Memorial card for Thomas Ashe

A memorial card for Thomas Ashe (1885-1917). Originally from Lispole, in the Kerry Gaeltacht, Ashe was both a cultural and political activist. A prominent member of the Gaelic League, Ashe was a teacher, being master of Corduff national school near Lusk in County Dublin. At some point he had joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the IRB, colloquially known as the Fenians) and, in 1913, the Irish Volunteers. During the Easter Rising Ashe led a battalion of the Irish Volunteers to disrupt communications and infrastructure in north County Dublin and in Meath. They were responsible for the most notable and successful incident of the Rising outside Dublin, when they defeated a substantial Royal Irish Constabulary force at Ashbourne, capturing the local police barracks after a five-hour gun-battle.
Ashe was imprisoned in Britain after the rising but was released in the general amnesty of June 1917. His stature guaranteed his seniority and he became president of the supreme council of the IRB. After giving a ‘seditious’ speech in Longford later that summer, Ashe was imprisoned under the wartime Defence of the Realm Act and in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison. He and a large number of other prisoners went on hunger strike on 20 September 1917 demanding recognition as prisoners of war. Ashe was force-fed on 23 September; a tube was inserted through the nose or mouth into the stomach, through which a mixture of raw eggs beaten in milk was pumped. On 25 September he was force-fed again by an inexperienced doctor, seemingly with considerable force; the feeding tube entered his lung and Ashe died that evening in the Mater hospital after his lungs filled with fluid. The circumstances of his death had a powerful resonance in the context of the shifting currents of Irish political life in the wake of the Easter Rising (Glasnevin Trust).