Bulmer Hobson - I.R.B. and The Volunteers

I.R.B. and The Volunteers

Hobson was sworn into the IRB in 1904 by Denis McCullough, their head in Belfast. Together they founded the Dungannon Clubs. The object of the club's title was to celebrate the victory of Volunteers of 1782 in restoring to Ireland her own Parliament, though they were additionally an "open front" for the IRB. The Volunteers of 1782 were an armed militia whose success, they suggested, could offer instructive lessons. The first Dungannon Club manifesto read: “The Ireland we seek to build is not an Ireland for the Catholic or the Protestant, but an Ireland for every Irishman Irrespective of his creed or class." Under the direction of Denis McCullough, Hobson became one of the key figures in the ongoing revitalization of the IRB in Ulster, along with Sean MacDermott, Patrick McCartan and Ernest Blythe.

Hobson moved to Dublin in 1907, and soon became a close friend of veteran Fenian Tom Clarke, with whom he had a very close relationship until 1914. In August 1909, with Constance Markievicz, he founded Na Fianna Éireann as a Republican scouting movement. In 1911 the republican newspaper Irish Freedom was founded, to which Hobson was an earlier contributor, and later that year he took over the editorship of it from Patrick McCartan.

Hobson was elevated to the IRB's Supreme Council in 1911, which coincided with the resignations of P.T. Daly, Fred Allen and Sean O'Hanlon, opening the way for Tom Clarke and the younger men to take control of the IRB. In 1913 he was elevated to the chairman of the Dublin Centres Board of the IRB, and later that year was one of the founding organizers of the Irish Volunteers, remaining a primary connection between the Volunteers and the IRB. He put together the plan to bring sufficient Volunteers and their supporters, discreetly to Howth on Sunday 26 July 1914 to unload and distribute the arms being landed from the Asgard. This became known as the Howth gunrunning.

As secretary and a member of the Volunteers provisional council, Hobson was instrumental in allowing Parliamentary leader John Redmond to gain control of the Volunteers organisation. He reluctantly gave in to Home Rulers' demands for control, believing that defying Redmond, who was popular with most rank-and-file Volunteers, would cause a split and would lead to the demise of the Volunteers. Clarke, steadfastly opposed to this action, never forgave him or spoke to him informally again. Hobson resigned as a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB, and was fired from his job as Dublin correspondent for the newspaper the Gaelic American.

Hobson remained a member of the IRB, but, like Volunteers chief-of-staff Eoin MacNeill, he was kept unaware of the plans for the Rising. Though he could detect underground preparations, he had no certain evidence. He would later be told by Volunteers officers J. J. O'Connell and Éimer Duffy that the Volunteers had received orders for the Rising, timed for Easter Sunday, and he subsequently alerted MacNeill about what the IRB had planned. MacNeill issued a countermanding order, which served to delay the Rising a day, and kept most Volunteers from turning out. Hobson was kidnapped by the organisers of the rising to stop him from spreading news of MacNeill's order, and was held in a safehouse in Phibsboro until the Rising was well underway.

Although MacNeill was later to serve in the government of the Irish Free State, Hobson was confined to a civil service job in the Department of Post and Telegraphs after independence. Though he had been one of the most active members of the IRB for years, and was instrumental in the founding of the Volunteers, Hobson took no major role in politics (though he was later an occasional adviser to Clann na Poblachta) after the Rising, or the subsequent Anglo-Irish War.