Revolutionary Ireland, 1912-25

Robert Lynch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441168610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Irlande

Revolutionary Ireland, 1912-25 analyses the main events in Ireland from the initial crisis over the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912 to the consolidation of partition Ulster with the settling of the boundary issue in 1925. Written with particular reference to the needs of students in further and higher education, each chapter contains an easy to follow narrative, guides to key reading on the topic, sample essay and examination questions and links to web resources. The main text is supported by an appendix of contemporary sources and a range of additional information including a chronology of significant events, maps, a glossary of key terms and an extensive bibliography. This comprehensive text will allow students to get to grips with this turbulent and fascinating period of modern Irish history.

1

Background to the Revolution

The Ireland which was revolutionised adopted its particular form with the Act of Union of 1801. The Act abolished the Irish parliament which, while existing for several centuries, only since 1782 had achieved a significant level of independence. This short-lived body, known as ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, after its most influential leader Henry Grattan, would become an idealised symbol for Nationalists of all shades throughout the following century of the nation’s lost political autonomy.

The Union itself was neither complete nor did it abolish the remnants of the old pseudo-colonial system. The Irish population was decimated by the Great Famine of 1845–51. Between those years numbers fell from a high of 8.2 million down to 6.6 million due to a combination of death and emigration. This decline would continue throughout the rest of the nineteenth century meaning that, by 1901, Ireland had lost almost half of its population in fifty years falling to a low of 4.5 million. Politically this meant that by the time of the revolution Ireland, like Scotland, the other member of the Union, was over-represented at Westminster. This curious arrangement was reinforced by the fact that the state still had a Viceroy at its head administering from Dublin Castle and there remained a whole web of archaic Irish departments which retained a complex relationship with ministries in London, most of which merely added an Irish section to their administration, thus further convoluting the constitutional arrangement. Ireland was certainly treated differently from the rest of Britain with uniquely its own armed police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), who would administer a series of colonial type coercion acts throughout the nineteenth century unheard of elsewhere in Britain. Similarly legislation passed at Westminster was not automatically applied to Ireland, being enacted in a piecemeal fashion through the political prism of Dublin Castle or shelved entirely in favour of specific Irish legislation. Such landmark legislation, generous as much of it was, would however largely be ad hoc responses to periods of political and social agitation on behalf of the majority Catholic population rather than part of a general trend towards modernisation and rationalisation of Ireland’s constitutional position. As such by 1912, for both opponents and defenders of the Union it was equally plausible to paint Ireland as either a colony or a partner of the rest of the United Kingdom.

Irish Unionism

Organised Unionism in Ireland had grown up in response to the threat of home rule in the 1880s. The movement was driven by a number of interlocking fears about the consequences of a devolved Catholic-dominated government in Dublin. Forged from an alliance of southern Anglo-Irish landowners and business leaders in the north-east, traditional fears of religious persecution were added to by concerns that a home rule parliament would jeopardise the economic prosperity of the heavily Protestant areas of East Ulster.

By the turn of the century Belfast was the most important industrial and financial centre in Ireland. While Dublin remained the administrative and ceremonial capital of Irish life, Belfast was the powerhouse of the Irish economy. By 1907 two-thirds of all industrial exports originated in the Belfast region and Belfast banks held over 50 per cent of all deposits and over 80 per cent of business credit balances. This extraordinary industrial growth was matched by a process of urbanisation, with population growth rocketing from 75,000 in 1841 to 387,000 in 1911, by some measures bypassing the southern metropolis as the largest city in Ireland.

This extraordinary rise of Belfast from a small settlement to a major Imperial city was achieved by a combination of luck and dynamic innovation. Driven by the mechanisation of the native linen industry in the mid-nineteenth century the city became a burgeoning export centre. The extraordinary attributes of Belfast harbour made the city the ideal location for the establishment of a flourishing maritime economy. Shipbuilding, revolutionised in terms of both scale and technology after the 1850s, would along with its attendant industries, come to dominate the economy of East Ulster in the fifty years prior to partition. In 1858 Edward Harland took over a small yard in East Belfast and along with Gustav Wolff built one of the most profitable and innovative shipyards in the world churning out characteristically large iron hulled, barque rigged single screw steamers. Although they catered for a worldwide clientele their links with the British mainland, especially Merseyside, remained the mainstay of the business. Indeed it was orders from White Star (famously secured over a game of billiards in 1869) that would both increase these links and supply the ‘Big Yard’ with some of its most notable commissions. From the launch of the Oceanic in 1870 Harland and Wolff set new standards of quality and innovation culminating in 1909 with the launch of the triple screw liners in the shape of the Olympic, Britannic and Titanic. By 1914 the yard experienced continued success under the guidance of William Pirrie after Harland’s death in 1895, and employed almost 15,000 men in East Belfast.

It was not however the only shipbuilding concern in the city. While Harland and Wolff stole the show with their massive creations, the much forgotten ‘wee yard’ of Workman and Clark established in 1879 turned out a more eclectic mix of products from sleek sailing ships to frozen meat carriers. While employing only half the workforce of its larger competitor Workman Clark turned out more gross tonnage of shipping than any other yard in the UK. Ancillary industries and commercial concerns also flourished in the Lagan Valley. Belfast ropeworks, opened in 1878 by none other than the son of the Victorian self-help guru Samuel Smiles, met the increasing demand for heavy rope for the shipbuilding industry. The 1880s also saw the growth of a native engineering sector replacing the earlier reliance on orders from Clydeside, making shipbuilding both self-sufficient and more economical. Along with this growth in mechanical and marine engineering dozens of medium-sized businesses flourished from food processing to tobacco and beverage manufacture, including the production of aerated water, and in the early years brewing which gave way eventually to whisky distilling. As a financial centre Belfast was unrivalled and banks such as the Ulster Banking Company, Belfast Banking Company and Northern Banking Company provided much of the early investment vital for the new industrial metropolis. While in the 1830s one could sensibly place an imagined Ulster parliament in Armagh and Londonderry there was little doubt on the eve of the partition decade that Belfast lay at the central nexus in not only Ulster but the entire Irish world.

The success of Belfast led this new East Ulster elite to two crucial conclusions that would have a profound effect in shaping the partitionist solution that would emerge in the aftermath of the Great War. The first was that Belfast prosperity was wholly reliant on Ireland remaining part of the British world and any loosening of this connection would have disastrous consequences for these industrial achievements. There was some truth in this. The development of close links between East Ulster and the north-west of England and the west of Scotland was crucial to the well-being of the Belfast economy. The crippling shortage of coal and iron in Ireland was offset by the import of these raw materials through Glasgow and Liverpool, the latter of which was also a crucial entrepôt for Ulster manufactures to be sent to worldwide markets. The resistance to home rule in the nineteenth century was thus backed up by genuine fears. There was real substance in Edward Harland’s threat in 1886 that if home rule were enacted he would pack up and move to Glasgow.

The second conclusion drawn was to be more damaging to the future of Irish unity. Claims emerged that the success of the Ulster economy was down to an Ulster Protestant proclivity for hard work and entrepreneurship; that it was the Protestant people of Ulster, their culture and worldview which had given rise to this success. This perception was, if not wholly false, desperately exaggerated. There is no evidence for a higher level of entrepreneurial skill in East Ulster despite the lingering stereotypes. Most of the key movers and shakers came from outside Ireland and those that were successful benefited enormously from circumstance. Between 1860 and 1914 the values of merchant shipping in the United Kingdom rose from £375 million to £1,403 million and Belfast also benefited from a wider shift of shipbuilding and heavy engineering away from the south and east of England to the north and west with ports such as Newcastle, Glasgow, Birkenhead and Barrow all experiencing the same dynamic growth. It was also the case that this drive to industrialisation and urbanisation was a very local phenomenon peculiar to East Ulster rather than peculiar to Protestant Ulstermen. Most of Ulster remained overwhelmingly rural with two-thirds of the population working on the land. Outside of the small enclave of the Lagan Valley, Ulster remained an agricultural and impoverished economy, little different from other parts of Ireland outside of the major urban centres. Indeed it was Belfast peculiarity in the Irish context that allowed it to exploit some of the lowest labour costs in the UK leading to its burgeoning population. The option of migrating to Belfast and heterogeneous economy lessened the effect of agricultural depressions. In terms of partition these perceptions created a widening gulf between Belfast and, not just Dublin, but the rest of Ireland.

These business elites would play a key role in the anti-home rule campaigns of the later nineteenth century. The powerful Belfast Chamber of Commerce founded in 1883 had grown in size and influence along with the city it represented. From a mere 76 members in 1827 it had swelled to 260 in 1893, only 3 per cent of whom were Catholics. While the Chamber has been viewed as the middle ground between business and politics, increasingly this middle ground would disappear and the two elements become fused together. In the decade prior to partition Irish Unionism became dominated by East Ulster priorities in terms of both its ideology and its geographical focus.

As such, growing economic divisions in Ireland ran in parallel with a wider power shift within Irish Unionism itself. The decades prior to partition would see a shift from the previous heterogeneous all-Ireland Unionism of the late-nineteenth-century campaigns against home rule to a localised homogeneous Ulster Unionism dictated by the interests of the commercial classes of East Ulster. By 1918 there was only one landed southern Unionist MP in the House of Commons. The story of the Ulsterization of Irish Unionism is really the story of the breakdown in the relationship between landed southern Unionist elites and the commercial middle classes of Belfast and the Lagan Valley. The shift was also a shift towards the Presbyterians of Ulster. In 1911, 95 per cent of Irish Presbyterians lived in Ulster, 90 per cent of them in the future Northern Ireland, while almost half of all Church of Ireland Protestants lived in the twenty-six counties which made up the future southern state. The famed ‘long retreat’ of Irish Unionism out of Ireland was also a retreat into northern heartlands.

The growth of Belfast would define the eventual partition settlement in the most profound sense. Indeed so all-pervasive was the domination of East Ulster priorities that the partition settlement which would emerge in the shape of Northern Ireland amounted to Belfast and its own defined hinterland. This is demonstrated markedly by the decision to keep the cities of Newry and Derry within the Northern area despite their being cut off almost completely from their natural hinterlands. Indeed Northern Ireland remains almost unique amongst partitioned counties in having two of its major urban centres lying only a matter of a few miles from the border. Along with the cold jettisoning of the three ‘outer Ulster’ counties of Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan, the partition saw the maintenance of the heartlands in the east of the province and the symbolic and economically important cities at its eastern and western extremities being secured, the commercial Belfast leadership allowed Ulster to fray at the edges.

While the rise of Belfast was extraordinary, it was typical of many British cities during the late-nineteenth century. What is perhaps more salient is the failure of industrialisation and its attendant urbanisation to impact the south and west. Viewed in an Irish context the rise of Belfast was indeed extraordinary.

Irish nationalism

By contrast the new generation of Irish Nationalists who would dictate the political sentiments of the majority during the partition period looked west not north for their inspiration. The so-called ‘new nationalism’ which emerged to fill the void in Irish nationalism after the fall of Parnell was in reality an often confused creation of a very modern homogeneous national culture, despite its archaic pretensions, as heterogeneous and dynamic as the economic transformation which had gripped East Ulster. Based on a mixture of Gaelic revivalism and invented cultural pastimes, it both consciously and unconsciously articulated itself against everything that Belfast and East Ulster had come to represent. Douglas Hyde, the founder of the language movement the Gaelic League and future first President of Ireland, stated in 1906:

A pious race is the Gaelic race. The Irish Gael is pious by nature. He sees the hand of God in every place, in every time, and in every thing. There is not an Irishman in a hundred in whom is the making of an unbeliever. The spirit and the things of the spirit affect him more powerfully than the body and the things of the body. In the things he does not see, he does not believe the less for not seeing them; and in the things he sees, he will see more than a man of any other race; what is invisible for other people is visible for him.¹

The Irish Revolution can in many ways be defined as the story of an internal revolution within Irish Nationalist political culture. The Home Rule party, the voice of Nationalist Ireland since the 1870s which had called for a repeal of the Act of Union of 1801 and the creation of a devolved legislative assembly in Dublin, would be supplanted by radical separatists in the form of Sinn Fein and its attendant military organisations, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the Irish Volunteers. This was by any measure a staggering achievement. So dominant had been the Home Rule party that their removal as the spokesman for Irish Nationalists was a necessary but daunting first step for any separatist movement before moving on to tackle the British directly. However, this change remains complex and, despite the rhetoric, was less a revolution than an amalgamation of various strands of Irish nationalism. There was a great deal of continuity where the ideas, methods and indeed membership of the Home Rule party would continue to shape the political strategies of Irish nationalism.

Certainly prior to the Easter Rising of 1916, and for a time after, advanced forms of nationalism were firmly in the minority. Irish Nationalists were steeped in the political traditions and cultures of the constitutional nationalism. Since Charles Stewart Parnell, ‘the uncrowned King of Ireland’, had reinvented it in the mid-1880s the relentless political machine of the Irish Home Rule party dominated Irish Nationalist political life. Even with the split of 1890–1, and the disgrace and death of Parnell himself, the party still maintained its monolithic presence in Irish life. All patronage flowed from it, from its single authoritarian leader at the top down to its grass roots made up of a myriad affiliated organisations, most of whom the party had forcibly co-opted. The rigid discipline of its members allowed for the party to remain solid in difficult times. Dissent was quashed mercilessly, and at times physically, such as at the infamous ‘baton convention’ of 1909 where Nationalists with a differing vision from the leadership were attacked with clubs and thrown out of the meeting.

However, for all its strengths the Home Rule party also had some inherent weaknesses. The rigid structure of the organisation meant that a leadership clique soon began to form and solidified over the decades. The elites in charge rarely changed, passing their political influence down to the next generation from father to son or uncle to nephew. These family dynasties came to dominate leadership positions and it was increasingly difficult for a new generation to break in. Those few that did manage to affect fundamental change in the party, it can be argued, were often detrimental to the purity of the party’s political vision. For example one of the most dynamic and charismatic new leaders to emerge, the West Belfast Catholic Joe Devlin, brought along a new tinge of sectarianism and pushed the party, whose first three leaders had been Protestants, in an even more conservative and Catholic direction.

Such conservatism was mirrored in the parliamentary party which was obedient, unimaginative and disciplined to the point of ossification. There was little dissent from the leadership policy line which meant that despite its size and domination of Nationalist Ireland the party began to rely more and more on a small, increasingly conservative elite to meet fresh challenges when they arose. After 1916 its inability to do this would prove fatal.

The party’s growing conservatism was fed into by the constraints placed on the party by the Liberal alliance. Parnell’s gamble to throw in his lot with Gladstone and the Liberals in the 1880s had not produced the desired result with the failure of the Home Rule Bill in 1886. Prior to this decision the Irish Party had remained outside of the structures of British political life and sold its votes to whichever party would best serve its interests. Irish votes in Westminster were very significant, amounting to some eighty-five seats. As such whichever of the main parties won the election still needed to have a very significant majority in order to form any kind of working majority government and far more than that to make it safe from the vagaries of by-elections and occasional defections. As such the decision in 1885 to side with the Liberals left the Tories little choice but to side with the opponents of home rule in the shape of Irish Unionists. This new dichotomy was to become an established truism of British politics. For good or ill the post-Parnellite Home Rule party was tied to the fate of the Liberals, having no other viable or credible political home now that the Tories had chosen the side of the Union.

In many ways the Irish question had done much to create this political dichotomy in British politics. The decision taken by Gladstone to support Irish home rule was to prove fateful for the future shape of British, and therefore Irish politics. The Liberal party itself fell apart over the issue with a large group of so-called Liberal Unionists crossing the floor of the house to join with the Tories. The Conservative party itself found in the Irish question an issue that could unite its various disparate elements and indeed the party managed to dominate British government for almost two decades in its aftermath, a period only punctuated by a short-lived Gladstonian administration in 1893 whose only major policy, a failed attempt at a second Home Rule Bill, also brought it to a quick end. Tory unity itself would hold until 1903 when the party split on the issue of Tariff Reform, allowing the Liberals to come back into power.

It is wrong though to think that the almost two decades of Unionist dominated Conservative government would be marked by a defensive or passive approach to the problem of Ireland. Indeed if anything the opposite was the case. With a visionary policy of meeting Irish grievances which many felt underpinned the desire for home rule, the Tories tried to push forward a radical reform agenda. This policy of ‘Constructive Unionism’ or ‘Killing Home Rule with Kindness’ as it has been called, was de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Map
• Chronology
• Who’s Who of the Irish Revolution
• Introduction
• 1 Background to the Revolution
• 2 The Ulster Crisis, 1912–14
• 3 The Easter Rising, 1916
• 4 The Rise of Sinn Fein, 1916–18
• 5 The War of Independence, 1919–21
• 6 Truce and Treaty
• 7 The Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–5
• 8 The Irish Civil War, 1922–3
• Conclusion
• Documents
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright