Donal Fallon Transcript

Listen to Donal Fallon's talk.

Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Donal Fallon seeks to separate fact from folklore regarding the notorious 'Animal gangs' of the 1930s and 1940s in Dublin. Recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 10 October, 2013, as part of its 'Crime in the City: Crime and History' series.

Firstly thank-you to everyone for coming along today. My name is Donal Fallon and I’ve always had a particular interest in Dublin gang violence and in particular the most infamous of Dublin gangs who were without doubt the ‘Animal Gangs’. Now when people think of the ‘Animal Gangs’ they think of the 1940s and onwards, they think of razor blades in potatoes, they think of Garda Lugs Branigan, they think of the battle of Baldoyle and characters like the infamous Hencho of the 1960s. And I should say gang violence in Dublin is nothing new. You know at the minute everyone's talking about Nidge and the lads on Love/Hate on television. But you can find gang violence in Dublin going right back as far as you're willing to go. In the eighteenth century you had Liberty Boys and the Ormond Boys. But I don’t think there’s been a single gang in the history of Dublin that have left the same lasting impact on the folklore of the city as the Animal Gang. Now what particularly interests me about the Animal Gang is their origins. Who are the first Animal Gang?  Where did they come from? And what I found during my research is that they emerged actually in the 1930s, not the later 1940s. That the Animal Gangs were actually there long before Lugs Branigan had ever even joined the Guards.  This gang are also often blamed for very many attacks on the Left and on the Republican movement in the 1930s. Not only have they entered the folklore of Dubliners and people in this city but they have also entered Republican folklore. Republicans of a certain age talk about being attacked by these gangs in the 1930s and 1940s.

I chose this image very deliberately and this is a Jack B Yeats painting of a young newsboy because when you read about the Animal Gangs what you picture are grown man with razor blades in potatoes and swinging bicycle tyres.  What I found over the course of my research and what I’ll talk about today a little bit, is the fact the first Animal Gang seem to have actually been made up of young, juvenile newsboys. Going back to the Republican folklore, the first I ever heard of the Animal Gang, the first reference I ever heard was a song, and a song which was sung by the Dubliners, in which it said:

On Banajos red ramparts the Spanish workers died

But O’Duffy’s bellowing animal gang sang hymns of hate with pride

So the idea that the gangs were part of some fascist movement or anti-republican movement was always something I thought. Now as I say the story of these gangs begins not with men but rather children. Newspaper boys to be precise and a newspaper strike in 1934. It’s important today before we talk about the very newspaper boys that produced the Animal Gang to talk a little bit about newspaper boys in general. Where did newsboys even come from in Dublin? References to young newsboys in the city can be found as early as the 1880s in the newspapers. And the first illustration I have managed to find of a young newsboy in Dublin is this one here. This image appeared in The Irish Times in 1882, and as far as I know is the earliest depiction of young newspaper boys in Dublin. Alongside this illustration was a letter written by Pro Bono Public who said, there are many trials and hardships faced by the majority of newsboys in Dublin, asking is not possible for us to establish a charity, a benevolent undertaking from the citizens of Dublin, to look out for these newsboys and provide for them. Newsboys appear from that time onwards in newspaper reports and they are always described in a couple of ways, they are typically ragged and barefoot; they are typically talked about as being starving and children of the slums. The Irish Times when they produced this illustration they warned readers underneath these children can perish of cold or some worse fate on the streets of Dublin. Newsboys were long in the city before the Animal Gang or before the 1930s. And Pádraig Yeates that historian of the Lock Out has written about how young newsboys in Dublin had a real tendency towards militancy in the early twentieth century. In 1911, Big Jim Larkin, the Liverpool firebrand socialist set about trying to establish young Dublin newsboys into a trade union. Incredibly he managed to do this and as Pádraig Yeates has written by organising young newsboys, Larkin also ensured that his own newspaper had a very good, effective distribution network on the streets. He built up a very good working relationship with some of Dublin’s youngest and poorest workers. The young newsboys were so influenced by Jim Larkin that in 1911 they showed their own militancy when the children went on strike in opposition to this man William Martin Murphy. Young Dublin newsboys took strike action in 1911. They were selling the Evening Herald newspaper and unhappy with the terms on which the paper was provided to them and encouraged no doubt by Jim Larkin they took militant action. During this dispute there were wild scenes and one occasion a gang of newsboys numbering two hundred attacked an Evening Herald van and threw bundles of the papers into the River Liffey. Ernie O’Malley in his brilliant diaries, his brilliant memoirs writes about seeing young newsboys in the streets attacking policemen and staff of the Evening Herald. He describes them as quick-witted urchins who lured the attackers into narrow by lanes. There the boys used stones and pieces of brick with accuracy against the police.

The links between the young Dublin newsboys and the union movement remained very strong, right through 1913 and continued into future decades. There are also many attempts to provide for these young newsboys, charity attempts. Ironically, the most successful of which was spearheaded by the son of William Martin Murphy, Doctor William Lombard Murphy, perhaps with a guilty conscience of the actions of his father. By 1928 the Belvedere Newsboys Club, a group, which have been established by William Lombard Murphy and many others, was operating from a very impressive premises on Pearse Street. And that was a charity which aimed to provide meals, and provide clothes and look out for these young newsboys in the streets of Dublin. William Lombard Murphy said at the opening of the Club brilliantly that, quote:

‘Everyone who knows the Dublin newsboy knows what good qualities are to be found in him. He might not possess the greater civil virtues such as thrift, order or regularity but he has immense loyalty to his parents and an innate and essential decency of mind.’

This club continued to grow right through the 1920s and 1930s. By 1931 the Belvedere Newsboys Club was looking out for one hundred and fifty young Dublin newsboys providing them with meals. Not alone did the institution provide food and shelter for youngsters it also argued for them and on their behalf. At their Annual General Meeting in 1931 the Newsboys Club put forward a proposal that a special court should be established in Dublin for children under fourteen far removed from the ordinary courts and presided over perhaps by a lady.

By the 1930s young Dublin newsboys found themselves once again flirting with politics on the Left and on the Right. In 1934 a newspaper dispute in Dublin would change everything on this front and bring the newsboys into conflict with Irish Republicans and ultimately lead to the establishment of the first Animal Gang. Dublin in the summer of 1934 saw a phenomenal newspaper strike, which shut down print media in the city. It began in the Irish Independent but it spread to The Irish Press and The Irish Times when the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, which been established by Jim Larkin so many years previously, began to remove their members from the offices of these newspapers. The strike would last for months with workers inside print media demanding an increase in pay and better conditions. An Phoblacht the radical newspaper of the Republican movement gave vocal and consistent support to the striking workers. And as Brian Hanley has noted the print unions strike committee allowed only two papers to be printed during that strike. One was An Phoblacht and the other was another Republican newspaper called The Republican Congress. The striking workers believed that both of these newspapers were on their side, and while they were definitely not going to allow anyone print The Irish Times, you were allowed print Republican newspapers. An Phoblacht said that this newspaper strike is more than a dispute between newspaper owners and newspaper employees this is a challenge to the workers and must be taken up by every citizen who has the interest of a free Ireland and a free people at heart. Now that message may have been appreciated by striking workers inside the offices of the Irish Independent and The Irish Press but it wasn't appreciated by one group of workers, and that was newsboys. The newsboys depended on these newspapers to make a living and the scarcity of the newspapers has a very direct impact on their living conditions. For workers in the Irish Press in the Irish Independent may have been getting strike pay while they were out on strike, there was no strike pay for youngsters on the streets who needed these papers in their hands. In 1934, the issue of the young newsboys was raised inside of the Dáil and it was said that officially there were only thirty-four boys and thirteen girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen working on the street selling papers but the dogs on the street knew that that wasn’t true and there were many, many more than that perhaps as many as two hundred youngsters on the streets who needed these newspapers.

So as you can imagine, when there’s only two papers in Dublin even if they are An Phoblacht and Republican Congress, they are in hot demand. Suddenly these papers which had been fringe papers on the Left become quite popular. The wholesale rate on the two papers was higher than newsboys were used to paying to The Irish Times or the Irish Independent, and so they make the decision to confront the editors of both newspapers, An Phoblacht and Republican Congress. There’s a brilliant file in the National Archives and it’s titled ‘Disturbances Created by Newsboys at Frederick’s Lane, Dublin City’. The file from the 14th September 1934 reports that on the 12th September Gardaí were alerted to the fact there was a row between newspaper boys and Republicans in Frederick Lane and that some windows were broken. Gardaí noted that when they got the scene they found fifty newsboys quickly moving away from the scene having refused to pay an extra three pence per dozen on copies of An Phoblacht. Later at about 8.50pm Gardaí noted that fifty men were seen marching four deep towards Parnell Square and taking up positions around the offices of An Phoblacht. It was obvious that the IRA had come to defend the offices of An Phoblacht after they had earlier been attacked by these young newspaper boys. The Republican movement took it upon themselves rather than going to the Gardaí to protect the premises from future attack. 

Not only did the young newspaper boys go to the offices of An Phoblacht and break several windows and attack IRA men, they later went to the offices of the Republican Congress and in this next incident you find where the very name animal gang comes from.  Going to the offices of the Republican Congress, they bump into a man Frank Ryan, a rather famous figure in republican history and indeed in republican folklore. Frank Ryan, on the left here, was the man who led Irish republicans to fight in Spain against forces of General Franco. Now Ryan produces this paper, The Republican Congress, which has emerged from a left-wing split, very shortly previously within the IRA. Essentially, the left-wing of the IRA had left the movement and established this new movement The Republican Congress in an attempt to create a new broad republican socialist front in Ireland. Now the newsboys go the offices of the Republican Congress and make the same demands which were made of An Phoblacht and the IRA’s newspaper. Again they demand a cheaper wholesale rate from Frank Ryan and Frank Ryan totally and completely refuses. Gardaí then noted that the newspaper boys attacked Frank Ryan, and according to the intelligence report Frank Ryan shouted after them that they were little better than animals in their behaviour. By this remark he unconsciously christened the gang because they later adopted the title animal gang. So Frank Ryan by condemning them as animals inadvertently christens them; they quite like the title. That theory is very interesting because like most Dublin people interested in the history and folklore of Dublin I've always believed that there were two potential origins for the name. One was the viciousness of the gang probably labelled against them by ordinary Dubliners who would call them animals.  And the other theory could have been that these were…it was always said that these men were supposedly dockers, grown men who had worked on the docks of Dublin alongside real animals and livestock. But in the Garda files, you have this theory, this brilliant theory that Frank Ryan was the one who named the gangs.

An Phoblacht and Republican Congress wasted no time in condemning the youths. On the 15th September 1934 the front of An Phoblacht said a gang known as the animals have smashed windows at their offices and had made several abortive attempts to enter the office. The IRA newspaper also claimed that some of the young newspaper boys were wearing Blueshirts. Now that claim is not in the Garda reports at all. This was a time when there was very intense anti-republican and anti-Communism in Dublin, and I think the IRA embarrassed by the fact that they had been attacked by young Dublin newsboys twist the story to look like the Blueshirts had attacked the office. The Garda report on the incident makes no reference to such shirts and it’s so detailed it's not the kind of thing they would have missed. The IRA also claimed the attack on their office was an outrage, an anti-strike move by agents of the employers and the Irish Independent. In a follow-up edition of the paper the IRA pledged itself to clean up city gangs.

Now two Dublin newsboys came to the attention of the IRA, now when I say boys these were grown men who sold newspapers but worked around the boys known as Macaulay and Lawless from the north inner city and identified by IRA as ringleaders of the violence. The IRA go into the north inner city in search of these young newsboys and it quickly becomes apparent that the bulk them live around this premise. This was Corporation Buildings in the heart of the north inner city. Corporation housing which was built in the early twentieth century in 1904 in the very heart of what had been the Monto district, the red light district of Dublin. Now Corporation Buildings have brilliantly been described as a total failure of housing for the working-class in Dublin and that is a good description of what they were. They are shown here in 1932 at the time of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. The IRA know that the bulk of young boys who attacked their offices come from this housing scheme and houses around it. They also know that they hang out in a hall called the Ardee Hall which the IRA describe as the animal gang hideout. In late September 1934, several members of the IRA go to the Ardee Hall, or in the words of An Phoblacht take over the Ardee Hall and they warn the animal gang that more exciting run-ins could happen in the future if their activity continues.

Now thankfully for the newspaper boys and the IRA, not long after this in late September 1934, the newspaper strike came to an end. A resolution was reached. The Times of London said the next day, that the losses that have been sustained by the city of Dublin are incalculable, but none have suffered as much as the youth of the city.  Gardaí believed if the newspaper strike was over, then the principal cause of conflict between the news vendors and An Phoblacht had been removed, and that the animal gang were likely to disappear. Gardaí also said that this young gang had no political motive and that the members were quote “hooligans”, pure and simple. But that was not to be the last anyone would hear of the animal gang. In fact, the term rapidly spread like wild fire. Being given huge, huge attention in the mainstream press, it actually seems that what would happen next is copycat gangs would begin to appear right across the city of Dublin. The Cork Examiner was one newspaper, which of course was totally unaffected by the printing strike in Dublin and like An Phoblacht and Republican Congress the Cork Examiner became quite popular in Dublin during the newspaper strike. Now they gave incredibly sensationalist coverage to the animal guy during the newspaper dispute. They wrote about how youngsters were inflicting ugly wounds with sharp instruments on one another and also wrote about clashes between two rival gangs at Railway Street in the heart of the inner-city. While the original animal gang had come from Corporation Buildings, it seems that quite soon afterwards copycat gangs begin to appear.  A tiger gang in Ringsend and yet another self-titled animal gang in Donnybrook appear only moments after the initial violence in the newspaper strike. No longer were these youngsters attacking the proprietors of newspapers, but it seems like much of the violence was now youth on youth and between rival gangs of youth.

So where does all of this fit into anti-communism if youths are attacking youths how is that relevant to anti-communism, which was also in the title of this lecture? It is important to state that the 1930s was a time of very militant anti-communism in Ireland. We had seen a red scare almost unlike anything before it in 1932 at the time of that election. Cumann na nGaedheal famously whip up anti-Communist feelings and try and present Fianna Fáil as a Communist menace. In the 1932 election there is a brilliant Cumann na nGaedheal poster which shows an Irish Tricolour with a red flag superimposed and says, quite simply, ‘keep the red off our flag’. Now, in addition to Cumann na nGaedheal whipping up anti-communist hysteria with regards the republican movement in Ireland there is an international dimension to this.  In Spain a democratically elected government, a democrat socialist government in many ways, comes the power. And the over throw of the Spanish Monarchy and the rise of anti-clerical feeling in Spain is used by the Catholic Church and others in Ireland. The argument is made that if the Catholic Church should fall in Spain it will next fall in Dublin.

There is also the very intense poverty of the inner city, and there’s a belief that that poverty is fertile ground for communism to spread. The Irish Times said in October 1931, that in a city where four thousand and eight-hundred tenements shield twenty-five thousand families it is almost a miracle communism has not flourished aggressively in this hideous city. March 1933, saw some of the worst anti-Communist violence in Irish history. Violence that RM Douglas, a historian of the period has described as the worst violence in Dublin since the Civil War. Much of the anti-communism in the early thirties was whipped up by various organizations. In particular, a group known as the St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League established in March 1933. The members of the St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League pledged themselves to keep the menace of communism off the streets of Ireland. And not long after the establishment of that group, in late March 1933, Connolly House on Great Strand Street in Dublin was attacked - headquarters of the Revolutionary Workers’ Group, the Communist Party of Ireland. Now this picture shows the inside of Connolly House after it had been attacked and two young Gardaí inside the attacked building. In March ’33, over three nights a crowd laid siege to this building, really whipped up by hysteria in the Pro-Cathedral. At a particularly vicious sermon, a Jesuit Preacher informed the congregation in the Pro-Cathedral, that here in the holy city of Dublin the vile creatures of communism are among us. Over three nights the crowd besieged this building while a small number of socialist activists inside including IRA men attempted to protect it. The blame for this attack in Irish left-wing folklore has always been laid on the animal gang. Charlie Gilmour who was then active with the IRA, recalled in a 1983 interview with The Irish Times being inside of this building when it was attacked. He said the backbone of the mob who attacked us that night were the animal gang. A vicious street gang drawn from the worst of the city’s slums.  In a 2003 obituary for Eugene Downing, another socialist who was inside of the building, The Irish Times said he took part in the defence of Connolly House when it was attacked by the notorious animal gang. But the length of time between this event and those claims should definitely be noted. There is no reference to an animal gang at the siege in the Garda reports at the time. The Guards compiled a very detailed account of just who attacked this building and what’s interesting about it, they say in their report there was a very large percentage of respectably dressed young women. They talk about the make-up of the crowd and it comes across as a very middle class mob.  I've always believed that republicans and socialists are unwilling to admit just how unpopular they were in the early 1930s and it’s much easier to blame this kind of violence on some animal gang than on those who actually carried it out.

Now where things get confusing is in the fact some people who are active at this time, even then made claims of an animal gang attacking them, though a little later. No one made claims as strongly as Peadar O'Donnell, the brilliant novelists and republican activist right through the revolutionary period and into the 1930s. Peadar O'Donnell claims in a 1937 book, that the animal gang were made up of very fine fighting material from the slum basements and were the most effective terrorist gang of 1930s Dublin. He also said that the animal guys were mobilised in an inner city hall at one stage in the 1930s and told by a young woman that the fight in Spain is only a precursor to a war against religion in Ireland and the churches of Dublin would be the first to suffer. O'Donnell claimed that young Dublin youths were gathered into a religious hall and told the Pro-Cathedral would be turned into an anti-God Museum if Communism ever succeeded in Dublin.

O'Donnell was not the only one to claim the Left at the time were attacked by the animal gang.  In his 2006 memoirs, Bob Doyle, the last surviving Irishman to fight in the Spanish Civil War before he died claimed that he remembered a gang he knew in the 1930s who were also attacking the Left.  He said they were made up of toughs. They used bicycle chains. He said they would fight Republicans with frequency on O'Connell Street. He also claimed, rather boldly, that the animal gang wore British Legion Poppies under their clothes. Now he believed they fought for the Blueshirts and he always thought a priest organized them. He went on to claim they attacked anyone on the Left: meetings, marches, demonstrations. Now those claims in 2006 they were made long after the events are I’ve never found a reference to an animal gang or inner city youths wearing poppies while attacking Republicans in Dublin.

There’s a couple of instances of anti-communist violence in the 1930s that are worth talking about. But firstly to give an extent of how widespread anti-communism was, this is a great story, because this is the band of the Pro-Cathedral, the St. Mary's Pipe Band who in the 1930 in the anti-communist hysteria of the moment are renamed the St. Mary's Anti-Communist Pipe Band, the official band of the Pro-Cathedral. All of the men you're looking at here follow Eoin O’Duffy out to Spain. The Blueshirts in Spain claim that Irish soldiers were unable to march to Spanish music and O’Duffy recruits this band from the inner-city, from the Pro-Cathedral to go to Spain so that, you know, Irish soldiers can march to Spanish airs while in Spain. Brendan Behan famously proclaimed that the Blueshirts were the only army in history to come back with more men than they left with. They did actually come back with more men than they left with because the pipers went out after most of the Blueshirts had gone.

On occasion in April 1936 there was a particularly nasty incident in Dublin of anti-communist mob violence that has always been blamed on the animal gang. It was an Easter Rising commemoration in April of that year. One historian has noted that the Communist Party and Republican Congress members were attacked by the animal gangs as they marched to Glasnevin Cemetery. Jack White, a man who had been a founding member of the Irish Citizen Army in 1913 but later became a militant anarchist in Spain was there in April 1936 he wrote years later, ‘I had to fight for three kilometres against the Catholic actionists who attacked us on the streets as we marched to honour the memory of the Republican dead who fell at Easter 1916. These were pious hooligans who came inside of the cemetery and tore up grave rails simply to attack us.’  Now this all happened out at Glasnevin Cemetery, and as I say in the folklore of the city, it has often been blamed on animal gangs. What encouraged the crowd to attack this Easter parade? I’ve always thought it was the presence of one man among them, a man called Willie Gallagher who was marching in the Easter parade was a Scottish MP, but more than being a Scottish MP he was a Scottish Communist MP, one of only four Communists ever elected into Westminster in London. There was a brilliant line at the time as Willie Gallagher was marching into Glasnevin Cemetery someone shouted in the mob, ‘Don’t allow that Scottish Communist bastard into a Catholic Cemetery.’ Now the funny thing about that Glasnevin Cemetery is, of course, a non-denominational cemetery where Catholics and Protestants are buried alongside one another, but that fact was lost on the mob.

Not only did they attack an Easter parade in April 1936, two days later, at College Green there was another day out. A crowd of between four and five thousand people gathered at a republican meeting where Willie Gallagher the Communist MP was going to speak alongside Irishman Peadar O'Donnell. Now between four and five thousand people turned up for that meeting but Gardaí estimated that ‘about ninety-eight percent of the people at College Green were hostile to the aims of the meeting.’ That’s a pretty good turnout for the hostile crowd. This meeting was stopped from happening. Again, I’ve always believed from the Gardaí reports of who was there on the day, this was not actions of young inner-city newsboys, the initial animal gang. Once again, this was the actions of a rather respectable middle-class mob. Not only did they stop a meeting on College Green from happening, but they later attacked Trinity College Dublin and the Masonic Hall. Now when you look at those three targets Communists, Trinity and the Masonic Hall it indicates a single thing and that is a sense of militant Catholicism at the forefront. Trinity College would've been regarded by the crowd as a Protestant institution. Of course Catholics were forbidden from attending it without the permission of the bishop right until 1970. The Republican Congress organisation at the time blamed the animal gang and other such defenders of faith and morals for the attacks in April, 1936. But was animal gang just shorthand by that stage for violent mob? Did the term mean anything? Certainly those who carried out the violence were far removed from a newspaper strike a few years previously.

Now when you're talking about the animal gangs to Dubliners today it's not communism in the 1930s they think of. It's the 1940s and infamous battles, like the Battles of Baldoyle and the Battle of Tolka Park. A certain folklore has emerged around the animal gangs of the 1940s but it’s very, very clear that they are quite far removed from the animal gangs of the 1930s.  I've always believed that the Spanish Civil War is a real turning point in Irish political history. You know the Left and the Right both go and fight in this war, seeing it as a continuation of their own struggles in Ireland. But in many cases they don’t return and the hostility and the militant violence between the Left and Right, in the thirties in Ireland, the street politics if you will, really seems to die out with the Civil War in Spain in the late 1930s. By the 1940s people talk about the animal gangs in a very, very different sense. Kevin Kearns in his oral history books of Dublin has done very, very good work on the animals in the 1940s. These seem to be totally different gangs who were in no way occupied with the Republican movement but rather gangs that were affiliated to bookies, affiliated to publicans and the like and who were involved in just simple criminality. A folklore has also emerged that the animal gangs were smashed in the 1940s by Garda James C Branigan or Lugs Branigan as he is known to generations of Dubliners. In his biography of Garda James C Branigan, Bernard Neary writes that the 1940s saw the Gardaí and indeed the state adopt a much tougher approach to Dublin gangs. I mentioned two instances there in my introduction to the ‘40s which are particularly interesting: a battle at Baldoyle and another battle at Tolka Park dragged the animal gangs back to the front pages of newspapers. In fact the battle at Baldoyle which was said to be orchestrated by two Dublin bookmakers in May of 1940 displaced the Second World War from the top of the national media in Ireland and whipped up hysteria in the capital that the animal gang were still alive and well.

Now that battle is a story for another study and another day but while focusing on the ‘30s I always like to briefly mention the Battle of Tolka Park in 1942, because I think it’s one of the most obscure moments in history of youth gang violence in Dublin. In March 26th 1942 nine youths were charged in Dublin with attempted murder because of a battle, or a clash to give guidance on the pitch of Shelbourne Football Club in Tolka Park. ‘Dublin Football Venue Onslaught’ read the headlines of The Irish Times reporting on truly bizarre scenes. During a clash between Mountain View and St Steven’s United in the Junior Combination Cup, hardly a crowd-puller, blood had been spilled on the terraces of an Irish football stadium. The clash occurred between two rival gangs, the Stafford Street Gang on one hand and the Ashe Street Gang on the other. Now how did two Dublin gangs come to find themselves on the pitch of Tolka Park? Newspaper reports at the time said one gang had rather incredibly gained access to the Stadium by travelling down the river Tolka on makeshift boats. The Irish Press reported that this gang had climbed over the partition from the Riverside into the stadium. The other gang had entered into the ground as a result of the turnstile man leaving his ‘stile, permitting easy access into the ground. The Irish Times, said that none of these youths had paid into the stadium as if that fact was ever in doubt. It was ten minutes into the second half play before the gangs would clash. The Irish Press reported a spectator noting that it was like hell had been let loose and the paper noted that the violence occurred for the something like the region of fifteen minutes, leading to two hundred spectators fleeing from the ground in panic. Arthur Smith, the linesman on the day would note to the papers that he saw a man running with a sword and heard spectators in the crowd shout it's the Ashe Street Gang and the Stafford Street Animal Gang. He also remarked that one man bleeding from the head was carried away from the violence behind the Drumcondra goal and onto the field of play by players. The ref of the day would note that he immediately stopped the game upon seeing the panic in the stands and that the injured man carried onto the field of play was taken into dressing room. Thirty youths were involved in the disturbances. Nine were tried for murder and very, very heavy sentences were handed out against those youths.

The idea that Lugs Branigan, shown here, had single-handedly stopped the animal gangs from running wild in Dublin is not something I believe to be true. I don't think you could beat gang violence off the streets by applying the tactics of gang violence and what actually brought about an end of the animal gang in my view, was the very heavy sentences that were handed out to youths in the courts. They were essentially treated as adults would be. Very, very lengthy sentences. Very few of them seem to have become active in gang violence after coming out of prison again. The youths, the nine of them that were charged with murder ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three. In the June court settings, Lugs Branigan himself came forward and spoke in the courts about the scourge of the animal gangs in Dublin.

There’s an entire different layer of folklore around the animal gangs in the 1940s. Dominic Behan, for example in his classic memoirs, Teems of Times and Happy Returns, tells a story about the Dublin animal gang who he says were mainly dockers boarding boats and going to Liverpool where they fought their equivalent for a day and took over the city of Liverpool. How much of that is actually true we’ll never know. And as is so often the case with this kind of Dublin history, the line between fact and folklore is often very, very blurred indeed. But I hope with my research at least what I’ve managed to do is show that in the 1930s it was not the animal gang who were attacking the Left at will but a much higher percentage of ordinary citizens motivated primarily I believe by religious hysteria. So thank you so much for listening. I hope you took something from that today.

(applause)

 

Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.