A Short History of the Irish Revolution, 1912 to 1927

From the Ulster Crisis to the formation of the Irish Free State

Richard Killeen

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780717163717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The years of the Irish revolution were the crucible of modern Ireland. Richard Killeen's authoritative survey of the period is an ideal introduction to this tumultuous time. The Irish revolution began with the Ulster crisis of 1912 followed by the Irish Nationalist Party securing the passage of the Home Rule Act in 1914. By then, however, the Great War had broken out: the Act was suspended for the duration of the war, with the violent Ulster opposition to it still unresolved. But the war changed everything. Over thirty thousand Irish troops died. A radical nationalist minority rebelled against British rule at Easter 1916, an event that established itself as the foundation date of a new, more assertive nationalism. In 1918 Sinn Féin supplanted the old Nationalist party and formed its own assembly in Dublin. At the same time the IRA began an armed campaign against British Rule. By 1922, Britain had withdrawn from twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland which now constituted the Irish Free State. The Ulster problem had, however, never been resolved. The result was partition and the establishment of two states on the island — something unthinkable fifteen years earlier.

A Short History of the Irish Revolution, 1912 to 1927: Table of Contents

• Ulster Crisis
• Nationalism Before 1916>
• The Rising and the War
• From the Rising to Partition
• Partition and the Treaty
• Two States

01	ULSTER CRISIS

The Irish Revolution started in London. Twice in the late nineteenth century, William Ewart Gladstone had sponsored an Irish Home Rule Bill in parliament. The most potent political figure of his time, he had nevertheless failed on both occasions. In 1886, the first bill failed in the House of Commons when his own Liberal Party split on the issue. The second bill, in 1893, passed the Commons but was predictably defeated in the House of Lords.

The House of Lords was one of those peculiar British institutions that made little sense in terms of modern assumptions: it was shamelessly elitist and anti-democratic in what was an ever-more democratising age. It represented privilege, both ancient inherited privilege and that more recently acquired through industrial fortunes. Lordships were created anew as well as inherited. Constitutionally, the House of Lords was the upper house of parliament, a revising chamber which in theory acted as a brake on the more frantic initiatives of the Commons. As was pointed out repeatedly, however, it discharged this function only in respect of bills sponsored by Liberal governments, which it cheerfully emasculated as it thought fit. On Tory legislation, its revising hand palsied.

By the time H.H. Asquith became Liberal Prime Minister in 1908, the House of Lords was nothing more or less than a Conservative barrage, whose sole purpose was to frustrate what it regarded as Liberal legislative excess. The problem for the Lords was that Asquith’s government had been elected in one of the biggest landslides in British electoral history. In 1906, the Liberals swept back to power after almost twenty years in the political wilderness. Their leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, became Prime Minister and appointed Asquith as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In that position, Asquith displayed the calm assurance that had distinguished his entire career. He introduced old age pensions and other reforms that pre-figured the Welfare State. When Campbell-Bannerman died, Asquith was his unchallenged successor as leader of the party and Prime Minister.

But just why had the Liberals—the party of Gladstone that had completely dominated mid-Victorian politics—come to spend twenty years squabbling with each other on the opposition benches? As always, there were many causes, but none was more central than home rule for Ireland. The split that Gladstone caused by this measure was, more than anything else, responsible for the Liberals’ wilderness years. Asquith had first entered parliament in the fateful year of 1886. His whole parliamentary career had therefore overlapped with this period of Liberal decline and division. Unlike Gladstone, Asquith was not a force of nature inspired by high moral ideals. He was a temperate lawyer, wonderfully competent and able. He was shrewd. And like any shrewd Liberal of his era, he remembered all too well the havoc that home rule had brought to his party. In his heart Mr Asquith resolved that here was an issue best avoided.

Not that it was an issue at all in 1908. On the opposition benches in the Commons there sat the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the heirs of Parnell. Their numbers were insufficient to influence the government’s majority and consequently they could be ignored. The government did introduce an anodyne measure called the Irish Council Bill in 1907, to offer Ireland a very limited form of devolution well short of home rule. It proved far too pallid for the various shades of Irish nationalism—including the IPP—and it was withdrawn.

Their Lordships were growing ever more alarmed by what was coming from the Commons. After a generation of nodding through Conservative measures, they were suddenly galvanised by Liberal legislation. Bills to do with education, plural voting and licensing were all thrown out in the Lords. The Liberals, invested with the legitimacy of a democratic landslide in the Commons, were powerless against their Lordships’ naked partisanship.

When Asquith became Prime Minister, his successor as Chancellor was David Lloyd George. Lloyd George was a radical, on the left of the party. He was mercurial and torrentially eloquent. As a small-town Welsh solicitor of an aggressive disposition, he had no love at all for the landed interest that dominated the Lords. In preparing his 1909 budget, he was faced with a large deficit which he was determined to make good. The deficit was caused by increased military spending and by the cost of Asquith’s old age pensions. To finance all this, Lloyd George increased income tax and death duties, taxed undeveloped land and mining royalties and imposed heavy duties on the licensed trade, a traditional Tory redoubt. He introduced a super tax on the very rich for the first time. If Lloyd George had set out to select a series of targets designed to infuriate the Tories generally and the House of Lords specifically, he could hardly have done better.

By constitutional convention, the Lords did not reject money bills. Yet here was a money bill that represented a direct assault on their interests, coming at a time when they had grown accustomed to a more assertive use of their veto. After much manoeuvring and agonising, the Lords rejected the ‘People’s Budget’ and tripped off a constitutional crisis.

The two general elections of 1910 were required to resolve it. Twice Asquith went to the country and twice he was returned. Only when he threatened to create enough new peers, all of whom would be safe Liberal placemen, to swamp the existing Tory majority, was the budget finally passed. From this, it was a short legislative step to the Parliament Act of 1911, which finally abolished the Lords’ veto, replacing it by a mere power of delay.

The two general elections had, however, caused the configuration of the Commons to change decisively. Asquith had won, but his majority had disappeared and he now found himself, as Gladstone had found himself twenty-five years earlier, depending upon the Irish Parliamentary Party for a secure majority. The IPP was happy to oblige. The condition was obvious. When all was said and done, they were a one-issue party and the issue was home rule. The measure that Asquith least wanted to touch was the one he was made to embrace.

Since the 1880s, in every test of political opinion in Ireland, home rule had produced an overwhelming majority. These were reasonably true tests, for a major franchise reform in 1884 had effectively brought all male heads of households in the UK onto the electoral register. There was only one blemish in the image of an Ireland solid for home rule: Ulster.

Ulster, the northern province comprising nine counties, was alone in Ireland in not having an overwhelmingly Catholic population. The province was almost evenly divided between the denominations, although there was a small Catholic majority. The eastern half of Ulster, however, was solidly Protestant. This included the two coastal counties of Antrim and Down and the great industrial city of Belfast. As one pushed west from this heartland, however, Protestant numbers weakened although still able to command local electoral majorities in many areas. The two most southerly Ulster counties, Cavan and Monaghan, and the most westerly (ironically, also the most northerly), Donegal, contained very substantial Catholic majorities.

Catholic meant nationalist and pro-home rule. Protestant meant unionist and anti-home rule. It really was as simple as that. The few exceptions here and there were of no account and statistically insignificant. Irish nationalism was an overtly Catholic project and Irish unionism a Protestant one. There was some small support for unionism among a tiny minority of southern upper-middle class Catholics, but in Ulster the overlap between confessional allegiance and political allegiance was nearly total.

The electoral map of Ulster in December 1910 was a perfect reflection of this confessional demography. With just a single exception, every constituency in the three most heavily Protestant counties—Antrim, Down and Derry—returned the Unionist candidate. The exception was South Down, which had a secure local Catholic majority. And so it went throughout Ulster, with the Protestant constituencies of North and Mid Armagh, South Tyrone and North Fermanagh declaring for the Unionists while the rest of the province—effectively most of west Ulster—remained overwhelmingly Nationalist. The farther south and west one went in Ulster, the more certain the Nationalist majority. The election of December 1910 simply underlined the immutable electoral geography of the province, visible in all elections since 1885.

Ulster was divided, with the Protestant heartland in the east centred on Belfast. But there was more to power than counting heads. The Protestant community in Ulster was vastly richer, more influential and more confident than the Catholics. The Industrial Revolution had touched Ulster alone in Ireland, and within Ulster it had been a Protestant phenomenon. Theirs was the community that had been enriched by it. Even among the Protestant working class, there were more skilled tradesmen than among the Catholics, who swelled the ranks of the unskilled or the unemployed in disproportionate numbers. The Protestant poor knew themselves to be part of a superior caste. As for the middle class, it was substantially Protestant.

Sir James Craig was the very epitome of the new Ulster plutocrat. He was the hatchet-faced heir to a distillery, very rich and from 1906 a Unionist MP at Westminster. He was meticulous. He was no orator and had little charisma, but he was at the heart of every Unionist intrigue in this period. One month before the election of December 1910, he was one of those on the Ulster Unionist Council who authorised the setting up of a secret committee to buy arms from abroad with a view to forming an Ulster army to resist home rule.

This was the Rubicon moment.

One of the great ironies of the Irish Revolution is that it was started by those who least wanted it. The Ulster unionists wanted nothing more than the status quo, the maintenance of the union of Great Britain and Ireland that had subsisted since 1801. Their faith in parliament had been well placed for a generation, but now all that was changing. Since home rule first became an issue in the mid-1880s, Ulster could always rely on the House of Lords to torpedo any proposed legislation. By November 1910, however, the danger of a Liberal government beholden to the Irish Parliamentary Party for its majority was sufficiently real to push the Ulster Unionist Council over the brink. The Parliament Act was already over the horizon, set to remove the Lords’ veto and therefore the surest bulwark against home rule. In forming the secret committee to buy arms and plan armed resistance to the will of parliament, the UUC was on the path of treason. And that is what the Ulster Crisis was all about: treason in defence of the constitution.

The work of securing arms for the putative Ulster army was devolved to one of those exotics who seem to flash across the Edwardian stage as if it were a music hall. Major Frederick Hugh Crawford had been at the wilder margins of Ulster unionism since the early 1890s. As a member of the Ulster Loyalist Union—formed to focus opposition to the first two Home Rule Bills—he had imported arms from England and organised the drilling of volunteers. On the strength of all this, he founded an armed society called Young Ulster which toyed briefly with the idea of kidnapping Gladstone, at that time eighty-four and in his fourth and final term as Prime Minister. He later saw more orthodox service as an officer in the Boer War. This was the person to whom the Ulster Unionist Council devolved the business of arming Protestant Ulster.

With the return of Asquith and the passing of the Parliament Act, the UUC plunged ever deeper in. As early as March 1911, it was committing funds to Crawford’s enterprise. The first arms had been secured by the summer of that year. As early as April, a body of armed Orangemen in military formation had presented themselves at a rally in Craigavon, Sir James Craig’s splendid country house outside Belfast. The paramilitary mobilisation would continue to gather pace throughout 1911 and 1912.

In the meantime, the political game moved on. Craig was the Ulster Carnot, the ‘organiser of victory’, but he was no leader and he knew it. Instead, he turned to Edward Carson to assume the leadership of the anti-home rule cause. Carson was an inspired if unlikely choice. He was not from Ulster, but from Dublin. He was born into a prosperous professional family—his father was a successful architect—and he himself became a barrister. He practised at first in Ireland, where he made a reputation for himself as a tough crown prosecutor during the land agitations of the 1880s. This brought him to the notice of the Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour, nephew of the Prime Minister and later to be leader of the Tory party and Prime Minister himself. He was called to the English Bar in 1893, one year after his election to the House of Commons as MP for his alma mater, Trinity College. He was appointed solicitor-general for Ireland and later solicitor-general for England (1900–05). But his most celebrated and notorious achievement had been not in politics but at the Bar. In 1895, he was counsel for the defence in the libel action taken by Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas. His destruction of Wilde in cross-examination confirmed his reputation as one of the most feared and respected lawyers in Britain.

The Unionists had therefore just found a leader from the heart of the Conservative establishment. Notwithstanding this background, Carson was under no illusions about guns. On the contrary, lawyer or no lawyer, he saw them as essential to the course that the Ulster resistance was now embarked upon. As a southern unionist, Carson saw Ulster as the rock upon which home rule would break, for he reckoned that if Ulster could stay out, the whole enterprise would collapse. Carson’s concern was for Ireland in the union, not just Ulster. Like most of his contemporaries, he simply could not imagine the island partitioned, so complete was the mental image of insular unity.

Carson made his first major speech as Unionist leader in September 1911, once again at a rally in Craigavon. There was no ambiguity: ‘We must be prepared, on the morning home rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant province of Ulster.’ If this was not a threat of de facto secession, what was it? Yet the lawyer in Carson was nothing if not subtle and ambiguous. Behind the scenes, he used his well-oiled political connections to try to reach successive accommodations with the government, while stirring up his Ulster audiences with inflammatory public speeches of great force and power. Carson was playing an Irish political game as old as Daniel O’Connell—he would hardly have welcomed the comparison—by using his control of the outraged mob as a lever to extract concessions from a frightened government.

Throughout 1911 and 1912, the process of political mobilisation, occasional importation of arms and drilling continued apace in Ulster. Drilling was illegal unless granted a permit by a magistrate, but since most of the magistrates were unionist in sympathy, that little formality was seldom a problem. The threat against which it was all focused was made flesh in the House of Commons on 11 April 1912 when Asquith introduced the Third Home Rule Bill, a moment that prompted John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, to thank God that he had lived to see the day. It was, incidentally, just three days before the sinking of the Titanic.

With the safety net of the House of Lords now gone, Ulster was thrown entirely upon its own resources. Well, almost. The Conservatives were demoralised after the passage of the People’s Budget and the Parliament Act, and in November 1911 Balfour had been forced aside in favour of a very different type of leader, Andrew Bonar Law. He had been born in Canada and brought up in Glasgow and significantly was of mixed Ulster and Scots background. His father had been born in Coleraine and had been the Presbyterian minister there before leaving for Canada. Where Balfour had been a southern grandee, Bonar Law was closer in knowledge, sympathy and formation to the tough Presbyterian ethic of the Ulster Protestants with whom he shared a visceral sympathy. Bonar Law’s arrival as Tory leader deepened the overt bond of sympathy and co-operation between the Ulster Unionists and the Conservative Party. He shared platforms with Carson and injected an element of righteous fury to the British anti-home rule opposition that sat very easily with the Ulstermen.

Bonar Law was the incarnation of growing British Tory opposition to home rule, most memorably captured in Kipling’s poem ‘Ulster 1912’. At Easter that year, as the Home Rule Bill was being introduced in the Commons, he spoke to a loyalist crowd of over 100,000 in Belfast. Prayers were read by the Anglican primate and the Presbyterian moderator. Hymns were sung, resolutions against home rule were passed, and the largest Union flag ever made was flown aloft. Bonar Law spoke from the heart: ‘Once again you hold the pass, the pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Ulster Crisis
• Chapter 2: Nationalism Before 1916
• Chapter 3: The Rising and the War
• Chapter 4: From the Rising to Partition
• Chapter 5: Partition and the Treaty
• Chapter 6: Two States
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan