by Neil Hegarty
The lockout was marked by a good deal of violence: the workers were threatened by attack from both the police and a series of employer-backed vigilante groups, and in response Connolly organized a protective group, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). Ultimately, some twenty-five thousand workers were locked out and deprived of a regular wage: this in turn, because they had families, meant that close to one hundred thousand people were threatened with penury and hunger. A relief fund brought a degree of respite, but by the end of January 1914 the ITGWU was forced to admit defeat. The union members gradually returned to work, on terms drawn up by the employers, shortly after the end of the lock-out. Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops condemned socialism, thus leaving no room for doubt as to the attitude of the Church.
Connolly’s speeches to the workers during the lock-out had led to his arrest and imprisonment, and he had briefly gone on hunger strike. Now, with the defeat of the workers in the spring of 1914, he was forced into a reassessment of his political views. The events of the lock-out reinforced his sense that labour needed more than ever to organize, the better to withstand its capitalist enemies; in addition, he devoted much energy to expanding and training the ICA as a front line of defence. At the same time, however, the failure of the lock-out undermined his class-based vision of Ireland’s future, while the notion of a united socialist Ireland seemed as remote as ever. It was clear to him that the war now approaching in Europe might present a golden opportunity – and clear too that nationalist and not socialist politics might prove the best vehicle for bringing about change.
Amid this plethora of activism, constitutional politics had certainly not become irrelevant. By 1910, for example, parliamentary reform had once again brought the possibility of a form of Irish political autonomy, the old goal of Home Rule, within reach. In that year, the delicately reunited Irish Party at Westminster supported the formation of a new Liberal government under Herbert Asquith – on the clear understanding that a Parliament Act would be passed, enabling the veto of the Conservative-dominated Lords to be overridden for the first time by the Commons. This was reform fundamental to the very institution of parliament itself – and it was indeed passed, with a third Home Rule bill swiftly proposed in the spring of 1912.
In truth this was a modest enough measure, repatriating to Dublin authority many domestic issues but retaining at Westminster control over Irish foreign policy, taxation and military affairs. Yet it was a bill that this time stood a very good chance of passing both the Commons and the Lords and becoming law. In Belfast the Ulster Unionists mustered in opposition, the fault lines in Ireland opening now into chasms. In September 1912 Sir Edward Carson led 250,000 Ulstermen in signing the Covenant, a declaration of intent to use ‘all means which may be found necessary’ to resist Irish self-government. Ulsterwomen had another, rather less martial Declaration, that noted ‘our desire to associate ourselves with the men of Ulster’ in their opposition to Home Rule. And in London, the Conservative opposition declared its support for the Unionists: ‘I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go,’ noted their leader Andrew Bonar Law, ‘in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.’9
Ulster Unionism was an articulate and daunting political force. It was unified by fear – and yet it was essentially no more homogeneous an entity than was Irish nationalism. For there was more to the Protestant population of Ulster than the prosperous mercantile elite of Belfast and its hinterland: it also embraced a class of small farmers scattered throughout the province, the remnants of the Anglican Ascendancy, and the tens of thousands of employees of Belfast’s shipyards and factories. The harsh by-products of Belfast’s industrial class, meanwhile, were evident for all to see in the forms of heavy reliance upon child labour, minimal levels of welfare, widespread poverty and general social distress. Class, in other words, was as intrinsic an aspect of life in Ulster as it was in other developed societies. Yet – as Connolly had discovered – such divisions and internal tensions could be papered over in the face of Home Rule, to be replaced by the imperatives of religion and race.
In these years leading up to World War I, Unionist political leaders engaged in the slow process of securing the extrication of Ulster, or a section of the province, from any new constitutional arrangement. The partition of the country, which had first emerged as an issue in the aftermath of the first Home Rule bill two decades previously, was now live and pressing; however, nobody could as yet determine whether partition would in fact happen, much less what final shape it might take. It was also an issue riddled with contradiction: the Home Rule that Unionists had rallied to prevent in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was now acceptable to them – if only Ulster could be removed from the equation.
Underlying these political calculations was a cold numbers game. According to the 1911 census, the Protestant population of the province of Ulster was just under 900,000, the Catholic population just under 700,000. This was too slender a demographic majority for comfort, especially when a generally higher Catholic birth rate was taken into account. Unionist leaders envisaged an Ulster in which Protestants would form a permanent political elite: one consisting of counties Antrim and Down (with hefty Protestant majorities), and Derry and Armagh (with small Protestant majorities); Fermanagh and Tyrone (with no Protestant majorities at all, although Protestants held the greater part of the land) would be added to bring a sense of critical mass to the new order. The three remaining Ulster counties with their substantial Catholic majorities, however, would not be included. Unionist leaders were thus open to the charge that they were on the one hand deploying the argument of democratic imperatives, while simultaneously denying the justice of that same argument. They could also be accused of abandoning their Unionist brethren in Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal to their fate, in the interests of realpolitik.
The Home Rule bill passed a third reading in the Commons in January 1913. In the same month, the Ulster Volunteers were created as a resistance militia; rapidly, its membership climbed to over ninety thousand. The force was daunting and professional: it included many highly trained former members of the British army, and soon it had diversified into women’s auxiliary units and the paraphernalia of a regular army. Its creation led inevitably to the formation of a rival force: the Irish Volunteers, the inaugural meeting of which took place in November 1913 amid the bourgeois surroundings of Wynn’s Hotel in central Dublin, a few doors along from the Abbey. Redmond’s Irish Party had a stake in this new organization – figures in the party sat on its council – but so too did the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), reconstituted from the Fenian period and consisting of individuals who had nothing but disdain for the forces of constitutional nationalism as embodied in Redmond and his Westminster colleagues. Soon, the IRB membership was working discreetly to radicalize the politics of the new movement.
These IRB members consisted of older Fenian figures – for example, Tom Clarke, who had spent years in prison for his involvement in bomb attacks in England – together with younger, highly educated and energetically committed activists. Among these were Joseph Plunkett, a well-travelled scholar of Irish and Esperanto; Thomas MacDonagh, also an Irish scholar and a trade unionist; and Patrick Pearse, a poet, intellectual, barrister and founder of a school in Dublin dedicated to the revival of the Irish language. Pearse’s cultural nationalism was influenced in part by the romantic mythology of Gaelic Ireland – yet he was a pragmatist too: of the rising Unionist military organization in Ulster he noted bluntly that ‘an Orangeman with a rifle [is] a much less ridiculous figure than the nationalist without a rifle’.10 A key aspect of Pearse’s political ideology was ‘blood sacrifice’, the Christian-inflected concept prevalent in Europe at this time that war might help to cleanse and renew a nation. ‘When war comes to Ireland,’ he wrote during World War I, ‘she must welcome it as she would the angel of God. And she will.’11
The sense of a rising threat to public order was reflected in the govern
ment’s tentative proposal, in March 1914, to send army divisions to Ulster in order to face down any potential threat. This plan came to nothing, however, in the face of a proto-mutiny at the Curragh barracks, west of Dublin, in which scores of cavalry officers threatened to resign if ordered north. The episode amply demonstrated the range of Ulster Unionist support – and now tension was ratcheted up yet further as each of the rival militias armed itself, beginning in the small hours of 25 April when members of the Ulster Volunteers unloaded several hundred tonnes of German-manufactured guns and munitions at Bangor, Larne and Donaghadee harbours and distributed them with smooth efficiency across the province.
In response – and with the assistance of Sir Roger Casement, an Irish-born former British diplomat who had gravitated towards the Irish nationalist cause – the Irish Volunteers too procured weapons from Germany: in July, the yacht Asgard sailed into the harbour at Howth, north of Dublin, and unloaded its (rather smaller) cargo of munitions in broad daylight.* The arms were taken into the city for distribution; an army detachment belatedly sent out to intervene fired into a crowd of jeering Dubliners later that day, killing four; the event was captured by the painter Jack B. Yeats in Batchelor’s Walk, In Memory (1915), which portrays a woman laying flowers at the scene of the killings. Ireland appeared indeed to be on the edge of widespread civil unrest – and for the British authorities, a kaleidoscope of other problems was already looming: imprisoned suffragettes were on hunger strike; a general strike was threatened; and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, had been assassinated at Sarajevo in June. It seemed clear that, by summer’s end, Europe would be on fire.
It was in this context of both national and international danger that the government invoked the authority of King George V and convened a summit on Ireland at Buckingham Palace. Here, for four days in the middle of July 1914 – a few days before the Howth gun-running operation – the two sides thrashed about in stalemate. In his opening address, the monarch sought the middle ground: ‘Today the cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people…to me, it is unthinkable that we should be brought to the brink of fratricidal strife upon issues so capable of adjustment – if handled in a spirit of generous compromise.’12 The last word was of course key – but it did not at first appear as if any form of compromise could be achieved; certainly, the issue of Ulster’s possible exclusion from Home Rule represented a vast divide between the two sides. Eventually, Redmond implied that he would not see Home Rule forced on to any county in Ireland against the will of its population: a sign, perhaps, that the divide could after all be bridged; and while the Home Rule bill did indeed become law in September, it was immediately suspended.
For World War I had now begun in Europe, and the constitutional affairs of Ireland would as a result have to wait. Redmond consented to such a suspension in the expectation that a united Irish effort against Germany and Austria–Hungary would lead in turn to a measure of national reconciliation in Ireland itself – and to a form of postwar Home Rule that would prove acceptable to all. He could not know that his plans would be wholly outstripped by events.
Chapter Eleven
Revolution
For the moment, Redmond and his constitutional approach remained ostensibly in the ascendant in nationalist Ireland. In Ulster, Sir Edward Carson had offered the Ulster Volunteers for service in the British armed forces; and in a speech at Woodenbridge in County Wicklow in September 1914 Redmond matched the Unionist offer, with the result that a surge of Volunteers signed on to fight; in the first two years of war alone, it is estimated that a hundred thousand Irishmen enlisted in the services. Redmond was operating on the understanding that this would be a short, sharp European war that would be concluded victoriously by Christmas – a fatal miscalculation that would eat into his support in the months and years of war to come. But the prospect of the sacrifice of Irish lives in the course of any British war – irrespective of its duration – was wholly unacceptable to some: at the same time as Redmond was making his Woodenbridge speech, a meeting of the IRB in Dublin had rejected both his suppositions and his leadership of the nationalist cause, seeing the war in Europe as a potential opportunity for Ireland to throw off British rule once and for all.
The result was a split in the Volunteer movement: the great majority followed Redmond and became the National Volunteers; and it can be fairly estimated that in the war years some 260,000 Irish served the Crown in one capacity or another. Their reasons for enlisting were many and varied. Doubtless some now did so out of a sense of duty and conviction, but it is equally evident that many, as in years past, enlisted for simple economic and social reasons: in order to draw a wage, to have a job, to be fed and clothed. The experiences of these Irish soldiers both signify the tangled and shifting loyalties of these years and illuminate the harsh material reality of life for many Irish communities.*
Meanwhile, a small minority – ten thousand or thereabouts – refused to participate in the war effort and continued to march under the banner of the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers were headed by Eoin MacNeill, but unbeknownst to him, the movement was being subtly infiltrated by the IRB, with the latter’s leadership occupying positions of authority within the Volunteer organization: among these leaders was Pearse, who held the title of director of military organization. The Irish Volunteers were supported by a substantial body of anti-war sentiment in Ireland, stemming from principles of pacifism as well as of nationalist and anti-British feeling; in addition, Pearse and others could see positive virtues in the creation of a relatively small but tightly knit fighting force. Equally, the Volunteer movement was nothing if not diverse: MacNeill’s measured pragmatism did not, for example, suit the more passionate politics of Pearse, Plunkett and MacDonagh.
The formation in 1914 of Cumann na mBan, the female association affiliated to the Irish Volunteers, added to this sense of breadth. Its composition was equally varied in background and outlook: while it was not a feminist organization per se, for example, it existed and operated against a backdrop of fierce cultural debate as to the role of women in wider society. In the small world of radical nationalist politics, moreover, overlap was inevitable: figures such as the Anglo–Irish aristocrat-turned-political agitator Constance Markiewicz, for example, had close connections to both the suffrage and the labour movements, and had been active during the lock-out. Cumann na mBan brought distinctive sensibilities to the debate – even if its membership was frequently marginalized and ignored.
Soon, the rising death toll on the western front impacted upon public opinion, and the popularity of Redmond’s party began to dwindle. Yet for radical nationalism these remained unpromising times, for the majority of the population was inclined firmly away from insurrection. The ongoing conflict in Europe and the demands of the war effort were leading to a gradual rise in agricultural prices and thus to a measure of prosperity for many; in addition, army pay was adding to the modest incomes of families up and down the land; and for some, Ireland’s future was simply and indissolubly bound up with Britain and the empire. Yeats, meanwhile, could look icily on a Catholic commercial middle class that, content to ‘fumble in a greasy till / And add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer’, was much too busy making money to throw in its lot with a rebel of any complexion.1
World War I was almost two years old before trouble erupted in Ireland. The potential revolutionaries remained far from united: Connolly, for example, still maintained a separate militia in the form of the small Irish Citizen Army – although figures such as Markiewicz moved easily between it and the Irish Volunteers. Connolly’s interests and those of elements within the IRB would not mesh definitively until January 1916, when the former was brought to a secret meeting of the IRB leadership and formally involved in the slowly developing plans for an uprising of the Irish Volunteers that Easter. The revolutionaries’ plans, moreover, were muddled by divergences of views within their ranks: even the small core
of IRB leaders was at cross purposes as to the merits of a rising. Initial proposals for a revolt against British rule had envisaged a national uprising, abetted by German military landings on the west coast. This plan had then been gradually altered, with the final scheme – as with Emmet a century before – anticipating a rising in Dublin that would then fan general unrest across the country; and a second theatre of operations in the west triggered by the arrival of German arms shipments on the Atlantic seaboard.
Ironically, this evident lack of clarity also hampered the response of the British authorities to the developing situation. While it was clear that trouble was brewing in Ireland, it was also true that military drills and parades were a familiar sight on the streets of Dublin. In October 1915, for example, Connolly and Markiewicz had led the ICA militia in a mock assault on Dublin Castle. It was therefore no easy matter in these times to distinguish a mere drill from something more dangerous. The chief secretary, Augustine Birrell, mourned that ‘the misery of the situation is this – you had armed bodies of Volunteers all over the place’.2 At the same time, British calculations tended naturally to discount the perils of home-grown insurrection in favour of time-honoured fears: in this case, the possibility of an invasion of Ireland by Germany, as a back-door means of attacking Britain itself. So, even though the authorities were in receipt of a good deal of intelligence, when trouble did flare in central Dublin on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, they were still caught unprepared.