The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (6 page)

IRELAND AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Six weeks after the start of the war, on 20 September 1914, John Redmond delivered a speech to a gathering of Irish Volunteers at Woodenbridge, County Wicklow, urging them to enlist in the army
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. Redmond had succeeded in gaining control of the Volunteer movement earlier in June 1914 to ensure it did not fall too strongly under the influence of radical nationalists and derail the chances of achieving home rule. The support of constitutional nationalism swelled the ranks of the Irish Volunteers, with membership estimated to be over 150,000 by August 1914 (Coleman, 2003: 33).

Redmond, who was a strong believer in Ireland playing a role in the empire, like Canada or Australia, believed that Ireland should make its contribution to the war effort, and hoped that its support would be rewarded with the implementation of home rule once the war ended. He entertained the hope that the experience of Irish nationalists and unionists fighting together for the same cause might heal the divisions of the preceding years. He was also aware that the UVF would immediately pledge its support and that nationalist Ireland could not afford to ‘allow the Unionists to win all the credit for sacrifice in the British cause’ (Bew, 1996: 38). His support for the war split the Volunteers, with the majority styled the National Volunteers remaining under Redmondite control and many of them (estimated at 24,000) enlisting. A rump of 10,000 Irish Volunteers, who were opposed to the British war effort, coalesced under the leadership of Eoin MacNeill (Fitzpatrick, 1996: 380).

Redmond’s call to arms and the loyalty of the UVF explain why many young Irish men joined the British Army during the First World War. Enlistment rates were higher in Ulster, from where half of all Irish recruits came. Approximately 45 per cent of Irish recruits were Protestant, a disproportionately high figure given that the Protestant population of Ireland was 26 per cent (Boyce, 2002: 193). Irish recruitment was a noticeably urban phenomenon, possibly because there was greater economic need in cities, but also because farmers benefited economically from the war and did not want to lose their sons or labourers to the army.

Many joined for reasons other than the influence of John Redmond or the UVF, including the sense of adventure associated with soldiering, the militarism of Irish society at that time, peer influence, family martial traditions and the financial benefits that would accrue to dependents. Some held a genuine conviction that the war was morally justified, and there was considerable sympathy among Irish Catholics for their Belgian counterparts. The German actions in Belgium, where Catholic priests were targeted, also meant that the Irish Catholic hierarchy were influential supporters of the war effort in its early stages (Fitzpatrick, 1996: 388–90; Pašeta, 2008: 76).

It is estimated that over 200,000 Irish men fought in the British Army during the First World War. There was an initial rush to enlist, with 44,000 joining up in the first five months. The realisation that the war would be a prolonged and bloody one soon cooled such ardour and recruitment figures fell to 46,000 in 1915. By 1916, when the horrors of the war were being brought home by conflicts like the Somme, enlistment declined noticeably and progressively; from 1916 to 1918 the annual enlistment figures were 19,000, 14,000 and under 11,000 respectively (Fitzpatrick, 1996: 388).

The UVF was rewarded for its support with the formation of a distinct 36th Ulster Division that would endure considerable losses, especially at the
Somme in 1916 where it lost over 5,000 men. As a result, the war and the Somme, in particular, hold a very significant place in unionist political and cultural memory. The Irish casualties at the Somme were not exclusively from the Ulster Division; 4,300 men from the 16th Division also perished (Horne, 2008: 12). Redmond’s hopes that the National Volunteers would be treated similarly to the UVF were dashed, although most southern Irishmen served in the 10th and 16th Divisions which played significant roles, and suffered considerable losses, in important engagements at Gallipoli, Guillemont and Ginchy (Dungan, 1997: 12). An estimated 27,405 Irish soldiers were killed in the war, approximately 14 per cent of those who enlisted, which is a similar proportion to overall British Army casualties (Fitzpatrick, 1996: 392).

The suspension of home rule created a very difficult position for the Irish Party. It had achieved its main aim in theory but not in practice. There was no longer a need to campaign for home rule, nor an opportunity to get on with the business of running a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. The influence that the Irish Party enjoyed from 1910, with the Liberals dependent on its support, disappeared as the main British parties moved closer together, eventually forming a coalition government in 1915, in which prominent Ulster unionists were given posts, including Edward Carson as Attorney General. Redmond was treated badly by the government which refused to allow the National Volunteers to be used for the defence of Ireland or to form a specific division for them. His hopes that Ireland might benefit from some of the economic spoils of the war were also dashed when the War Office failed to award any significant contracts to Irish firms. The continued suspension of home rule, Redmond’s political impotence and his continued support for a war that grew increasingly less popular in Ireland meant that his party was in a precarious position even before the events of Easter 1916 in Dublin.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

A detailed documentary history of unionism is contained in Patrick Buckland’s
Irish Unionism, 1885–1923
(Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1973). This work is complemented by
Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland, 1886–1922
(Gill and Macmillan, 1973) which provides a detailed account of the tactics adopted by Ulster unionists to resist the third home rule bill and their acceptance of home rule for six counties in 1920. Digitised copies of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant are on the website of the Public Record of Northern Ireland,
http://www.proni.gov.uk/index/search_the_archives/ulster_covenant.htm

The classic account of the political controversy created by the third home rule bill is A. T. Q. Stewart,
The Ulster Crisis, 1912–14
(Faber, 1967). There are two detailed and comprehensive accounts of the Irish home rule movement in Alvin Jackson’s,
Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) and Alan O’Day’s,
Irish Home Rule, 1887–1921
(Manchester University Press, 1998).

The leading political figures of the period are examined in biographical studies including Alvin Jackson’s,
Sir Edward Carson
(Dundalk, 1993), F. S. L. Lyons’s,
John Dillon: A Biography
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968) and Paul Bew’s,
John Redmond
(Dundalgan, 1996). The Irish policy of the two principal British political parties is examined in Patricia Jalland’s,
The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914
(Harvester Press, 1980) and Jeremy Smith’s,
The Tories and Ireland, 1910–1914: Conservative Party Politics and the Irish Home Rule Crisis
(Irish Academic Press, 2000). The evolution of partition is chronicled by Michael Laffan in
The Partition of Ireland, 1911–1925
(Dundalgan, 1983).

Ireland’s participation in the First World War is the subject of Tim Bowman’s,
Irish Regiments in the Great War
(Manchester University Press, 2003), Myles Dungan’s,
They Shall Not Grow Old: Irish Soldiers and the Great War
(Dublin, 1997), Keith Jeffery’s,
Ireland and the Great War
(Cambridge, 2000) and two edited collections of essays – Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (eds),
Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us All?’
(Manchester University Press, 2002) and John Horne (ed.),
Our War: Ireland and the Great War
(Royal Irish Academy, 2008).

Part 2

ANALYSIS

2 The Easter Rising, 1916

ENGLAND’S DIFFICULTY AND IRELAND’S OPPORTUNITY

F
ollowing the defeat of the IRB uprising in 1867, radical nationalism which sought the complete separation of Ireland from Britain through force of arms went into decline for nearly 40 years. With many Fenian leaders imprisoned and exiled, constitutional nationalism came to prominence, striving for the twin goals of Irish home rule and land reform. Revolutionary nationalism re-emerged in the early twentieth century as a result of the Gaelic cultural revival that reinforced the sense of Ireland having a distinct identity separate from Britain, the sense that the constitutional movement had failed to deliver on home rule, the centenary commemoration in 1898 of the United Irish rebellion and the rejuvenation of the Fenian leadership (Lyons, 1968a: 42–3).

Although the Fenian movement had not been to the forefront of Irish political activity it had retained a dedicated cluster of activists, one of the most prominent of whom was Thomas Clarke, who had spent 15 years in prison in Britain for planning a bomb attack on London in the 1880s. His return to Ireland in 1907 was a significant factor in the revival of the IRB and coincided with efforts by new younger leaders to reorganise the movement and plan a new insurrection to achieve Irish freedom. In Belfast, Denis McCullough had succeeded in purging the brotherhood of its older members, including his own father who had initiated him into the movement, while in Dublin a similar process occurred in 1911 after the ousting of the city's most prominent Fenian organiser, P. T. Daly (McGee, 2005: 291, 350). Another important figure in the new revolutionary leadership was Seán MacDermott who was appointed as the IRB's national organiser in 1908.

The IRB was still a small organisation, especially in Dublin, and its regional strength varied widely; in 1911 its estimated membership was 2,000 (Kelly, 2006: 142–4; Foy and Barton, 1999: 6). It sought to extend its influence
through infiltrating a number of cultural and political organisations that shared its nationalist ideology, including literary societies, the
Gaelic League
(founded in 1893 to promote the revival of the Irish language), the
Gaelic Athletic Association
(the governing body of Gaelic sports such as hurling and Gaelic football) and the newly formed fringe political organisation Sinn Féin (SF).
Sinn Féin
was formed in 1905 as an amalgam of a number of small advanced nationalist bodies that had emerged around the turn of the century, including: the Dungannon Clubs founded in Ulster by Denis McCullough and Bulmer Hobson, which sought an Irish republic; Cumann na nGaedheal, a front for the IRB; the Celtic Literary Society; and the National Council formed in 1903 by the Dublin journalist Arthur Griffith. Griffith ‘hated British rule’ but was not as ideologically committed to a republic as some of the other members of the early Sinn Féin Party, realising that Irish public opinion was not yet ready for it. He was prepared to accept a monarchist form of government for an independent Ireland and suggested a dual-monarchist relationship between Ireland and Great Britain along the lines of Austria-Hungary, as outlined in his pamphlet
The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland
, published in 1904 (Laffan, 1999: 16–24).

Gaelic League
: Organisation formed in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde to revive the Irish language. Became increasingly politicised and included many revolutionaries including Patrick Pearse.

Gaelic Athletic Association
: Association formed in 1884 to codify and regulate Gaelic sports. It was infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and many prominent revolutionaries were members.

Sinn Féin
: Political party formed by Arthur Griffith in 1905, adopted a republican constitution in 1917 and split in January 1922 into pro-treaty (later Cumann na nGaedheal) and anti-treaty factions and again in 1926 with the formation of Fianna Fáil.

Griffith was one of the few nationalist thinkers to envisage what anindependent Ireland might look like and many of the ideas set out in
The Sinn Féin Policy
(1906) were implemented by both the First Dáil and subsequent Irish Governments after independence, including abstention from Westminster, the establishment of arbitration courts, the creation of a foreign consular service, the abolition of the poor law system and the creation of a national stock exchange (Laffan, 1999: 16–19). Griffith's Sinn Féin enjoyed a brief period of success in 1907 when the IPP MP, Charles Dolan, converted to the party, although he lost an ensuing by-election. The Party's only serious electoral success was the election of 12 councillors to Dublin Corporation, including W. T. Cosgrave and Seán T. O’Kelly (Daly, 1997: 47). Thereafter, the movement went into decline and on the eve of the Rising amounted to little more than a Dublin-based pressure group that was probably better known for the newspaper of the same name that Griffith produced.

The formation of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913 provided another organisation through which the IRB could exert its influence covertly and one, more importantly, that could be used to implement its desire of an armed uprising against British rule. When the Volunteers split in September 1914, the rump MacNeillite Volunteers allowed the IRB to reassert its influence (Foy and Barton, 1999: 14). If the Irish Volunteers provided the means through which the IRB could execute a rebellion, the outbreak of the First World War in August provided the opportunity, and the organisation was determined to have a rebellion in Ireland before the end of the war. A military council was formed to plan it, consisting of Patrick Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt
and Joseph Plunkett, who were joined subsequently by Clarke, MacDermott and Thomas MacDonagh (Foy and Barton, 1999: 15–16). This clique kept its plans secret not only from the Volunteer leaders but also from many senior figures in the IRB, including the President of the Supreme Council, Denis McCullough. The unfortunate history of informers within Irish revolutionary movements was obviously part of the reason for this. However, there was also a fear that their efforts might be opposed. This was especially true of the Volunteers, where MacNeill would only commit them to armed insurrection for defensive reasons, such as attempts to suppress them or impose wartime conscription.