on, there were, during the day, 600 special Royal Irish constables on duty
in Limerick. But, at night, in spite of unlit streets, the 600 constables
gave place to the sixty men of the Black Watch.



"Priests preached sermons Sunday urging the people to withstand the enemy
with the same spirit they did in the time of Sarsfield," said young
Alphonsus O'Mara, the mayor of Limerick, whom I met at breakfast. His Sinn
Fein beliefs had imprisoned him in his hotel, for his home was beyond the
town and he would not ask the British military for a pass. Opposite the
breakfast room we could see the drawn blue shades of Limerick's dry goods
store. A woman staggered by with a burlap bag of coal on her shoulders. A
donkey cart with a movie poster reading: "Working Under Order of the Strike
Committee: GOD AND MAN," rolled past. A child hugging a pot of Easter
lilies shuffled by. "There's no idea that the people want communism. There
can't be. The people here are Catholics."

But a little incident of the strike impressed me with the fact that there
were communists among these fervent Catholics. In order to pictorialize the
predicament of the Limerick workers to the world through the journalists
who were gathered in Limerick waiting the hoped-for arrival of the first
transatlantic plane, the national executive council devised this plan. One
bright spring afternoon, the amusement committee placed poster
announcements of a hurling match that was to be held just outside of
Limerick at Caherdavin. About one thousand people, mostly Irish boys and
girls, left town. At sunset, two by two, girls with yellow primroses at
their waists, and boys with their hurling sticks in their hands, marched
down the white-walled Caherdavin road towards the bridge. The bridge guard
hooped his arm towards the boat house occupied by the military. Soldiers,