The mysterious 'disappearance' of Bulmer Hobson

Marnie Hay

Issue 390, vol.98, Summer 2009

A Belfast Quaker by background (who resigned from the Society of Friends in 1915), by 1899 Hobson had espoused a combination of separatism, republicanism and non-sectarianism – and was introduced to the IRB in 1904. Moving to Dublin in 1908, he rose to become a member of the IRB’s Supreme Council, and helped to establish the Irish Volunteers in 1913.

Eoin MacNeill deemed military action without ‘a reasonably calculated or estimated prospect of success, in the military sense’ to be wrong – because of the risk to human life. Hobson also refused to support an insurrection that had little chance of military success. He favoured a policy of guerrilla warfare should the British government attempt to disarm the Volunteers or pursue a policy of conscription in Ireland…On Good Friday, 1916, Hobson was inveigled to a house where armed IRB men arrested him. Once, however, the Rising was under way, the order came for his release.

Mac Neill suggested, after the surrender, that Hobson join him in requesting a meeting with General Sir John Maxwell with a view to stopping the violence. Well aware that this would lead to their arrest, MacNeill pointed out that they would have no political future if they were not arrested. But Hobson decided to follow his separate path – and so he had to lie low in order to avoid arrest. In this way began his more permanent ‘disappearance’ from the limelight.

Hobson was pursued by rumours of treachery and cowardice, originating in some IRB quarters. He was conscious that many of his old friends and colleagues in the nationalist movement ‘would not notice or come near’ him. This whole cloud over his reputation might well have been dissipated, of course, had he – like MacNeill – indeed served a prison sentence. In other nationalist quarters, by contrast, he was regarded more positively – with Padraig Pearse declaring him to be ‘not lacking in physical courage’, and with old nationalist friends like Free State Government minister Ernest Blythe and civil servant P.S.0’Hegarty securing him a position in the new civil service.

Marnie Hay is IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Fellow, Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin. She is author of Bulmer Hobson and the nationalist movement in twentieth-century Ireland, (Manchester University Press, 2009)