Dividing Ireland

World War One and Partition

Thomas Hennessey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134639137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides an original assessment of the First World War in Ireland and its consequences, the key to understanding the complexities of the Irish nation today. Thomas Hennessey explores how the War transformed the nature of the Irish and Ulster questions from devolved self-government within the UK to a free Irish republic outside the British Empire, considering such influential figures as de Valera and Michael Collins, and issues such as conscription. He examines both this process of re-evaluation, and the vital question of the consequences for Northern Ireland today.

Chapter 1
National identity, Home Rule and the Ulster question

The Government of Ireland Bill

In Ireland, constitutional theory and nationalist ideology met in the demesne of Irish self-government. The emergence of the home-rule movement in the 1880s revealed the sectarian nature of Irish politics, particularly in the northern province of Ulster. Until this point, Ulster Protestant voters had been divided between the two major British political parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, while a small section of extreme loyalists identified with Orangism. Most Ulster Catholics, on the other hand, tended to support Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, commonly called the Irish Party, which in 1885 had seized seventeen of the province’s thirty-three seats at Westminster. The decision of the Prime Minister, W.E.Gladstone, to grant home rule led to the revival of the Orange Order, which had originally been formed in Armagh in 1795 against a background of sectarian faction—fighting. From the 1880s it formed a powerful cross-class alliance of Protestants who feared the implications of home rule.¹ The first two Home Rule Bills, in 1886 and 1893, had been defeated in Parliament, and it was not until 1910 that the possibility of home rule returned. Following the 1910 general elections, Herbert Asquith’s Liberal Party relied upon the parliamentary support of Parnell’s successor, John Redmond, to secure a House of Commons majority After the passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which restricted the ability of the House of Lords to reject Commons legislation, it appeared that the final obstacle to home rule had been removed. It now seemed that Redmond was to secure the goal which had eluded his predecessor.

In 1912 the Liberal Government introduced the Government of Ireland Bill, commonly known as the Home Rule Bill, creating an Irish parliament within the United Kingdom. The Irish Parliament was to be bicameral consisting of, first, a forty-member Senate.

Under the Bill as finally enacted, the first senators were to be nominated by the Lord Lieutenant, and afterwards to be elected, according to the principle of proportional representation, by the four provinces of Ireland—Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught. There was also to be a House of Commons, consisting of 164 members elected on a constituency basis. Irish representation was to continue at Westminster, but was reduced from 108 to 42. The legislative powers of the Irish Parliament followed from a general grant to make laws for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of Ireland, subject to specified exceptions including defence and trade with any other place outside Ireland. Certain other matters were reserved from its powers, and retained by the Imperial Parliament at Westminster representing the whole of the United Kingdom, including the collection of taxes, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Post Office, each of which was subject to special regulation—for example, the RIC was to be transferred from Westminster to the Irish Parliament after six years had expired from the passing of the Act. Clause 1(2) of the Home Rule Bill stated that:

Notwithstanding the establishment of the Irish Parliament contained in this Act, the supreme power and authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom shall remain unaffected and undiminished over all persons, matters and things within His Majesty’s Dominions.

In legal theory the Imperial Parliament had legal sovereignty over all things in the British Empire, and all legislative bodies in that empire were subordinate to the British Parliament. Throughout the Empire the executive government, in its higher branches, was carried on in the name of the Crown through officers whose functions were exercised, directly or indirectly, on behalf of the Crown. There was thus in the Crown a formal expression of imperial unity, and allegiance to the Crown was a common tie between all British subjects in whatever part of the Empire they dwelt.² In international law the British Empire formed a single unity, or realm, which was represented by the Imperial Crown acting on the advice of the cabinet of the United Kingdom, which was responsible to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The Dominions were not sovereign states, and although they had developed self-government, granted through Acts of the British Parliament, the United Kingdom Parliament enjoyed overriding legal supremacy, exercised in particular in accordance with the provisions of the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865. Dominion parliamentary legislation was subject to British government disallowance, meaning the power of the sovereign, acting on the advice of United Kingdom ministers, to annul, within a specified period, an Act passed by a Dominion or colonial legislature, and assented by the Dominion Governor-General or Governor, who was the sovereign’s representative.³

In practice this was very rarely used. The legislative competence of the proposed Irish Parliament was defined in terms identical to those employed by Westminster with relation to its overseas territories. The Act of 1852, which granted a representative constitution to the colony of New Zealand, by its preamble gave the legislature the power to make laws for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of the colony. This phrase was repeated for the Canadian Federal Parliament in the British North America Act 1867, in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 and the South Africa Act 1909.⁴ By the early years of the twentieth century the word ‘Dominion’, which had increasingly imported the idea of equality of status with the United Kingdom and hence of legislative independence of Westminster, was already being used to refer to these ‘colonies’. By the end of the Great War this colonial status was nothing more than a matter of form, which was to be confirmed by the Imperial Conference of 1926 when it declared that the United Kingdom and the Dominions were ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in respect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.⁵ ‘Dominion status’ was the expression used to describe the constitutional—as distinct from the purely conventional or legal —positions of the five Dominions, or any one of them;⁶ indeed the Empire was, from the outset, spoken as something not possessing final form at any given point in time.⁷ In 1912 the precise nature of the relationship between Westminster and the status of the Dominion Parliaments, and consequently the proposed Irish Parliament, was surrounded in ambiguity, although the Imperial Parliament was legally supreme. It was not clear that a subordinate Irish Parliament would ultimately regard itself as such, or if it did, whether it would content itself with that status.

Irish unionism and British nationality

Within Ireland the main opposition to home rule came from the predominantly Protestant population, which wished Ireland to be governed by the Imperial Parliament as it had been since the Act of Union. Politically, the Irish Unionist Party could be distinguished between those living in southern Ireland in the Leinster, Munster and Connaught provinces, and those in Ulster, divided from their southern brethren by class rather than geography.⁸ The southern provinces were predominantly an agricultural society in which many prominent Southern Unionists were large landowners; in contrast, north-east Ulster, industrialised and export-oriented, accelerated the political strength of the Belfast manufacturing classes, who held sway over a Protestant working class divided into a pliant labour aristocracy, centred on the shipyards.⁹ The nationalist-unionist communal divide was widely considered by contemporaries to occur along religious lines, with the former predominantly Roman Catholic and the latter Protestant; numerically, in Ulster in 1911 there were 890,880 Protestants out of a population of 1,581,969; in the southern provinces there were only 256,699 Protestants scattered among 2,551,854 Roman Catholics.¹⁰

The focus of Protestant opposition was the Irish Unionist Party, led by Sir Edward Carson. Carson was born in Dublin and was a member of the Church of Ireland; his main career was law, coming to prominence in Ireland as a crown prosecutor. From 1910 Carson was leader of the Irish Unionist Party, spearheading the anti-home rule campaign. In this he worked closely with James Craig, born in the Belfast suburb of Sydenham, a Presbyterian and Orangeman.
From 1911, as a Home Rule Bill establishing a parliament for the whole of Ireland within the United Kingdom made its passage through the British Parliament, Ulster Unionists began to form themselves into an armed militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), whose membership was estimated by 1912 to be 100,000. The Ulster Unionist Council (UUC) provided the central structures of Unionist defiance, and plans for a provisional government, should home rule come into force, were laid down and endorsed at a meeting of the UUC in September 1912.

The prospect of home rule for Ireland focused Unionist attention on the nature of the relationship between allegiance and national identity in the British Empire. In Unionist Ireland, Britishness and Irishness were in a constant state of flux. The Irish unionist community possessed a dual British-Irish identity, the primacy of Britishness and Irishness for the individual depending upon the social and political context in which each was employed.
For Irish Unionists the status of British subjectship was far more than a legal definition. It contained a deep emotional tie to the notion of a Britishness based upon a civic nationalism which married the state with national consciousness, viewing the British people as a community bound together by a common historical experience and mission, possessing a unique genius for the creation and preservation of constitutional liberty.

In terms of identity there were two evident strands within Irish Unionist concepts of Britishness. The first was a British imperial patriotism which placed a greater emphasis on Irishness as a ‘national’ identity and Britishness as an ‘imperial’ identity. This did not automatically mean that the Irish identity would be the primary one, for imperial patriotism might easily provide the greater emotional attachment for an individual. The question as to whether the growing nationalisms in the white settler British Dominions could be accommodated within the British Empire was a problem which alarmed many early-twentieth-century British imperialists. A.J.Balfour, a former Chief Secretary for Ireland, had defined the problem as how to reconcile the principle of nationality, by which he meant the feeling of nationality or the consciousness of a separate history which had been developing among the white settlers in the British Dominions, with an imperial patriotism, not more ardent, but larger in scope, which included not only Great Britain but the whole of the Empire. ‘It is only by following the example that we have set that the future of this Empire can be made absolutely secure’, Balfour concluded:

A Canadian, an Australian, a New Zealander, a citizen of South Africa…must have, and they will have, their own feelings of separate nationality. The Canadian is a Canadian. He wants, and ought to want to feel that Canada has its own principles of development and its own future…. Do not let us discourage this feeling of local patriotism.¹¹

In Ireland this perception was summed up by ‘An Ulster Imperialist’, in the Irish Review of March 1911, who attempted to find a linkage between Irishness on the one hand and Britishness on the other. ‘Ulster Imperialist’ highlighted the differences between the various territorial communities which made up the British Empire, and sought to define the meaning of the words ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Nationalism’ and to separate their real, permanent implication from the temporary accidents of existing party politics. Taking the ‘Least Common Denominator as being local patriotism’, ‘Ulster Imperialist’ linked them up with ‘other forms of the same sentiment’ setting out the four most common and best understood varieties of local patriotism in a series comprising parochialism, provincialism, nationalism, and imperialism.

‘Ulster Imperialist’ believed that esprit de corps lay at the root of all human civilisation, as it grew from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the clan, and so forth. As soon as a man had got beyond mere individual selfishness he found himself taking an interest in the affairs of his own district. To call the result ‘parochialism’ was to use a rather deprecatory phrase for a feeling of ‘public spirit’ of the same kind as, but different in degree from, ‘imperialism’. The first extension of the lowest form of local patriotism could be called ‘provincialism’. From this standpoint Edinburgh looked down upon Glasgow as vulgar, while Glasgow returned the compliment by disparaging an effete Edinburgh; of course, wrote ‘Ulster Imperialist’, this mutual contempt really arose because each city was immensely proud of itself. Similarly, Ulster was convinced that she was the first province in the British Empire, while Leinster, in turn, derided Ulster as an upstart. The second extension of local patriotism, arising out of ‘provincialism’, was ‘Nationalism’. The fusing of parishes made a province, the fusing of provinces a nation. Nationalism arose from a welding of smaller identities, each distinct as long as it was considered under any of the previous headings. Influenced by nationalism, Edinburgh and Glasgow fused, and joined in other fusions—of the Highlands and Lowlands for instance—to form one Scottish Nation.

Travelling still further ‘Ulster Imperialist’ arrived at ‘Imperialism’: the next and most natural extension of esprit de corps, but upon a much larger scale. Genuine imperialism was based upon the fusing of separate nations without the loss of their national identity, just as provincialism was a wedding of separate and separable parochialisms. This imperial idea was new, a vision of a mighty brotherhood, sentiment and commerce; the same kind of vision, claimed the author, that Alfred the Great saw when he began to build England out of the heptarchy in the ninth century, or that Brian Boru [sic] saw in tenth-century Ireland. In modern times this was called imperialism and was so new and large that many people failed to understand it. ‘Ulster Imperialist’ considered one cardinal mistake of the English to be the way that they often thought and talked of the United Kingdom and the British Empire as if these were actually the English Kingdom and the English Empire. Worse still, they constantly acted upon that same assumption and so rode rough-shod over feelings of local patriotism that demanded their respect and encouragement if the Empire was to be one in something more than name. Personally, the author wrote:

from the viewpoint of one who consciously adopts all the four varieties of local patriotisms. I am Parochial (literally, being a vestryman as well as a treasurer of our local parish!); I am Provincial, being directly interested in the development of commerce and agriculture in Ulster; I am National, in that I am an Irishman and proud of it, anxious to help Ireland as far as lies within my power…. I am Imperial, glad of my small share in the proudest boast the world has ever heard—‘Civis Britannicus sum’—mark the phrase: it is ‘Britannicus’ not ‘Anglicanus’.

Up to this point, ‘Ulster Imperialist’ had used the words ‘nationality’ and ‘nationalism’ in their ‘real’ sense, but he was also anxious to illustrate how widely they differed from political meanings. An Orangeman, for instance, who called any man in Ireland a ‘Nationalist’ usually implied that his opponent approved of dynamite and murder as political arguments; almost everyone understood the term to be synonymous with home rule, because that movement was organised by politicians who had annexed the term ‘Nationalist’. One might believe home rule to be bad or good, but, argued ‘Ulster Imperialist’, it had nothing to do with the existence of nationality. ‘Real Nationalism and political Nationalism’ were two entirely different things, and one had to try and disentangle the permanent meaning from the temporary term; the only way to do this was to analyse the context:

Suppose a speaker announces—‘I am an Irish Nationalist, and therefore I vote for the Union’. Politically, the phrase has no meaning; really it conveys—‘I am an Irishman, and I desire the welfare of the old country: I believe the Union is beneficial to the Irish Nation, and therefore I vote for it’…. Contrast this now with another imaginary speaker, who states—‘I am an Irish Nationalist, and therefore I hate all Irish Unionists’. Politically the meaning is obvious, but translate the sentence in terms of permanent Nationalism, and every vestige of meaning disappears.¹²

Alongside this existed a second expression of Britishness which emphasised the existence of a British nation extending from the British Isles and throughout the British Empire. This view was summed up by Lord Robert Cecil in October 1910 when he stated that ‘If we believe in anything, it is that und...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Note on terminology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 National identity, Home Rule and the Ulster question
• Chapter 2 Ireland in 1914
• Chapter 3 The Great War and national identity, 1914–16
• Chapter 4 The Easter Rising and aftermath
• Chapter 5 Loyalty and the Crown
• Chapter 6 The Irish Convention and the conscription crisis, 1917–18
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography