forces arrested him at Cork City Hall on August 12, 1920, on charges of possessing seditious documents and a police cipher key. A summary court-martial at Victoria Barracks sentenced him on August 16 to two years in prison. MacSwiney told the court he was Chief Magistrate of Cork, declared the proceedings illegal, and warned that he had already decided the terms of his own detention. According to the Irish Examiner of August 18, 1920, he put it bluntly, saying he would be free, alive or dead, within the month. He had stopped eating four days earlier.

He lasted far longer than a month. Moved to Brixton, he became the most watched prisoner in the world. Newspapers across Britain, France, the United States, and the colonies carried daily bulletins on his condition, and the French paper Le Petit Journal gave his fast a full illustrated front page in September. Historian Ann Marie Desmond, writing for Kilbrittain Historical Society, records that Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse predicted MacSwiney would prove more powerful in death than either the British prime minister or the king.

Back in Cork, the GAA called off its fixtures in solidarity. Michael Collins reportedly weighed a rescue, but MacSwiney wanted to stay alive as long as he could, because every extra day bought another day of headlines. English journalists grew so suspicious of his survival that they speculated Fr Dominic was smuggling food in his beard, and the authorities had the water from the Lord Mayor’s tooth basin sent for laboratory analysis. Privately, MacSwiney admitted to his chaplain that he would have paid a thousand pounds for a cup of tea.

He was not alone. Eleven republican prisoners were starving in Cork Men’s Gaol at the same time. Michael Fitzgerald of Fermoy died on October 17. Joe Murphy died in Cork on the same day MacSwiney died in London.

Reviewing Francis J. Costello’s biography “Enduring the Most” for History Ireland, Patrick Maume noted that calls for MacSwiney’s release came from around the world and were privately backed even by King George V, yet Lloyd George’s government refused to yield.

A hero's funeral

What followed was one of the great political funerals of the century. MacSwiney lay in state at St George’s Cathedral in Southwark, dressed in his Volunteer uniform with a Franciscan habit beneath it at his own request, and roughly 30,000 people filed past.

A uniformed guard of honor walked his coffin through London. Fearing enormous demonstrations in Dublin, the authorities seized the remains at Holyhead and shipped them under military escort straight to Cork, where a scuffle over the body was photographed and syndicated worldwide.

More than 100,000 people lined the route in Cork on October 31 as he was carried to St Finbarr’s Cemetery and buried in the Republican Plot beside Mac Curtain. Arthur Griffith gave the oration and returned to the words about endurance.

The National Museum of Ireland, which holds the last photograph taken of him in Brixton, places MacSwiney at the center of what it calls the propaganda war, noting that news of his death echoed far beyond Ireland and fed independence movements across the empire. Gandhi and Nehru cited him. So, later, did Ho Chi Minh, who was washing dishes in London when MacSwiney died, and Nelson Mandela.

Kevin Barry, aged 18, was hanged in Dublin a week later. The truce came nine months after that. MacSwiney never saw it, and neither did his daughter Máire, who was two when her father went to prison and who grew up as the child of a man the world had watched die.