England has killed Christian children, has imprisoned Christian women in barbed wire enclosures, has devastated Christian churches where there was less poverty and less vice than in any other Christian community in the world and has armed savages to help her in a war which has its origins in motives as base and as odious as ever prompted a Sultan of Turkey to burn an Armenian village … And yet Cardinal Vaughan,* in the name of the Catholic Church in England … calls down God’s blessing on the arms which are exterminating Christian nations.1
Younger and more militant republicans took up arms in defence of the Boers. Arthur Griffith – a founder of Sinn Fein and one day to become the President of the Irish Free State government – and John MacBride – pillar of the Celtic Literary Society and active member of the revolutionary Irish Republic Brotherhood – had gone together to the Transvaal to work in the Langlaagte gold mine.2 MacBride remained in South Africa and organised an Irish Brigade to fight with the Boers against the British. Most of its members were Americans of Irish origin, but they fought under a gold-fringed green banner which was emblazoned with a harp and the motto ‘Our Lord. Our People. Our Language’.
A second Irish Brigade, under the self-styled Colonel Lynch, South African correspondent of Collier’s Weekly, was largely made up of Afrikaners and augmented by German and French mercenaries. Between them, the two battalions did not number five hundred men, whereas several thousand Irishmen – some in Irish regiments but most in ‘English’ infantry battalions – fought for the Empire. The London music hall audiences sang ‘Brave, Dublin Fusiliers’ and asked ‘What Do You Think of the Irish Now?’?3 But the Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland) organised by Maud Gonne, the daughter of a Unionist colonel in the British Army, were doing all they could to undermine the morale of British soldiers stationed in Dublin. Young women who ‘walked out with Redcoats’ were harassed in the street. The Board of Guardians was persuaded to enquire into the number of illegitimate children in the Dublin workhouse, with the clear implication that the responsibility lay with the British garrison. Irish nationalism depended on a combustible combination of romanticism and violence. So, despite her success on the streets and Irish battalions’ failure in South Africa, Maud Gonne believed that ‘the band of Irishmen in the [Boer] Brigade had done more for Ireland’s honour than all of us at home’.4
Maud Gonne’s introduction to Irish politics had been conventional social work among the starving peasantry of the western counties. She was immortalised by W. B. Yeats – who loved her and lost her – in his poem Easter 1916:
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful …?
That unlikely description of a revolutionary was complemented by an even more surprising, but equally forlorn, encomium to two other women whose names are forever linked in the cause of Irish nationalism:
The light of evening Lissadell
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Lissadell was the family home of Eva and Constance Gore-Booth. Like Maud Gonne, the Gore-Booth sisters were daughters of the Protestant ascendancy. In her youth Constance Gore-Booth had shared Maud Gonne’s enthusiasm for hunting. The Master of the Sligo Hunt said that she rode as well as the best men in the field. She also, wrongly as it turned out, believed herself to possess artistic talent. At art school in London, she showed no interest in politics. After she married Count Markievicz, a minor Polish aristocrat, and returned to Ireland she patronised rather than practised the arts and helped to raise funds for the Abbey Theatre which Yeats and Lady Gregory had founded in Dublin. During amateur dramatics rehearsals, she found a copy of the magazine Sinn Fein lying about. She read it while waiting for her cue. It set out the argument for taking Irish nationalism out of Westminster and on to the Dublin streets. She was instantly converted to Arthur Griffith’s cause. Paradoxically, the Countess Markievicz was to become the first woman to win election to the Imperial Parliament – though she would not take her seat in the Commons. Yeats turned against her. But the nationalists forgave her for the upper-class accent which made her speak of her devotion to ‘Ahland’. By the time she joined them, they were used to the habits of the Protestant ascendancy. When a nationalist prisoner was released, emotionally unstable, from Portland Gaol, she saved him from mental hospital by what she described as ‘confining him to my old nurse in her peaceful little house’.5
During the blockhouse and wire phase of the South African war, Irish nationalists in Dublin constantly demonstrated in favour of the Boers or, to be more exact, against the British. They would have supported anyone who was fighting against the Empire, but there was, amongst Irish nationalists, a genuine sympathy for oppressed people of every sort. That attitude was typified by Roger Casement, scholar, diplomat and mystic. In 1904, he became a centre of world attention when his report on the Belgian colonial administration of the Congo exposed the ‘atrocities’ which were an established feature of the regime. A year later he wrote an account, for the United Irishman, of his father’s campaigns with Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot. Like many middle-class nationalists, he was eclectic to the point of eccentricity in his pursuit of the Irish ideal. While abroad on Consular Service, he had insisted that his address was the Consulate of Great Britain and Ireland, and he wanted a separate team to represent Ireland in the Olympic Games.6 He held less than practical views on how the campaign for independence should proceed: Irish Nationalist MPs should desert Westminster and return to Dublin and form a National Executive to ‘create a confident, reliant National mind in the country’.7 Whatever the implausibility of his plans, he contributed to the emotional impetus that kept nationalism alive in early Edwardian Ireland when Westminster believed that the dream had died. Like Yeats, Maud Gonne and the Gore-Booth sisters, Casement thought of himself as a servant of Cathleen ni Houlihan, Ireland’s mystic queen.
The social and cultural elite formed only a small part of the hinterland from which Nationalist politicians could draw strength. Despite Gladstones two Land Acts, Ireland remained ‘the most distressful country’. Sixty-three per cent of Dublin’s population – about 194,000 out of 304,000 people – were officially designated as ‘working class’.8 Half of the ‘working class’ lived in tenement houses. Half of those families occupied only one room. Communal ‘stand pipes’ provided water. Sometimes one tap served as many as ninety individuals. The same number of families often shared two earth closets. ‘We cannot conceive’, an official report concluded, ‘how any self-respecting male or female could be expected to use accommodation such as we have seen.’ Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, the standard of living in Ireland was appreciably below that in mainland Britain. The cost of living rose more quickly in Dublin than in London, but Dublin wages, always below London levels, did not keep pace. Printers were paid about 90 per cent of the London wage, skilled building workers 70 per cent and labourers 54 per cent. The time was ripe for intervention by the trade unions which had been a feature of English industrial life, at least for skilled craftsmen, for seventy years.
James Larkin, the son of a poor Irish immigrant, worked (like his father) in the Liverpool docks. He became the General Organiser of the National Union of Dock Labourers. In 1907 he extended his work to Dublin and then moved on to Belfast. A year later, he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and became its general secretary. Larkin was essentially a syndicalist, for whom Home Rule took a poor third place to an increased hourly rate for Irish industrial workers and the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Griffith, of Sinn Fein, thought of Larkin as a representative of English trade unionism in a nation which wanted to put aside all things English; but the preface to the Transport Union’s handbook held out hope that Larkin would one day be an effective ally. A series of land acts had, in Larkin’s Marxist judgement, transformed Ireland from a feudal to a capitalist society. He wanted to free its people from the ‘soulless, s
ordid, money-grabbing propensities of the Irish capitalist class’. The land belonged to people who were ‘entitled to the fullness of the earth and the abundance thereof’.9 Those views he propagated, to the immense advantage of Irish nationalism, in The Irish Worker, a newspaper with a circulation ten times as great as Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein, the official journal of the party which later took that name, ever achieved.
James Connolly was, like Larkin, the son of an Irish labourer who had emigrated to find work. Young James, with no better prospects than his father – carting refuse in Edinburgh when his son was born – enlisted in the British Army. He remained with the colours for almost seven years but – at least according to legend – deserted when he had only a few months left to serve.10 He returned to Scotland, first to Perth and then to Dundee, where two branches of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation competed for his attention with the advocates of ‘New Unionism’, the industrial organisation of unskilled labourers. Connolly’s militancy was the product of experience. His father, having suffered an accident at work, was demoted to lavatory attendant on a wage reduced from 19s 6d to 7s 6d a week.11
In 1895, Connolly was appointed full-time organiser of the Dublin Socialist Club and returned to Ireland. A year later, he became active in the Republican movement. Neither Connolly nor the cause prospered. In 1903 he emigrated to America where he lived with his cousins in up-state New York and was employed as agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.12 His fellow workers were deeply unimpressed by his advocacy of the principles laid down in Marx’s Erfurt Programme, and in 1910, disillusioned once more, he returned to Ireland to become the Belfast organiser of Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He remained an unrepentant Marxist. ‘If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin, unless you set about the organisation of a socialist republic, your efforts would be in vain … England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that freedom whose cause you betrayed.’13
Maud Gonne, who adopted Griffith’s Sinn Fein policy ‘because it taught self-reliance and called for the withdrawal of the Irish Members from Westminster and the setting up of the Irish Council responsible for the Irish nation’, described herself as the ‘link between Griffith and James Connolly on one side and between him and Yeats on the other’.14 But about one subject they needed no intermediary to reconcile their views. Both men knew that independence alone would not solve the land’s problems.
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man ‘Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stones.’
At the moment of ‘terrible beauty’ in 1916, James Connolly – leading his Irish Citizens’ Army from Liberty Hall, the headquarters of his union – established his place in Republican folklore as a warrior and he went on to achieve immortality as one of the martyrs of the uprising. He stands, in the pantheon of Irish nationalism, alongside Eamonn de Valera and Michael Collins, both late recruits to the cause. De Valera, a mathematics teacher, did not become formally associated with the nationalist movement until November 1913. Connolly was essentially an organiser who was planning revolution in Dublin when young Michael Collins was still making his way from Clonakilly to the Post Office Savings Bank in London’s West Kensington, and then through Horne and Co. (Stockbrokers) to the Board of Trade. In 1916 Collins and Connolly were shoulder to shoulder alongside Plunkett, MacDonagh, Pearse and MacDiarmad in the Dublin General Post Office, while de Valera was directing fire on the same English enemy from Boland’s Mill. Connolly’s claim to stand apart from and above them rests on the years of methodical work he put in for Irish nationalism and Ireland’s poor which preceded the declaration of the Republic in 1916.
In Westminster, despite the signs of burgeoning revolution which Connolly, Larkin, Gonne and the Gore-Booth sisters typified, the politicians continued to think of Home Rule as a matter to be decided by the normal process of parliamentary and party business. The Unionists reiterated that they were against it for ever and the Liberals did business with John Redmond, the leader of the Nationalist Party, according to their needs and his strengths. When they could form a government without his support, Ireland was forgotten.
In defence of the imperial Parliament, it has to be acknowledged that it was difficult for English gentlemen to believe that politics could be taken from the ballot box on to the streets with such effect that the government of the greatest empire that the world had ever known would be forced into a change of policy. They had been warned. In the United Irishman Arthur Griffith set out the position plainly enough. ‘The era of constitutional possibilities for Irish nationality ended on the day that Charles Stewart Parnell died.’15 But Griffith, they believed, was whistling in the dark. Irish nationalism had run its course. When Charles Dolan, the Nationalist Party Member of Parliament for North Leitrim, resigned his seat and fought the by-election as a Sinn Fein candidate he was beaten decisively. The assumption in Whitehall was that ‘Fenian outrages’ were, like every other aspect of Republicanism, part of Ireland’s unhappy history.
In 1903 Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman (a republican paper older than his own Sinn Fein) interrupted the advocacy of route marching and musket drill to call for a boycott of King Edward’s visit to Ireland. ‘To Irish Nationalists, the King is as foreign as the Akond of Swat, but, unlike that potentate, he claims to be the sovereign of this country.’16 The King was welcomed with almost universal rapture. ‘No sovereign’, wrote the Cork Examiner, ‘visiting our shores ever met with anything like the hearty good will, the honest unaffected welcome extended by the people of all classes in every part of the county … This fortnight has made history.’17 The newspaper was, by implication, comparing the King’s reception with the hostility with which he had been greeted when, as Prince of Wales, he had visited Ireland in 1885.
It seemed that the political tide was moving against Home Rule. And Lord Rosebery’s several attacks on Campbell-Bannerman, which had begun when the new party leader was under threat because of his outspoken views on the Boer War, had been increasingly focused on the Liberal Party’s continued commitment to Irish self-government. It seemed that the opponents of what was still official party policy had found the champion they needed. The Liberal Imperial Council, founded at the turn of the century, was emboldened to issue a blatantly divisive manifesto. ‘The time has arrived when it is necessary to clearly and permanently distinguish Liberals in whose policy with regard to Imperial questions patriotic voters may justly repose confidence from those whose opinions naturally disqualify them from controlling the actions of an imperial Parliament.’18
Opponents of Home Rule were waiting for a politician of standing and stature to lead the fight. Rosebery was clearly the man. In February 1902, he had published a letter in The Times which expressly repudiated Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership of the Liberal Party. The letter was a reply to Campbell-Bannerman’s who had asked rhetorically if Rosebery’s criticisms of Liberal policy were made from the ‘interior of our political tabernacles or from some vantage point outside?’ Rosebery’s answer was that he ‘remained outside the tabernacle, but not … in solitude’. The threat was implied but obvious. Then Rosebery struck again with his ‘fly-blown phylacteries’ speech in Chesterfield and the rejection of ‘Mr Gladstone’s party’ for as long as it supported Home Rule – a particularly damaging assertion since Campbell-Bannerman had just recommitted the party to support that policy.
Campbell-Bannerman, who was in no mood to temporise, denounced what amounted to a call for schism. In the passionate debate which followed, many of the speeches were made at lunches and after dinners. So it came to be called ‘war to the knife and fork’. But there was very little that was congenial or gregarious about the spirit in which the demands and counter-demands were made. From time to time, Liberal politicians were distracted from their internecine warfare by Lloyd George’s allegation that the Chamberlains were the beneficiaries of government co
ntracts for Boer War military supplies. Beneath the surface of superficial unity in face of a common enemy, the disagreements rumbled on.
There was talk of attempts, by Liberal Home Rulers, to oust ‘imperialists’ and plots by ‘imperialists’ to unseat Home Rulers. Campbell-Bannerman – who had survived a vote of confidence in his leadership – told a party meeting, perhaps as the price of his survival, that he had no objection to the expression of differing views, only to the creation of organisations formed with the intention of ‘perpetuating and accelerating’ them. Asquith, whose manoeuvring on the subject was more astute than honourable, was, Campbell-Bannerman believed, in a strong position to calm the agitation. A request that he should not speak at one of the ‘imperialist’ banquets was rejected with the typically urbane explanation that he had already accepted the invitation and it would be discourteous not to fulfil his obligation.
The campaign against Campbell-Bannerman gained force. Opponents leap-frogged each other as they extended their criticism from South Africa to Ireland and from Ireland to the man who persisted in advocating Home Rule. Haldane exploited Asquith’s determination to maintain his position as ‘Prime Minister in waiting’ by asking him to lead the demand for a change of direction with a public repudiation of the Liberals’ traditional commitment to Irish self-government. Asquith responded with speculation about the possibility of a ‘clean slate’ promoting a reconciliation with the Liberal Unionists. When he addressed his constituents he endorsed Rosebery’s view of Home Rule but was silent on the subject of Campbell-Bannerman. Asquith used the high regard in which Gladstone was held to justify the rejection of his most passionately held belief. Even Gladstone’s ‘magnificent courage, unequalled authority and unquenchable enthusiasm’ had not convinced the British people of the need for an Irish parliament.
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