European war’s temporary freeze on trouble in Ireland
At its most intense, the crisis created by the introduction into the House of Commons at Westminster on 11 April 1912 of a new (the third) Home Rule Bill for Ireland was one of the most serious experienced by the British body politic for decades.
And the sense of crisis evident over the following two-and-a-half years was exacerbated by the fact that the same system was simultaneously trying to cope with the long-running - and increasingly bitter - debate over female suffrage, and the challenge presented by the growth of industrial and political labour.
Yet until the recent centenary commemoration of the confrontation over Irish home rule, it had virtually disappeared from the popular memory in both UK and Ireland – in marked contrast (in Ireland at least) to the salience that the Easter Rising has long possessed in the same popular memory.
This is unfortunate, for the points of contact between the two episodes were marked, even if it cannot be said that the divisions over home rule prefigured those engendered by the declaration of the Republic on the steps of the GPO on Easter Monday 1916.
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The most obvious point of similarity was the shared contempt of Irish republicans, Ulster unionists and British Conservatives for the constitutional arrangements prevailing between 1912 and 1914, as expressed in their common, if differentiated, repudiation of the deliberations at Westminster.
This contempt had long been a defining feature of the Irish republican separatist tradition, but the actions of both the unionists and Conservatives (the two groups were effectively to fuse in 1912) were in marked contrast to their treasured self-image as the best (indeed, sole) defenders of that British constitutional tradition.
The principal rationale provided by them for such a discrepancy was that the incumbent Liberal government had itself acted unconstitutionally in various ways, most obviously by removing the veto power enjoyed by the (unionist-dominated) House of Lords in 1911.
This was, of course, not the first time that the British constitutional order faced the threat of a violent overthrow by those who presented themselves as its most sincere defenders, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the late 17th century being the classic example.
But the government of Herbert Asquith consistently seems to have under-estimated the danger emanating from the unionist constituency, just as its successor underestimated the seriousness of the threat coming from Irish republicans a few short years later.
Thus both Ulster unionists between 1912 and 1914 and Irish republicans in 1915-1916 made plans to secede (either temporarily or permanently) from the United Kingdom, and create provisional governments under their control. They drew up public statements of first principles (the Covenant in the case of the former and the Proclamation for the latter); formed militias that quickly acquired tens of thousands of members - the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers; and sought to arm these militias by a variety of means, including gun-running expeditions from the European continent.
For these latter ventures, a range of official and unofficial contacts were established by both groups with the German government, who (for their own entirely self-serving reasons) played the role of ‘gallant ally’ to Irish republicans and unionists alike.
If anything, at this crucial juncture (on the eve of the Great War) the authorities in Berlin, with good reason, saw greater possibilities in the potential of the unionist bloc, with its friends in the highest of places, to nurture debilitating weakness within the political and military structures of the United Kingdom. (For its part, that unionist hierarchy had historically identified with the royal houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg, which provided Britain with its monarchs for 200 years prior to the creation of the House of Windsor in 1917).
Further, there is compelling evidence to think that one of the factors taken into account by the German government in its decision to go to war in the Autumn of 1914 was its belief that the threat to British interests arising out of the Irish imbroglio was so great that London would not, could not, dare to move its troops (either those stationed in Ireland, or in Britain itself) to any European theatre; or at least not before the Imperial German Army had had the opportunity to put into effect its plan to knock France out of the war at its very outset with a lightning blow.
Paradoxically, it was precisely the very seriousness of the Irish situation in August 1914 that allowed it to be resolved, or rather shelved, so quickly, as all the involved parties appreciated the benefits of playing the ‘patriotic’ card at a time of genuine national and international crisis.
In the short run, the Irish party seemed to have gained the greater benefit from the new situation created by the outbreak of general war, by virtue of the passage onto the statute book of the Home Rule Bill in September 1914. The beneficial effects of this action were, however, immediately undermined by the Act’s immediate suspension (and the accompanying declaration that further deliberations would take place on the Ulster question), and, over the longer term, by the shockingly high number of casualties - and non-existent military gains - produced by the fighting on the Western Front, and subsequently Gallipoli.
As a consequence of its active support for such operations, the Irish party experienced a rapid fall in its public support, to the point that even prior to Easter 1916, it was all but moribund, and ripe for displacement by the up-and-coming republican tide.
It is interesting to ruminate on a rather overlooked controversy that took place in September-October 2012, in the context of the then-recent centenary of the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant. It was signed 100 years earlier by almost 500,000 people who vowed to defend Ulster’s place in the kingdom and defeat plans for a home rule parliament in Dublin.
This centenary was enthusiastically marked by nearly all elements of the unionist bloc in Northern Ireland, but a discordant note was struck by the Belfast District Synod of the Methodist Church in Ireland, which issued a statement in relation to same.
In this, the Synod expressed respect for the good faith of the signatories of the Covenant and the associated women’s Declaration, and acknowledged the historical context of the actions of their forebears. But it nevertheless voiced ‘profound regret’ at the Covenant’s invocation of God on the side of the unionist cause, and its implied ‘approval of the use of violence’ in support of that cause.
This courageous statement, from ‘within the tradition,’ was roundly condemned by many elements within unionism, and the negative fallout from it seems to have played a part in stymying further large-scale commemorations by modern unionists of other landmark events of the home rule crisis, such as the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, or the Larne gun-running.
Thus far, there has been nothing comparable to disrupt the broadly even-tempered build-up to the centenary of the Easter Rising, south of the border at least; the revisionist onslaught on the Rising that was evident throughout much of the northern Troubles from this perspective seems to be a spent intellectual force.
It will be interesting, to say the least, to see if this equanimous state of affairs persists through to the end of the programme in August.
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