| ; |
Three causes conspired to delay the
bringing of the Home Rule Bill into operation. They were Ulster, Sinn
Fein, and the Great War. Already, when Redmond addressed the mass meeting
in O'Connell Street, Dublin, on March 31, 1912, Ulster and the adherents
of Sinn Fein were both actively engaged in propaganda work. Lord Randolph
Churchill, many years before, had provided Ulster with a watchword with
which to challenge Home Rule. "Ulster will fight and Ulster will
be right," he declared, and the Tory party pledged themselves to
support Ulster in her resistance. Bonar Law declared that "with the
help of the Almighty, we intend to keep that pledge."[1]
[1] Speech at Bristol, reported in The Times, January 16, 1914.
From September, 1911, the North had begun to arm, and by 1913 a very considerable
body of men had been raised, who were being trained on the lines of the
regular army. They were drilling in every Protestant parish in Ulster,
under old army officers, and were organized into three army corps. "The
figure of Ulster, grim, determined, menacing, dominates the scene,"
said the Archbishop of York in a debate in the House of Lords. When at
the close of 1913 a Royal Proclamation against the importation of arms
into Ulster was issued it was announced in reply that Ulster was already
armed. It had received over thirty thousand rifles and twenty thousand
revolvers from Birmingham alone. At the head of the formidable organization
stood a Southern Unionist, Sir Edward Carson, wielding a power which he
himself said was such "as in the life of any one of us has never
fallen to any other man."
The extraordinary spectacle was witnessed of loyalists holding or to
hold the highest legal positions in the land, declaring openly that they
intended to defy the law. F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, proclaimed
on September 22, 1913, that when the unhappy moment for war arrived, "we
hold ourselves absolved from all allegiance to this Government...From
that moment we shall stand side by side with you, refusing to recognise
any law."[2] Sir Edward Carson declared that "Ulster would march
from Belfast to Cork and take the consequences, even if not one of them
ever returned." Bonar Law, addressing a meeting at Blenheim on July
12, said that on a previous occasion, speaking as a private Member, he
had counselled action outside constitutional limits; he now, as leader
of the Unionist party, took the same attitude. "I can imagine,"
he said, "no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which
I shall not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported
by the overwhelming majority of the British people." A Provisional
Government had been formed in Ulster, and on "Ulster Day," September
28, 1912, the Covenant was signed by 218,000 persons, after a solemn religious
service held in the Ulster Hall. Sir Edward Carson declared that he felt
it to be the "supreme moment of his life." It pledged the signatories
to stand together "in defending our cherished position of equal citizenship
in the United Kingdom, and using all means to defeat the present conspiracy
to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland." F. E. Smith had declared
that "for solemnity and for binding force "the like of the Covenant
could not have been witnessed since the first Solemn League and Covenant.[3]
[2] Speech at Ballyclare.
[3] Speech at Whitby, September, 1912.
The position was a difficult one. On April 24, 1914, 50,000 rifles and
a million cartridges were landed at Larne and Bangor under the eyes of
the police and officials, bearing the impress of the Deutsche Munitionen
und Waffenfabrik; men were drilling all over the province and women were
forming themselves into corps for field signalling and red cross work
or were actually practising the use of arms.[4] To deal with a conspiracy
against the authority of England the law had never failed in resources,
but to deal with a people in armed rebellion to support their connexion
with England was a more complicated problem. Redmond's reiterated assurance
that no separation was contemplated by the Home Rule party fell on deaf
ears; the Unionists were bent on getting rid of Asquith's Government,
and Sir Edward Carson declared that Ulster was occupied in setting up
its own Government, whose members would sit in their own Parliament from
September onward. "It may be, probably it will be, an illegal procedure.
Well, if it is, we give a challenge to the Government to interfere with
it, if they dare." What made the situation more threatening was the
attitude of the Regular Army. Over a hundred officers in the British Army
had signed the Covenant, and Sir Edward Carson believed that no officer
in the Army would obey orders to march against Ulster. The matter was
soon to be put to the test, and the "Curragh Mutiny" took place.
On March 20, 1914, Brigadier-General Gough and 57 officers, stationed
at the Curragh, reported that they preferred to accept dismissal if they
were ordered north, and General Gough was relieved of his command.[5]
The action of the officers appears to have arisen out of a misapprehension,
there being no intention of employing them in active measures against
Ulster, though certain troops were to be moved north to protect depots
of arms and other Government property.
[4] By the end of September, 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force had reached
a strength of 56,000 men commanded by Major-General Sir George Richardson,
a retired officer. By the end of March, 1914, it numbered about 84,000,
of whom 25,000 were armed with rifles. General the Right Hon. Sir Nevil
Macready, Annals of an Active Life, i, 173-174.
[5] Major-General the Right Hon. J. E. B. Seely, Adventure, pp. 162-171;
General the Right Hon. Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, vol.
i, p. 176 seq. Though the Government maintained that the whole trouble
had arisen owing to Sir Arthur Paget having exceeded his instructions
in putting the alternative to General Gough and other officers of "active
operations against Ulster" or "dismissal with loss of pension,"
it seems clear that the coercion of Ulster had been seriously discussed
by members of the Cabinet. See Major-General Sir C. E. Callwell, Field-Marshal
Sir Henry Wilson, his Life and Diaries, i, 138-142.
General Gough was reinstated, but the Secretary of State for War, Colonel
Seely, who had issued the orders, and Sir John French resigned. Meanwhile
a new aspect had been given to the question by proposals made by Asquith
in introducing the Home Rule Bill for its passage in the third consecutive
session, as was required by the recent Parliament Act. These proposals
for the first time outlined partition; the exclusion of the six counties
was to be, however, optional by areas and limited in time. Carson refused,
demanding that the exclusion should apply to the whole of Ulster and should
be permanent. The time-limit was destined to become a crucial point.
During all this time events in Ulster were being watched with impatience
and anxiety in the South of Ireland. Side by side with the preparations
for open rebellion in Ulster a movement equally menacing was appearing
in Nationalist Ireland. It was brought to a head when a large number of
Catholic workmen were dismissed from the Belfast shipyards on the complaints
of their comrades that they were disloyal. At first there was a disposition
in Southern Ireland to admire the determined attitude of Ulster, but the
approval given to military preparations made in the North while similar
preparations made by Nationalists in the South were met by prompt and
heavy punishment soon changed this feeling into one of bitter hostility.
Gun-running for Sir Edward Carson at Larne was regarded in Parliament
and by the public as a piece of harmless bravado, and an easy tolerance
was extended to what some regarded as a huge game of bluff and others
as a sign of spirit and resolution. But the landing of arms at Howth for
the Irish Volunteers who had determined "to take a leaf out of Carson's
book," led to military interference, followed by bloodshed and an
angry outcry.[6] This occurred on July 26, 1914, less than a month before
the outbreak of war with Germany.
[6] The arms had been purchased by Darrell Figgis at Liege and were transhipped
into a yacht brought out by Erskine Childers for the purpose of landing
them.
To understand the condition in the South we must go back some ten years
and consider the rise of Sinn Fein. This new movement grew out of the
impulse given to the sense of nationality by the work of the Gaelic League,
but it was distinct from it in conception and aim. The Gaelic League,
which was established in 1893, chiefly through the energy and enthusiasm
of Dr. Douglas Hyde, the son of a clergyman in Co. Roscommon, who had
spoken the native language since his childhood, had as its chief aim the
directing of young Irish people back to a knowledge and understanding
of the native Gaelic tongue and literature. It proposed to place before
them literary ideals different from those that they obtained second-hand
from England; in the words of the founder, to "de-Anglicize"
Ireland. Many things had conspired to obliterate the use of the native
tongue; the system of National Education discouraged it, the priests had
ceased to preach in it, and the population, as a whole, had become ashamed
to speak it. Even in Irish-speaking districts, the teaching of the schools
was given in English. O'Connell's refusal to speak the language of his
birth, even when addressing vast Irish audiences, gave a deadly blow to
its prestige. The tendency to look to England for all literary and social
ideals was strengthened by the presence of the Irish Parliamentary Party
at Westminster, with the inevitable consequence that the mental attitude
of the main body of Irishmen was directed across the water to what was
going on in London.
All interest in the beautiful folk-songs, folk-traditions, and culture
of their native land was dying out with the language, and when the Gaelic
League was modestly launched by a few young scholars led by Dr. Hyde,
it was opposed by the politicians. But the idea appealed to the people
and branches of the Gaelic League sprang up wherever Irish folk were to
be found, inside and outside of Ireland. It not only set hundreds of young
men and women learning their mother tongue but it had a stimulating effect
on their minds far beyond their immediate studies. It touched some underlying
strain of native intelligence. Irish dances and Irish folk-singing were
revived; societies were formed to edit and publish Irish texts, and reading-books
and grammars were forthcoming. The classes gave a new and vital interest
to life and wrought a social and spiritual revolution. By its fundamental
rules, the Gaelic League was strictly non-political, and it knew no distinction
of creeds. Hundreds of persons who all their lives had been held apart
by these divisions now met with a common sympathy and common interests,
and learned to know and appreciate each other. To such established agencies
as the Irish Agricultural Organization Society and the Congested Districts
Board it added the stimulus of personal endeavour, and out of it sprang
new spheres of effort for the material well-being of the poorer classes.
On the other hand, it purified and invigorated Anglo-Irish literature
by opening to it fresh and unspoiled methods of expression, which bore
fruit in the early poems, plays, and folk-legends of a group of young
writers who have many of them become known all over the English-speaking
world. Discarding questions of practical utility, the leaders of the Gaelic
League taught that the language was in itself a national inheritance which
it was the duty of the nation to preserve.
Irish social and political movements have at all times swung backwards
and forwards between peaceful methods of propaganda, and the adoption
of physical force. The Young Ireland movement was succeeded by the Fenians,
and the Gaelic League was followed by Sinn Fein. To many of its members
the moment seemed a disastrous one when the Gaelic League abandoned its
original programme and split upon the point of active political propaganda.
But there was growing up beside it a body of men who were determined to
drive the new impulse out of its original literary mould into the paths
of pure politics, and to use what Padraic Pearse called "the most
revolutionary influence that ever came into Ireland" for distinctively
revolutionary purposes. The sense of a common nationality among all men
and women of Irish birth, which the Gaelic League had instilled, was now
to be used to enforce a public recognition of Ireland as a distinct and
independent nation. Sinn Fein came into the field to replace the older
organization, often under different names, such as the "Irish Self-determination
League"; it eventually split the ranks of the older society, the
President, Dr. Hyde, after stormy scenes, deciding to withdraw from the
position he had held since the inception of the movement.
The name adopted by the new organization, Sinn Fein, "Ourselves,"
has been misunderstood. It can perhaps best be expressed in the words
of a poem written by John O'Hagan before the Society which called itself
by the name was ever heard of—
"The work that should to-day be wrought, defer not till to-morrow,
The help that should within be sought, scorn from without to borrow.
Old maxims these—yet stout and true—they speak in trumpet
tone,
To do at once what is to do, and trust Ourselves Alone."
But the men who adopted this motto of self-help came in the end to apply
it chiefly in the political sphere, with all the implications that an
avowal of a separate nationality involved. Mr. O'Hegarty, who was for
many years a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood,
traces the uprise of all these associations—Sinn Fein, the Gaelic
Athletic Association, the Fianna, and finally the Irish Volunteers—to
one and the same source, the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
"It helped and guided the others, it co-ordinated and organized,
and at the supreme moment it acted...It had members everywhere, its tentacles
went into everything, it maintained a footing in every organization and
movement in Ireland which could be supported without doing violence to
separatist principles. Everywhere it pushed separatist principles...Strange
and transient Committees and Societies were constantly cropping up, doing
this and that specific national work. The I. R. B. formed them. The I.R.B.
ran them. The I.R.B. provided the money. The I. R. B. dissolved them when
their work was done."
And at the back of the I. R. B. stood the Clan-na-Gael of America "to
which no appeal for money for an object even remotely separatist was ever
made in vain."[7]
[7] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, pp. 13, 14.
As a political organization Sinn Fein did not come into being till 1905.
Its way was prepared and its spirit was infused into the movement chiefly
by the work of two men, Arthur Griffith and P. H. Pearse (Pádraic
Mac Piarais). Though one in their ends, the methods they used were different.
In his weekly paper, the United Irishman, first established in 1899, Arthur
Griffith, while preaching the doctrine of absolute independence, discussed
in a series of admirable articles the revival of Irish industries, the
condition and prospects of agriculture, and the development of industrial
ideals. Material prosperity he set before his readers as a thing to be
aimed at, and the methods by which it might be attained were worthy of
the most serious consideration. He preached the renewal of a fraternal
spirit between Irishmen of all classes and mutual co-operation for the
benefit of the country. He boldly declared war on the Parliamentary party,
and proposed to substitute for it a policy formed on that of the Hungarian
Franz Déak, a main point in which was abstention from the Austrian
Parliament. The constitutional work of Redmond and his party he declared
to be "useless, demoralizing, and degrading," and he endeavoured
to turn the eyes of his readers from the Parliament at Westminster, and
to bring about independence by the promotion of the country's interests
from within. Griffith's book, The Resurrection of Hungary, had a wide
sale, but it led to exaggerated views, not found in the book, such as
that the language of Hungary, which threatened to become extinct, had
been revived by the efforts of a few persons gathered in a drawingroom,
and that the same result might be expected in the case of Irish. But this
was true only of the upper classes, who had ceased to speak Hungarian;
the language had never died out among the people at large.
Sinn Fein took its stand on the dictum that "The Constitution of
1782 is still the Constitution of Ireland;" it announced non-recognition
of British authority. Griffith stood for educational methods in preference
to physical force; but he demanded "a sovereign independence"
which was not in the programme of the Parliamentary party, and he dropped
that party as being a party of compromise. Though Sinn Fein grew in time
into a formidable opposition which set itself to undermine Redmond's power
and to send its own candidates to the polls, the country at the moment
saw no advantage in returning men to Parliament who were pledged not to
sit; and long afterward, when Irish soldiers returning invalided from
the battlefields of France found the faces of their own relatives turned
from them, it was to wonder "what those fellows in Ireland were up
to now?" So little real progress did Sinn Fein make in its early
days.
If it was Arthur Griffith who formulated the policy of Sinn Fein on the
side on which it touched the practical patriotic work of Sir Horace Plunkett
and George Russell ("A. E."), it was P. H. Pearse who supplied
the spiritual impetus which lay behind it. The attitude of Pearse and
his words remind us of the speeches of Robert Emmet, though he was a man
of more practical power than Emmet had been. Pearse took as his models
the "physical force men" of Fenian days. In his oration over
the grave of the Fenian, O'Donovan "Rossa," Pearse declared
that the new generation had been "rebaptised in the Fenian faith"
and had "accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme."
He adds: "We, the Irish Volunteers, know only one definition of freedom.
It is Tone's definition; it is Mitchel's definition; it is Rossa's definition."[8]
Again he writes:—
[8] Published in Poblacht na h-Eireann (The Republic of Ireland), January
3, 1922. See Appendix, II. p. 460.
"Irish Nationality is an ancient spiritual tradition, one of the
oldest and most august traditions in the world. Politically, Ireland's
claim has been for freedom in order to attain to the full and perpetual
life of that tradition. The generations of Ireland have gone into battle
for no other thing. To the Irish mind for more than a thousand years freedom
has had but one definition. It has meant not a limited freedom...a freedom
compatible with the suzerain authority of a foreign Parliament, but absolute
freedom, the sovereign control of Irish destinies."[9]
[9] P. H. Pearse, Ghosts ("Tracts for the Times," No. 10, 1916).
And again:
"Freedom is so splendid a thing that one cannot worthily state it
in the terms of a definition; one has to write it in some flaming symbol
or sing it in music riotous with the uproar of heaven."[10]
[10] The Separatist Idea ("Tracts for the Times," No 11, 1916).
These words, written just before the rising of 1916, are characteristic
of the attitude of Pearse. But though he wrote like a rhapsodist, he was
a quiet but determined man. He was strongly imbued with the idea, not
uncommon among the young men of his day, that Ireland needed a blood-sacrifice,
which he and they could make on her behalf; and at his boys' school at
St. Enda's he set himself to train up a generation of youths in the Gaelic
tradition and to imbue them with the ideas that possessed his own soul.
In the Easter week rebellion he and his comrades ungrudgingly made the
sacrifice he preached; but it was dangerous doctrine, and, directly or
indirectly, it led hundreds of young men to death, and the whole country
into anarchy.
Sinn Fein took outward form in the Volunteer movement. They recognised
among the determined Ulstermen a real "Sinn Fein" movement under
another name, protesting also against Parliamentary methods, decrying
the right of England to determine their action, and preaching reliance
on "themselves alone." The arming of Ulster pleased them. "Personally,"
said Pearse, "I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much less ridiculous
figure than the Nationalist without a rifle; and the Orangeman who can
fire a gun will certainly count for more in the end than the Nationalist
who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun."[11] He says he wrote
"with the deliberate intention...of goading those who shared my political
views to commit themselves definitely to an armed movement."[12]
The armed movement was that of the Irish Volunteers. "Ulster,"
wrote Irish Freedom, "has done one thing which commands the respect
of all genuine Nationalists—she has stood up for what she believes
to be right and will be cajoled neither by English threats nor English
bayonets...We are willing to fight Ulster or to negotiate with her;...but
we will not fight her because she tells England to go to Hell."[13]
[11] Quoted in R M Henry, The Evolution of Sinn Fein, p. 125.
[12] Ibid., p 127.
[13] Ibid., p. 132.
At the end of October 1913 Professor Eoin MacNeill published an article
calling on Nationalist Ireland to drill and arm. A huge meeting held at
the Rotunda ended in the enrolment of 4,000 men. By December there were
10,000. Pearse, speaking at Limerick, said that by the Volunteers they
were going to give Redmond a weapon to enforce the demand for Home Rule.
Redmond at first took little heed of the movement, which he thought negligible.
But when a pause in the slow business of the House of Commons was brought
about by Sir Edward Carson's acceptance of exclusion "until a federal
scheme had been considered, when the whole matter would be reviewed in
the light of the action of the Irish Parliament and how they got on"
he threw himself into the movement. On July 15 there were 80,000 Volunteers
in the South as against 84,000 in the Ulster force, but they were increasing
at the rate of 15,000 a week. Very soon they were reckoned at 132,000,
besides a reserve force. Redmond determined to capture the whole body
for the Parliamentary party, but this led to the resignation of Pearse
and some other of the more extreme men. Later the Volunteer army was to
split into two on the question of the War; and besides all this a third
"Citizen Army" began to grow up in Dublin to carry out the designs
of the Labour party.
Into the midst of a discussion in the House of Commons of the occurrences
during the gunrunning at Howth a graver question obtruded itself. On August
4 the tocsin of war sounded through the world. The Amending Bill from
the Lords which was to have been taken in the Home Rule debate in the
Commons on July 28 was postponed by Asquith till Thursday, to ensure a
calmer atmosphere; but when Thursday came the imminence of war caused
it to be postponed indefinitely. At the climax of a struggle which in
some form or other had occupied the entire lifetime of John Redmond the
cup of fulfilment was dashed from his lips. But the Leader of the Opposition
laid it down that this postponement should not "in any way prejudice
the interests of any of the parties to the controversy." He spoke
not only for the Unionist party, but for Ulster.[14] On the following
Tuesday the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made his fateful speech
announcing the outbreak of war and the outrage committed on Belgian neutrality.
At the close of a great speech, which carried with it the main body of
the members and brought "Willie" Redmond, the brother of the
Irish leader, to his feet, the Foreign Secretary, with a sudden lift of
his voice, said: "One thing I would say: the one bright spot in the
very dreadful situation is Ireland. The position of Ireland, and this
I should like to be clearly understood abroad—is not a consideration
among the things we have to take into account now." Redmond's reply
was one of the noblest that stand upon the records of the House. Brief
as it was, it was, as Mr. Stephen Gwynn, who was present, says, "less
a speech than a supreme action. It was the utterance of a man who has
a vision and who, acting in the light of it, seeks to embody the vision
in a living reality."[15]
[14] Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond's Last Years (1919), p. 126.
[15] Ibid., pp. 132-134.
In a few simple words Redmond reminded the House that at the end of the
disastrous American War in 1778 a hundred thousand Irish Volunteers sprang
into existence for the purpose of defending Irish shores. Again to-day
two large bodies of Volunteers existed in Ireland. "I say to the
Government," he exclaimed, "that they may to-morrow withdraw
every one of their troops from Ireland. Ireland will be defended by her
armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose the armed Catholics in
the South will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant
Ulstermen. Is it too much to hope that out of this situation a result
may spring which will be good, not merely for the Empire, but for the
future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation?"
The proposal was an act of faith, for Redmond had not consulted his party
or the Volunteers, but he was justified by the event. On the basis of
the freedom pledged to her by the Home Rule Bill Ireland was willing to
give, at that moment of danger, a loyal friendship to England. To all
who heard him it was clear that the acceptance of Redmond's offer meant
the acceptance of the principle of Home Rule, and with it of the sealing
of amity between the two countries. Sir Edward Carson did not respond,
but his position as the champion of Ulster against Home Rule made acquiescence
almost impossible. Ulster was not ready for unity with the South. It is
true that all difficulties had not been surmounted. The Amendment Bill,
which had received considerable alteration in the House of Lords, referred
to the area in Ulster which was to be excluded from the Government of
Ireland Bill, as the Home Rule Bill was called. Were Tyrone and Fermanagh
to be among the excluded counties, and for what length of time was exclusion
to last? These were important details, and by the King's command a special
conference had been called at Buckingham Palace in July to consider them,
but no conclusion had been reached. But the main principle of Home Rule
for all Ireland except Ulster had been accepted and passed by the House,
and all future relations between the two countries ought to have been
conducted in the spirit of that agreement. Redmond kept his part of the
bargain, and Nationalist Ireland endorsed his action. The Volunteers of
the South were willing to carry out Redmond's original proposal to defend
their own country against attack from Germany; and out of 170,000 Southern
Volunteers only 12,000 followed Professor Eoin MacNeill's secession when,
later on, they were asked to serve overseas.
By the end of the year 16,500 had joined the Army. The best spirit prevailed.
The Regulars were cheered as they embarked for the Front, and committees
were formed in which men and women of both creeds worked heartily together
to push on recruiting, to work banners for the troops, to aid in hospital
preparations, and to assist the Belgian refugees. "The wonderful
spectacle was seen of a willing Ireland leagued together to aid Great
Britain in her necessity." Redmond assured the House that from every
part of Ireland he had received assurances from the Irish Volunteers that
they would fulfil their part; and the tidings that began to come through
from the Front of the charge of the Irish Guards with the words "God
save Ireland" on their lips, aroused in both countries a new enthusiasm.
On September 18 the Home Rule Bill received the Royal Assent.
On the lines of its newly gained Parliamentary independence Ireland was
ready to respond to Asquith's appeal "to give the free-will offering
of a free people."[16] But his announcement that "as soon as
possible arrangements by which this offer can be made use of to the fullest
possible extent" failed to materialize. On the contrary, every sort
of discouragement was placed in the way of individual Irish action of
any kind. The Volunteer corps as a body was neither recognized nor armed.
The regimental colours worked by the ladies' association under Lady Fingall
were' refused. The suggestion, warmly supported by Lord Meath, of an Irish
corps bearing the old inspiring title of the "Irish Brigade"
and consisting entirely of Irish officers and men, was ignored. The National
University was not allowed an O.T.C., and it proved difficult for Catholics
to get commissions in the army. Everything possible seemed to be done
to damp down the ardour of the Irish people, who were responding to the
promised gift of Home Rule in a spirit of gratitude and new friendship.
They were made to feel that, in practice, no change in their status was
recognized and that they in no way differed from the Englishman except
that they had not his advantages. On the other hand they saw a quite different
treatment being meted out to Ulster, whose leaders were still repeating
to its Volunteers the old cry "We are not going to abate one jot
or title of our opposition to Home Rule, and when you (Ulstermen) come
back from serving your country you will be just as determined as you will
find us at home."[17]
[16] Speech in Dublin, quoted in Stephen Gwynn, op. cit., pp. 156-157.
[17] Sir Edward Carson's speech at Coleraine.
Every effort was made to applaud the deeds of the Ulster Division in the
field, while those of the Southern Irish leaked out as though by accident,
and the advice of Redmond was consistently ignored. Birrell, writing after
Redmond's death, said that the Irish leader "felt to the very end
bitterly and intensely the stupidity of the War Office," and Mr.
Lloyd George, looking back on those months, spoke of "the stupidities
which sometimes look almost like malignancy, perpetrated at the beginning
of recruiting in Ireland" as almost past belief.[18] There is no
doubt that Lord Kitchener deeply distrusted the Volunteers as such, and
preferred to have the Irish directly under the War Office, drafted into
different regiments and treated as ordinary recruits rather than as a
distinctive corps. Any appeal to nationality and patriotism was deprecated
by him and others of his staff; and he preferred the Ulster Division,
which considered itself politically English, to a Southern Division, which
would hold itself to be freely offering its services as from one free
state to an allied state. Though some remedies were afterwards applied,
the process of awakening friction between two peoples only newly brought
into political sympathy had a disastrous effect; and though on the field
of battle Irishmen met and fought together as brothers from whatever quarter
or class in the home-land they were drawn, a fresh gap of sentiment was
created between Ulster and the South, and a marked difference of opinion
began to appear in Ireland as to the duty of Irishmen toward the War.
A section of the Volunteers now declared the War "a foreign quarrel"
and disclaimed the right of Redmond to "offer up the lives and blood
of Irishmen...while no National Government which could speak and act for
the people of Ireland is allowed to exist."[19]
[18] Speech of October 28, 1916. But in view of what afterwards happened,
Kitchener's hesitation seems to have been justified.
[19] Manifesto from twenty members of the original committee of the Volunteers,
quoted in Stephen Gwynn, op. cit., p. 155.
A split was made in the ranks, and Redmond and his policy were disowned,
his nominees being expelled from the committee. Recruiting went down,
and Sinn Fein doctrines were assiduously instilled by a thousand channels
among the people. But in April 1915, recruits were still coming in at
the rate of fifteen hundred a week. Then came the formation of a Coalition
Government. Redmond was offered a seat, but not for an Irish office. He
refused, knowing that it would be said that he had been rewarded for sending
young Irishmen to their death; but Sir Edward Carson became Attorney-General.
The effect of the coalition was that Irishmen believed that Home Rule
was to be shelved, and recruiting dropped from six thousand to three thousand
in the two following months; and though a new recruiting campaign gave
it fresh impetus, the ardour of the first months was gone.
SINN FEIN AND THE RISING OF EASTER WEEK, 1916
While Irish regiments were winning their honours in France and at Gallipoli
and coalescing as brothers in the trenches, a fresh and startling development
occurred at home. In Easter week 1916, there was an outbreak of rebellion
in Dublin. Mr. P. S. O'Hegarty tells us that as far back as August 1914,
at the opening of the Great War, the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood had decided that an insurrection must be made before the end
of the war, and bent all their energies to bring it about.[20] Six out
of the seven young men who signed the Proclamation for the Irish Republic
belonged to the Brotherhood, and Connolly, though he acted independently,
shared this view. Of the leaders of the Rebellion Pearse was, as we have
seen, a mystic with a belief in the needed purification of Ireland's lethargy
by a sacrifice of blood, and of the same mind were the young poets Thomas
MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett; Sean MacDermott and Edmund Kent, The O'Rahilly,
and others of the group, were also men of a fine and high intelligence,
possessed of the purest and most unselfish motives, who were prepared
to accept failure and death as the passport into the company of the heroic
dead who in the past had perished for their country. Associated with them
were men of a different type, Labour men of advanced opinions, like Tom
Clarke and James Connolly, who were leaders in the Citizen Army and who
had been influenced in adopting communistic doctrines by the wretched
social conditions and low wages existing among the poor of Dublin and
the workers in the docks and mills of Belfast and other towns of Ireland.
Associated with Connolly was James Larkin, the organizer of the great
industrial struggle of 1913, whose headquarters at Liberty Hall formed
the centre from which the strikes of that year were planned. It became
the headquarters of the Transport Workers Union and of the Citizen Army.[21]
There were all shades of opinion among the leaders who rose.
[20] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, pp. 2, 15.
[21] In September, 1924, after a long sojourn in the United States, first
undertaken to incite American opinion against England in the war, Larkin
returned to Dublin as Chef de bataillon in Trotsky's "Foreign Legion,"
and as "one of the twenty-five men appointed [by Moscow] to govern
the world."
On April 26, 1916, being Easter Monday, the Republic was proclaimed, and
the country called to arms in its defence. The General Post Office was
seized and turned into military headquarters and there was fighting in
the streets, but the back of the rebellion had been broken before the
rising, not by the authorities, who were unprepared for the outbreak,
but by the calling off of the mobilization through the country by Professor
Eoin MacNeill, who was acting as Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers.
The countermanding orders reached the various stations early on Sunday
morning and threw the whole scheme into confusion. The reason for this
sudden change of plan, which probably saved the country from being deluged
in blood, appears to have been the failure of Sir Roger Casement's attempt
to land arms and munitions on the Southwest coast of Ireland, the tidings
of which came to hand just before the mobilization. Casement's biographer
speaks of him as "the central figure and in a certain sense the figurehead
and original prime mover in the rebellion." While the rising was
being organized at home, he was moving about freely in Germany endeavouring,
by various promises, to seduce Irish prisoners in the camp at Limburg
from their allegiance, and to persuade them to join an Irish Brigade "to
fight solely for Ireland under the Irish flag alone and in Irish uniform...and
to be of moral and material assistance to the German Government."[22]
He met with little success, the Munster Fusiliers being particularly resentful
that such attempts should be made upon their regimental honour, accompanied
by threats of punishment if they did not consent. Their reply: "We
must beseech his Imperial Majesty to withdraw these concessions unless
they are shared by the remainder of the prisoners, as, in addition to
being Irish Catholics we have the honour to be British soldiers,"
is too fine to be forgotten.[23]
[22] His proclamation was published in The Ulster Guardian of August
21, 1915, copied from the Daily Chronicle.
[23] The story of Casement's attempt to seduce the imprisoned men was
told at his trial by Corporal Robinson, who was present on the occasion,
and also by Herr Liebnecht, the Socialist member of the Reichstag, who
protested against it.
There is no doubt that both Pearse and Casement expected financial and
material help from Germany, and the Volunteers had long been hoping that
he would succeed in inducing German officers to come to Ireland to train
their men and to bring arms and ammunition. It was this attempt of an
old servant of the Crown to land equipment from Germany on the shores
of Ireland to assist a rebellion against England in the midst of the war
with Germany, that gave the most sinister complexion to the rising.[24]
The attempt failed. Casement was landed in a collapsible boat on the southern
coast, and was recognised and arrested on Good Friday morning, while a
German ship carrying twenty thousand rifles and a million rounds of ammunition
was scuttled by her commander in Tralee Bay to escape capture by the British.
The whole arrangements for the rising were deranged and the country insurgents
outside Dublin were called off by hasty dispatches.
[24] Casement was born in Co. Dublin in 1864, but of an Ulster family.
He entered the Niger Coast Protectorate service in 1892, and was later
employed in the Consular service in West Africa and Rio de Janeiro. From
1909-1912 he was engaged in making enquiries as to the Congo rubber atrocities
and reporting on them. In 1905 he had been made a Companion of the Order
of St. Michael and St. George. He was knighted in 1911. He retired on
a pension in 1913. Casement's own statement was that he had come over
to call off the rebellion, which he considered as hopeless. See letter
by Miss Eva Gore Booth in The Socialist Review of September, 1916.
From Easter Monday to the following Friday the flag of the Irish Republic
waved from the General Post Office, the headquarters of the rebel forces.
During those eventful days Stephen's Green was occupied by the Volunteers,
and some of the chief buildings in the city, the Four Courts, Jacob's
biscuit factory, the City Hall, and the bridge at Lower Mount Street were
strongly held by them. Liberty Hall and Bolands' bread factory were also
Volunteer centres. The men showed their training by the accuracy of their
fire and the excellence of their marching. Their arms were formidable,
the officers carrying swords and the newest German pattern of automatic
pistol. But a military cordon was gradually drawn round the occupied parts
of the city and after some days of desperate fighting, General Lowe received
a message at noon on April 29 from "Commandant-General" Pearse,
carried by a woman-nurse, stating that he wished to negotiate.[25] He
was informed that only unconditional surrender would be agreed to, and
that evening 500 of the leaders and men surrendered. Connolly, who had
been twice badly wounded and who directed the operations of his men from
his bed, which he had caused to be taken into the firing line, was removed
to hospital.
[25] Pearse's order of Surrender runs as follows:—"In order
to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of
saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered,
the members of the Provisional Government present at Headquarters have
agreed to unconditional surrender, and the Commandants of the various
districts in the City and Country will order their commands to lay down
arms." These conditions were also agreed to and signed by James Connolly
and Thomas MacDonagh for their respective commands.
The Countess Markievicz, dressed in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer,
who with Michael Mallin, had been holding the College of Surgeons in Stephen's
Green with 109 men and ten women followers, made a dramatic exit by kissing
her revolver as she surrendered her arms to the officer in command, and
marching out at the head of the troop. By Saturday evening the last band
of the insurgents had surrendered and quiet reigned. But the finest street
in the city lay in ruins, and from many of the buildings flames and smoke
still ascended. The shops had been looted by the populace early in the
struggle.[26]
[26] A Record of the Irish Rebellion of 1916. Contemporary notes published
by "Irish Life."
The general feeling had at first been against the rising and it was denounced
not only by Redmond, who emphasized the "additional horror"
caused by the fact that the news arrived from Dublin on the same day on
which the report had been received of the magnificent dash forward of
the Irish troops to retake the trenches won by the Germans at Hulluch,
but by District Councils and Boards of Guardians all over the country.[27]
Mr. O'Hegarty is probably right in thinking that "if the English
Government had laughed at it, tried the promoters before a magistrate
and ridiculed the whole thing, with no general arrests and no long vindictive
sentences, they could have done what they liked with Ireland."[28]
[27] The Voice of Ireland, pamphlet (1916).
[28] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, p. 4.
This is an Irish point of view. But in the urgency of the war with Germany
such sanity and coolness was hardly to be expected. The English were kept
excellently posted up by their Intelligence Department as to all that
was going on in Ireland and the preparations that had been made long before
the actual rising; their information about the communications that had
been made with America and Germany was equally complete. But O'Hegarty
is right in saying that the volleys of rifle fire which one by one picked
off the chief signatories of the Proclamation on the May mornings succeeding
the Rising blotted out the old Ireland, and that in a few weeks the whole
temper of the people toward it was changed. The men who had been condemned
as disturbers of the peace became popular heroes and martyrs, and "men
who had never heard of Sinn Fein began to ask about its ideas...the rebels
were forgiven everything, for they had meant, in their wild, mad way,
to help Ireland, and the Government that punished them only meant to humble
her." The Government seemed, indeed, to be acting in a panic. Three
thousand arrests with imprisonment and deportation followed the executions,
and in the revulsion of feeling, heightened by house-searchings and raids
by the military, and some very bad cases of unauthorized executions by
certain officers, of which the shooting of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington
was the worst example, Sinn Fein received a new life.
The Republican ideal once more caught hold of masses of the population;
and though the rising had cost between four and five hundred lives and
destroyed nearly £2,000,000 worth of property, all this was forgotten
in a wave of Separatist fervour.[29] Organizations that had formerly stood
aloof from each other decided to accept the name, and a compact comprehensive
party was formed, with a similar Republic to that of 1916 as its object.[30]
In New York the men who had been shot in Dublin were accorded a public
funeral. On the other hand, Asquith talked of at once setting up an Irish
Parliament, with an executive responsible to it, and Partition, temporary
or permanent, as part of its policy. It seemed that an Act for the practical
operation of which Redmond had for years struggled in vain was to be given
to Sinn Fein for a week's rebellion. Irish Members were to be retained
at Westminster in full strength, but the whole arrangement was to be temporary
until after the war. "Partition," as the exclusion of the six
counties of Ulster came to be called, though most unpopular in Ireland
and pronounced by Redmond to be "unworkable," was reluctantly
accepted by him on the understanding that it was to be only a temporary
measure; he believed that the force of circumstances and the dictates
of patriotic feeling and of common sense would bring Ulster in and that
the North would find that partition from their own country was, even from
an administrative and financial point of view, distasteful and unpractical.
But in a secret Cabinet, at which Redmond was not present, this temporary
measure became hardened into the permanent exclusion of the six counties,
and modifications were also agreed to in the provision for retaining Irish
Members in their old numbers at Westminster. Lloyd George, who was in
charge of the negotiations, was accused on both sides of having made false
promises, and resentment, deep and bitter, arose in Ireland.
[29] The casualties are given in the official report as 450 killed, 9
missing, and 2,614 wounded, total 3,073. Payments in respect of property
destroyed were made after the rising of £1,742,926, paid out of
the pockets of the British taxpayer, but this does not represent the full
amount of the losses sustained. See The Administration of Ireland (1920),
"I.O."
[30] A. de Blacam, What Sinn Fein stands for, p. 89.
The whole situation was changed. The Ulster party had won, but at the
cost of enforcing the lesson that no British Minister's word could be
accepted as binding. It gave the deathblow to the position and influence
of Redmond, who was looked upon as having, in his desire to arrive at
a solution by compromise, sacrificed his followers and his country. It
seemed to prove that any Irish statesman who endeavoured to combine loyalty
to his country with loyalty to the Empire would be abandoned, not only
by Irishmen but by the British Government. The Bill was withdrawn, Dublin
Castle again became a Tory stronghold and, as Sir Horace Plunkett had
prophesied, an opposition was aroused which drove thousands of moderate
men into the Sinn Fein camp. The first election, that of North Roscommon,
resulted in the return of a Sinn Fein candidate, and in June, 1917, Mr.
de Valera, whose name began now for the first time to be heard of outside
his immediate circle, was returned by a sweeping majority of nearly three
thousand for East Clare, the constituency for which Major William Redmond,
the brave and distinguished brother of the Parliamentary leader, who had
fallen in the attack on Wytscheate Wood, had sat.
END OF CHAPTER XXIII
|
|
