A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  In gratitude for the Irish Party’s support throughout this crisis, Asquith promised Home Rule. And in 1911 the peers bowed to the inevitable and passed the Parliament Act. Henceforth the Lords could reject bills only for three successive parliamentary sessions—roughly two years. If Asquith kept his promise, Ireland seemed sure to have its own parliament by 1914.

  Irish Unionists were horrified. They had chosen Sir Edward Carson as their leader in 1910. One of the most brilliant lawyers of his day, Unionist MP for Trinity College Dublin and a former Conservative minister, Carson had become a household name in 1895 when he brought down the playwright Oscar Wilde. On 23 September 1911 he addressed 50,000 men from Unionist Clubs and Orange lodges at Strandtown in east Belfast:

  With the help of God, you and I joined together ... will yet defeat the most nefarious conspiracy that has ever been hatched against a free people.... We must be prepared ... the morning Home Rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of Ulster.

  The Conservatives threw caution to the winds and gave full backing to Unionist resistance. Their leader, Andrew Bonar Law, whose father had been a Presbyterian minister in Coleraine, came to Belfast on Easter Tuesday 1912. Seventy special trains brought in 100,000 loyalist demonstrators who, after marching past the platforms at the Balmoral showgrounds, listened to prayers by the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and the Presbyterian Moderator, and joined in singing Psalm 90. After the unfurling of the largest Union Flag ever woven Bonar Law assured them that they were like their forebears besieged in Derry:

  Once more you hold the pass, the pass for the Empire. You are a besieged city. The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you have closed your gates. The Government have erected by their Parliament Act a boom against you to shut you off from the help of the British people. You will burst that boom.

  Two days later, on 11 April 1912, Asquith introduced the Home Rule Bill in the Commons. Redmond told the House with evident emotion:

  If I may say so reverently, I personally thank God that I have lived to see this day.

  Episode 211

  THE COVENANT

  O God, our help in ages past,

  Our hope for years to come,

  Our shelter from the stormy blast,

  And our eternal home ...

  The Ulster Hall, Belfast, Saturday 28 September 1912. The Protestants of Ulster had set aside this day, ‘Ulster Day’, to show the world their determination—to demonstrate their detestation for the Liberal government’s Third Home Rule Bill now before parliament. After prayers and lessons the Presbyterian minister Dr William McKean rose to deliver his sermon. He took as his text a verse from the First Epistle to Timothy: ‘Keep that which is committed to thy trust’:

  We are plain, blunt men.... The Irish Question is at bottom a war against Protestantism; it is an attempt to establish a Roman Catholic ascendancy in Ireland to begin the disintegration of the Empire by securing a second parliament in Dublin.

  All over Ulster people emerged from churches and meeting halls to sign ‘Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant’. They were pledging themselves

  to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in using all means which may be found to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland.

  At noon prominent Ulster Unionists, led by Sir Edward Carson, walked to the City Hall. Its Portland stone gleamed in the sun. Greeted by the Lord Mayor, aldermen and councillors in their scarlet and ermine robes, Carson entered the vestibule and advanced towards a circular table directly under the dome. There, with a silver pen, he was the first to sign the Covenant. When he re-emerged, the reverential hum of the vast crowd changed to tempestuous cheering.

  At 2.30 p.m. a procession of bands from every Protestant quarter of Belfast converged on the City Hall. All played different tunes simultaneously, producing an extraordinary cacophony. The Pall Mall Gazette described the scene:

  Seen from the topmost outside gallery of the dome, the square below, and the streets striking away from it were black with people. Through the mass, with drums and fifes, sashes and banners, the clubs marched all day. The streets surged with cheering.

  Bowler-hatted stewards struggled to regulate the flow of men eager to sign. A double row of desks stretching right round the City Hall made it possible for 550 to sign simultaneously. Some signed in their own blood. Signatures were still being affixed after 11 p.m. Women signed their own declaration. Altogether 471,414 men and women who could prove Ulster birth signed either the Covenant or the declaration—over 30,000 more women, in fact, than men.

  At 8.30 p.m. a brass band advanced towards the Ulster Club in Castle Place playing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. Its staff major and spear-carriers had almost to carve a way through the surging mass to accompany Carson in a waiting motor-brake to the docks. The vehicle was pulled down High Street by hundreds of willing hands. The Pall Mall Gazette reported:

  With a roaring hurricane of cheers punctuated on every side by the steady rattle of revolver shots, onward swept this whole city in motion with a tumult that was mad.

  At Donegall Quay a fusillade of shots saluted Sir Edward as he stepped aboard the SS Patriotic. From the upper deck he shouted out:

  I have very little voice left. I ask you while I am away in England and Scotland and fighting your battle in the Imperial Parliament to keep the old flag flying (cheers). And ‘No Surrender!’ (loud cheers).

  As the vessel steamed into the Victoria Channel, bonfires in Great Patrick Street sprang into life; a huge fire on the Cave Hill threw a brilliant glare over the sky; fifty other bonfires blazed from hills and headlands around Belfast Lough; and salvos of rockets shot up into the air.

  Denounced as ‘a silly masquerade’ by the Irish News, ‘an impressive farce’ by the Freeman’s Journal, and by the Manchester Guardian as ‘anarchic hectoring by the ascendancy party’, the signing of the Covenant and the attendant celebrations did show that Ulster Protestants were in earnest.

  In fact they were more in earnest than the general public—and, indeed, the government—then realised. As early as November 1910 the inner committee of the Ulster Unionist Council secretly sought a quotation from a German arms manufacturer for 20,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. In March 1911 the UUC, including Carson himself, voted its first cash allocation for the buying of rifles. Carson urged the Council’s inner circle: ‘I am convinced that unless a steady supply is started, we will be caught like rats in a trap.’

  The gun was returning to Irish politics. Meanwhile the Nationalist camp was being severely dislocated by the outbreak of a fierce class struggle in Dublin.

  Episode 212

  THE GREAT DUBLIN LOCK-OUT

  Dublin, once the second city of the Empire, had struggled to prosper under the Union. Apart from Guinness’s Brewery and Jacob’s biscuit factory, it had failed to acquire industries of any size. And by the start of the twentieth century doctors, lawyers, public servants and other members of the middle classes, commuting by electric tram, had moved out to the suburbs. The once elegant Georgian terraces they left behind decayed to become shabby tenements rented out room by room to the families of the poor.

  The majority of the men made a meagre living as casual labourers, carters and dockers. Women earned pittances as domestic servants and washerwomen, or became prostitutes seeking business from the many soldiers stationed in the city. Disease flourished in the crowded, damp and draughty tenements. Dublin’s death rate was the highest in the United Kingdom.

  Labour unrest over much of Europe spilled over into Ireland. Jim Larkin, a union leader from Liverpool, led a great dock strike in Belfast in 1907. He then moved to Dublin where he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. The leading figure in the Dublin Employers’ Federation, William Martin Murphy, set out to smash Larkin’s union. Owner of the Dublin t
ramways, the Irish Independent newspaper and much else besides, Murphy began by offering his employees a stark choice: leave the itgwu or lose your jobs. On 21 August 1913 he dismissed a hundred men.

  This action was regarded by the trade unionists as a ‘lock-out’. Given courage by Murphy, other employers also locked out their workers. A titanic class struggle had begun. Larkin called all the tramway workers out on strike on 26 August. As the future playwright Seán O’Casey remembered, ‘While all Dublin was harnessing itself into its best for the Horse Show, the trams suddenly stopped. Drivers and conductors left them standing wherever they happened to be.... They came out bravely, marching steadily towards hunger, harm and hostility.’

  Every night Larkin stiffened the resolve of the workers by his fiery oratory. Countess Markievicz recalled:

  Listening to Larkin, I realised that I was in the presence of something that I had never come across before, some great primeval force, rather than a man. A tornado, a storm-driven wave, the rush into life of spring and the blasting breath of autumn, all seemed to emanate from the power that spoke.

  The authorities banned a meeting in O’Connell Street fixed for Sunday 31 August. But on the afternoon of that day Larkin, wearing Count Markievicz’s frock coat, evaded the watching police and entered the Imperial Hotel opposite Nelson Pillar—a hotel owned, incidentally, by Murphy. Ernie O’Malley was there and described what happened next:

  Jim Larkin, to keep a promise, appeared on the balcony of the hotel, wearing a beard as a disguise. He spoke amidst cheers, and hoots for the employers. Police swept down from many quarters, hemmed in the crowd, and used their heavy batons.... I saw women knocked down and kicked.... I could hear the crunch as the heavy sticks struck unprotected skulls.

  Heavy-handed action by the police, who killed one man, resulted in a special government inquiry. The dispute paralysed the city. Murphy now had 404 employers behind him.

  The strikers and their families were starving. British trade unionists sent a steamship every week loaded with food. Better-off sympathisers helped to run soup kitchens. George Russell, the writer from Portadown who signed himself ‘Æ’, fired off an angry letter to the newspapers:

  It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see four hundred masters deciding openly upon starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride.…

  You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by your victory. The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they—it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order.

  As the lock-out continued the leaders decided to send some of the starving children to be cared for a time by families in Liverpool. The Archbishop of Dublin objected that the children might be sent to homes which were not Catholic: ‘The Dublin women now subjected to this cruel temptation to part with their helpless offspring ... can be no longer held worthy of the name of Catholic mothers.’

  Touring England, Larkin failed to get the sympathetic strikes he needed to win. On 18 January 1914 the Union advised the men to return to work. Larkin declared: ‘We are beaten. We make no bones about it.’

  Meanwhile, throughout this labour dispute—in effect a struggle within the nationalist camp—the issue of Home Rule never dropped out of sight.

  Episode 213

  THE CURRAGH ‘MUTINY’

  ‘Traitor!’, roared Sir William Bull across the floor of the House of Commons. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith had just made it clear that Home Rule would be pushed through the Commons by the guillotine. That day, 13 November 1912, tempers flared. Conservative and Unionist MPs chanted: ‘Resign! Resign!... Civil war! Civil war!’ Ulsterman Ronald McNeill, MP for East Kent, hurled a bound copy of the Standing Orders at Home Secretary Winston Churchill, striking him on the head. Nevertheless, early in 1913 the bill passed the Commons.

  Ulster Unionists had pledged themselves to use ‘all means which may be found necessary’ to stop Home Rule. ‘All means’ included the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in January 1913. By the end of the year the UVF had grown to 90,000 men—and this did not include the Motor Car Corps, the Signalling and Dispatch Rider Corps, the Ballymena Horse, the Medical Corps and the Nursing Corps. In Dublin Patrick Pearse, headmaster of St Enda’s boys’ school, declared: ‘Personally I think the Orangeman with a rifle is a much less ridiculous figure than the nationalist without a rifle.’ The Irish history professor Eoin MacNeill agreed, and presided over a crowded meeting in the Rotunda concert hall in Dublin on 25 November 1913. There it was agreed to form the Irish Volunteers. What were these Volunteers for? The stated object was somewhat vague: ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland’.

  We now know that no fewer than twelve out of thirty men on the Irish Volunteers’ executive were members of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, dedicated to armed rebellion. Tom Clarke, an IRB ex-convict, wrote enthusiastically from Dublin to Joe McGarrity, the Clan na Gael leader in Philadelphia:

  Joe, it is worth living in Ireland these times—there is an awakening.... Wait till they get their first clutching the steel barrel of a business rifle and then Irish instincts and Irish manhood can be relied upon.

  In fact there were few enough rifles as yet for the Volunteers to clutch.

  Meanwhile Asquith desperately sought a resolution. In 1912 one of his Liberal backbenchers, T. C. Agar-Robartes, had moved an amendment to the Home Rule Bill to exclude from its operation the four most Protestant counties in Ulster, saying: ‘I have never heard that orange bitters will mix with Irish whiskey.’ But his amendment had been decisively rejected. Now Asquith and his cabinet drafted a variety of partition proposals. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party, responded: ‘Irish nationalists can never be the assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation.... The two nation theory is to us an abomination and a blasphemy.’ But Redmond did support Asquith’s amendment allowing each Ulster county to opt out of Home Rule for six years. Then Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader, let him off the hook: ‘We do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years.’

  That was on 9 March 1914. Ten days later Carson challenged the government to ‘come and try conclusions with us in Ulster.... I am off to Belfast.... I go to my people.’

  Carson had gone to set up a Provisional Government of Ulster. Asquith felt he had to take decisive action to prevent the UVF seizing control of the province. Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered a naval cordon into position: two light cruisers to Belfast Lough, and seven battleships and eight destroyers to the Clyde. Colonel John Seely, the War Minister, rushed troops northwards.

  Then fifty-eight cavalry officers at the Curragh army camp in Co. Kildare announced that they would prefer to be dismissed rather than lead their men against Ulster loyalists. The War Minister appeared to cave in to this so-called ‘mutiny’: he gave the officers a written assurance that the government did not intend to crush political opposition in the north. Asquith dismissed Seely, but it was too late. Fully alerted, the UVF moved its headquarters to a heavily sandbagged position at Captain James Craig’s home, ‘Craigavon’, in east Belfast.

  Meanwhile barges steamed from Hamburg eastwards along the newly constructed Kiel Canal to Danish waters in the Baltic. Here in great secrecy Major Fred Crawford, on behalf of the UVF, prepared to take on board 24,000 modern rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition. Then he steamed out in a gale into the North Sea. To avoid recognition, in the dark he transferred the 216 tons of arms to a coal-boat, the SS Clydevalley, off the coast of Wexford on 19 April. As Crawford approached Ulster, members of the UVF Motor Car Corps received a momentous order:

  Your car should arrive at Larne in the night o
f Friday–Saturday 24th–25th instant at 1 a.m. punctually but not before that hour for a very secret and important duty.

  Episode 214

  TO THE BRINK OF CIVIL WAR

  During the small hours of Saturday morning 25 April 1914 members of the Ulster Volunteer Force unloaded from the SS Clydevalley 216 tons of modern rifles and ammunition at Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee. There was no interference: the authorities futilely directed their attention to a decoy ship, the SS Balmerino, in Belfast Lough. Motor-cars sped through the night distributing the arms to prepared dumps all over Ulster. It was the first significant use of the internal combustion engine in military history.

  An Englishman, Captain Wilfrid Spender, played a key role in the operation. His wife Lilian recorded in her diary:

  W. had told me he would have to be away that night ... seeing after the big Test Mobilisation ... which was being kept a profound secret until the last moment.... His post was to be at Musgrave Channel, assisting at the Hoax which took in all the Customs officers, & kept them occupied all night, watching the Balmerino which of course contained nothing but coal!