1916 (8 page)

United Kingdom participation in the European war on 4 August forced the issue. John Redmond used all his influence, such as it was, with the government to oblige it to pass the home rule bill.
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In any event Asquith could hardly take the country into war with the Irish and Ulster questions utterly unresolved. His compromise was that the home rule bill be placed on the statute book, but accompanied by a suspensory Act ‘for twelve months or such later date (not being later than the end of the present war) as may be fixed by His Majesty by Order in Council.’ He promised an amending bill dealing with the Ulster question, and when the bill was given formal assent on 18 September Asquith conceded that the coercion of unionist Ulster was an ‘absolutely unthinkable thing’.
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The war worked immediate changes on the Irish political scene. In a sense it marked a closure of the Ulster crisis, for within a short time Carson and Redmond respectively pledged the Ulster and the Irish Volunteers to the British war effort. In so doing both made concessions. Carson had hoped in August 1914 to pledge the UVF to the British side, with two battalions to be sent abroad, but only if the home rule bill were postponed.
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But when the government pressed on with its bill (much to the disgust of British unionists) Carson, a thorough-going imperial patriot, could hardly stand over his demand. Redmond came best out of the last stages of the bill, because he had after all gained what not even the great Parnell sought – a home rule measure on the statute book. Furthermore, by urging the Irish Volunteers to ‘take their place in the firing line in this contest’ he had (as one of his severest critics William O’Brien acknowledged) made the best possible use of the Volunteers: ‘in fighting England’s battle in the particular circumstances of [the] war … they were fighting the most effective battle for Ireland’s liberty.’
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Yet Redmond did not yet have his parliament; and if Irish nationalist disillusionment with the war were to surface, then he might be in an awkward position. But this is not to say that any such disillusionment would have seriously undermined Redmond’s position, though his very success in getting the home rule bill passed into law further reduced his room for manoeuvre. He could hardly refuse to help the war effort, especially as Ireland’s friends in the British empire (and Redmond had and valued such friends) were enthusiastic supporters of the British war effort. On the Ulster unionist side there is evidence that some at least believed that
the UVF as the sharp edge of resistance was a spent force. Lord Dunleath of Co. Down, describing himself as ‘one of the Pioneers of the Volunteer Movement’, wrote to Carson on 9 March 1915 that the general idea in the minds of the men who promoted and organised this movement was to give as strong an expression as possible of their resolve to resist the policy of home rule. Speeches in and out of parliament, and monster demonstrations in Ulster, had apparently failed to interest the English and Scotch electors, or to concentrate their attention on the passionate abhorrence of home rule on the part of the Protestant population of Ireland and of the industrial inhabitants of Ulster.

Thus it was the ‘plain duty of those of us who were possessed of influence to take some step, which would convince the government of the reality of our determination to resist this policy by every means in our power’. They had organised the Volunteers, gradually equipped and trained them into a fairly efficient force of volunteer infantry, and finally provided them with arms and ammunition. This had the desired effect of turning English and Scottish attention towards Ulster and had assisted, and would assist, her political leaders in the future. Until a few months ago ‘we found ourselves on the brink of a conflict with the armed forces of the Crown’. Now the war offered a favourable opportunity to reconsider ‘our position and future policy’. Dunleath claimed that ‘many of us are undoubtedly willing, if necessary, to risk our lives in defence of what we believe to be our rights and liberties, but I venture to think that an encounter with the armed forces of the Crown would inflict a serious injury upon our cause, and that every possible effort should be made to avoid the possibility of any calamity of this character.’

He did not think ‘that our men are prepared to go into action against any part of His Majesty’s forces, and we [their leaders] should not consider ourselves justified in calling upon them to do so’.

Dunleath understood that unionist politicians would like very much to be able to assert in their speeches that the Volunteers would undoubtedly come out and fight at the first attempt to administer the home rule Act, ‘but I venture to suggest a strong hope that this assertion will not be made or encouraged by the leaders of the unionist party’. He now fell back upon Dicey’s belief that the best way for unionists was to offer passive resistance, at least in the first instance (especially against paying taxes to the home rule parliament); if payment were enforced, the Volunteers would always be available to resist and ‘our men would like nothing better than to go out against the nationalists’. He concluded that ‘our political position as
passive resisters, supported by a large body of armed Volunteers, should be a strong one – whereas if even a single British soldier or sailor was killed or wounded in Ulster, I am afraid that our future prospects would be extremely gloomy.’
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This was to some extent put to the test in 1919 when, as the British government again took up the home rule burden, Carson threatened that he would ‘call out the Ulster Volunteers’ if there were any attempt to take away the rights of Ulstermen – a threat which prompted an angry response in the British press and in parliament. Government spokesmen defended Carson uneasily, with one Conservative MP dismissing Carson’s loyalty as ‘the loyalty of Shylock’.
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It is unlikely that even the common experience of war would have overcome the ideological divide between Ulster unionist and Irish nationalist, though there were signs of a mutual acknowledgement of each other’s bravery in combat, and respect for each other in this momentous enterprise. Nevertheless, few would have predicted that at the war’s end the home rulers would be dismissed from the political landscape, and Ulster unionists left as the sole occupiers of the patriotic ground. Fewer still would have expected the separatist rebellion of Easter 1916. Contemporaries could not of course foresee that the Ulster unionist protest against home rule would in any way contribute to the Easter Rising; and for the historian this remains an intriguing question. The debate had an early start. Bulmer Hobson complained that ‘it seemed to the Irish people that the English desired to have it both ways and when they [the Irish] sought to enforce their national rights by the methods of Fenianism they were told to agitate constitutionally, and when they acted constitutionally they were met by methods of Fenianism.’
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Ronald McNeill, Lord Cushendun, acknowledged that the methods adopted by unionists might be said to contribute a ‘bad example’, though he thought them justifiable as the ‘lesser of two evils’. He added archly that ‘there was something humorous in the pretence put forward in 1923 and afterwards that the violence to which the adherents of Sinn Féin had recourse was merely copying Ulster. As if Irish nationalism in its extreme form required precedent for insurrection from Ulster.
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Some modern historians tend to agree with Bulmer Hobson. Jeremy Smith writes that:

In organising themselves against home rule and exposing British governmental weakness, they [the UVF] encouraged nationalists to emulate their example … ‘The Orangeman who can fire a gun,’ Patrick Pearse wrote in 1913, ‘will
certainly count for more in the end than the nationalist who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun.’ The seeds of events in Ireland over the following decade were clearly planted in the pre-war period.
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Michael Laffan acknowledges that Bonar Law and Carson ‘were to be deeply shocked and repelled by much that happened in Ireland during the decade which followed their defiance of parliamentary government, but without their example the Irish revolution would not have come about’, and he quotes General Maxwell in June 1916: ‘The law was broken, and others broke the law with more or less success.’
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This brings the historian into the fascinating but dubious realm of virtual history. We cannot know what would have happened had the Ulster and southern Irish unionists meekly accepted the home rule parliament which they believed threatened their lives and liberties in 1912–14; likewise we cannot know what would have happened had John Redmond meekly accepted that the Ulster unionist opposition was in earnest in its desire to resist Dublin rule, and abandoned his belief that Ireland, a nation pure and indivisible, must not be denied her birthright. What we do know is that Redmond’s leadership, indeed the whole character of the nationalism of his day, was regarded with increasing distaste by separatists, who from the early summer of 1915 planned their riposte – a rising, with German help, during the war. Michael Laffan remarks perceptively that ‘the Irish Volunteers’ popularity did not mean that Irish nationalists had been converted en masse to the idea of revolution’, which implies, to say the least, that a free choice lay in the hands of the separatists of 1916, and they resolved to take it.
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But there is the question of the guns that were taken into Ireland in 1912–14. Ben Novick calculates that there were more than 66,000 rifles in Ireland in the hands of paramilitary organisations by March 1915, and if Ireland was not a country of guns in the nineteenth century, she quickly made up for that in the early twentieth.
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Guns are important; but so is the will and the opportunity to use them. Michael Wheatly’s analysis of provincial nationalist opinion reveals ‘a mass political mobilisation, militarism and a bellicosity of language unseen in recent times’.
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It is true
that the overwhelming majority of the Irish Volunteers who declared they would use guns in 1913–14 did in the end do so: but in British army uniforms, against the Germans and the Turks. Paradoxically, the minority of Irish Volunteers who used them in Ireland in 1916 shouldered, not the best available weapons of the day, but a ‘grab-bag assortment of outdated
weapons’.
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The key point was not the condition of the weapons they employed but the belief that the gun was indeed a keystone of liberty; and that belief, though never lost by separatists, and praised even by home rulers, was thrust to the forefront of Irish politics by the Ulster rebellion.

If Ulster’s stand for union reinforced the 1916 rebels’ conviction that the rifle was the instrument of freedom, then it failed to direct their attention to what, in retrospect, seems like another, rather more obvious, conclusion. They completely ignored the implications of the Ulster crisis, and simplified Irish politics into an age-old confrontation between ‘England’ and ‘Ireland’. Their Proclamation insisted that all Irishmen and Irish-women owed allegiance to the Republic, now actually in being. It failed to recognise the existence, let alone the beliefs, of the Ulster unionists whose armed defiance of home rule Pearse professed to admire. Nearly five years after the Rising, on 21 September 1920, Lord Grey (who on 3 August 1914 described Ireland as ‘the one bright spot on the map of Europe’) set out a grim, but realistic, choice for Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists. ‘At present,’ he wrote, ‘Ulster wrecks anything that nationalist Ireland will accept: Sinn Fein clamours for a united Ireland and either willfully ignores the Ulster difficulty or says it is our business to see that the difficulty is overcome.’ Grey proposed to apply what he called the ‘coercion of facts, which both sides have hitherto declined to face’. Irishmen, he concluded, must choose between: ‘(1) compromise and agreement with each other; or (2) a divided Ireland; or (3) civil war’. Grey believed that when they understood the logic of the situation he had no doubt that they would choose the first of these courses.
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He was mistaken. And it seems not unreasonable to say that the partition of Ireland, unthinkable in the home rule episodes of 1886 and 1893, but emerging, painfully, as the possible base of some sort of compromise in 1913–14 was, after the Easter Rising, hard to avoid.

I

The response of the Irish party to the Easter Rising was in one key respect unambiguous – the Rising was condemned and deplored. It was variously described as criminal, insane, politically stupid, a direct threat to home rule, hopelessly impractical, foolish or, using one of the most heavily-used words of the time, ‘misguided’. Criticism was still commonplace months after the Rising, expressed by speakers and writers right across the party, whether pledge-bound MPs in the parliamentary party or the large body of councillors, officers and activists who remained at the heart of the party’s mass affiliates, the United Irish League (UIL) and Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH).

Nevertheless, attitudes towards the rebels themselves were ambivalent. Certainly, the party’s leader, John Redmond, described them as ‘irreconcilable enemies’ who had made an ‘attempt to torpedo home rule and the Irish party’, but the dilemma faced by his party was acute.
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The rebels, for all the damage they had done, were nationalist Irishmen. According to the
Longford Leader
(owned by the party MP, J.P. Farrell), they were the constitutional movement’s ‘own flesh and blood’.
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Moreover, the Irish party remained proud of its Fenian antecedents and had for decades praised a long succession of rebels and martyrs to the cause. John Fitzgibbon MP (who had himself, like Farrell, been an imprisoned agitator) could well understand the ‘mental agonies’ of those arrested after the Rising: ‘These men can be consoled by the fact that they had in the past history of Ireland many comrades who suffered the same treatment, so that it is not to be wondered at.’
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