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The bitterness and enmity of 1916 was to end with a rare interlude of joy for Irish political prisoners and their families. Four days before Christmas, the British prime minister David Lloyd George, less than a month in his job, ordered that all the remaining republican prisoners in Frongoch be released.
This was to prevent the “infinite mischief”, as John Redmond put it, of having republicans seething in a makeshift prison camp in Wales over the Christmas period.
The “infinite mischief” had already occurred. The execution of the leaders of the Rising had ensured all British attempts to appease Irish public opinion were accompanied by the loud sound of the stable door being closed after the horse had bolted.
Nothing would assuage Irish anger, but Frongoch proved to be a counterproductive measure that would have long-term consequences for British rule in Ireland.
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It made even stauncher republicans out of those committed to the cause and republicans out of the innocents who had been rounded up after the Rising and transported to this former distillery turned prisoner-of-war camp on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park in Wales.
Planning
Michael Collins, its most famous inmate, described Frongoch as a place where Irish republicans trained and planned for the coming revolution “at English expense”.
Batt O’Connor, one of 30 men interned in Frongoch who later went on to become a TD, once said of it that “many a lad came in a harmless gossoon and left it with the seeds of Fenianism deep in his heart”.
Frongoch was in a beautiful location but it was an ugly place – draughty and unsanitary. It was hot in summer and unbearably cold in winter. The food was abominable and soon word filtered out to the press about conditions in Frongoch.
It was divided into two camps, North and South. One was called “Purgatory” the other “Siberia”.
The place stank, but the men’s spirits were undaunted. They even staged an “All-Ireland final” in June between Kerry and Louth. Friendships were forged and conspiracies hatched.
Gradually the British began to release the men. Those deemed less culpable for their actions in the Rising went first. By December 1916 all that was left were those deemed the biggest culprits.
On December 21st the chief secretary to Ireland Henry Duke stood up in the House of Commons and announced that as an “act of grace and conciliation” the rest of the prisoners would be released from Frongoch.
One of them was Michael Collins. Collins left the camp two days later but, because of war time restrictions on cross-channel travel, did not arrive back in Dublin until Christmas morning.
Collins was like a gelding that had been locked up in the winter and let out in the spring. He rampaged around Dublin on Christmas Day playing tricks on friends and imbibing what alcohol was available.
By the evening time he was paralytic.
“He was lifted on to a sidecar and, drunk as a lord, bundled by his friends into the Cork train,” one friend recalled.
He was not the last Irishman though to leave Frongoch. That distinction belonged to Fr Laurence Joseph Stafford from Ballitore, County Kildare.
He was a British army chaplain during the first World War and witnessed the horrors of the landings at Gallipoli in August 1915 where he was posted to the 10th (Irish) Division.
The Irish prisoners at Frongoch were originally ministered to by an Austrian priest, a legacy of the fact that it had been a camp for German prisoners-of-war before the Irish arrived.
The British believed that appointing an Irish chaplain would be a sop to the men in Frongoch, but Stafford made a serious faux pas by turning up to the camp dressed in the uniform of the hated enemy.
He was immediately dubbed the “khaki priest” and the “English priest”, though he was Irish born and bred.
From such unpromising beginnings, Stafford eventually won the trust of the men.
WJ Brennan-Whitmore understood instinctively where Stafford was coming from. He too had served in the British army, but left in 1907 and joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913.
He commanded a small outpost in Sackville Place during Easter Week 1916, was arrested afterwards and sent to Frongoch. A journalist, he published With the Irish in Frongoch a short time after his release.
He wrote of Stafford: “This clergyman was so unostentatious and so obliging that he won our hearts; and a great affection sprung up between us, though officially we still resented his appointment to us”.
Release
Stafford continually lobbied the British for the men’s release, arguing succinctly that “Christmas was Christmas”.
Stafford would have been excused any further war service after all he witnessed, but he continued to serve as a chaplain with the British army in Italy.
Two internees were not released that Christmas. William Thomas Halpin and Edward Tierney were detained in a nearby asylum for the insane.
They became a cause célèbre for prisoner welfare groups. Halpin was eventually released a year later, but Tierney spent the rest of his life in various institutions for the mentally ill.
He died in Grangegorman asylum in Dublin in 1925 and is buried in the republican plot in Glasnevin cemetery.
Frongoch is no more. On the site a new school stands. To commemorate the centenary pupils at the Ysgol Bro Tryyweryn school staged an exhibition that linked this beautiful and remote part of Wales with the Irish revolution.