It is a while since anything has been posted here, although of course none of us were able to find this site last week while Max was away hunting.

I should like to acknowledge my debt to Miles Kington, who previously chronicled some accounts from the history of the Dublin Underground Railway. These can be found in the 1978 issues of Richard Boston's sadly defunct ecological magazine Vole. However Kington's reseaches were incomplete, and it has recently become possible to unearth more about the origins of the Railway.


Thread Digression Part III: Some Underground History

The initial diggings for the Railway were made in the 1870's, as part of a grandiose plan to raise Dublin's status as a city of the British Empire. Works were abandoned however, in the 1880's, during one of the Stock Exchange's periodic Panics - and, it is said, in reaction to the Phoenix Park atrocity. The project was raised and dropped several times during the Home Rule debates, but was finally abandoned altogether on the fall of Parnell. It was only in 1911, under Asquith's Liberal Government, and with the support of Redmond's Irish Party, that serious working was resumed. The Railway was almost complete in August 1914 when the outbreak of war forced the postponement of the opening ceremonies.


However the existence of an unused railway line running below the streets of Dublin was well known to some of the leaders of the Easter Rising. In particular, some of the volunteers in Connolly's Irish Citizens Army had been recruited to work on the Railway, and knew its layout well. It is certain that some plans did exist to make use of the Railway during the Rising, and Roger Casement appears to have been involved in a plan to smuggle a train on to the line.


There is an obscure reference in the Black Diaries of Roger Casement to a dream of "a train penetrating a dark tunnel in Dublin", which scholars have generally dismissed as a standard homoerotic image, and probably a forgery at that. However there is a fragment of a ballad, to the tune of "Spanish Lady", which suggests that there may be some basis to the story:-


"As I rode to Dublin City,
At twelve o'clock on Easter night,
Who should I meet but Roger Casement,
Driving a train to join the fight."


What is definite is that the British Government did not stand by its promise to open the Railway after the War. Instead, during the War of Independence from 1919-1921, the Railway was extensively used by Michael Collins and his Squad. In the meantime Ned Broy in Dublin Castle was somehow able to conceal from his nominal employers all the records relating to the Railway, and substituted some inaccurate plans in their place.


The confusion of the times is captured in a story told by one of Collins' Volunteers many years later. Frank O'Connor came across the tale while writing his biography of Collins "The Big Fellow". As he was unable to corroborate the story he decided not to use it in his book, but he used to recount it in private with great flair.


One night a team of detectives from Dublin Castle believed that they had found a secret entrance to the Railway, and they descended through a manhole in Sackville Street. Unfortunately for them this actually led to the main Dublin sewer, which Collins, who was aware of their activities, was able to control. At a given signal he ensured a mass release of the chamber pots and lavatories of Dublin, so that the detectives were swept away in a flood of the most noxious effluvia. They emerged in the Liffey, amid a stinking tidal wave. As they climbed up a ladder to the quayside, a passer-by, who could smell them long before they were visible, called out:
"Youse boys must surely love your food to swim in it after you've eaten it and shat it out!"
The detective team crept back to the Castle to be hosed down. They were forever after known, behind their backs, as "The Brown and Tans."