Irvine, George (1877–1954), republican, language activist and campaigner, was born in August 1877 in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, the son of John Irvine, a bookseller, and Jane Irvine (née Boyle). George was one of seven children, four of whom were living in 1911. John Irvine’s shop on East Bridge Street, Enniskillen, specialised in selling religious tracts; he and his wife gained a reputation for proselytising, a fact which would later seriously impede their son’s career. The Irvines were unionists, and belonged to the Church of Ireland. However, as was common for protestant nationalists, George Irvine venerated politically heterodox forebears; he took pride in his great-great-grand-uncle, Colonel William Irvine (qv), who led the Lowtherstown corps of the Irish Volunteers and presided over the Dungannon Convention in 1782. Irvine was educated at Enniskillen Model School and Portora Royal School, before moving to Dublin in about 1900. He attended Trinity College Dublin (TCD), but did not take a degree. After working as a superintendent of games in St Andrew’s College, in about 1904 he joined the teaching staff of the Diocesan School, Molesworth Street, where he remained until Easter week, 1916. In 1911 Irvine resided at 6 Mount Pleasant Square, Ranelagh, with his widowed mother, his older brother William and older sisters Sybil and Máire.
In 1905 Irvine joined the Gaelic League, becoming an active member of the Drumcondra branch. Here he formed two important friendships with fellow members of the Church of Ireland, James Deakin (qv) and Ernest Blythe (qv). Deakin recruited him to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (c.1907) and Irvine became a senior member of Sinn Féin, joining the party’s executive in 1910. He first joined the Teeling Circle, and in 1911 he was elected centre of the Mangan Circle. In 1912 he was elected secretary of Dublin Centres’ Board, the coordinating body for the IRB in Dublin.
Active in the Gaelic League (having learned Irish), Sinn Féin and the IRB between 1907 and 1922, Irvine enjoyed a parallel career as one of the most active proponents of nationalism within Irish protestantism. In common with contemporaries such as Bulmer Hobson (qv), Irvine understood the value of enlisting his co-religionists into the (then technically apolitical) Gaelic League as a means of effecting their conversion to republicanism. Seeking to reverse the decline in protestant membership of the League, four Dublin-based IRB men and members of the Church of Ireland, Irvine, Blythe, Deakin and Sean O’Casey (qv), the future playwright, held a meeting in May 1907 ‘to consider the means of bringing the principles of the Gaelic League prominently under the notice of Protestants, and inducing them to take their place prominently in the Gaelic movement’ (The Leader, 11 May 1907). This developed into the Committee of Protestant Gaelic Leaguers, of which Irvine was secretary, and later the Church Services Committee, which sought to introduce Irish-language services to the Church of Ireland. A final, more durable permutation came in April 1914 with the creation of the Irish Guild of the Church (Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise), which held its first public meeting in Irvine’s school on Molesworth Street. Irvine was the sole member of the original IRB quartet to join the Guild. The Guild was officially entirely non-political, and included Church of Ireland bishops among its senior officers; however, Irvine helped to lead an influential republican faction within the organisation, which had assumed control within four years.
Irvine was present at the inaugural meeting of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913; like other senior IRB men, he hoped to use it as a means to launch a rebellion. Between 1914 and 1916 he was an active member, serving as a captain in B Company of the 4th Dublin Battalion under Éamonn Ceannt (qv), and taking part in the Howth gun running. During the Easter rising, Irvine served under Ceannt in the South Dublin Union. Irvine and his men were forced to surrender following a celebrated engagement with British troops at the Union. Irvine was court-martialled and sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. In the weeks afterwards, Máire Irvine publicly defended her brother from a hostile and inaccurate attack in the Fermanagh unionist paper the Impartial Reporter.
Irvine spent his imprisonment in Portland and Lewes gaols. In a letter to a friend, he described praying every morning and evening with his catholic fellow rebels. This was purely an ecumenical gesture; he had no interest in converting to catholicism and remained until his death a devout member of the Church of Ireland, who believed the church should be reconciled to Irish–Ireland ideals. Irvine was released as part of a general amnesty in June 1917. That month he made a hero’s return to Enniskillen, where he was chaired through the streets. He attended service in the Church of Ireland wearing his Volunteer’s uniform, and refused to stand for the national anthem. He initially re-joined B Company of the 4th Dublin Battalion, until he was appointed vice-commandant of the 1st Dublin Battalion in 1918. In May that year Irvine led a republican takeover of the Irish Guild of the Church, which resulted in the resignation of bishops and other senior office holders. Between late-April and June of 1918 he was involved in organising the ‘protestant protest against conscription’.
Irvine was selected as the Sinn Féin candidate for North Fermanagh for the general election to be held in December 1918. However, a complication emerged when the local Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), who were bound to support the Sinn Féin candidate under the terms of an electoral pact, refused to support Irvine on the grounds that his parents, they alleged, had been proselytisers. The parish priest of Enniskillen orchestrated a successful campaign to force Irvine to renounce his candidacy. His replacement on the ticket, Kevin O’Shiel (qv), subsequently lost the election to the unionist candidate. For Sinn Féin, North Fermanagh was an embarrassment that undermined the party’s claim to represent people of every faith. Irvine was fiercely disappointed; he later stated that he had been promised the support of sufficient protestant voters to win the seat, which, he believed, would ultimately have meant Fermanagh’s inclusion in the Irish Free State. Ernest Blythe, Irvine’s old Gaelic League and IRB comrade, was returned for North Monaghan and embarked on a long public career; Irvine remained a peripheral figure.
During the war of independence, Irvine continued as vice-commandant of the 1st Dublin Battalion. His men affectionately called him ‘The Grey Ghost’ (Irish Independent, 1 July 1954). A former colleague remembered him as ‘quiet, reserved and taciturn he had a depth of character out of the ordinary. He brought tact, devotion, and enthusiasm into his work’ (Sean Prendergast, Bureau of Military History). Irvine adopted something of a dual character during this period: to his mainly catholic colleagues in the IRA, he was distant and unassuming, his protestant background rarely visible; but to his co-religionists, he was a radical. Writing as Seoirse Ó hEireamhóin, in 1920 Irvine issued a stern warning to unionist co-religionists in an article titled ‘Will the Church of Ireland disappear?’ (Gaelic Churchman, January 1920). The article condemned what he viewed as the complacency of the majority of Anglicans, who clung to unionist politics, with little thought as to what would happen after independence. An anti-Treatyite, Irvine had a brief civil war. He was arrested by National Army forces on Bolton Street on 30 June 1922 and interned in Mountjoy until his release on 12 December of that year.
For the remaining twenty-two years of his life, Irvine took no further part in militant republicanism, and largely avoided conventional politics. Employed as an Irish teacher in Parnell Square Technical School, he devoted himself to a range of political and social interests, including animal welfare, the republican cause in the Spanish civil war, political prisoners, and, towards the end of his life, the position of the protestant minority. Seeing love for nature as a continuation of the Gaelic movement, from the late 1920s Irvine became a well-known animal welfare activist. He was an active member of the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (DSPCA), as well as the International League for the Protection of Horses. His letters criticising wild animal shows, zoos, circuses, deer-shooting, animal export, and various other cases of animal mistreatment appeared in the press. From about 1933, Irvine was secretary, and the leading figure, in the Irish Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. The anti-vivisection movement frequently overlapped with anti-vaccinationists, initially due to objections to the use of bovine matter in smallpox vaccines. Irvine used his position in the Union to argue against vaccination. In February 1933 he presided over a meeting in the Mansion House, Dublin, in which calls were made for the discontinuation of vaccination for diphtheria and smallpox. During the 1930s Irvine served on the standing committee of the National Association of the Old IRA and in the late 1930s and early 1940s he served as an Old IRA representative on several committees which sought special status for political prisoners, and the release of republican prisoners. Irvine sympathised with the republicans during the Spanish civil war and helped lead the Irish Food Ships for Spain Committee.
Some protestant nationalists found the 1920s and 1930s difficult, as the predominantly catholic ethos of the new state emerged. Irvine appears to have fallen into this category. In July 1949 Irvine protested when two dáil deputies used the term ‘non-catholic’ in reference to members of the Church of Ireland. This was, he said, ‘the greatest possible insult’ to the church (Irish Times, 19 July 1949). One month earlier, he stated that ‘Ireland owes a lot to protestants, and the spirit of protestantism, even the absolute independence of the twenty-six counties’, and highlighted a tradition of loyalty to the Crown among generations of catholic leaders (Dublin Evening Mail, 22 June 1949).
On his retirement from Parnell Square Technical School in 1947, Irvine found himself in reduced circumstances. He left Mount Pleasant Square and took digs on the South Circular Road and in Terenure. George Irvine died on 30 June 1954 and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery. He was the last surviving member of his family. He left the bulk of his small estate (£700) to the Performing and Captive Animals’ Defence League.