The division between the two chief Irish enforcers was echoed in the Irish government. The ‘greening’ of Dublin Castle, the remarkable increase in the number of Catholics in high office since the turn of the century, produced a disconcerting opposition to conscription. Most alarming was the refusal of the Lord Chief Justice to discipline local magistrates who passed anti-conscription resolutions.7 The division was also mirrored among British ministers. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Henry Duke, preferred the Inspector General’s cautious assessment, warning that full conscription would ‘be likely to end the whole chapter of effort to establish concord between the two countries’. It would ‘consolidate into one mass of antagonism all the Nationalist elements in Ireland, politicians, priests, men and women’.8 But Duke’s fellow Conservative Walter Long, the First Lord of the Admiralty, took a much firmer line. Long, who had served as chief secretary ten years before, had (largely through lack of competition) established himself as the government’s leading expert on Irish policy. In April 1918 he was given an unprecedented liaison role, ‘responsible for Irish administration to the Cabinet’.9 His confidence that though ‘the Irish will talk, shout, perhaps get up a fight or two,’ they ‘will know when they are beaten’, reflected his paternal take on Irish national character.
Curiously, at no point did the Cabinet seem to worry about the advisability of arming and training a vast number of potential dissidents. Duke’s gloomy reflection in late March that ‘we might almost as well recruit Germans’ was ignored, and when the Cabinet discussed the issue at the beginning of April, even Duke had a bout of optimism. Although it would inevitably ‘cause disturbances’, he thought conscription could be carried through – perhaps by a Home Rule government. He even thought there was a chance of setting up ‘a Conservative Parliament’ if Home Rule was implemented alongside conscription. (‘To support the introduction of Conscription and not to carry it through’, however, would be disastrous, and create ‘a state of suppressed rebellion’.)10 Within a fortnight Duke had decided that in any scenario conscription ‘will produce a disaster’.11 He resigned on the day the Military Service Bill was rushed through parliament, 16 April. The Cabinet followed Long’s line. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, belligerently dismissed Duke’s fears of civil war with one of his favourite historical parallels: ‘Lincoln had to face a similar situation.’12 Like Lincoln, he implied, he would not flinch from fighting to vindicate the Union.
Seeing Duke as a broken reed, he had been casting around for a more robust replacement for several months, but the search was not an easy one. The Irish chief secretaryship was never the most coveted Cabinet post, and in this moment of crisis its appeal was especially limited. Two Liberals shied away, one because he did not want to enforce conscription, the other because he (sensibly) doubted that the government was ‘firm on Home Rule’. In this fix, a remarkable new idea emerged. The Chief Secretary would be spared the task of enforcing conscription; he would stay in London, and the lord lieutenancy would be put ‘in commission’. Ireland would be governed instead by three commissioners, military, civil and legal: Lord French, Lord Midleton and Sir James Campbell. This emergency scheme had at least the virtue of being a kind of structural reform of the Irish administration – something scarcely attempted since the 1801 Act of Union, even though the administration’s flaws had always been obvious. Though it was stillborn, it had fateful consequences. Field Marshal French immediately crossed to Dublin and set up what he called ‘Advanced General Headquarters’ in Dublin Castle. A volunteer was eventually found to take on the job of chief secretary, the rather obscure Liberal Edward Shortt, and within a fortnight French was made lord lieutenant. In his own mind he went to Ireland as, in effect, military governor – he wanted it made clear that the plan was to set up ‘a quasi-military government in Ireland’ with a soldier at its head.13
French, who had been parked as commander-in-chief of home forces since being relieved of command of the expeditionary force in France, was spoiling for a fight. His immediate priority was to tighten controls on the press (which was ‘very outspoken’ and doing ‘a good deal of harm’), arrest people who ‘spread discontent and sedition’, and make arrangements to place any of the large cities of Ireland ‘in a state of siege [a concept not recognized in British law, which he may have borrowed from the French] at an hour’s notice’. But the ‘essence’ of his project was to be air power, a weapon so far used only in open warfare. He planned to establish ‘strongly entrenched “Air Camps” ’ in the centre of each of the four Irish provinces. With the range of military aircraft then available, the size of these areas should allow them at least one hour ‘to play about with either bombs or machine guns’. This cheery view of the use of lethal force was echoed in French’s darkly humorous assertion that air power ‘ought to put the fear of God into these playful young Sinn Feiners’.14
French certainly did not downplay the challenge: he had ‘no doubt that the country is thoroughly roused by a bitter animosity and resolution to oppose conscription’. The issue went critical on the day he wrote this to Lloyd George, 18 April. Meetings of nationalist leaders (including the Labour leader Thomas Johnson) at the Dublin Mansion House, and the Catholic Hierarchy at Maynooth, signalled an unprecedented fusion of Irish national opinion. Significantly, the Irish party withdrew from Westminster – not for the first time in its history, indeed, but this time seemingly proving that Sinn Féin’s much mocked abstentionist strategy was better than its own. It was no surprise that conscription was hugely unpopular; the question was whether opposition to it would shift into direct action, and maybe even to armed resistance. Sinn Féin, whose consistent rejection of military service made it the natural rallying point for anti-conscription activity, remained studiedly ambiguous on this.
The Catholic Church was also, inevitably, ambivalent. Many of the junior clergy were already engaged in the national movement – as early as January 1917 the RIC had warned that ‘practically all’ the clergy ‘showed open sympathy with the action taken by the rebels’ in 1916. This may have been an exaggeration, but the drift was unmistakable. There had been patriot priests before 1916 – Ernest Blythe had been curious to find one a member of the IRB – but they had kept a low profile. The celebration of the piety of the rebels, led by the Catholic Bulletin, created a new dynamic. From July 1916 the Bulletin published a series of biographical notes under the heading ‘The Events of Easter Week’, and by September over fifty ‘martyrs’ had been commemorated. The listing went on through 1917. Martyrdom could not be in a mistaken cause. The ‘identification of Catholic practice and republican nationalism’ was deliberate and sustained.15 The long quarrel between the Fenians and the Church was being composed. Between 1917 and 1921 something like half the priests working in Clare, for instance, would publicly associate themselves with the separatist cause.16 When Sinn Féin began to contest elections in 1917, eighty-odd priests across the country subscribed to an election fund. Fr Michael O’Flanagan, a leading influence in the early Sinn Féin election campaigns (in the view of Sinn Féin activist Kevin O’Shiel he was ‘far and away the most powerful factor’ in winning the North Roscommon election), became the organization’s vice-president in October 1917.
The bishops were naturally more cautious. Although one or two of them had fiercely denounced the repression of the 1916 rebellion, the Hierarchy’s traditional endorsement of legitimately constituted order kept it out of politics. In June 1917, it issued a letter of instruction repeating the long-standing ban on priests speaking on ‘political or kindred affairs’ in church, but calling on them to ‘exhort their people to beware of dangerous associations’, and ‘sedulously shun all movements that are not in accord with the principles of Catholic teaching’. Though it did not precisely identify any of these, it hinted that some ‘forms of government that are popular at the moment’ were associated with ‘civil tyranny and religious persecution’. The ‘form’ it had in mind was surely republican.17 At the same time, the Church’s
support for the old parliamentary party was being eroded, especially in the north, because of John Redmond’s acceptance of partition in the 1916 constitutional negotiations.
The conscription threat ended this political neutrality. Military intelligence reported that the Catholic clergy, who, ‘except for some of the younger members’, had so far been ‘generally pro-British and anti-Sinn Fein’, had now ‘to a man declared against conscription and all their influence will be used against it’. The bishops had even discussed trying to persuade Catholic RIC men not to enforce it.18 Crucially, the Hierarchy opposed compulsory military service not just on universal principle, but specifically for Ireland – on the basis that the Irish had not given their consent to the war. This was in one sense democracy in the abstract, but in identifying Ireland as outside the political community represented at Westminster it was also pure nationalism. As soon as the government announced its intention to introduce conscription, the Hierarchy labelled it in openly political terms ‘a fatal mistake surpassing the worst blunders of the last four years’, and warning that it might provoke ‘desperate courses’. On 18 April 1918 it took two decisive actions. It issued a declaration that conscription was being forced on Ireland ‘against the will of the Irish nation’, and denouncing the Military Service Bill as ‘an oppressive and inhuman law which the Irish people have a right to resist’. And it organized countrywide masses of intercession for the following Sunday, after which the anti-conscription pledge would be signed by the congregations. The bishops were clearly hoping to avert the threat of violent nationalist resistance, but both the forceful wording of their anathema and the national organizational framework provided by the Sunday masses accelerated the process of mobilization.
The pledge drafted by the Sinn Féin Executive, and agreed at an all-party meeting in the Dublin Mansion House a few hours before the bishops met, committed people to ‘resist Conscription by the most effective means at our disposal’. It was accompanied by a statement starkly labelling the passage of the conscription bill ‘a declaration of war on the Irish nation’. When the draft was taken to the meeting at Maynooth by Sinn Féin’s President, Eamon de Valera, the Hierarchy’s head, Cardinal Logue, balked at the phrase ‘the most effective means’, and the bishops’ manifesto used the phrase ‘every means that are consonant with the law of God’. There was another slight difference: where the Mansion House pledge denied the right of the British government to impose compulsory service, the bishops took a moral rather than political line, condemning enforced conscription as ‘oppressive and inhuman’. But the crucial word in both was ‘resist’, and Logue’s demand for a commitment to passive resistance failed. The Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, ‘made short work of his passive resistance, for nobody could define what passive resistance meant’.19 And even Logue himself made clear that it did not mean ‘we are to lie down and let people walk over us.’20
The fusion of clerical and political leadership over the conscription issue in April 1918 transformed Irish politics. The Catholic Church provided a framework for mass mobilization that would probably have been beyond the resources of any political organization at that point. Archbishop Walsh became a trustee of the new Irish National Defence Fund, intended to support the families of those arrested for opposing military service. A branch was established in every parish and administered by the local priest. The local clergy also facilitated the Parish Defence Committees, which were seized on by the Irish Volunteers as an ideal vehicle for organizing resistance activity. The kind of resistance they planned was certainly active, and possibly armed. Though several people were reported by the police as having refused to sign the pledge because it was too restrictive, most seem to have interpreted it as setting few limits.21
The political atmosphere across the country was thunderous even before Sunday 21 April. In Tyrone, the local press reported with some awe that the speechmaking was ‘most violent, bitter and seditious, and from start to finish breathed nothing but hatred of England’. In Longford the police reported not only a surge in Volunteer activity such as drilling, but a far more confrontational, ‘extremely aggressive’ Volunteer public posture.22 ‘A sort of Holy War against the British Army is being preached,’ and priests were ‘stating that they will themselves lead their people to death sooner than accept’ conscription.23 The actual day of the masses and pledge-signings was a truly dramatic one, felt by many to be nationalist Ireland’s first real equivalent to the fevered mass commitment of the anti-Home Rule Ulster Covenanters’ meetings at the height of the prewar crisis in 1912–14. Hundreds of thousands signed the pledge and subscribed to the Defence Fund, which amassed £250,000 over the next few weeks.
The final nail in the coffin of the conscription project was hammered in by the labour movement. A special meeting of the Irish Trades Union Council on 20 April issued a call for a general strike on the 24th. No comparable shutdown had ever been seen in Ireland.24 A week later Constance Markievicz and Agnes O’Farrelly arranged ‘the Woman’s Day’ (Lá na mBan), bringing together the women’s organizations Cumann na mBan and the Irish Women’s Franchise League to endorse the pledge ‘Irishwomen! Stand by your countrymen in resisting conscription.’25 The veteran nationalist T. M. Healy, who had witnessed several, judged ‘ “Anti-conscription” … the most remarkable movement that ever swept Ireland’. The Sinn Féin publicist Aodh de Blacam was to claim, with some justification, that in the conscription crisis ‘the Irish republic came into its own.’26
‘COMBATING GERMAN INTRIGUE’
Facing the storm of protest, the government pulled back, deciding in mid-May to put conscription on ice once again. Even Long eventually accepted that, since resistance would be led by ‘priests and women’, no government would be able to go on with repression ‘after one or two priests and a few women have been shot by the soldiers’. But he warned that abandoning conscription altogether would be regarded as a triumph for the Hierarchy. This would ‘have a very serious … effect upon the stability and prestige of Government in Ireland’, so he urged the Lord Lieutenant as late as October to make clear that conscription remained a possibility.27 This semi-mystical sense of prestige led the authorities to keep the threat, and the resistance it provoked, alive right up to the end of the war.
On top of this, when the government decided to shelve conscription it also decided at the same moment to launch a new round of arrests of the nationalist leaders who had frustrated its plans. On the night of 17–18 May seventy-three prominent Sinn Feiners were picked up and immediately deported under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). More followed later. The justification was the allegation that Sinn Féin was still actively conspiring with the great enemy. The so-called ‘German Plot’ has generally been dismissed as a fabrication, and ironically it was also scouted by some of the British authorities themselves – French included. But the ghost of Roger Casement’s abortive Irish Brigade still haunted Britain. Casement’s idea of recruiting Irish prisoners of war in Germany to fight against Britain had seemed – not only to Casement himself – a dangerous one. Though a bare handful of men had joined the unit, and the Germans had treated it with ill-concealed contempt, it revived memories of the very real threat posed by French military expeditions to Ireland in the 1790s. Bizarrely, one of its members, Corporal Joseph Dowling, was found stranded on a small island off the Clare coast on 12 April, after landing in a dinghy from a German submarine. His reason for being there is still a mystery: the Germans may have sent him to set up a communication station, but nobody on the Irish side knew of this. His claim, after his arrest, to have been sent to negotiate with nationalist leaders (improbably enough, he specified the parliamentarians John Dillon and John Redmond) was dismissed even by Walter Long as ‘incredible’, and French too ‘didn’t believe a word’ of it. Despite this, the strange intelligence officer at Dublin Castle, Major Price, seems to have convinced the head of the RIC to call for the arrest of the Sinn Féin leaders.28
French still thought that ‘combating G
erman intrigue’ was just as important as ‘restoring order’ in Ireland. But while pro-German attitudes certainly existed, actual links with Germany were hard to identify. Chief Secretary Shortt soon had to admit to the Prime Minister that not all those arrested had been in direct contact with German agents, and none could be proved to have been. All he could say was ‘we know that some one has, and each of the interned persons has said or done something which gives ground for the suspicion that he or she is in it.’ The risks of failing to make sure of the evidence before acting had been pointed out to the Cabinet, but ignored. Within days of the arrests there was an ‘outcry for the evidence’ and it became clear that the Irish Executive had nothing but what the Cabinet Secretary dismissed as ‘evidence of the most flimsy and ancient description’.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 3