IRELAND IN TRANSITION, 1867–1921
This wide-ranging collection brings together multiple perspectives on a key period in Irish history, from the Fenian Rising in 1867 to the creation of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1921, with a focus on the formation of Irish identity. The chapters, written by a team of experts, focus on key individuals or ideological groups and consider how they perceived Ireland’s future, what their sense of Irish identity was, and who they saw as the enemy. Providing a new angle on Ireland during the period from 1867 to 1921, this book will be important reading for all those with an interest in Irish history. D. George Boyce is Professor of Political Theory and Government at the University of Wales, Swansea. His publications include The Making of Modern Irish History (1996). Alan O’Day is Fellow in Modern History, Greyfriars, University of Oxford. His publications include Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921. Contributors: Nicholas Allen, D. George Boyce, Virginia Crossman, N.C. Fleming, Matthew Kelly, James Loughlin, James H. Murphy, Janet Nolan, Margaret O’Callaghan, Emmet O’Connor, Alan O’Day, Ian Sheehy, Michael Wheatley.
IRELAND IN TRANSITION, 1867–1921
Edited by D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day
First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Selection and editorial matter © 2004 D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day Contributions © 2004 individual contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ireland in transition, 1867–1921 / D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day p. cm. 1. Ireland—History—1837–1901. 2. Ireland—History—1901–1910. 3. Ireland—History—1910–1921. I. Boyce, David George, 1942– II. O’Day, Alan. DA951.I74 2004 941.5081—dc22 2003019745 ISBN 0-203-64357-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-67127-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–33257–5 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–33258–3 (pbk)
CONTENTS
vii
List of contributors A time of transitions
1
D . G E O R G E B O Y C E A N D A L A N O ’ D AY
PA RT I
Home rule, Ireland and a ‘union of hearts’ 1 Max Weber and leadership, Butt, Parnell and Dillon: nationalism in transition
15 17
A L A N O ’ D AY
2 Nationality and loyalty: Parnellism, monarchy and the construction of Irish identity, 1880–5
35
JAMES LOUGHLIN
3 ‘These quiet days of peace’: Nationalist opinion before the home rule crisis, 1909–13
57
M I C H A E L W H E AT L E Y
4 T.P. O’Connor and The Star, 1886–90
76
IAN SHEEHY
5 A First World War transition: state and citizen in Ireland, 1914–19
92
D. GEORGE BOYCE
PA RT II
Irish Ireland and a separatist identity 6 Broken glass and batoned crowds: Cathleen Ni Houlihan and the tensions of transition JAMES H. MURPHY
v
111 113
CONTENTS
7 National reconstruction: George Russell (Æ) and the Irish Convention
128
NICHOLAS ALLEN
8 The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin
142
M AT T H E W K E L LY
9 ‘With the eyes of another race, of a people once hunted themselves’: Casement, colonialism and a remembered past
159
MARGARET O’CALLAGHAN
PA RT III
Reformed Ireland or ‘risen people’?
177
10 Unintended consequences: the national schools and Irish women’s mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
179
JANET NOLAN
11 ‘The charm of allowing people to manage their own affairs’: political perspectives on emergency relief in late nineteenth-century Ireland’
193
VIRGINIA CROSSMAN
12 True Bolsheviks? The rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Ireland, 1917–21
209
EMMET O’CONNOR
13 Old and new unionism: the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, 1906–21
223
N.C. FLEMING
241 281
Notes Index
vi
CONTRIBUTORS
Nicholas Allen, Assistant Professor, English Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina D. George Boyce, Professor of Politics, University of Wales, Swansea Virginia Crossman, Lecturer in History, Keele University N.C. Fleming, Research Fellow, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast Matthew Kelly, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Hertford College, University of Oxford James Loughlin, Reader in History, Magee Campus, University of Ulster James H. Murphy, Professor of English, All Hallows College, Dublin City University and De Paul University Janet Nolan, Professor of History, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois Margaret O’Callaghan, Lecturer in Politics, Queen’s University Belfast Emmet O’Connor, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Magee Campus, University of Ulster Alan O’Day, Fellow in Modern History, Greyfriars, University of Oxford Ian Sheehy, formerly Hertford College, University of Oxford Michael Wheatley, Research Fellow, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast
vii
A TIME OF TRANSITIONS D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day
[It is the] equivalent to shutting a man in a tiger’s cage and advising him to make himself as comfortable as possible. Revd Colthurst to Walter Long, 18 February 19201
If history is a seamless web, there are moments when it is stretched into previously unimagined shapes. One such epoch is between the Fenian Rising in 1867 and the creation of the two Irelands at the beginning of the 1920s. Armed rebellions define the period but it is not merely about insurrection and politics, literature and culture; rather this is a time that marks the transition in an Irish mentalité. As D. George Boyce’s essay remarks, Ireland was a country whose political landscape had changed profoundly, and in which the integrity of the quarrel was diverted by the deluge of world war into new directions. The First World War effected changes in the outlook on events, the grouping of parties in Ireland and even, arguably, the ‘mode and thought of men’. Although not a hermetically sealed time capsule this era has a unique place in the formation of modern Ireland and in the Anglo-Irish past. The pace and timing of change was uneven. The Church of Ireland clergyman cited above expressed not merely the apprehensions of many on the ground who experienced the distinctly uncomfortable birth pangs of new Irelands but the feelings of ordinary Irish people of all complexions who found themselves in the midst of upheaval. Transition – meaning profound changes both directly and informally in socio-economic life, to the political structures and psychology of the era – approximates the spirit of the age, for though many things were still familiar in 1921, few things in Irish life were identical to what they had been in 1867. Change was gradual in some areas but there were five moments of sharp discontinuity within the broad sweep of time: the Land War (1879–82), franchise reform and the first home rule episode (1884–6), the Wyndham Land Act (1903), the Ulster crisis (1912–14) and the armed rebellion (1916–21). Each was a moment from which there could be no turning back. And though in inception these were political events, each had deeper implications. Transitions induced a shift in the outlook of the people, and especially the 1
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leaders, of Great Britain who by the 1920s abandoned the cherished ideal of a nation-state inclusive of Ireland. The original essays prepared for this volume consider the forces of stability and transition, focusing on personalities, events, the nature of change and its consequences. They do not treat all possible themes but each illuminates a dimension of the Irish problem; collectively they add to our understanding of the nature, mechanisms and outcomes of transition or its absence. As well they assess the shifting nature of Irish identities and how these were negotiated. The contributors are cognisant of the complex of relationships, Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist, British and Irish, Ireland and its diaspora. The essays are organised around three broad sub-themes: ‘Home rule, Ireland and a “union of hearts” features the chapters by Alan O’Day, James Loughlin, Michael Wheatley, Ian Sheehy and George Boyce; ‘Irish Ireland and a separatist identity’ contains the contributions of James H. Murphy, Nicholas Allen, Matthew Kelly and Margaret O’Callaghan; ‘Reformed Ireland or “Risen People?”’ is treated by Janet Nolan, Virginia Crossman, Emmet O’Connor and N.C. Fleming. To date, the events and personalities of this period have not suffered neglect, and they are unlikely to be relegated to the scrapheap of history in the future. This is the most extended period in which Ireland stood at the forefront of British political life: no other issue – not the empire, foreign relations, social welfare, economic questions, female suffrage or labour unrest – consumed so much time before 1914. Irish personalities and leadership are assessed from differing angles by O’Day, Sheehy, Allen, O’Callaghan and Fleming. O’Day considers whether individuals or movements shape history, placing this conundrum within theoretical formulations of leadership, nationalism and communication, through the careers of three key individuals who embodied distinct forms of leadership – the respected (Isaac Butt), the charismatic (Charles Stewart Parnell) and the bureaucratic (John Dillon). He notes that Dillon’s institutionalism was unable to accommodate the changing tide of an Irish identity loosened from its Liberal–Nationalistic moorings, and that the pattern of leadership affords some comfort to Sinn Féin’s depiction of the Irish party as a fossilised relict. Critics of the Irish party, especially Sinn Féin after 1900, Sheehy observes, claimed that these men had been corrupted by long association with Westminster culture and also that they lacked an Irish ‘soul’, trying to be both Irish and English at the same time. His essay traces the involvement of T.P. O’Connor with The Star newspaper between 1886 and 1890, showing how his role as editor reflected the way in which, in the aftermath of the first Home Rule Bill, Irish journalists in Fleet Street capitalised on the Liberals’ need for Irish political expertise. Irishmen were able to secure press positions and recognition that previously had been largely closed to them. Sheehy examines O’Connor’s political project on The Star of an Irish–Radical alliance to secure reform, and how it revealed the dual political identity he had developed as an emigrant journalist. Sheehy highlights three issues: an evolving sense of dual or even multiple identities within the Nationalist political clique, 2
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the emergence of fresh opportunities in London for ambitious Irishmen in the wake of the first home rule episode and the extent to which this group was, as Sinn Féin would proclaim, spoiled by intimacy with London culture. And, as Boyce explains, the death-knell of dual identity for most Irish Catholics was sounded after 1916. O’Connor’s type of British Radicalism increasingly found itself out of tune with the advancing exclusive Irish Catholic and quasi-Gaelic Nationalist identity. Allen and O’Callaghan explore the dilemma of the route to Irish national identity and its consequences for two members of the Protestant intelligentsia, George Russell (Æ) and Sir Roger Casement, respectively. Casement’s sense of the injustice of the exploitation of the soil and its traditional occupiers was informed by the nationalism he had espoused during the period from the start of the Land War in 1879 to the death of Parnell in 1891. The foundations of Casement’s later anti-imperialism, and anti-imperialist Irish nationalism, were laid by the local and national identities he acquired and put together during his boyhood. This identity was not set aside for two decades in Africa, and then reignited after 1903 in the Antrim Road Ard Righ circle in Belfast. Unionists, by contrast, usually receive less notice and are the neglected step-child of Irish history. Fleming reveals the complexities and strains encompassed in northern ascendancy unionism through a profile of the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, who exemplified the ambiguities of his class. Bearer of a famous name, Londonderry was an old-style patrician who found adaptation to a more militant Protestant Ulster unionism inimical to his own flexible identity. Londonderry shared with home rule Nationalists and many of his caste a capacity to be both Irish and British; in his instance combining Protestant Ascendancy, Ulsterman and British identities in which he saw no inherent contradiction. His attempt, as Fleming shows, to moderate an increasingly parochial Ulster Unionist self-consciousness was at odds with the growing militancy of grass-roots popular Protestantism. His dilemma was exposed by the Unionist threat of armed resistance during the Ulster Crisis of 1912–14 and even more fully during the Irish Convention of 1917–18, when Londonderry attempted to conciliate Nationalists. Yet, in light of the subsequent sectarianism of the new Irelands, his vision of a society based on citizenship which he would have seen as defined by loyalty, but allowing for an expression of simultaneous multiple loyalties now looks relevant again. The centrality of individuals to the events of the age results from a communications revolution that built up their roles. Late Victorian ‘globalisation’ was as pervasive as its present-day counterpart. Its cornerstone – the spread of literacy and new technology – created a print-based popular culture. In 1861 over 38 per cent of Irish people were illiterate; by 1911 illiteracy had diminished to 12 per cent, mainly confined to the elderly in remote districts. This change was accompanied by a rise in the numbers of pupils and teachers. In 1867 the average number of children attending at primary schools was 322,000, in 1914, 508,000; teacher numbers expanded from 8,000 to 13,500 during 3
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the same period in spite of a diminishing population. Inversely, the number of Irish-speakers continued to drop. In 1861 there were still over a million Irishspeakers, but this number had almost halved by 1911. Even that persistence of the vernacular masked the deterioration of Gaelic as the ordinary medium of communication. The number of miles of railway track rose from 537 in 1850, to 1,909 in 1866, to 2,370 in 1880 and 3,410 in 1913. By the time of Parnell’s death in 1891, Ireland was cobwebbed by a quick, inexpensive transport network acting as the conduit for letters, periodicals and political communication. Whether in person or via the press, politicians and agitators, clerics and commerce cut a swathe across the country. A confluence of rapid dissemination of propaganda and ease of travel for agitators was characteristic of the Land War. Periodicals rose in number and readership after 1867, especially in the provinces.2 Between 1880 and 1886 the number of Nationalist newspapers leaped from 41 to 55. Newspapers dished up a diet of politics and served as the medium of political instruction. Jim McLaughlin’s stimulating evaluation in Reimaging the Nation-State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building (2001) pinpoints Catholic and Protestant pressmen as cornerstones of the ‘organic intelligentsia’ who fostered constructions of Catholic and Protestant identities. Wheatley, in this volume, considers the texture of the third home rule crisis, explaining that the papers were the prime medium for the transmission of news, announcements, advertisements and opinions on local and national affairs, but he also enters a caveat about journalistic influence. In the provinces the papers were the most important forum for the dissemination of news and opinions to the intertwined commercial, professional and political elites of ‘small town’ Ireland. Endemic and fierce competition meant that while local proprietors and editors – particularly in their leader columns – continued to fancy that they were the vanguard of local opinion, these men could never afford to move so far ahead of the pack as to risk loss of circulation and advertising revenue. The provincial press was far more a mirror of local beliefs than their harbinger. No one appreciated the possibilities of the new technology more readily than Parnell.3 The linkage of politics and the press received reinforcement with the induction of many journalists, editors and newspaper proprietors into the National Party as MPs, while others were prominent in the local organisation of its infrastructure. Loughlin, Crossman and Allen consider distinct threads of information transmission, propaganda and identity: the symbol of monarchy, the relief of distress and the vision of George (Æ) Russell who hoped to construct a new technocratic society. Symbols of nationhood are varied, but necessarily assume fundamental importance at moments of contested identity, Loughlin argues. His essay assesses Irish attitudes to the monarchy during the years 1879–85, a period which saw Parnell consolidate his hold on Catholic opinion. An important part of that campaign was to foster popular alienation from the agencies and symbols of the British state, especially the monarchy, while the ‘royal’ trappings with which Parnell became figuratively enrobed lent colour to his epithet ‘uncrowned king’. On the other hand, the government and the Dublin Castle administration, con4
A TIME OF TRANSITIONS
cerned to thwart Parnellite ambitions, regarded the monarchy and its local representative, the Viceroy, as suitable tools for a counter-offensive. How each side braced itself for this struggle to win allegiance, with Nationalist determination to impose an exclusive Irish identity culminating in the disorder surrounding the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Ireland in 1885, is aired in Loughlin’s inquiry. And, as he shows, each of the contestants utilised its assets in what was a far from one-sided affair.4 Crossman investigates the ways that Conservative ministers, and their supporters in the press, sought to ensure that Liberal Chief Secretary John Morley’s efforts to relieve rural distress would be seen as an illustration of the potential pitfalls rather than the benefits of self-government. The evidence from their inquiry commission was used to condemn the boards of guardians as unfit for their functions. The intention was to humiliate the guardians and through them the Nationalist movement. The way the money was ‘squandered’ afforded, according to the Daily Mail, ‘an exquisite proof of the people’s capacity for spending without caring a rap out of whose pocket the money comes’.5 Morley himself was accused of allowing his anxiety to placate Nationalists to overrule common sense. Crossman skilfully dissects the rhetoric on fiscal extravagance, showing that the alleged financial improvidence helped to bolster support for unionism in Britain and at the same time enhanced a separate Irish identity though one quite different from that propounded in Nationalist ideology.6 The grant of £20,000 to the distressed Poor Law unions was intended to relieve suffering and also to empower local bodies, Crossman points out. As a result of the act, starvation was prevented, people were not forced to pauperise themselves, and the government demonstrated its determination to inaugurate a new era of emergency relief. This was a good-news story. That it was not reported as such, except at the time of the act’s introduction, is highly revealing about Nationalist rhetoric and self-perception. Unionist propagandists set the agenda for the debate over the act, focusing on the issue of maladministration. Few Nationalists attempted a rebuttal, or to shift the parameters of the debate to other, arguably more relevant, issues such as the efficacy and legitimacy of the Poor Law system. The readiness of Nationalist politicians and journalists to believe the allegations of wholesale fraud and corruption once they were endorsed by an official inquiry suggested a fundamental lack of confidence that had serious implications for the development of Irish national identity. They were beset by a lurking fear that Irishmen really were as bad as their critics claimed: incompetent, inefficient, corrupt and unable to distinguish truth from lies. This fear surfaced as a kind of metropolitan snobbery, a process of transference by which national faults became the attributes of Irish provincials, symptomatic of local not national politics. Declan Kiberd has suggested that a function of the 1916 insurrection was to overthrow such stereotyping.7 The desire to curb local autonomy under a national government was rooted in the same fear. The leaders of the national movement displayed little awareness of, or interest in, the task facing Nationalist Poor Law guardians. Basing Irish 5
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identity on a rejection of all things British had the effect of marginalising those who were in any way associated with the existing system of government. As regional identities were increasingly absorbed into a broader national identity, so provincial issues became subsumed into national ones. Crossman argues that local politics operated as a second front to the national campaign, strengthening the movement but weakening local democracy. Æ (Russell), Allen observes, visualised a doctrine of ‘intellect, science, culture, humanity’ as a new departure for Irish nationalism and the mode for creating a fresh inclusive Irish identity. Parading the virtues of civic society, he was already convinced of the inevitability of an independent, if partitioned, state. Russell allied his co-operative ideal to the preparation of citizens for this new order. To do this, he employed a new vocabulary, instructing individuals to accept his redefinition of their Irish identity. Ethnicity was no longer the mark of Irish difference; evidence of rational thought is in contrast offered as proof of the progress that Ireland would make beyond the decadence of a failing British empire. The Irish Convention of 1917–18, Allen suggests, pushed Russell to this resolution by its frustration of any compromise between unionism and nationalism that he might support. Russell’s disenchantment with the Convention can be compared with Londonderry’s parallel disappointment traced in Fleming’s essay. Faced with stalemate, Russell redrew his plans for an Irish project. This had little effect on Convention proceedings, but it prepared Russell for one of his most important achievements of the 1920s, the positive engagement with AngloIreland through the pages of the Irish Statesman. For Janet Nolan, the new or shifting identity was not limited to males or to Ireland but could be found instead among emergent school teachers whose female pupils found new opportunities in America. And if the struggle for identity led Æ off in a curious direction, the impact on Casement, as O’Callaghan shows, was even more peculiar. Murphy, Kelly and O’Connor provide access into the new cultural and political movements which challenged the old Nationalist vision at the beginning of the twentieth century. Murphy and Kelly retrace a trodden path with fresh eyes; O’Connor investigates the less travelled route of the Socialist Party of Ireland. The three decades from the fall of Parnell to Irish independence, Murphy comments, constitute a time when various intelligentsia groupings, restive with but ultimately reliant on the newly confident nation, engaged in cultural struggles to fashion a more conducive Ireland. Celticism, a complex discourse about race, language, culture and Anglo-Irish relations, whose roots went back several centuries, enabled them to challenge present realities. Celticism and its less racially essentialist variant, Gaelicism, were at the heart of the Anglo-Irish literary renaissance, the Gaelic League and the often reactionary Irish Ireland movement. Language, poetry, drama and journalism were the direct concerns of Irish littérateurs but they were influenced by and had an impact upon efforts to bring about an economic renewal and new political and revolutionary movements in an age radicalised by the Boer and First World Wars. The contest did not have an assured outcome; the thrust of the cultural 6
A TIME OF TRANSITIONS
movement was to secure not simply self-government but a nation imbued with a specific form of identity. Kelly similarly explains that Sinn Féin’s principal achievement before the First World War was to fashion a Nationalist paradigm, however fragile, which could contain a range of advanced opinion but was invulnerable to constitutional gesturing. Protestants, Catholics, language enthusiasts, women’s suffrage campaigners, Irish Irelanders, socialists, Fenians – all were acknowledged as legitimate contributors to the debate; acceptance was conditional on their rejection of devolution as the means to solve the problem of Ireland’s constitutional status. Indeed, this phase in the development of Irish separatism might be understood as one in which this series of sub-cultures – more often than not a product of the heightened national consciousness generated by the successes of land agitation and the home rule campaign – salted by generational tension, coalesced into a more generalised counter-culture that identified the Irish Parliamentary Party with the status quo. During the period from the reunification of the parliamentarians to the 1916 Rising, clear boundaries were established between advanced and constitutional nationalism – the National Volunteers’ split left this in no doubt. Both sides entered into internal debates concerning aims and aspirations, both embraced a host of political identities, but, thanks in part to the vigilance of Arthur Griffith, dallying with the other side ceased to be an acceptable part of Sinn Féin manoeuvring – only defection would do. Irish separatism’s last act of unambiguous political autonomy had been the rising of 1867. The innovations of Sinn Féin hinted at possible future action, but by what means remained profoundly unclear. As O’Connor remarks, the Socialist Party’s very existence was indicative of the importance of radicalism during these years. The party offers a rare window on the political outlook of trade union leaders at a time when labour was highly politicised, and deeply involved with the politics of the independence struggle, but declined to create a conventional political party. In particular, it played a role in developing Labour’s foreign policy, and acting as an ambassador to the international socialist movement. The party also became a battleground over the question of relations with the socialist and communist Internationals, and the embryo of communism in Ireland. O’Connor maintains that the party is best understood as a true reflection of the politics of the leadership of Labour and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. If radical politics ultimately balked at revolution, before 1921 it was genuinely influenced by syndicalism and Bolshevism. In many respects its story paralleled that of the contemporary labour movement. It began in imitation of pre-1914 precedents, developed with modest expectations, blossomed in the flush of radicalism that followed political revolution abroad and at home, faltered as the international labour movement wilted before the capitalist counter-attack in 1920–1, and then divided into mutually hostile camps of communists and social democrats. Boyce places the problems of transition and identity in context. The First World War, he writes, tested two important political principles, both derived from the French Revolution: the Rights of Man and the Duties of Man. Their 7
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place in the relationship between the state and its subjects (in the United Kingdom ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’) must not be obscured by concentration on local circumstances and the vagaries of British and Irish politics. Individually, and as members of groups, people in Ireland were concerned with farms, food and political fashions. But their choices in the war were informed by the most important European legacies of the nineteenth century, the question of the state’s duty to man, and of man to the state. The French revolutionaries held that ‘the source of all liberty resides essentially in the nation; no group, no individual may exercise authority not emanating from the nation’.8 The Duties of Man declared, among other items, that ‘every citizen owes his services to the Patrie’ whenever the law summoned him to defend it.9 For the British state, the Patrie was the whole British Isles; for Irish Nationalists (especially as home rule was indefinitely postponed) it was Ireland; and the Irish citizens’ duty did not extend to responding to the summons of the law to join the army. The Rights and Duties of Man were incompatible in Ireland by 1918. The right to self-determination excluded, or perhaps transcended, the duty of Irish Nationalist citizens to submit to the summons to war. Parliamentary democracy as practised by the Home Rule Party was held to have failed. Ireland, in its own way, exemplified the political ideals and beliefs that proved so destructive of the defeated imperial powers of Europe and still have resonances today. Concentration on this period has other justifications as well, especially because profound structural transformations in society both induced and accentuated major social, cultural and political realignments. The catalogue of change is thick – in the 1860s it would have been folly to suppose Ireland would be separated from Great Britain, even more whimsical to predicate this happening within a lifetime and that what would come into being at the close of 1921 would be two Irelands each equipped with separate self-governing institutions. A Protestant ascendancy still firmly in place in the mid-1860s was by 1921 in the doldrums in three-quarters of the country and having to re-position itself in the north. In 1869 Gladstone reduced the Church of Ireland to legal equality. Disestablishment held portents for the place of the Protestant ascendancy. Gladstone’s thinking was not restricted to the Church question. In his last speech in the general election campaign in 1868 he pointed out, ‘the Church of Ireland . . . is but one of a group of questions . . . We therefore, aim at the destruction of the system of ascendancy’.10 Landed dominance did not end abruptly: legislation was required in 1870, 1881, 1882, 1885, 1887, 1888, 1891, 1896, 1903 and 1909. The single most important act came only in 1903 but the path to a peasant proprietorship was adumbrated in the ‘Bright’ clause or purchase provision in the act of 1870, in the legislation of 1881 and most substantially in the Ashbourne Act of 1885. By 1905 nearly all agricultural land was either subject to judicially set rents or owned by former tenants.11 This transition did not take place without a struggle. The outcome over time, contrary to what Gladstone had desired, was to amend rela8
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tions between landowners and tenants so as to undermine the future of even resident landlords.12 As a consequence of the avalanche of parliamentary legislation, 72 per cent of tenanted holdings by 1915 had been transferred to occupying farmers, a revolution in ownership brought about through conventional political channels, with the British Conservatives and a section of Irish landlords as its midwives. In nineteenth-century Ireland local administration consisted of appointed officials – magistrates, juries, and the grand juries which possessed immense authority over expenditure – and elected or party bodies – municipal councils and Poor Law boards.13 Elective positions were seized by popular forces in the south during the 1880s and the re-ordering of power was finalised under the Local Government Act of 1898 which established democratically elected county and urban councils.14 The overall effect was to entrench ethnic–religious elites, and to institutionalise sectarianism to an unprecedented degree. Local government reform contributed to the territorialisation of Ireland’s political map. The 1898 Act with its inevitable effects was not the handiwork of wild-eyed Radicals and Nationalists but rather of the Conservatives, particularly Arthur and Gerald Balfour. Life did not remain unchanged for women either. Nolan observes that as women’s chances for marriage and cash incomes diminished in post-famine Ireland, the national school served as a training ground for female emigration, equipping girls with the necessary skills to seek their fortunes overseas.15 In fact, by the late nineteenth century unmarried women who had spent their childhoods in national school classrooms were a majority among those leaving Ireland for cities in the United States, the favoured emigrant destination in those years.16 But, it must be borne in mind, as Nolan remarks, that by the 1880s qualified candidates were gaining teaching posts, instead of the less prepared local favourites who had previously been preferred. The National Commissioners spearheaded this charge by issuing a series of ever-stricter standards for teacher training and hiring practices. Localism was being eroded. However, Nationalist propaganda largely persuaded disgruntled Catholics that this change could be laid at the door of a hostile ‘alien’-dominated central administration. The literature focuses on the tenant’s hatred of the landlord but this class, in spite of its ultimate loss of political authority, actually survived the onslaught of Catholic nationalism. The prosperous world of a Protestant middle order, the backbone of Irish Protestantism outside Ulster, disintegrated much more completely. This trend pre-dates 1867 but, for example in County Longford, inexorable decline set in around 1871, at first gently and then precipitously after 1911 so that by the 1920s the total number of Protestants in the county had dwindled by 40 per cent since the start of the period.17 While the number of Catholic farmers remained static between 1871 and 1911, the cohort of their Protestant counterparts fell by 40 per cent. The decline of Protestant labourers, servants and even professionals was even more dramatic. Only a narrow range 9
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of industrial employments survived and middlemen – once virtually the power brokers in the countryside – disappeared altogether. Nor was this peculiar to Longford. Wheatley finds that only in Sligo town in County Sligo was there a sufficiently vigorous Protestant business and professional class to support active Unionist papers. Rather than easing intra-communal tensions, ‘the superior status and exclusive character of southern Protestant society continued to incite Catholic resentment and assault and the absence of a dense and fully articulated social structure made the exposed remnants of the former ascendancy acutely vulnerable to such external pressures’.18 The final kick for many of the Protestants who had bucked the trend and remained came during the turmoil of 1919–22. A rising Catholic middle class was distinguishing itself by means of education, occupation, habitation patterns and even in some instances by accent.19 This upward mobility accelerated in the decade before 1893. But this world, too, was living on borrowed time. Senia Pašeta maintains that the years after 1914 undermined the status of many educated, well-placed Catholics who found themselves sidelined by a socially conservative minority championing a programme of Irish identity which emphasised pre-industrial and Gaelic values.20 In the north, often noted for its exceptionalism, transition if slower and less complete by 1921 was nonetheless real. There the old ascendancy forged a fresh relevance inside Ulster unionism but its social and economic leadership neither went unchallenged nor was identical to the earlier deference accorded to inherited status. An increasingly assertive sectarian democracy exacted a price. Unlike their southern brethren, northern ascendancy leaders presided over a completed social structure and were able to retain their nominal position, but only at the cost of bowing to the will of plebeian Protestantism. Traditional authority structures looked familiar, concealing fundamental changes beneath the surface. Thus, in both south and north old deference was under attack but the ammunition employed in the assaults differed. The changes were complemented by transitions in the economic and demographic structure. Ireland, unusually in western Europe, lost population during the period.21 The decline was most severe in the poor districts, especially in the west. In 1911 the populations of Clare, Galway, Roscommon and Sligo were less than half their 1841 totals. But the three crucial changes were the growth of urbanisation, emigration and the rapid decline of rural labourers. Emigration exacted a toll, especially on rural society. Acting as a safety valve, it also caused psychological jolts both to those who stayed and to those who left. However, the greatest transformation was ‘the virtual collapse of the class of Irish agriculture labourers’.22 Emigration made good political copy; priests cynically condemned its baleful effects while privately welcoming the outflow of poorer people, and Nationalist politicians fell over themselves in attributing it to British rule. Protestants left in broadly similar proportions to Catholics, the chief discrepancy being that there were fewer of them in the cohort of rural labourers who were so much in evidence among those who left. David Fitzpatrick observes, 10
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throughout the post-Famine century, emigration represented the expected stage in the cycle of life – the Irish equivalent of moving out of the parental household into lodgings in the modern city. Children were reared as potential emigrants, and when they reached adulthood many knew that they ‘must travel’. . .23 If Nationalist politics gained something from support by an overseas Irish invention of its own ‘imagined community’, individual families and the Catholic Church were the chief beneficiaries.24 Families saw children as economic assets, ‘their principal attraction being their potential munificence as future emigrants’.25 One million pounds on average was remitted annually, representing perhaps 2 per cent of gross national income.26 Girls were exceptionally valuable: they composed possibly eight out of ten of those Irish abroad who sent money home. In parts of the west, remittances were crucial to the perpetuation of the family farm. Dependence on the generosity of children abroad intensified resentment against a parasitic ascendancy which seemed increasingly irrelevant. Demographic and social trends present a paradox. On the one hand, the political manifestations of nationalism became more rural-oriented after the mid-1880s just as the country became increasingly urban. In contrast, Unionist politics made a positive response to the urbanisation of the area around Belfast. Industrialists, notable for their absence in the Nationalist Party, began to play a larger part in Unionist politics. In 1893 representatives of commerce and industry took a leading role in the anti-home rule campaign, while throughout the years after 1886 the economic case against creation of a Dublin Parliament was at the forefront. Some Unionist politicians showed an awareness of small-farmer radicalism and others of the trades unions.27 But no correlation exists between religious proportions and the rural orientation of nationalism, if only because virtually all districts in the south had huge Catholic majorities and these were unchallengeable. The Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884–5 provided the masonry and Gladstone’s home rule measure in 1886 the cement which bound nationalism and ruralism inexorably together. Under the franchise and redistribution legislation a new system of representation, the single-member constituency, was created. Overall the electoral system after 1885 entrenched rural-based political control in Catholic areas; in Ulster the impact was to favour the urbanised east. As the basis of representation did not change until the end of the period, another anomaly in the representative system intruded. By 1910 in proportion to its population Ireland as a whole, but not northern and eastern Ulster, was vastly over-represented by thirty to forty seats. Within the country this distortion gave the rural south and west enormous political importance while, in contrast, the Unionist north-east was disadvantaged. This had a double distorting effect. Nationalist Ireland had exaggerated numbers whereas Ulster Unionists were in the reverse position. Nationalists resisted any alteration that affected their numbers. As many of the schemes for the limited enfranchisement of women also would have redistributed parliamentary seats, 11
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the Irish party opposed suffrage measures. Second, the imbalance inflamed Conservative and Unionist resistance during the third home rule dispute, on the basis that it was being passed in the wake of the pruning of the House of Lords’ veto by an ‘artificial’ majority.28 Over the island there were only comparatively small localised shifts in religious proportions though, as in Longford, statistically insignificant changes had wider ramifications. Belfast presents a more dramatic case. The number of Catholics in Belfast more than doubled between 1861 and 1911, but fell as a percentage from over a third to approximately 24 per cent. In general terms, across the country, Protestants drifted away from Catholic areas, and in Ulster, particularly around Belfast, increased their proportion. Churches benefited from rising standards of living in the country. Clergymen, except perhaps those from the Church of Ireland, gained in influence during the last third of the nineteenth century. Modernisation theorists such as Gaetano Mosca believed that nationalism was replacing religion and becoming the chief factor of moral cohesion.29 In contrast, the stages and intensification of both Irish nationalism and pro-state Ulster unionism were intimately entwined with rising religious militancy – Catholic and Protestant. And, though analogous to Émile Durkheim’s stress on the religious core of modern communities,30 what happened was a stretching of traditional confessionalism to encompass communal life in new ways so as to redefine and entrench identities. Whereas the much heralded ‘devotional revolution’ is usually celebrated as a Catholic event and associated with religious practices, this force infected Protestants as well and was significant for demarcating the socio-cultural milieu of religious sects. This is to take issue with the recent assertion that ‘Catholicism – although always significant – became a major part of national identity only following the Civil War [1922–3] and was an expression of the ideological exhaustion of the predominantly Republican movement’.31 Much of the new state-financed provision of services founded in the Edwardian era was channelled through voluntary agencies in the hands of the denominations. Even the Congested Districts Board established under the Land Act of 1891 had a reputation among Unionists as a clerical slush fund.32 Nothing illustrated this more graphically than the Catholic sectarian Ancient Order of Hibernians in Ulster which became a benevolent society for the distribution of the boons of the ‘new liberalism’. Religious differentiation was given a fresh impetus during the period, be it in the enlarging appetite for education, public posts, employment, charity or state services. The secular state was profoundly denominational in colouration. Neither the evolution of self-government in both parts of Ireland nor the Irish problem ended in December 1921. The Union between Great Britain and Ireland was dissolved partly, not completely, for the larger part of Ireland. As in other end-games, the conclusion was not tidy; it was not truly satisfactory for any of the participants. But, the Irish problem as an integral feature of British political culture was over; the experiment of an all-British Isles united state faded into an inglorious denouement. When Ireland reared its head in British 12
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politics thereafter, it did so under different conditions, never again becoming so central or the stuff of party warfare. Irish difficulties no longer galvanised ideological concerns; the symbolic status of Ireland was a relic of the past. There were important new challenges posed by Irish difficulties both within the two Irelands and for Great Britain but they were genuinely different in kind.
13
Part I HOME RULE, IRELAND AND A ‘ U N I O N O F H E A RT S ’
1 M A X W E B E R A N D L E A D E R S H I P, B U T T, PA R N E L L A N D D I L L O N Nationalism in transition1 Alan O’Day
Parnell died, the greatest statesman we had since O’Connell. diary entry, 6 October 18912
Introduction The observation above by an obscure diarist links Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, the two towering personalities of Irish nationalism between the Union in 1801 and the Easter Rising of 1916. How individuals and events interact, whether political figures initiate the movements they lead or merely ride the whirlwind, is a perennial question. In the older literature the Irish party often is portrayed as inflexible and a collection of bureaucratic wire-pullers while more recent writers have seen it as responsive, even vibrant. Three related matters are examined in order to shed light on the issue: first, whether individuals or movements shape history is analysed; second, there is consideration of theoretical formulations of nationalism; third, three key individuals who embodied distinct forms of leadership – the respected, the charismatic and the bureaucratic – are assessed. The case studies of three national leaders reveal a transition in Irish politics, a transition consistent with Max Weber’s analysis of leadership. The rationale for focusing on political and party leaders is provided by Tom Garvin who observes that the ‘development of the militant pragmatic, disciplined mass political party [w]as the characteristic Irish political institution’.3 O’Connell, the founder of modern Irish nationalism, saw his task as getting ‘all Catholic Ireland acting as one man’.4 His labours were directed towards moulding ‘a people who can be thus brought to act together and by one impulse are too powerful to be neglected and too formidable to be long opposed’. For his efforts, O’Connell is celebrated as the ‘Emancipator’ and commemorated by the foremost public monument in central Dublin. O’Connell was the visible personification of the demand that Catholics be granted civil liberties within the United Kingdom. He did not achieve this on his own; numerous other people, 17
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some holding secure niches in the pantheon of national heroes and others now long forgotten, walked in his shade upholding the standard. Yet O’Connell had no difficulty in professing that it was his tenacity that gained the final triumph of Emancipation in 1829. Admirers and critics alike at the time accepted O’Connell at his own valuation.5 However, this apparent historical truism can no longer be taken for granted. As Kevin B. Nowlan points out, ‘Daniel O’Connell probably more than any other major figure in modern Irish history has been the victim of the shifts in popular attitudes to nationalism and its significance’.6 The injection of new forms of analysis – history from below – over the past two generations awards pride of place to changes in economic structure, social forces and to large impersonal factors as the catalyst in Nationalist transformation. Patrick O’Brien, when Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London, championed this fashionable methodology, observing that ‘historians are educated to deal with group rather than personal behaviour, in part because their subject has been deeply permeated by the social sciences’.7 Tom Bartlett illustrates the tendency to throw cold water on the purported achievement of great men, arguing that O’Connell was the beneficiary of changes in society that allowed him to seize credit for an emancipation that would have been achieved in his absence.8 K.T. Hoppen challenges the centrality of Nationalist politics altogether, proposing that there was a ‘gap between local realities and the rhetoric of national politics. Such communities, whether individual in the geographical or the social sense, often maintained a style of politics only intermittently, in step with the stated aims and methods of the movements generally held to have dominated Irish history in the nineteenth century’.9 He contends that ‘the two great movements of “national consciousness” led by O’Connell and Parnell should not, therefore, be seen as the only true representations of authentic political feeling, but rather as unusual superimpositions upon the deeply pervasive and enduring localist traditions of Irish political life’.10 Jim McLaughlin insists that it was neither the political leaders nor Nationalist intellectuals but school teachers, priests, newspaper editors, what he calls the ‘organic intelligentsia’, who were the building block of a Nationalist construction of the Irish nation in the second half of the nineteenth century.11 In contrast, the ‘high politics’ school adopts the line that only significant people matter. Its doyen, Maurice Cowling, maintains, ‘between the inner political world and society at large on the one hand and between personal and policy objectives on the other, no general connection can be established except whatever can be discovered in each instance about the proportions in which each reacted on the other’.12 Carrying the argument further, Alistair Cooke and John Vincent claim that politics was the business of an elite consisting even in the case of Great Britain of about 100 people at any one moment. Ideas, commitment, social movements, mass opinion are subordinate, in this interpretation, to the momentary requirements of party and personal ambition. ‘For [Tories], as for Liberals,’ they write, ‘the Irish question was not one into which practical Irish considerations entered in any detail’.13 Their intervention represents an 18
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extreme affirmation that leaders alone dictate the pace and agenda of political life. This debate about the relationship between individuals and their impact in history receives an airing from the opposite pole when Patrick O’Brien asks the question ‘is political biography a serious enough genre to engage the attention of academic historians?’. To his rhetorical query, he responds ‘most of us . . . think not’.14 He objects, unless the outcomes of a policy or set of policies are recognised by historians as significant and until those policies can be attributed in large measure to the ideas and leadership exercised by prominent politicians, then their lives, however deeply researched and readable, contribute very little to our understanding of the history of government and politics . . .15 While we cannot yet make a reasoned judgement about whether individuals were or were not the key element in the making of modern Irish nationalism, we can proceed knowing that the question has exercised academics and the chattering classes.
Post-1867 nationalism Irish nationalism is a dynamic ideological movement for attaining and maintaining the autonomy, unity and identity of Ireland and her people; it is a vehicle for activating people and creating solidarity among them in the common quest for a cherished goal. In Ireland, according to Garvin, the ‘traditional character of mass politics and the habit of mobilising everybody in the community for political action were deeply ingrained in the political culture’.16 Nationalism arose in the later eighteenth century at the point in time when a market economy, efficient transport network, literacy and print media enabled disparate peoples to ‘imagine’ that they had a common identity. The Catholic Church spread national consciousness and provided the grass-roots management of a political movement. National identity does not materialise out of thin air, it must be inculcated. Leaders have the essential function of informing the masses whom they wish to adopt the national ideal what it constitutes and how they inescapably are part of the nation, imagined or otherwise. Some writers dwell on the role of an overarching coterie of a comparatively small number of individuals, such as O’Connell and Parnell, others on much wider national or local elites. Most, however, follow Miroslav Hroch in Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (1985) who pinpoints the intelligentsia as the prime agents in the process of creating the nation. Hroch constructs a threefold typology for national movements. In the initial stage, intellectuals develop an interest in the antiquities of the territory. This corresponds to the establishment of the (Royal) Dublin Society and the (Royal) Irish Academy in the eighteenth century. He 19
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notes that the purveyors of this culture lack a political programme at the outset and do not seek to mobilise the masses until a further metamorphosis has taken place. In the second phase, the now numerically expanding intelligentsia develop a political programme and seek to incorporate the masses into their conception of the nation. Finally, his third stage is when a significant sector of the population is converted to and pursues political aspirations – mass mobilisation. In the instance of Ireland, the stages, though not always in Hroch’s sequence, existed. Hroch’s model highlights the core ingredient of leadership and indirectly offers a framework for understanding its different manifestation in differing phases of nationalism. The intelligentsia, in his formula, are superseded by moderate bourgeois leaders who in turn give way to politicians advocating more radical national goals. Garvin adopts a compatible scheme, pointing to four incremental aspects in the unfolding of Irish nationalism: the origins of political culture; the emergence of popular political organisation; the growth of public opinion; and, beyond the period, the development of the machinery of the state.17 It should not be expected, therefore, that individual leaders possess identical qualities, sponsor the same programmes or utilise common means over time. The second and no doubt fundamental point in Hroch’s description is the role of leaders. They may and usually do build on pre-existing identities as a stage in creating an overarching sense of a common bond. Benedict Anderson adds that ‘nationalism has to be aligned with large cultural systems that preceded it’.18 Max Weber, a founding father of sociology, was concerned about modes of authority and domination. He identifies three sets of power relationships: legal domination which is continuous and subject to rules (corresponding to Garvin’s fourth stage, establishment of the machinery of government); traditional domination based on a belief that the legitimacy of authority has always existed and subjects obey out of personal loyalty; and charismatic domination, in which power is exercised by a leader who possesses extraordinary qualities. Leadership is a core element in all three, but Weber had a particular interest in charismatic authority and this is pertinent to the present discussion. As he points out, charismatic leadership is a uniquely personal response to a crisis but, when the crisis itself passes, either the followers desert him or they seek to transmute the leader’s authority into bureaucratic structures for dealing with everyday problems. For Weber, history alternates between the charisma of the great figure and the routinisation of bureaucracy. Therefore, just as nationalism has distinctive phases, the leadership of a nationalist movement exhibits different faces in the course of its evolution. As well, analysis of leadership is enhanced by communications theory. Paul Lazerfeld sees the audience as a tissue of inter-related rather than isolated individuals whom the communicator activates.19 For him, ‘opinion leaders’ fulfil the role of ‘intervening variables’ between the media and the audience. In George Gerbner’s estimation, media has the function of forming the ‘mass’ by creating shared ways of selecting and viewing events; by delivering to them technologically produced and mediated message systems. Thus the result 20
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is that by channelling mass society into common ways of seeing and understanding the world the cultivation of dominant image patterns binds together communities. Michael Gurevitch stresses the mutual dependence between the political communicator and the media. Politicians, he maintains, command scarce resources and for the purveyors of the media there is pressure to give chief figures the lion’s share of attention. Additionally, John B. Thompson notes the distinctive nature of the mass communication process, emphasising that messages are produced for an audience not physically present at the place of production, the necessity of an information storage mechanism which persists, the reproducible nature of information and the availability of the message. These propositions feed into the discussion by emphasising the function of leadership and how it connects to the mass audience. Leaders necessarily have to adapt to shifting demands. Butt had to motivate a bourgeois following at a time before mass mobilisation; Parnell needed to first inspire and then canalise an aroused public opinion; and Dillon from the 1890s sought to convert Parnell’s mass appeal into a bureaucratic political system. Each of the three people represents a form of leadership within the established paradigms of nationalism, leadership and communication. They did not operate in a vacuum. O’Connell had pioneered the matrix of nationalism already. He discovered the congruence of socio-economic and religious–national fault lines. E.J. Hobsbawm observes that the linkage of social and national demands was much more effective than pure appeals to nationalism in mobilising popular opinion.20 By restricted deployment of the still inchoate Catholic masses, O’Connell gained the limited, liberal aim of religious inclusion for his bourgeois co-religionists. Also, his enlistment of the priests and the partial deployment of the Catholic masses by aggregating a myriad of grievances provided the locomotive energy of the national alliance. His was a nationalism characterised by liberal-democratic rhetoric, inclusion of Protestants but within what became an essentially Catholic milieu, the centrality of the clergy as the subalterns and a mixture of co-operation and confrontation with the British state. Still absent, though, was sufficient modernisation of Ireland to sustain a national movement. By the 1870s the preconditions for mobilisation were in place; what was now required was the emergence of leaders who could mould the national cause into a mass movement. Butt, Parnell and Dillon came to the fore in an environment different from that which inhibited O’Connell, and each co-opted and extended the foundations he had laid.
Respected leadership: Isaac Butt Once the most revered man in Nationalist circles, Isaac Butt became merely a footnote in history after his death on 5 May 1879.21 Yet, from the mid-1860s until his demise, Butt’s name was synonymous with the principal Nationalist causes. To the detriment of his own legal earnings, he was an eloquent counsel for Fenians in the 1860s, the leading force in the Amnesty Association campaign 21
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to free convicted Fenians, chief political spokesman for the tenant-right interest in the late 1860s and 1870s, and above all the inspirational figure behind the movement for home rule. His reputation, though, was on the wane by 1879. Butt repudiated the wanton disruption or ‘obstruction’ of parliamentary business, a tactic that brought Parnell to public notoriety. To many, Butt came to epitomise Irish subservience to British rule; he was a man who in the words of an early supporter ‘would not strip to fight’.22 Butt can be situated within what George Boyce terms colonial patriotism – devotion to the country by a segment of Protestants who associated themselves foremost with Ireland.23 He conforms to an advanced stage of Hroch’s middle phase, just prior to mass mobilisation, when moderate bourgeois figures propose a constitutional and limited programme. A Protestant, he exemplified an inclusive Irish nationalism which sought the willing allegiance and incorporation of all of the respectable classes, without religious distinction. He was a respected, even popular, figure but, unlike O’Connell and subsequently Parnell, not a charismatic leader; his chief qualities were public presentation of the national claim and effective communication with the British political elite. Butt epitomises the key personality syndrome of communication theorists. He, thus, was well equipped for the mode of leadership required at the point when the national cause was vested in the newly formed Home Rule Party, though, as his clash with Parnell revealed, less adept at making the transition to mass politics. In the 1850s and 1860s Butt supported the demand for tenant right in Ireland, urged state sponsorship of Irish railway construction and defended Catholic interests against rampant no-Popery elements. Loss of his parliamentary seat in 1865 occurred just when there was a sea change in Irish politics. Maturation of Butt’s political thinking coincided with fresh opportunities in the second half of the 1860s. Alarmed at the Fenian conspiracy, the government began in 1865 to imprison the conspirators. Though largely unable to save Fenians from the dungeons or transportation to Australia, Butt earned their respect and gratitude, in the process experiencing transmogrification into a Nationalist icon. As well, he spoke at many meetings across Ireland and wrote with telling effect on tenant right, social and economic conditions, denominational education and, above all else, in favour of amnesty for Fenian convicts. William Gladstone secured a Liberal victory in the general election at the end of 1868 on the specific platform of remedying Irish disaffection. In 1869 he pushed through legislation disestablishing the Church of Ireland. Rather than staying grievances, it raised Irish expectations. Moreover, though the government released a number of Fenian prisoners in late 1869, this merely heightened demands to free the remainder. In September 1869 Butt, already head of the Amnesty Association, assumed the leadership of the new Irish Tenant League. There were many divisions within the patriotic community, with amnesty, tenant right and education vying for priority. During autumn 1869, tenant farmer meetings were broken up by Fenians who resented any diversion from the amnesty campaign. In November 1869 Butt attempted to ease the rivalry 22
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between these movements, stating ‘I believe the two objects, so far from being antagonistic, help each other. Everything that calls out a national spirit in Ireland tends to create a power that forwards the redress of every Irish wrong’.24 The national question held a number of attractions, including the possibility of submerging these differences under a common banner. The self-government ideal might be fashioned into a tool capable of bridging divisions. Butt told one audience, it is a mere question of time when we . . . ought to strain every nerve to achieve for Ireland national independence. And when I say national independence I don’t mean separation. I mean a self-government which gives us the entire right to manage our own affairs . . .25 On its formation in 1870, Butt’s federal home rule scheme became the Home Government Association’s programme. ‘Federalism’, he believed, would offer Ireland an opportunity for ‘independence without breaking up the unity of the empire, interfering with the monarchy, or endangering the rights or liberties of any class of Irishmen’.26 Under it ‘Ireland could enjoy all of [the] selfgovernment and distinct national rights which would be necessary for full development of her national life’. Butt envisaged self-government as the means of reconciling creeds: ‘It is from the joint deliberations of all classes of Irishmen that we may most confidently hope to present a plan of a national legislature, in which the just influence of property and education, and rank may be harmoniously combined with popular privileges and power, so as to make the legislature the real representative of the nation’. Butt captured just the right note when addressing the Irish public. In December 1870 he said, they were not to crouch and whine at the feet of England, but to demand by moral force, their rights, and moral force was always strong when physical force was behind it. That physical force consisted in the existence of twelve millions of Irishmen scattered over the globe, whom England might unite in friendly federation, or whom they might make her foes.27 Though initially reluctant, Butt, who became MP again in 1871, was persuaded to convert the Home Government Association into a popular organisation. A National Conference was held in Dublin between 18 and 21 November 1873 to found the Home Rule League. Butt stressed the benefits of self-government for reconciling classes and creeds, foreseeing victory arriving through the moral force of public opinion, an opinion that would be demonstrated when most of Ireland’s MPs were elected to advance home rule: If Ireland at the next election, sent eighty men faithfully to press the demand of the Irish nation for home rule there would be a moral 23
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power in such a declaration of the national will – in the support which that demand would receive from the Irish people wherever they were scattered over the face of the globe.28 At the general election in early 1874 sixty home rulers were returned. On 3 March most of this contingent formed itself into a new independent Parliamentary Party. Butt accepted the party chairmanship, holding it until his death. Weber observed that, at this stage of political development, parties in the country simply do not exist in the ‘form of permanent associations organised across local boundaries. Cohesion is provided solely by the members of Parliament’.29 Weber’s view receives modern support from Antonio Panebianco who emphasises ‘genetic’ party development, that is the importance of the party’s founding moment which will continue to condition its life.30 Additionally, Panebianco distinguishes between elite, mass and catch-all parties. Elite parties, such as the home rulers, are formed by cliques within the parliamentary assembly joining together to reflect common concerns and then to fight effective campaigns in an enlarged electorate. According to Panebianco, in elite parties, with origins in the assembly, the Parliamentary Party normally dominates. Home rulers began the new Parliament in high spirits but their hopes were quickly dashed. Too many home rulers only adopted the label to save their seats; the movement had very limited funds; its roots in the country were tenuous; the means of putting pressure on delinquent members largely absent; this was not a disciplined party but only one where MPs agreed to consult together; Butt himself, though a gifted speaker and writer, had little appetite for the routine of mundane organisational matters, while his private life and persistent indebtedness diverted his energies at crucial moments though this aspect has sometimes been exaggerated in the literature; and the new Conservative ministry was not beholden to and was, as events proved, unresponsive to Irish demands. Home rule’s fortunes rode heavily on Butt’s shoulders. Between 1869 and 1876 he expended immense physical resources attending meetings and speaking up and down the country. Any diminution of his efforts would have had an enervating effect and, with both his energy and finances dissipating, Butt’s ageing frame proved rather too frail. On the positive side, Butt was popular, standing as the foremost politician in the country, and he secured an understanding from Fenians to give parliamentarianism a three-year trial. He and the bulk of those who followed him believed that the process of educating public opinion in Britain required a lengthy gestation. In the meantime Butt held that the best course was to state within the accepted norms of discourse and behaviour Ireland’s case for self-government, express other grievances and seek ameliorative legislation. His strategy was Janus-faced: he sought to persuade the Irish people that their interests could be promoted effectively in the House of Commons, while demonstrating to observers in Britain that Ireland’s claims to self-government were reasonable and would be advanced in a dignified fashion. Moreover, Butt always insisted that although the promotion of 24
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Ireland’s case in Parliament was useful, it was not by any means the steppingstone to success – success, he maintained, would come only when public opinion united behind the home rule demand.31 Butt’s formula necessitated patience and a substantial degree of political sophistication among supporters; this would best be boosted by a bounty of useful measures. Scarcely any were forthcoming. Moreover, Butt’s financial problems constantly dogged his political work, moving one member of his party to comment in November 1875, ‘I would trust him with my cause but not my money. You might as well put water in a colander as money in Butt’s pocket’.32 Butt’s obituarist deftly caught the tenor of his life, observing ‘when the choice was between the pleasure of the moment and the fulfilment of a duty, we will not say to others, but to the higher gifts of his own nature, pleasure was sure to gain the day’.33 The chorus of a popular street ballad of the era also was testimony to his standing: Then hurrah for noble Isaac Butt, that hero true and brave, He’ll work for Ireland’s freedom and his country won’t deceive.34 The ‘Obstruction’ issue which blighted Butt’s final years did not loom large until the spring of 1877.35 Then it sprang up to become the foremost issue in Irish politics. Through it, Parnell, the best-known practitioner, quickly gained a public stature second only to Butt’s. By autumn the two men routinely locked horns over parliamentary policy. Butt refused to bend, using his influence in the party and Home Rule League and with the Catholic bishops, and deep reservoirs of support in the country, to outmanoeuvre the obstructionists. In January 1878 a national conference ended with Parnell pledging support to Butt, and the party leader promising a more vigorous approach. Relations between the men were never mended, however. Parnell’s popularity rose; Butt’s retreated. Still, it remained true that Butt did not reject ‘obstruction’ outright but believed that the moment had not arrived, that its use would merely alienate British opinion. He continued to believe in the power of moral force. More combative tactics could only be justified when that moral power had demonstrably failed. Butt’s position and health declined; he never reappeared in the House of Commons after 1878. Butt and Parnell were not very far apart in their respective outlooks on obstruction. Both men shared a vision of self-government as a reconciling force; both focused Irish attention on the House of Commons, seeing it as a forum for educating opinion; both saw the work of their country’s MPs there as crucial. They differed in emphasis. Butt and Parnell concurred on the importance of the expressive and informative aspects of representation though they came to place different weight on these functions and on when was the best moment for each. By 1877 Parnell judged that public opinion in Ireland would only continue to support parliamentarianism if MPs acted vigorously. Butt ignored the advice of friends who urged him to direct a more activist campaign in order to thwart the 25
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‘obstructionists’, no doubt, partly, because he resented Parnell, but also because he preferred ‘to teach the country what it does not know’, to cite Walter Bagehot.36 There was an underlying consistency in Butt’s long political life. From his earliest days he was prepared to take unpopular stands. Butt’s intransigence over obstruction was a late manifestation of this political courage. Untypical among his Protestant contemporaries, Butt shifted from conservative patriotism to nationalism, during the perambulation defining many of the essentials of the modern self-government movement. Like many other Irish Protestants, Butt was squeezed by the tensions of straddling an Irish and a British or imperial identity. He belongs to a line of Nationalists that have sought to emphasise the common bond of citizenship, not that of ethnicity or of religion, as the prime ingredient of the Irish nation. He is important for articulating and championing moderate nationalism at a time when it appeared to be in the doldrums. A respected figure, his limitation in the face of Parnell’s challenge was a narrow political base that lacked the hard edge of popular Catholic enthusiasm, the very element sustaining O’Connell a generation earlier. Certainly, respected leadership proved appropriate until 1877 but Butt became a liability when he was unable to adapt to the shifting temper of national feeling thereafter. His failure was that he was incapable of sensing the need to move to a more populist approach as nationalism lurched towards mass mobilisation.
Charismatic leader: Parnell Born into the section of Protestant ascendancy that exalted its patriotic past in 1846, Parnell also inherited from his mother an American anti-English tradition.37 Schooling in England then attendance at the University of Cambridge fitted him with a sense of effortless superiority and an upper-class English accent. In spite of a background that assumed participation in local and national political culture, Parnell seems to have taken little interest in politics until the beginning of 1874. Up to that time his focus, as befitted a young gentleman, was on horses, hunting and cricket. Gladstone’s call for a general election propelled Parnell into home rule politics. If the Home Rule League in Dublin found itself surprised by this Parnell allegiance, prominent members did not wait long to co-opt him into the upper echelon of the movement. In March 1874 he contested the County Dublin byelection. His campaign was lacklustre but the experience whetted an appetite for parliamentary honours. He actively sought support for the next vacancy and in April 1875 his hour struck when he stood with the combined support of the Home Rule League and the Catholic Bishop of Meath in the by-election for County Meath. His stated principles – support for tenant right, denominational education, release of the remaining Fenian prisoners and home rule – was the standard fare for ‘national’ candidates.38 The years from 1875 to 1880 were vital in Parnell’s learning curve. He emphasised the beneficial effects that would be derived from a peasant proprietary, self-government, locally rooted elected 26
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institutions, progressive social and political ideas and an active Parliamentary Party. These were not new concepts – Parnell never claimed originality – but taken together they represented an approach that brought him into touch with contemporary currents in Catholic Ireland. Whereas O’Connell’s constituency was the priesthood across Ireland and the bourgeoisie of south Leinster and Munster, Parnell reached out more widely geographically and further down the social scale. His brand of nationalism contained the seeds of sustained mass mobilisation though, as yet, conditions were not ripe. During his first two parliamentary sessions Parnell attended, voted and listened conscientiously. He encouraged the Irish people to ‘watch the conduct of their representatives . . . It was not everybody who could attend there all their time. He could because his time was not so valuable’.39 He did not speak in public often either. Parnell was not a gifted orator then or later though he became an efficient speaker, especially in the House of Commons. By early 1877 Parnell appreciated that popular feeling in Ireland was frustrated at the lack of results, and even more by the absence of vigour of the home rulers. He set about remedying the latter, drawing upon himself the condemnation of British politicians and the English press. By summer the differences with the party chairman over obstruction were widening; Parnell found himself the object of veneration by radicalised elements among the Irish in Britain and at home. From autumn 1877 until Butt’s death there were intermittent efforts to heal the breach between Parnell along with the other ‘Young Turks’ and the party elders, but none held for long. Obstruction was a peculiar route to acclaim, for Parnell was an aloof man who cut no grand figure on the platform, and the bulk of his parliamentary interventions concerned business of little account to ordinary Irishmen. What Parnell grasped, certainly by late summer 1877, was that he could communicate directly with a large and distant audience through the press.40 High levels of literacy and the cheap and rapid dissemination of information, especially the reproduction of speeches, enabled a new breed of politicians to extend themselves beyond the constraints of establishments to ‘imagined communities’ coming into being and for which they were the midwives. Unlike O’Connell earlier and Butt, he did not need to agitate in person. This image was malleable. The fact that he had little direct contact with the people allowed him and them to mould the Parnell each desired. The Land War (1879–82) lifted Parnell from the stature of popular to charismatic leader, a process coinciding with the sustained mass mobilisation of Ireland’s Catholics. Parnell’s unique place in modern Irish nationalism is a consequence of the confluence of his emergence and mass mobilisation, the third phase of Hroch’s typology. Transformation into the personification of national aspirations required time but Parnell was blessed with an exceptional run of good luck. After assuming the presidency of the new Irish National Land League in October 1879, he agreed to visit America to solicit funds for the movement. By the time he arrived in New York, the situation had changed. 27
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Successive crop failures brought the spectre of famine to Ireland and the mission was converted into raising money for relief. In slightly more than two months he initiated a highly successful campaign. The tour catapulted Parnell into the position of the foremost Irishman, giving him a world stage and making him the ‘uncrowned king of Ireland’. Already he had discovered that reports of speeches in Parliament generated a mass audience in Ireland; he now found that the same avenue of communication brought his transatlantic exertions to every Irish hearth. The American speeches were dull but their impact at home was enormous.41 Even The Times’s unfavourable coverage of the mission raised Parnell’s stature, if only by focusing on him. Following the general election in April 1880 his new status contributed to Parnell’s being elected chairman of the Home Rule Party. Had the land struggle subsided soon afterwards, the issue would have lost its bite. However, it quickly took on enlarged proportions; by autumn 1880 and until his arrest in October 1881, Parnell was the centrepiece of an agitation that permanently altered the face of rural Ireland and Catholic national consciousness. Imprisonment from October 1881 to May 1882 completed his deification. Less routinely visible from mid-1882, Parnell’s mystique thereby was enhanced rather than dampened. He had been dismayed by the excesses of the land struggle and was uncomfortable with the growing spirit of Catholic supremacy to which it gave birth. From this time onwards he avoided agitation, instead concentrating on parliamentary matters. This was also the moment when his chief lieutenants began the process of transmuting Parnell’s authority into bureaucratic structures for dealing with everyday problems. As Weber observes, history alternates between the charisma of the great figure and the routinisation of bureaucracy. The Irish National League under the dominance of the party became the near-exclusive forum of nationalism by late 1885. Charismatic figures function intuitively, Parnell himself had little enthusiasm for the machinery being devised in his name and he left detailed management to his chief lieutenants.42 In the end this indifference cost him dearly. A charismatic leader’s hold on authority is tenuous and is forfeited when he fails to prove himself in the eyes of disciples.43 In 1885 and 1886 he gained his greatest successes, scoring a huge electoral victory in Ireland by capturing 85 (86 with the Liverpool Scotland division) of the country’s 103 seats, followed by Gladstone’s conversion to home rule. Thereafter, seen as the man who nearly won self-government, Parnell was celebrated in street ballads and his face adorned collectibles – trinkets, plates and reproductions for the parlours of Irish homes.44 Parnell was less active between 1886 and 1890; followers acting in his name constructed a Nationalist machine that penetrated every Catholic district. His absence was enforced, in part, by illness, the need to placate Liberal allies by not encouraging agitation and the existence of a Conservative government as well as an undoubted preference for domesticity with Mrs O’Shea. Parnell’s distance from his colleagues and indifference to the second phase of the Land War, the Plan of Campaign, irritated some of them. For this, too, he would pay a 28
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price. But there was little that could shake mass adoration until the divorce court revelations of mid-November 1890. From then until his death the following October, Parnell fought a tenacious uphill battle to restore his position. Parnell’s conception of his place in the national movement was rational and extraordinary at the same time. On the one hand, he was the man who had brought Ireland to the brink of self-government, the person who could lead his people into the promised land. Moreover, he could not grasp the shock caused by his private life, if only because the relationship with Katharine O’Shea was general knowledge among his colleagues. On the other hand, he repudiated his opponents’ notion that they and their bureaucracy could replace him, for his authority came directly from the people. They were bound by the party pledge to sit, act and vote together but Parnell stood above such a compact which he never signed.45 There was little about his rise, ascendancy and fall that admitted of rational understanding; certainly the virulence of his opponents was anything but rational. Parnell’s conception of leadership differed from that held by his chief associates. Not surprisingly, many of the organisation men and also those who felt that Parnell had failed to aid the tenants during the Plan of Campaign deserted him. Theirs was a rational response; those who remained loyal accepted that his leadership was not subject to conventional norms. Followers of such a leader Weber argues, believe in his extraordinary qualities rather than in stipulated rules or in the dignity of a position not bound by tradition. But, as already noted, a charismatic leader’s hold on authority is tenuous and is forfeited when he fails to prove himself in the eyes of disciples. Parnell, above all, had sinned not by his moral turpitude but in dashing the dream people had of him, the unfettered faith in which he had been venerated in Catholic Ireland. The crushing of belief is always subject to retribution. The special invective reserved for a disendowed charismatic leader was now cast upon him; he was torn asunder by disillusioned followers but Parnell’s repute with posterity was only elevated by the ferocity of the attacks. As a ballad of the time professed: Parnell has been our leader from first unto the last, He was not like a grasshopper, or either an outcast, He has fought for prosperity unto the last, That is what the people say in Ireland.46 Parnell is unique among the personages of the period. His authority was personal and his life does not admit of dissection by ordinary historical analysis. Among his biographers, R. Barry O’Brien, who knew Parnell intimately, appreciated this quality. The institutionalisation of his authority belonged to Parnell’s followers. They were able men, perhaps none more so than Dillon, but he lacked Parnell’s most essential quality – charisma. That, of course, was something that could not be transferred. The machinery they erected functioned reasonably effectively for a generation but, without a Parnell, there was the imminent prospect that it would be brittle in the face of a crisis. 29
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Bureaucratic figure: John Dillon John Dillon, son of the Young Irelander John Blake Dillon, was born into the Catholic bourgeoisie.47 Dillon gained notoriety and popularity as an agrarian Radical during the Land War. But he is remembered as a key personality in the Irish party after 1885, chairman of the anti-Parnellite faction 1896–99, and party leader again during 1917–18. In the aftermath of the split resulting from the divorce court revelations in late 1890, Dillon gradually became the chief expositor of a bureaucratic Nationalist machine, controlled by the Parliamentary Party, thus conforming to Weber’s hypothesis of disciples’ institutionalisation of power. Dillon held views on inclusive political nation based on civic rights and articulated radical-liberal opinions, though in later years he was conservative on labour questions and women’s suffrage. Dillon, solitary, aloof, fastidious and lacking in bonhomie, was respected in Ireland and by the House of Commons.48 Yet, he also had a vindictive streak, made manifest in his attitude to Sir Horace Plunkett, Sir Antony MacDonnell, James Larkin and James Connolly; Dillon was unwilling to accommodate the Irish landlord class and the divisive influence of urban labour questions. His public career falls into three phases: radical and agrarian up to 1891; party and parliamentary leader 1891–1914; and increasingly critical though constitutional opponent of Britain and its Irish policy, 1914–18. By attacking the supposedly anaemic parliamentary approach of Butt in January 1878 Dillon won public notice; in February 1879 he famously condemned the ailing Butt.49 When the Irish National Land League was formed in October 1879, Dillon was a member of the original committee and accompanied Parnell on a mission to America. Though Dillon admired Parnell, the two were never intimate colleagues. He was returned to the House of Commons in 1880 but his principal forum was Land League meetings. Dillon proved a stern critic of Gladstone’s Land Bill introduced in April 1881, which he believed would do nothing for small farmers. He was detained (ultimately being imprisoned six times during his career) under the Protection of Person and Property Act, 1881. Dillon privately opposed Parnell’s decision to de-escalate the land campaign in 1882, announcing his withdrawal from politics ‘for the next few years’,50 and departed for America in summer 1883. In summer 1885 Dillon returned home where he found the political climate altered. Though he had differed with Parnell over cessation of the Land War, he now believed that the Irish leader’s strategy on home rule had borne fruit. Dillon was elected to the House of Commons in 1885. Gladstone’s adoption of home rule in 1886 confirmed his acceptance of Parnell’s strategy and convinced him of the utility of the Liberal alliance. He was to be a tenacious exponent of both in the 1890s. However, the Conservatives’ return to office in July 1886 heralded the renewal of the land agitation, and the following years were dominated by the second phase of the land struggle, the ‘Plan of Campaign’. He and William O’Brien were the most visible leaders of the agitation. Though an
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earnest Catholic, Dillon always opposed clerical interference in secular politics; following the Papal Rescript condemning the Plan of Campaign, Dillon on 4 May 1888 retorted, ‘that document is not binding on the conscience of any Irishman at all’.51 From this period he faced a stream of criticism from some ecclesiastics, notably a long-running controversy with the Bishop of Limerick. Parnell’s death in 1891 marked the emergence of the second phase of Dillon’s career. Although he never lost sight of the land question, especially the fate of evicted tenants, he increasingly focused on the management of the antiParnellite faction and the home rule question.52 Effectively, Dillon was the anti-Parnellite chairman, Justin McCarthy’s, deputy, consolidating his preeminence by 1894. Dillon worked to reconstruct his vision of Parnell’s authority with its emphases on united control, strong leadership, vigorous discipline, the reassertion of the party’s primacy in the national movement and placing the constituencies in a position subordinate to the parliamentarians.53 When the Liberals reclaimed office in August 1892 Dillon was routinely consulted about policy. Gladstone’s retirement created a vacuum in his party, severely testing Dillon’s allegiance to the Liberal alliance. Following the general election of 1895 the Conservatives returned to office, limiting Nationalist influence, but this outcome also provided Dillon with the ammunition to expel T.M. Healy from positions of influence in the movement. Healy championed a clericalism and anti-centralist approach to the party that Dillon believed would only sap Nationalist unity. On McCarthy’s resignation, Dillon succeeded to the leadership in February 1896 and immediately abolished the troublesome party committee but never enjoyed uncontested adherence; the Healy faction and the Irish Catholic constantly snapped at his heels. At this point there were in reality three Irish national parties, though Dillon led much the largest.54 Dillon announced at the Irish Race Convention in September 1896 that he was ready to stand aside if this would abet reunion. However, he was less accommodating towards Plunkett’s attempts to bring Unionists and Nationalists together. Although he attended the All-Ireland Committee conference in 1896, Dillon never shed his mistrust of dialogue with Irish Unionists, displaying an animus against Plunkett, the co-operative movement and reformism generally from the hands of antiNationalists. Similarly, though he supported the Irish Local Government bill (1898) sponsored by the Tory government, he was uneasy about proffered plums from that quarter. In 1898 O’Brien initiated the United Irish League on an agrarian platform. Dillon was ambivalent about this new association, believing that it could lead to confrontation with the government and endanger the alliance with the Liberals. In February 1899 he resigned the party chairmanship in order to facilitate party reunion. Freed of the leadership, Dillon felt able to take a more forthright political stance. He was a key critic of the Boer War. The land conference in December 1902 agreed a formula for tenant land purchase which became the backbone of the Wyndham Act (1903), the single largest measure of government-sponsored 31
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land purchase. Whereas O’Brien was a keen promoter of the accord and thereafter became the chief Nationalist proponent of ‘conference plus business’ as the way to unite all classes and creeds for Ireland, Dillon’s instinctive dislike of negotiations with landlords soon resurfaced. While some of his objections to the act were well founded, in August he attacked the ‘doctrine of conciliation’,55 believing that the right approach was to put unrelenting pressure on the landlords and government. An ensuing breach with O’Brien was never healed; O’Brien’s later published accounts severely tarnished Dillon’s reputation. Dillon used his growing ascendancy to press upon Redmond the need to resist the conference approach to deal with the vexing university question. Similarly, the devolution proposals promoted by the Under Secretary, MacDonnell, were insidious to Dillon. When the Liberals returned to office in December 1905 Dillon again was regularly consulted. In 1906 he laboured assiduously to defend Catholic interests in the abortive Education Bill for England and Wales and was deeply involved in negotiations over the Chief Secretary, James Bryce’s, local government proposal which, however, he always disliked. A much modified scheme incorporating Dillon’s major objections was proposed by Bryce’s successor, Augustine Birrell, the next year. The Nationalist response was uncertain; a conference was called to consider it. Dillon’s part was curtailed abruptly when his wife died on the eve of the meeting. The conference rejected the measure and it was withdrawn by the government. For Dillon the Evicted Tenants Act (1907), Irish University Act (1908) and the Irish Land Act (1909) were more satisfying outcomes. During the budget crisis of 1909 he spoke frequently and incurred unpopularity in Ireland for supporting a measure which would increase the Irish tax burden. Dillon, like Butt, was prepared to stand out against popular feeling. Between 1910 and 1914 the home rule question re-emerged. During 1913 he cast an unsympathetic eye on the ‘malignant enemy’,56 Larkin, during the Dublin ‘lock-out’. Dillon was at the hub of negotiations over home rule in 1914, being present at the abortive Buckingham Palace Conference (21–24 June). Opposed to ‘partition’, he was prepared to support local autonomy for northern Protestant areas so long as the formal unity of the country was not compromised. During 1914 Dillon was frustrated by the government’s handling of the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ (20–25 March) and the fatal consequences of the use of troops at Bachelors Walk in Dublin on 26 July. With the coming of the First World War, Dillon entered the final phase of his public career. At the outbreak of war in August, Dillon accepted Redmond’s support of the British decision to enter the conflict though never sharing his leader’s enthusiasm and he abstained from the military recruiting campaign. Between the Easter Rebellion of April 1916 and the general election of 1918 Dillon’s political acumen faced its greatest challenge. When the rebellion broke out he was in Dublin and able to estimate its effect. On 11 May he made an impassioned speech in the House of Commons against further executions.57 32
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Thereafter Dillon, a natural pessimist, was plunged into constant gloom about the situation. He was immersed in David Lloyd George’s abortive attempt to resolve the home rule question between May and July 1916, then offered important criticisms of the government’s actions in Ireland during the autumn. In spring 1917 he declined nomination to the Irish Convention. On 12 March 1918 Dillon was elected party chairman in succession to the deceased Redmond. When the government sought to impose conscription in Ireland he joined forces with Sinn Féin and the Catholic bishops to resist it which, in the event, was never imposed. He made a further vain effort to persuade the government to implement self-government, introducing a motion for self-determination on 29 July 1918. After the inability to reach an electoral pact with Sinn Féin, the Irish party was overwhelmed by its republican rival in the December general election; Dillon himself was easily defeated. Afterwards Dillon played little active part in Irish affairs. Had he left politics in 1882 or 1892 he would have been remembered as one of the foremost figures of the land struggle. His stature then was captured in a chorus: They arrested John Dillon, Tipperary’s tried man, At the fight in St Stephen’s, he stood in the van With Parnell our great leader, undaunted and brave, But Dillon they feared, on his mission to save.58 But, his reputation was scarred by the long years of parliamentary manoeuvres after Parnell’s fall and the failure to achieve home rule. Furthermore, his Young Ireland brand of nationalism seemed outmoded in the years after 1916, while conservative views on labour and women did not endear him to a rising generation. His long prominence at the heart of Nationalist politics testifies to his managerial qualities and capacity for leadership in ordinary circumstances. Yet his lack of charisma and an intellectual inflexibility told against him after 1914, even though, of the principal figures in the home rule movement, he was the most suspicious of the government’s course. He was unable to bend these objections to meet the rising anti-British sentiment of Ireland’s Catholics. Dillon’s impact on the direction of a national party conforms to Weber’s theorem that history alternates between charismatic leadership and its institutionalisation by followers.
Conclusion Whether men make movements or movements make men does not admit of an unequivocal resolution. In no small measure both remain valid contentions. Nevertheless, contrary to Patrick O’Brien’s assertion, the work of Nationalist and sociological theorists and the cases of Butt, Parnell and Dillon demonstrate that major figures, albeit in different respects, occupy the front row in the march of Irish nationalism. Each man saw his political stock nosedive but, while 33
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the posthumous reputations of the respected and bureaucratic leaders did not recover, that of the charismatic figure if anything loomed even larger in death and was incorporated into the mythology of Irish culture. The institutionalisation of Parnell, through the Irish party, in contrast, was held to have inhibited the march of the nation. But, a greater dimension to the discussion is the way that the case studies of three national leaders between 1867 and 1921 reveal a transition in Irish politics, a transition consistent with Weber’s analysis of leadership. Respected or popular leadership is the norm; charismatic figures are exceptional. These latter arise, if at all, as Weber observes, in moments of crisis. Butt proved inadequate when confronted by the challenge of obstruction. Parnell became a charismatic leader as a consequence of the Land War crisis. It is always daunting to follow a charismatic leader. Dillon was a genuinely popular agitator in the 1880s and later respected for his intellect but never beloved. He with Redmond bureaucratised Parnell’s leadership, which generally worked satisfactorily until they confronted the challenge of revolution. Predictably, they had no adequate reply after 1916 and the wheel turned once more to Weber’s charismatic leadership springing forth in an hour of upheaval. That new leadership soon succumbed to Weber’s cycle. The investigation conforms to media theorists’ focus upon the function of leadership and the symbiosis of leaders and the purveyors of communication. Additionally, it sustains Hroch’s insight into the importance of mass mobilisation in national formation and Panebianco’s theorem that the point of inception of a political party is decisive. Dillon, in many respects Butt’s intellectual heir rather than Parnell’s, was unable to accommodate the changing tide of an Irish identity loosed from the old moorings of liberal–nationalism. The pattern of leadership outlined affords some comfort, albeit from a different slant, to the Sinn Féin critique of the Irish party as a fossilised relict.
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2 N AT I O N A L I T Y A N D L O YA LT Y Parnellism, monarchy and the construction of Irish identity, 1880–5 James Loughlin
As Timothy Healy explained it, his epithet ‘uncrowned king’ to describe Charles Stewart Parnell was simply a spontaneous product of the excitement generated during a fund-raising tour of North America in 1880.1 This explanation, however, rather underplays its significance. In fact it reflected, and was one of the more attention-getting aspects of, a sustained campaign both to enhance Parnell’s leadership of Irish nationalism and to shape the nature of Irish national identity itself in one of the most formative periods of modern Irish history. As the pre-eminent symbol of Britishness the monarchy was one of the most important institutions against which an independent Irish national identity could be defined. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the creation of a ‘royal’ persona for Parnell – with its cluster of associations evoking authority, deference and allegiance – was identified as a significant element of the process of delegitimising the authority of the British state in Ireland at the same time as it advanced the interests of the Nationalist movement. The significance of monarchy to the politics of identity was accepted, in its own way, no less by the viceregal system in Ireland than it was by the Parnellite leadership. In this period, repeated attempts would be made to engineer closer personal contact between royal personages and the Irish masses in the belief that the royal presence had the ability, in the right political circumstances, to trigger the ‘natural’ loyalty of the people. Despite the claims of both sides, however, the Irish people were a problematic variable. The extent of their engagement with nationalism, either British or Irish, was difficult to gauge and predict. This chapter will explore, and attempt to assess the importance of, the monarchical dimension to the conflict of national identity between Parnellite nationalism and the viceregal system at a time of profound change in Irish politics.
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JAMES LOUGHLIN
I Notwithstanding concerns about Queen Victoria’s role during the famine,2 Irish attitudes towards the queen were not implacably hostile. She was well respected as a model of familial virtues and middle-class values. Anthony Trollope captured the duality of Nationalist perceptions of the Queen in his novel of the Land War of 1879–82, when the Irish-American agitator, Gerald O’Mahoney, in declaring his republican principles, at the same time praises Victoria as the best Queen in history: he was ‘quite disposed to worship her’.3 To Parnell, keen to maximise Irish and Irish-American alienation from British rule in Ireland, this kind of sentiment suggested limitations on the extent to which alienation could be taken. That he should attempt to crush such sentiment during his North American tour by claiming that Victoria had contributed ‘nothing’ to famine relief in the late 1840s4 is not surprising, especially when the developing conflict between the Land League and the viceregal system in Ireland was increasingly taking on the character of a zero-sum game: what was lost by one appeared to be gained by the other. To this end, as we shall see, the ‘callous queen’ theme could be easily married to that of avaricious royalty. Also, such attacks enhanced Parnell’s radical Nationalist credentials at a time when he was competing for funds with other relief organisations, especially one organised by the Vicerene, Lady Marlborough, and which can be seen as the exercise of ‘welfare monarchism’ by proxy.5 Parnell’s attack on the Queen was propagandistically acute: it facilitated the reduction of debate about British rule in Ireland to a comparison of the respective personal merits of himself and Victoria, the former selflessly struggling in the service of his native land, the latter ‘selfish, vain and vixenish’.6 Nor was his criticism wholly unsound. She was a reluctant contributor to the Vicerene’s relief fund, minimalist in her idea of a suitable donation, and only on the advice of her Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, was she persuaded to donate £500.7 Even then she queried whether ‘the whole £500’ – not an overly generous sum given the scale of the distress – should be given to Ireland as there was ‘so much distress in England’.8 Parnell’s American tour was a great political success. He came back from America with his popular authority confirmed as Ireland’s uncrowned king, and physically, as Healy noted, Parnell ‘looked like a King’.9 Thereafter the royal dimension to his public persona developed accordingly, sharpening the imperious edge to an already existing hauteur that could find expression in a tendency to excuse non-appearances at public meetings without explanation as part of ‘the ethics of kingship’.10 Certainly, ‘royal’ describes the welcome prepared for him by Land League branches in Dublin on his entry to the city in September 1881. Conveyed through the streets in a carriage ‘drawn by four horses with outriders, dressed in the costume so familiar in Ireland – dark green jackets and white breeches’, Parnell stood ‘to acknowledge the adoration of thronging masses shouting repeatedly, “Here comes the King of Ireland”’.11
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By this time a popular cult of Parnell was well under way, one that managed, to some extent, to integrate the political concerns of the Irish public sphere with everyday preoccupations. It was reflected in the production of crockery and jewellery embellished with images of the uncrowned king, waltzes composed in his honour and, especially resonant for a Catholic population, a ‘home rule medal’ with a bust of Parnell on one side and ‘God Save Ireland’ on the other. Appropriately enough, this was produced by J.J. Lalor of Dublin, a retailer of Catholic religious merchandise.12 The cult of Parnell in Ireland was contemporaneous with the cult of Queen Victoria, the Queen–Empress, in Britain; a cult that was promoted in a similar fashion, with the marketing of household and personal goods and luxuries – crockery, cigars and tobacco, soap, postcards, tea, biscuits, etc.13 Accordingly, at a time when the popular deification of the Queen was being promoted in Britain and helping to shape the image of the British as an imperial race, the cult of Parnell – the ‘uncrowned king’ – was functioning to counteract its appeal in Ireland; and not least because the Queen’s monetary petitions to parliament could so easily be posited satirically as examples of royal greed disregarding authentic Irish distress, as the journal Pat demonstrated in 1882 with reference to the Duke of Albany, the Queen’s youngest son (see Figure 1, overleaf).
II The monarchical dimension of the Parnellite critique of British rule in Ireland was difficult for the government effectively to respond to. Committed as it was to the convention that the institution remain aloof from political conflict, playing the royal card required delicacy and circumspection. Ideally, the desired outcome was mass attendance at, or approval for, royal or viceregal occasions that could be interpreted publicly as satisfaction with the constitutional status quo and rejection of Nationalist demands for home rule. This would not prove easy to achieve, given that Irish social attitudes were being transformed by the agrarian struggle.14 The task was made more difficult by the person in whose interest it was undertaken, the Queen, who was deeply alienated from the Irish masses and fearful that Irish disorder could ignite social chaos in England unless ruthlessly suppressed.15 Nor would the passage of time diminish her fears. The ‘Victorian internet’,16 the electric telegraph, had profoundly extended the imaginative context of the Irish question, with both threatening and discomforting consequences. American Fenians, for example, responded to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 by making threats against the lives of the Queen and Prince of Wales,17 while, in 1882, the Canadian Parliament was moved to present an inconvenient ‘respectful and loyal petition’ on home rule and the release of Parnellite ‘political prisoners’.18 In the event, the burden of cultivating Irish loyalty fell to the Queen’s representative – more properly ‘substitute’ – in Ireland, the Viceroy; and for Lord Cowper, a reluctant occupant of the post when Gladstone returned to office at 37
Figure 1
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the general election of April 1880, the task was complicated not only by frequent public ridicule of the viceregal ‘mock’ court,19 but by the developing cult of the ‘uncrowned king’ and the fact that Cowper did not have the Queen’s confidence, though his instincts were as coercionist as hers.20 Accordingly, his attempt to use a lull in agrarian violence in the spring of 1881 to arrange a visit by the Duke and Duchess of Connaught met a blank royal refusal, as did his attempt to have the Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, preside at the Social Science Congress in Dublin in October 1881.21 It was hardly accidental that the Social Science Congress chose Dublin for its annual meeting. With the passage of the Land Act of 1881, which conceded fixity of tenure, fair rent and free sale to tenant farmers, coupled with a planned arrest of Nationalist leaders, it was hoped that popular support for Parnellism would collapse. The Congress president, Goldwin Smith, a former university tutor to the Prince of Wales, defined its purpose as being to demonstrate opposition to ‘any wild schemes [home rule] that could only end in ruin’.22 Smith, however, went too far for British public opinion when he called for a royal residence – implying Victoria’s presence – as part of the remedy for Ireland’s ‘disordered’ state.23 But while Smith’s initiative was without practical effect, it was not without importance. The publicity it generated helped ensure that the monarchy’s relationship with Ireland remained a significant element of the debate on the Irish question in general. That question entered a new and highly dangerous phase with the imprisonment of the Parnellite leadership and the suppression of the Land League in October 1881. Intended to establish conditions of normalcy,24 the arrests only succeeded in removing a restraining hand on agrarian violence, while grievously damaging one of the few remaining linkages between the royal family and Irish Catholic opinion – trades exhibitions.
III These exhibitions had their origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851, designed and organised by Prince Albert, and which had its Irish equivalent in 1853, graced by the royal couple.25 Thereafter the connection between such occasions and royal patronage – in Ireland, as in Britain – was firmly established. Ostensibly non-political in character, they nevertheless embodied an implicit anti-Nationalist message, in that it was widely believed in Britain that Irish devotion to industry and the arts would undermine Nationalist agitation.26 With the incarceration of the Parnellite leadership in the offing, such considerations, we can be sure, informed government thinking on the intended Dublin trades exhibition of 1882, preparations for which began in autumn 1881. Gladstone’s private secretary, Edward Hamilton, opined: if the Dublin exhibition came to anything it would be ‘an excellent occasion on which the Prince and Princess [of Wales] might show themselves . . . [T]he absence of real royalty in Ireland is not one of her [Ireland’s] least wants or political grievances’.27 39
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Nationalists, of course, had their own agenda for such exhibitions: an industrially prosperous Ireland would be essential to the economic success of self-government.28 Accordingly, government and opposition in Ireland cooperated in the organising of trade exhibitions with very different motives. In 1881, however, the fraught political atmosphere made continued co-operation impossible, as hitherto muted antagonisms found public expression following the Parnellite arrests and after a loyalist-dominated Belfast Committee – formed to organise Ulster’s contribution to the exhibition – withdrew when the exhibition’s Executive Committee rejected royal patronage.29 A Dublin trades exhibition did eventually take place in March 1882 without either royal or viceregal patronage. It was an explicitly Nationalist event, being opened on the same day as the O’Connell monument was unveiled in Sackville (now O’Connell) Street. Designed to demonstrate the extent of popular alienation from the viceregal administration, the two events attracted the largest crowds seen in central Dublin in the nineteenth century.30 By this time also Cowper had decided to resign, repelled by the rituals of ‘a mock court’, frustrated by his administrative powerlessness, intimidated by popular hostility, and – the last straw – affronted by the understanding between Gladstone and Parnell known as the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’, under which the Nationalist leadership was released from prison.31 The compact also provoked the resignation of W.E. Forster, who had planned to use Cowper’s resignation as an occasion to combine the offices of Viceroy and Chief Secretary – the symbolic/constitutional and the functional/administrative. In effect it would have meant the revival of a post that had been abolished in the late seventeenth century, Lord Deputy.32 Increasingly coercionist when Gladstone was keen to abandon coercion, Forster’s hopes were unrealistic. Gladstone was, though, happy to accept the proposal when it was made by Cowper’s replacement, Lord Spencer, a respected former Viceroy who was prepared to take up the reins again, together with the seat in Cabinet that was normally the preserve of the Chief Secretary.33 It was not the office of Lord Deputy that Spencer’s powers evoked in Nationalist minds, however, but that of a contemporary eastern despot (see Figure 2).
IV Spencer’s personal powers and authority were further enhanced as a result of the Phoenix Park murders whose victims were T.H. Burke, Under Secretary at Dublin Castle, and Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed Irish Chief Secretary.34 Cavendish’s replacement, George Otto Trevelyan, was a wellmeaning but overly sensitive, weak politician, who would find the trials of his office extremely stressful,35 and thus, even had he wanted to, was incapable of acting as a restraining influence on Spencer. Further, the murders provoked a radical reorganisation of the Castle administration and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, together with a Coercion Act that gave the Viceroy personal powers to deal with Irish crime and disorder, including the establishment of non-jury trials 40
Figure 2
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and virtually unlimited powers of search.36 But for our purposes, Spencer is especially significant due to his belief that a closer connection between the royal family and the Irish masses was an essential element in the consolidation of the Union. It was a belief not dented in the least by the rise of Parnellism. Indeed, the mass gatherings that Parnell attracted could be read as validating the perception of the Catholic Irish as peculiarly susceptible to personal authority: the task was, ‘in an image worshipping country’, to redirect, with some urgency, that attraction to royal personages.37 The task, however, was not made easier by a Queen whose alienation from ‘semi-savage’ Nationalist Ireland was greatly intensified by the Phoenix Park murders, for which she blamed ‘Mr Gladstone and his violent, radical advisers’.38 Moreover, though Spencer had determined to use only in ‘emergencies’ the formidable coercive powers he had acquired, he was faced with a Parnellite Party that was about to redirect its energies away from agrarian agitation towards home rule, and which would attempt to do so by keeping Ireland in a state of emergency through aggressive agitation against the Irish executive.39 And Parnellites were handed a useful stick with which to beat Spencer repeatedly when the supposed murderers of the Joyce family in Maamtrasna, Connemara, in August 1882 were convicted on what was later to be revealed as the perjured evidence of prosecution witnesses.40 Accordingly, it would prove extremely difficult for Spencer to perform his specifically viceregal functions – as the Queen’s representative uncontaminated by involvement in party conflict – which he took extremely seriously. Though Spencer was convinced that when he received a good public reception it showed the failure of agitators to prevent the natural loyalty of the people from expressing itself, it yet took only a simple accident, such as a birdcage falling from an upstairs window during a viceregal procession in Dublin, for panic and confusion out of all proportion to the incident to prevail.41 And yet, hostile as the Parnellites were to Dublin Castle, their attitude to the Viceroyalty as a constitutional office was somewhat ambiguous. With both major British parties opposed to home rule, their focus was framed at a more intermediate level, with proposals that both included and excluded the Viceroyalty. For example, in 1883 Justin McCarthy introduced a bill in the Commons proposing the abolition of the Viceroyalty around the same time that Parnell was privately supplying Gladstone with a list of reforms that specifically excluded this.42 The bill had a brief parliamentary life, but it was more significant than this would suggest, for the Viceroyalty signified one of the fault lines running through Nationalist ranks, between Parnellites and moderate home rulers. Both O’Connell and Butt had taken the view that while Dublin Castle was the centre of Britain’s coercive apparatus in Ireland, the Viceroyalty was yet one of the most important remaining signifiers of Ireland’s separate constitutional and national status under the Union. Nationalists opposing the bill – who also tended to be against agrarian agitation and aggressive opposition to the Spencer regime – did so on this ground, adding that abolition would do nothing to reduce the Irish 42
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executive’s coercive capacity. They preferred a measure to depoliticise the office by allowing a member of the royal family to hold it for five or six years, together with a removal of the ban on Roman Catholic occupants, thus making it acceptable to Irish opinion.43 McCarthy’s bill also stimulated a debate in the Nationalist press on the merits of abolition. This was unremarkable, except for the participation of W.J. O’Neill Daunt, a veteran Repealer and associate of O’Connell, who enlisted the Liberator in the ranks of the anti-abolitionists with the claim that O’Connell regarded abolition as something that would merely consolidate the Union.44 But as the press debate developed, it moved beyond the practical merits of abolition to address the issue’s metaphoric significance as one dividing elitists and popular democrats in the broad Nationalist family. John M’Grath, replying to Daunt, argued that he and ‘modern Nationalists’ looked at this subject from very different viewpoints. Daunt’s ideas were apparently those of Grattan; they suited a time when Ireland had looked to the aristocracy and gentry as the great pioneers of her freedom, and a true source of national pride. But things had changed since then, ‘and Mr Daunt, with other leading politicians, should adopt their minds to existing combinations’.45 It was an acute observation. Daunt was privately appalled at the apparently ‘revolutionary’ aspects of Parnellism and the prospect of home rule under such a movement, much preferring the rule of a native aristocracy made alive to its national responsibilities and unquestionably loyal to the Queen;46 as did Augusta Goold – granddaughter of Thomas Goold, Irish Master of Chancery in the late eighteenth century and opponent of the Act of Union – who combined a public defence of the Viceroyalty as ‘an august office which is part of our constitution’ with private angst at ‘the great misfortune’ of a people so ‘inherently aristocratic and monarchical’ as the Irish being ‘absolutely driven’ into ‘wild’ forms of democracy’.47 The subtext to the debate on abolition of the Viceroyalty was concerned with the kind of people the Catholic Irish were, and the extent to which it was possible to shape their identity. But while the anti-abolitionists generally expressed many of the sentiments Spencer wished to cultivate, it was also apparent that their brand of nationalism was not in the ascendant. Nevertheless, everoptimistic about the prospects of shaping Irish identity in a monarchical mode – both Gladstone and Spencer were prey to the delusion that forthcoming franchise reforms, the most radical in the nineteenth century, would not greatly benefit Parnell48 – Spencer saw in the controversy divisions that could be exploited to thwart Parnellism.49 That movement, in fact, was much less radical than it appeared. The rhetorical violence of its campaign against Spencer disguised a social conservatism that characterised leader and led,50 and whose politics were attuned to the kind of accommodations they could persuade the British parliament to make. When Daunt wrote to Parnell in 1885 making the case for retaining the Viceroyalty, the latter readily agreed that the case had merit.51 As the object of Parnellite 43
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vilification it is perhaps understandable that Spencer failed to appreciate the real nature of Parnellism, remaining convinced of the efficacy of legislative reform as a means of undermining it. The conciliation of Ireland’s Catholic population, however, was constrained by the need to retain the support of the state’s problematic Orange supporters in Ulster.52 Accordingly, when William Shaw, a leading anti-Parnellite MP, introduced a bill to remove the ban on Catholics holding the viceregal office, Gladstone could privately acknowledge Cabinet approval for the measure, while publicly refusing the support that would have ensured its enactment.53
V 1885 was to see the climax of the struggle between Parnellites and the Spencer regime. It was a year in which a general election would have to be held following the radical franchise reforms of 1884–5, and with this in mind both the efforts of the Viceroy to thwart Parnellism and the latter’s response – increased attention to voter registration and the formation of local National League branches to the accompaniment of anti-Spencerian vilification – proceeded with greater urgency. Convinced that he had made considerable progress in re-establishing the ‘natural’ social order of Ireland, Spencer yet feared that the temper of the Parnellite movement was such that it would now seek to alienate the Irish people, not just from the Irish executive, but from the royal family also. Spencer regarded this development as partly his own fault, a product of the ‘emergency’ measures he had been forced to implement and of his merging of the symbolic and administrative functions of Viceroy and Chief Secretary, which had, by proxy, mired the royal family in political controversy.54 The Nationalist journal, Pat, had already addressed the issue in a political cartoon (Figure 3) wittily punning on the words ‘levy’ and ‘levee’ to illustrate the impossibility of forcing the Irish people to be loyal. Colour was given to Spencer’s fears in late January 1885 when Parnell, in a speech at Cork, made his famous claim that no man had the right to place the ‘ne plus ultra’ to the march of a nation, supported by an account of the rapacious exploitation of Ireland by English monarchs down the ages.55 Spencer believed this situation could only be effectively redressed by a major royal visit, preferably by the Prince of Wales, in conjunction with an extensive Irish reform package, to include local government, a Secretary of State to replace the Viceroy for administrative purposes, together with, for the purpose of engendering loyalty – though he withheld the proposal from a hostile Victoria – a permanent royal residence in Ireland. In this way, ‘the growing feeling of coldness to the Crown in Ireland where the people are more easily moved to loyalty for the Queen and the Royal family than the English or the Scotch’ would be checked.56 Anxiously pressing his case with the alarming advice that ‘every delay makes it more difficult to occupy the ground which we want to hold’, Spencer’s 44
Figure 3
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pleading gradually overcame the objections of a Queen concerned that she not appear to be responding to terrorist acts.57 By early February, finance for the visit – £3,000 – had been obtained, together with the agreement of the Prince of Wales, upon whose head the Fenians had reportedly placed a bounty of $10,000 ‘dead or alive’,58 and a Cabinet endorsement that took care to place responsibility for the Prince’s welfare firmly on Spencer’s shoulders.59 Certainly there is little evidence that his Cabinet colleagues generally had quite the same belief in the nationally transforming effects of exposure to the royal presence on the Irish people that he had, while, given the impassioned atmosphere of Irish politics at this time, the visit was guaranteed to generate controversy. In part, this was due to Parnellite anxieties about the progress of their movement. Growth in local branches of the National League since 1882 had been unimpressive, while the party organ, United Ireland, had not made a profit until 1884.60 In this context the royal visit had a threatening aspect that needed to be countered, which the Nation sought to do by presenting the Prince of Wales as a reluctant visitor, the victim of Dublin Castle manipulation.61 But it was the Parnellite movement’s most brilliant propagandist, William O’Brien, editor of the party organ, United Ireland, who sprang forward to lead the anti-visit agitation. Having engineered his own expulsion from the House of Commons O’Brien called a mass ‘indignation’ meeting in the Phoenix Park at which the forthcoming royal visit was the chief focus of condemnation. The choice of the Phoenix Park for the protest was inspired, for it allowed O’Brien to revive popular memory of one of the most contentious episodes in recent Dublin history, when, during the last visit of the Prince of Wales to Ireland in August 1871, the Metropolitan Police had made an unprovoked attack on a Nationalist meeting in the Park while the Prince happened to be visiting the Park’s viceregal lodge.62 It was easy to revive and refocus the indignation produced by the memory of that incident onto the forthcoming royal visit, assisted by claims that Dublin Castle was intending to treat the Irish people ‘as if they were a nation of Negroes’ made docile by royal ‘glass beads and trinkets’,63 an interpretation that was not entirely wide of the mark given Spencer’s hopes for the visit, and which the irreverent Punch also suggested in a cartoon (Figure 4) depicting the Prince and Princess of Wales preparing for it. However, important as it was for Parnellite purposes to create and sustain popular opposition to the visit, it yet required careful handling. In the final analysis, for all its rhetorical violence the Parnellite party was engaged in a constitutional campaign to convince British opinion of the case for home rule. The trick was to maintain popular feeling against the visit at white heat while ensuring the physical well-being of the royal visitors. Accordingly, O’Brien advised the avoidance of discourtesy to the Prince, recommending that the Irish people postpone their greetings until the Prince came to Ireland for the purpose of opening an Irish parliament.64 In fact, United Ireland’s initial response to the forthcoming visit was to express sympathy for the Prince, absolving him of any 46
Figure 4
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responsibility for an affair engineered by ‘the gang who mind the viceregal throne in Dublin’.65 Events would show, however, that it was impossible to maintain the balance between indignation and respect that Parnellites sought to strike. The problem was that a Nationalist boycott of the visit allowed press comment on it in Britain to be dominated by the addresses of loyalists and Orangemen, which were likely to be portrayed as representative of Irish opinion in general. How, in such circumstances, could the Nationalist viewpoint be authentically communicated to British public opinion? Eventually the need to do so would lead to the abandonment of aloof disdain in favour of harassment of the royal visitors. By mid-March, three weeks before the beginning of the visit, a tone of personal abuse of the Prince was entering Nationalist commentaries.66 At the same time an unforeseen development added to the fraught political context of the visit. In February 1885 the pro-administration Cardinal McCabe, Archbishop of Dublin, died, thereby initiating a struggle for the succession to this most important see. Spencer and the Castle intrigued at Rome to have a successor of the same ilk appointed while the Parnellite leadership and press pushed the claims of the better-qualified and Nationalist president of Maynooth College, Dr William Walsh, who was eventually successful.67 Spencer’s belief that a public declaration by Gladstone to the effect that ‘a message of condolence had been received from the Queen’ would do much to cultivate popular opinion in Ireland tells us more about Spencer’s mindset than Irish Catholic opinion. But a more important reason behind the drift to aggressive opposition to the visit was the ability of royal issues to open fissures in Nationalist ranks.68 As the royal visitors’ first port of call would be Dublin, it was important that the city corporation be brought into line with Parnellite designs. Accordingly Parnell advised a policy of ‘reserve’ to demonstrate inalienable attachment to Nationalist principles and opposition to Spencer’s suppression of constitutional liberties.69 However, the Lord Mayor, John O’Connor, a Nationalist with an uncertain record for political reliability,70 had, shortly before, veered between extremes of hostility and conciliation on the visit, vehemently attacking it at O’Brien’s ‘indignation’ meeting in the Phoenix Park, only to then offer a public letter of abject apology for his actions, occasioning consternation among the party leadership and bringing comfort to Unionists.71 Moreover, O’Connor’s action stimulated others with similar reservations to express them. E.D. Gray, a friend of the Prince of Wales, used O’Connor’s apology to express ‘the general feeling’ that the Prince of Wales, Ireland’s future King, should be respectfully received, adding quite erroneously that the visit had nothing to do with Dublin Castle but was connected with the work of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, of which both he and the Prince were members.72 Again, at a meeting of ratepayers of Dublin’s North Ward convened for the purpose of ensuring the corporation’s compliance with the Parnellite line on the visit, Alfred Webb, a former treasurer of the National League and a leading Protestant Nationalist, invoked the authority of ‘Grattan, 48
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O’Connell, Butt, and other patriots like these’ to justify an endorsement of the Lord Mayor’s apology and a respectful reception for the royal visitors as fully consistent with the assertion of Irish rights and opposition to coercion.73 Despite his Parnellite connections, Webb had more in common with the strand of Nationalist opinion articulated by O’Neill Daunt, and would be a leading member of the small but significant Irish Protestant Home Rule Association formed in 1886 largely for the purpose of persuading British opinion that Irish Protestants had nothing to fear from home rule.74 The support of this group for self-government, however, was informed by a rational belief in the need for better government rather than the historicist and emotive arguments that infused Catholic nationalism. In this context, since Ireland under home rule would continue to acknowledge the monarch as head of state it only made sense to respectfully greet the heir apparent. Webb had sought to mobilise support for his position from the founder of the Land League, Michael Davitt, but Davitt, already alienated from the Parnellite leadership due to his views on land nationalisation,75 and now resident in Rome, was not engaged by the issue and did not wish to antagonise the Parnellite leadership further.76 The seriousness with which the latter took the North Ward meeting is evident from the presence of Timothy Harrington, national organiser of the National League, who vehemently opposed Webb’s proposal. Such were the emotions aroused that Webb only got home safely with the aid of police protection.77 United Ireland did seek in a reasoned way to persuade the dissenters of the error of their ways, claiming their activities were ‘debilitating to the psychological welfare of Nationalists’;78 nevertheless, despite the fact that the Parnellite majority on the corporation – now in possession of a florid, overblown, ‘royal’ declaration from the party leadership advising boycott – ensured its will would prevail, it was not enough to drown out the protests of those opposed to it.79 It was not that the protests were individually very significant, rather that for a Parnellite leadership acutely concerned about how Irish affairs were reported/distorted in Britain, they could easily be made to appear indicative of Nationalist weakness,80 especially as public bodies in the rest of Ireland divided for and against the visit.81 In this context the temptation to maximise Catholic opposition to it by smearing the Prince of Wales with sectarianism was too great to resist.82 The difficulties besetting Parnellites over the royal visit gave some satisfaction to Spencer, but it was tempered by concern about the developing state of Nationalist opinion. Accordingly, he took steps to ensure that a forthcoming renewal of the Crimes Act of 1882 was postponed until after the visit, and that Addresses to the Prince from Orange lodges contained only formal greetings, devoid of political references.83 However, his hopes of ensuring the visit’s success by associating it with an extensive reform programme soon ran into difficulties. Encouraged by support for this plan from George Errington, an Irish nominal home ruler largely responsible for arranging the misguided anti-Parnellite Papal 49
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Rescript of 1883,84 Spencer pressed his case in Cabinet,85 while favourable public debate was encouraged by the appearance in the April issue of the Fortnightly Review of two articles publicly supporting the case for reform that he was pressing with his Cabinet colleagues.86 Cabinet attention, however, was currently occupied with Joseph Chamberlain’s ill-fated ‘Central Board’ scheme for Ireland, a plan that demanded attention due to the somewhat misleading assurance of Cardinal Manning and a number of the Irish Catholic hierarchy that it would ‘pacify’ Ireland and enable them to oppose home rule.87 Spencer’s and Chamberlain’s reform plans were not entirely incompatible, and Chamberlain would later add abolition of the Viceroyalty to his scheme.88 Nevertheless, the fact that both schemes were up for discussion meant that it was not possible to associate the royal visit to Ireland with an announcement of an extensive reform plan to create a congenial context for it. As it was, the visit proceeded with only the certainty of a forthcoming renewal of coercion. The only conciliatory act specifically associated with the visit was a proclamation in the official organ, the Dublin Gazette, announcing that in future prelates and bishops of the Catholic Church would, in Ireland, share ‘the precedence’ which had belonged to such dignitaries of the established Church of Ireland before the Irish Church Act of 1869.89 Even then it was not an entirely voluntary act, following in the wake of Nationalist protests in parliament.90 Nor did the administration gain much from the gesture. Popular Protestant opinion was irritated,91 while it did nothing to persuade the Catholic hierarchy to participate in the royal visit. The Church had made a compact with Parnell in 1884 which it did not want to endanger, though the hierarchy was not unanimous. As an influential institution of Irish Catholic society, however, it had to be conciliated, which including the Catholic seminary, Maynooth, in the Prince’s itinerary was intended to do.92 Spencer, moreover, successfully lobbied the Queen to have the visit made a ‘family’ excursion by the inclusion of the Waleses’ children.93 This was a clever attempt to shape the character of the visit by emphasising the uncontentious moral and familial dimension to the royal persona rather than the constitutional, thereby inhibiting mass public hostility. Certainly, Nationalist difficulties in finding the most appropriate stance on the visit continued. Not only were loyalists preparing their addresses, but divisions continued to surface within Nationalist ranks. Indeed, for some members of the Catholic clergy who recalled the patronage and protection the Prince had apparently offered Catholic institutions in Rome during political upheavals in Italy in the early 1870s, the idea of a boycott was repugnant.94 The uncertainties surrounding the Parnellite stance on the visit were evident in somewhat schizoid commentaries, in which assurances that the Prince would be ‘as safe in Ireland as he would be at Sandringham’ went together – for the purpose of assisting the development of the National League95 – with contempt for the ‘fat middle-aged Englishman . . . a mere electioneering carpet-bagger’ coming to Ireland to consolidate Spencer’s coercion regime.96 Recourse was had to yet 50
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another appeal for guidance from Parnell, which did not differ in essentials from its predecessors, apart from the omission of the advice to maintain an attitude of ‘dignified neutrality’ to the visit.
VI Since 1849 no royal visit to Ireland had begun with as much trepidation as that surrounding the visit of 1885.97 But it got off to an excellent start. The arrival at Kingstown and entry into Dublin on 8 April was a great success, stimulating the Liberal Unionist Irish Times to describe Westland Road railway station, where the royal party alighted in the city, as ‘the portal of goodwill’.98 And from the beginning Edward struck the ‘welfareist’ note that would characterise his activities thereafter, explaining, during a visit to the spring cattle show at the Royal Dublin Society, the activities of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes of which he was a member, and providing a demonstration of his concern by a visit to a slum area where he was reported as declaring, in reply to a request for help, ‘I will do all in my power’.99 This successful start came as an enormous relief to Spencer and CampbellBannerman, expressed in wonder at ‘the vast crowds eager to demonstrate their loyalty’ and a temptation to read into it an endorsement of Spencer’s ‘conduct as Viceroy’.100 The remaining engagements of the first week proved highly satisfactory. A levee at Dublin Castle attracted seventy peers, raising loyalist hopes for the reversal of landlord absenteeism and the establishment of an Irish royal residence.101 Concerned that ‘neutrality’ was leaving the public sphere in the hands of the loyalist population, the Nation stressed the ephemerality of the emotions the royal visit aroused,102 but it was William O’Brien, as editor of United Ireland, who produced the most impressive Nationalist response. To drive home the argument that Irish Catholic and Nationalist opinion was opposed to the visit, O’Brien produced the results of a massive survey of Irish opinion he had organised. In the days before opinion polls, this was a truly impressive exercise. In late March he had requested from local boards, National League branches, journals and individuals all over Ireland expressions of opposition to the royal visit condensed into ‘one sentence’. Produced as a supplement to United Ireland in the first week of the visit, the results disclosed that in the whole of the three southern provinces only ‘the Kingstown and Bray Town Commissioners, the Sligo Corporation, and the Mallow Town Commissioners will approach the Prince with addresses’. By contrast, the corporations of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Clonmel, Kilkenny, Wexford and Drogheda, together with 84 boards of town commissioners and around 160 boards of Poor Law guardians were boycotting the royal visit. They were following in the van of the Parnellite Party whose MPs, together with 800 local National League branches, represented, on O’Brien’s estimation, ‘close on 200,000 members’. Of leading public figures, Archbishop Thomas Croke of Cashel and the bishops of Clonfert and of 51
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Down and Connor, together with many more of the local clergy, supported the ‘dignified reserve’ and the ‘charity’ of the people’s silence. Finally, O’Brien added to the main body of his survey as many private individual replies as he could find space for.103 There could hardly have been a more impressive mobilisation of Nationalist opinion. And yet, it was not enough for O’Brien’s purposes. The exercise was undertaken, not to persuade committed Nationalists of what they already knew, but to counteract the expected claims in the anti-Nationalist press in Britain that congenial receptions for the royal party were representative of Irish opinion in general. Not only were these duly made, but, provokingly, the loyalist reception for the royal visitors was presented in zero-sum terms as indicating the weakness of Parnellism,104 especially by Punch (see Figure 5). In this context, what had originally seemed a dignified and highly effective means of registering Nationalist Ireland’s protest against a coercive administration, now appeared a major propagandist blunder. Accordingly, a decision was taken to repair the mistakes of the first week of the visit by aggressive opposition in the second. On Sunday 12 April twelve major Nationalist demonstrations took place at venues across the south and west of Ireland at which anti-royal and antiimperial themes were integrated, and expressed in a focus on the ‘Famine Queen’ myth, Disraeli’s supposed enthusiasm for the effects of the Great Famine, and a re-enactment of the Madhi’s defeat of British forces in the Sudan in 1884.105 But it was O’Brien – convinced that the counter-productive effects of the previous week could only be effaced by being as ‘relentless and disagreeable as the law will allow’ – who engineered the coup de théâtre that shaped Nationalist reactions to the visit thereafter. 106 O’Brien, MP for Mallow, led a mass demonstration at Mallow railway station when the Prince alighted briefly to receive an address from the town commissioners on 13 April. It was an action guaranteed to ensure a vigorous response from Spencer and the Royal Irish Constabulary; and the resulting chaos – with rival bands setting ‘God Save Ireland’ in competition with ‘God Save the Queen’ to the accompaniment of a police baton charge on the station’s Nationalist besiegers, while a furious O’Brien demanded ‘justice’ – was entirely suited to his purpose.107 Nationalist Ireland was indignant, questions were raised in Parliament about police brutality and sobriety, while British public opinion was left under no illusions about Nationalist feeling towards the visit.108 The emotions aroused at Mallow carried over to Cork City, the chief southern destination of the royal party. Houses displaying royal emblems had their windows smashed, and reports circulated that the police and resident magistrates of the city had thrown upon the Lord Mayor personal responsibility for keeping the peace.109 Appeals for calm were made and when the royal couple arrived they were able to carry out several of their duties. Nevertheless, at certain points they were subject to quite serious abuse, including threatening behaviour at close quarters, the throwing of missiles and, most unpleasantly, the 52
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Figure 5
throwing of ‘a miniature wooden coffin . . . with accurate aim into the royal carriage, landing on the Princess’s knees’.110 The royal visitors met a similar reception in Limerick;111 it was surely with relief that they made the return journey to Dublin where a ball attended by 6,000 people awaited.112 No less would they have been relieved when their itinerary took them northwards into Ulster for the final stage of the visit, where their round of engagements had the character of a triumphant progress of greetings and celebration;113 a character, however, that was largely determined, ironically, by the hostile reception the Prince and Princess of Wales had met with in the south. It was also here, during a speech at Belfast, that the Prince allowed himself an oblique expression of distaste at his reception in the south by pointedly praising north-east Ulster as a model of industry and progress for the rest of Ireland to emulate.114 While the Parnellite reaction to the royal visit dominated the press accounts of its later stages, this was not the only variety of Irish nationalism to find 53
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expression. Just as the controversy over viceregal abolition drew out antiParnellite nationalism, so too did the royal visit of 1885, if more discreetly. For a strand of nationalism increasingly deemed elitist, it was perhaps entirely appropriate that the agency for its expression was the formidable Lady Florence Dixie,115 a close friend of the Prince of Wales who was godfather to one of her children. Dixie used her access to the Prince before and during the royal visit to try to enlist his support for Daunt’s anti-Parnellite idea of a home rule settlement that would undo the socially destabilising effects of the Land War by restoring the Irish nobility to positions of power in Irish politics.116 Daunt had not expected much to come of Dixie’s efforts,117 nor did it, whereupon she released her correspondence with the Prince to the press in the hope of encouraging public support for the project.118 Another personal approach to the Prince of Wales while he was in Ireland came from his old tutor, Goldwin Smith, who pressed on Edward the visit’s value as a blow against Parnellism, something which could effectively be built upon by an extensive reform programme to include a royal residence and parliamentary sittings in Dublin: ‘they [the Irish] ought to see both the Sovereign and the Parliament’.119 Whatever their differences, and despite the pronouncements of Bagehot’s English Constitution about the apolitical position of the monarchy,120 what all parties concerned with the royal visit of 1885 had in common was the belief that, where Ireland was concerned, the monarchy was much too important an institution to be regarded as politically neutral.
VII If it is a central function of public ritual to reflect and reinforce national integration,121 then there could hardly be a worse illustrative example than the royal visit of 1885. The essential requirement of ritual effectiveness – a high level of societal communitas – was noteworthy by its absence. 122 Not only did deep national, cultural and religious differences divide the societies of Britain and Ireland, both of which simultaneously royal ritual affected to symbolise, but unlike the relatively simple native societies that anthropologists often focus on, the political context which framed the visit of 1885 was dysfunctionally dynamic rather than stable, conflictual rather than harmonious, and complicated by a media variable widely recognised as crucial to perceptions of success and failure. That Spencer was moved to arrange a royal visit in such unfavourable circumstances and that Parnellites were disposed to react to it with such unprecedented hostility was determined by their anxieties about the extent to which their policies in recent years had succeeded in mobilising the newly enfranchised Irish masses – bound to go to the polls in a matter of months – for their respective conceptions of national identity. Given Spencer’s knowledge of Irish political conditions, his decision to arrange the visit represented, to say the least, the triumph of hope over experience, fuelled by his personal sense of guilt about implicating 54
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the monarchy in political controversy. Spencer, however, was also influenced by the apparent success of the monarchy in Britain in stabilising the existing social and constitutional order in this period of democratic change, and convinced that the ‘image worshipping’ Catholic Irish were more susceptible to royal influence than were the Scots or English.123 The evidential basis for the influence of the monarchy in Britain, however, at least among the working class, was not substantial: there is reason to believe the existing constitutional and social order was accepted, but did not really influence working-class culture and values.124 Irish Catholic attitudes to the constitutional signification of the monarchy were even more problematic. In Britain the monarchy was emblematic of an accepted constitutional order – Crown, Lords and Commons – but in Ireland it was more emblematic of the coercive and unpopular governmental system centred on Dublin Castle. Certainly the monarchy failed to achieve the ambitious objective Spencer set for it in 1885. While British press reporting of the first week of the Irish visit of 1885 provided the trigger for Parnellite opposition, of itself that hardly accounts for its vehemence. In fact, its legitimising context can be traced back at least to Parnell’s North American tour of 1880, when he sought to undermine the moral credibility of the monarchy by his revival of the ‘Famine Queen’ myth – much earlier than has recently been claimed125 – and how the sovereign’s apparently endless demands for public money could be easily framed negatively as greed in the face of real Irish distress. Accordingly, the effects of Spencer’s amalgamation of viceregal and administrative functions, it can be argued, merely enhanced and sharpened antagonism that already had a fruitful soil in which to grow. At the same time, that he was not accountable to the Commons, and thus not personally available for Parnellites to vent their anger at, made it only too likely that they would do so by proxy in 1885. An additional inducement was the belief that vigorous opposition to the royal visit would assist the growth of the National League. Professor Murphy’s argument that Parnellite hostility was due to the fact that ‘the Irish party had to marshal all its resources in order to turn public opinion against the visit’ both fails to appreciate these considerations and overestimates the extent of public support for the visit.126 In the latter respect, he fails to take account of the substantial Protestant and loyalist community in the greater Dublin area – not to mention ease of railway access from Belfast – which could be relied upon to give the royal visitors an enthusiastic welcome even if no Nationalists were present, and whose opinions Parnellite opposition would not have affected. Theodore Hoppen’s argument about the significance of localism in Irish life is an important consideration when assessing Irish attitudes to politics in general and, by extension, royal occasions.127 Arguably, localism was the fundamental obstacle in the way of both Spencerian and Parnellite campaigns for public support. While it is certainly the case that Spencer’s hopes of thwarting Parnellism failed – and he could only have been further discomfited by the disclosure, 55
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shortly after the royal visit, that the ‘uncrowned king’ was apparently in direct genealogical descent from Edward I128 – there is also reason to believe that the non-Unionist population were not as engaged with the Parnellite project as the party leadership would have wished. Undiluted nationalism is an inadequate explanation for Parnellite success at the general election of 1885, and when Gladstone publicly declared for home rule in 1886 the bill he produced to effect it was the subject of strong criticism in Ireland regarding its workability, while the news of its defeat in the Commons caused barely a ripple of popular protest.129 Moreover, not only were Parnellite gains from the royal visit of 1885 questionable, their activities hardly provided a supportive context for Gladstone’s claim that home rule would be accompanied by a growing Irish sentiment of loyalty to Crown and constitution.130 It was clearly with the costs to the home rule campaign of the anti-royalism of 1885 in mind – it also established a precedent of Nationalist non-involvement in Irish royal occasions – that in his memoirs William O’Brien sought to justify his actions by claiming that they had converted the Prince of Wales to home rule.131 Rumours to this effect did circulate occasionally, but were totally without foundation.132 O’Brien’s claim reflected a somewhat misguided tendency to assume a greater power for political rhetoric and action than was realistic. Certainly it would be rash to assume a homogeneity or synchronicity between political oratory in the public sphere and private belief in the local. Indeed, both the monarchy and Irish constitutional nationalism would eventually, and simultaneously, fall foul of their respective publics. The Teutonic ancestry of the royal family was perceived as a serious threat to the monarchy during the First World War, a threat disabled in 1917 by a rapid change of identity involving the rejection of German titles and the adoption of the English family name ‘Windsor’.133 No such rapid adjustment was available to constitutional nationalism: 1917 saw its terminal crisis develop as more ‘authentic’ forms of Irish national identity took hold in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. Both cases illustrate the problematic relationship between political/constitutional leaderships and the forces they seek to embody and direct in periods of great socio-political transformation.
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3 ‘ T H E S E Q U I E T D AY S O F P E A C E ’ 1 Nationalist opinion before the home rule crisis, 1909–13 Michael Wheatley
The beginnings of the ‘home rule crisis’ have been dated variously from the general elections of 1910, the September 1911 launch of the ‘Ulster campaign’, the publication of the Government of Ireland Bill in April 1912, the Ulster Covenant of September 1912 or the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in January 1913. Each of these events has been seen as initiating a deepening crisis, in which the issues of Irish home rule and ‘Ulster’ resistance dominated political life in Ireland. This was a period, according to one of the first biographers of John Redmond, Warre B. Wells, in which parliamentary democracy became ‘an impolitic fiction’ and the Irish lost ‘their habit of obedience and respect towards parliament’.2 More recently, George Boyce has written that in the years 1912–14 there was a sense that constitutional politics were ‘failing’, with home rulers paralysed and uncertain in the face of unconstitutional opposition, while the exclusion of Ulster was seen as an unmitigated wrong and home rule as being in jeopardy.3 The Unionists’ inexorable Ulster campaign has been chronicled by many,4 and across Ireland there was certainly by 1914 what David Fitzpatrick has called an ‘extraordinary outburst of mimetic militarism’,5 with over 230,000 Irishmen participating to varying degrees in private paramilitary organisations. According to the Irish party MP and writer Stephen Gwynn, ‘the political effect of their [the UVF’s] existence was so great that it inevitably called out a counterpart’.6 Despite this, studies of Nationalist opinion during the crisis have been conspicuous by their absence. Where the Nationalist response has been described, the focus has been primarily on the rich source material of the papers of Redmond and John Dillon, outlining their negotiations and setbacks, rather than on the popular mood. This focus on the leadership is understandable – their reactions to the many actions of Unionist politicians and paramilitaries appeared distinctly muted. Trapped by their alliance with the Liberal government, they responded almost passively to events outside their control and were then caught in a series of humiliating climb-downs.7 57
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There may, however, be another explanation for the limited analysis of the crisis outside Ulster. If, for much of the period, there was not a sense of crisis among southern Nationalists, there would not be a popular ‘response’ to it. As will be seen, contemporary writers instead wrote regularly of ‘apathy’. As late as September 1913, Redmond still had to deny publicly the Unionist charge that Nationalists were apathetic, conceding that they had been nearly silent, but seeing this as proof that they had been ‘law abiding and orderly’.8 Contemporaries frequently described a lack of enthusiasm rather than a sense of crisis. In mid-1912, the pro-home rule English journalist Sydney Brooks confessed that he sometimes doubted whether the Irish really wanted home rule – ‘they show none of the ardour and determination of the Poles or the Finns’.9 In the summer of 1913, Patrick Pearse voiced his discontent with Irish complacency to his former pupil (later the historian) Denis Gwynn. He said that he would rather see Dublin in ruins than that the ‘existing conditions of contentment and confident security within the British Empire’ should continue.10 Gwynn’s father, Stephen, would write of the years 1910–13: ‘In point of fact Ireland had at this time the good humour which comes of prosperity.’11 This chapter is based primarily on the study of sixteen provincial, weekly newspapers published in five politically inter-linked counties in the Irish midlands and East Connaught – Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo and Westmeath. Throughout this period, local, weekly newspapers remained the most important forum for the dissemination of opinions from and to the intertwined commercial, professional and political elites of ‘small town’ Ireland. Newspapers’ political affiliations were clearly flagged – in the five counties studied, ten were Nationalist, two independent and four Unionist.12 Of the Nationalist papers, eight repeatedly declared themselves supporters of Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party and two, the Roscommon Herald in Boyle, County Roscommon, and the Midland Reporter in Mullingar, County Westmeath, were owned by the chronically ‘factionalist’ brothers Jasper and George W. Tully. Every newspaper operated in a highly competitive environment in which the costs of entry for new titles were low, rivals constantly attacked each other to win both readers and advertisers, and the Dublin-produced dailies (particularly the Nationalist Irish Independent) were making inroads. This endemic competition meant that while local owners and editors – particularly in their leader columns – continued to fancy that they were in the vanguard of opinion, they could in fact never move so far ahead as to endanger circulation, printing contracts and advertising revenues. The provincial press was more the mirror than the leader of local beliefs. For Nationalists in the five counties studied here, the ‘home rule debate’, at least until the autumn of 1913, was generally a spectator sport. Political activity relating to any sense of ‘Ulster crisis’ was minimal, and even the flurry of activity sparked by the Belfast riots of 1912 was short-lived. For long periods there was a paucity of news coverage and comment, let alone debate, about Ulster or the threat to home rule. There was little for the locals to contribute and there 58
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was equally little perception that home rule was endangered. Complacency and Gwynn’s ‘good humour’ could still be seen in Roscommon in August 1913, when the Roscommon Journal wrote: ‘Now at last we rest somewhat contented, with the long lost goal appearing in view’.13
Elections and the balance of power: 1909–10 In late 1909 the imminence of a general election did little to stir political enthusiasm in the five counties. In only one parliamentary division was there a contest – in North Westmeath, where long-standing Nationalist disunity climaxed in a straight faction fight, won by the dissident Laurence Ginnell. Though Ginnell’s previous flirtations with Sinn Féin supporters were cited among his many ‘defects’ by Irish party supporters, home rule (let alone any more radical form of separation from Britain) was not a campaign issue. More suppressed tensions in the other four counties were similarly unrelated to home rule. Only in North Leitrim did James Dolan, brother of the defeated Charles, the ‘Sinn Féin’ MP of 1907–8, attempt an abortive bid in November 1909 to revive the idea of a Sinn Féin candidacy.14 The December declaration of the Liberal Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, that a Liberal government would be ‘entirely free’ to propose ‘full self-government in regard to purely Irish affairs’, attracted less local press coverage than the various faction fights across Ireland, notably Ginnell’s in North Westmeath, Tim Healy’s in North Louth and the O’Brienite John O’Donnell’s in South Mayo (all three of these ‘factionists’ won their contests). Such political fights among Nationalists, and the just-passed Land Act, were the main national issues covered in the local press. Admittedly, prior to the campaign, Orange disorder in Ulster had also been reported. Several papers carried the story of the August–September intimidation of Catholics in Portadown, County Armagh. The most coverage was supplied by the Sligo Champion, which displayed a menacing form of ‘conciliation’ by opining that ‘the King Billyites of Portadown will, sooner than they anticipate, realise Catholic omnipotence and its attendant conciliatory results’.15 However, no Ulster political discontent, let alone threats, reached the press in the five counties during the election campaign itself. In what was supposed to be the roughest general election nationally since 1892 – i.e. between Nationalists – the Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) could still report ‘less popular interest than in former years’.16 At the end of 1909 he wrote that there was ‘much excitement among Unionist societies in Ulster’, while ‘the Nationalists are sitting on the fence, waiting’.17 They did not have that long to wait, and the result of the election – effectively a tie between Liberals and Unionists, with the parliamentary balance of power held by the Irish and Labour parties – led to a genuine upsurge of coverage of Westminster politics by the local press. The press reported on the ‘No Veto, No Budget’ crisis, the death of King Edward VII, the Veto Conference 59
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and Redmond’s apparent espousal of and later retreat from ‘Home rule all round’. Local newspapers’ own correspondents, syndicated reports and items culled from the Dublin, Belfast, London, English provincial and United States press covered the unfolding story. In early 1910 in particular, Irish politicians were seen as using the balance of power to win against ‘English’ ones. Among his supporters, the supposed statesmanship and firmness of Redmond was repeatedly contrasted with the weakness of the Liberal Cabinet. Thus in March the Westmeath Independent could write of a ‘Straight Fight’, with Redmond’s determined attitude the one redeeming feature in the present crisis, set against ‘the many equivocations’ of Asquith – luckily Asquith’s views did not count, as the Irish held the balance of power.18 T.P. O’Connor summarised the mood in March, writing to the Master of Elibank, the Liberal Chief Whip. Redmond had to pick his steps very warily owing to the feverish excitement in Ireland – not on the Budget – but on what they consider the bold tactic R has advised . . . they cling to the Idea that No Veto, No Budget is the true, the courageous, the only policy.19 In this period, Redmond’s status in Ireland was undoubtedly high and possibly as great as it was ever going to be. As John Dillon Nugent, national secretary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), put it to a Sligo rally in April, Redmond stood ‘in the interests of Ireland and a united Irish race all over the world at his back, master of the situation and controlling the British Empire (cheers)’.20 Only two local Nationalist papers, those controlled by the Tully brothers, refused to give Redmond any credit and instead slated him, after April, for throwing away his control of the balance of power. For the Tullys, the budget deal made by Redmond with the Liberals was corrupt and secured on the promise of government jobs.21 As the King’s death led to the ‘Truce of God’ between the two main British parties, and as the subsequent British Veto conference on the future powers of the House of Lords excluded the Irish party, the Tullys pushed this line repeatedly. The rest of the press followed London events from the same sources as before, speculated on what was going on behind closed doors and promoted a forthcoming fund-raising tour by Redmond in America. Police reports and press leaders indicating waning local political interest began to appear in the second half of the year. In July, the Sligo RIC county inspector reported that there was ‘no stir in local politics’,22 while in September the Longford Leader lamented the current ‘laxity and apathy’. Likening the Irish to ‘the Jews in their journey through the desert’, it wrote that ‘our people forget their ideals and past history almost at every moment’.23 In October the Roscommon Journal declared that: ‘The county has never been so quiet as during the past year. Why? Because the people thought that the battle had been won’.24 The collapse of the Veto Conference and the renewal of British party warfare 60
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led to a chorus of calls for unity ahead of the predicted general election, but coverage of the second 1910 election was perfunctory. No seat was contested in any of the five counties. A succession of RIC county inspectors reported on the lack of any interest locally. The inspector for Leitrim reported ‘little interest in the Election’; for Sligo that the United Irish League (UIL) was less and less active; for Westmeath that his county was completely quiet; and for Roscommon that: ‘The General Election did not cause any excitement in the county and little interest was evinced therein’.25 Though Tim Healy’s fight to retain his North Louth seat was reported, press coverage of contests elsewhere in Ireland was small. The Westmeath Independent commented: ‘Here at home we have little more to do than to wait and see’.26 It was assumed that the new Parliament would see a renewed ‘coalition’, whose first priority would be a Parliament bill – home rule would have to wait. The Unionist Sligo Independent quoted the opinion that the Home Rule Bill would not even be tabled until 1912 and that the whole of that year would be needed for it to pass.27 Jasper Tully said the same and already attacked the delay involved.28 As for Ulster events, coverage in the local press was sporadic in 1910, mostly focused on the actions of the ‘Carrion Crows’ (Ulster Unionist MPs) in Parliament. In February though, the Roscommon Herald noted briefly that the cry of ‘Ulster will fight’ had revived,29 while two weeks earlier the Sligo Champion carried a piece headed ‘Grave, Silent Fellows’, reporting a London paper’s prediction that home rule would trigger civil war in Ulster. The formation of rifle clubs and transformation of Orange lodges into ‘military units’ was cited. The Champion derided this, saying that Ulster opposition was a ‘cipher’ and ‘bluster’, but still felt moved to declare: ‘When the sweeping process is completed we shall have, in that part of the country, Christian toleration, and civilisation instead of bigotry and barbarism’. It noted that Ulstermen had not previously died in the last ditch – ‘More’s the pity’.30 Barring reports on the ‘Carrion Crows’, the local press was, however, then silent on ‘Ulster’ for nine months, until December. Only then did bellicose threats from Unionists during the second election campaign, notably James Craig’s Lisburn speech on the need to train men and acquire arms, percolate through to the five counties. The Western Nationalist and Sligo Champion both attacked such rhetoric – the latter was also irate about Sligo Unionists daring to hold a local public meeting, and carried aggressive leaders almost throughout December.31 The Unionist Longford Journal reported that ‘there is a strong feeling at present that home rule should be resisted with force and sensible, levelheaded men have advocated the use of arms!’32 At the end of the year, the Roscommon Messenger and Westmeath Independent reported a thoughtful letter to a London paper from Stephen Gwynn, saying that Craig, though he was being encouraged by men who would not risk their property or persons, was courageous, not a fool and not a joke. Gwynn predicted that both sides would arm and that one day the arms might go off.33 Coverage of Ulster threats spilled over into January 1911. The Unionist Sligo 61
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Times carried a report on the ballooning of Unionist clubs, claiming they would soon have over 200,000 members.34 The South Westmeath MP Sir Walter Nugent publicly called in Athlone for forbearance and toleration, arguing that Nationalists must let Ulster Unionists damn themselves.35 However, the tone of post-election press coverage then rapidly turned to mockery. The Roscommon Herald dismissed tales of the north arming as just ‘talk, talk’;36 the Sligo Champion called stories of Ulster mobilisation ‘clap trap’.37 The Leitrim Observer reported: ‘It is said the Ulster Orangemen are drilling all over the province, but a Northern farmer writing to the daily press says he sees them engaged only in drilling turnips.’38 Had Ulster’s bluff already been called?
‘The usual monotonous story of a peaceful country’ – 1911 After the election-related flourish of Ulster coverage, press interest in both Ulster and home rule’s progress almost vanished. Admittedly, Redmond made it clear on 18 January that the whole year would be taken up with private negotiations, while the Roscommon Messenger expected home rule to become law only at the end of 1913.39 Reports from London on the passage of the Parliament Bill were published, but later in the year the main ‘British’ news stories of interest became the upsurge of labour disputes and the passing of Lloyd George’s National Insurance legislation. Biographers of Redmond and Dillon have noted their lack of political activity in 1911,40 and Patricia Jalland has also described the government’s lack of focus on home rule in that year.41 Things were little different in provincial Ireland. After a poorly attended county meeting in April, the South Roscommon MP John Hayden expressed surprise that the ‘advent of home rule’ had not awakened greater interest in Roscommon.42 His own newspaper, the Roscommon Messenger, wrote in August of the need to fight ‘faction and apathy in the last days of the national fight’.43 The triennial local elections aroused little enthusiasm and the Leitrim Advertiser noted that interest had been ‘never at such a low ebb’.44 In October, the Westmeath Independent wrote that ‘There is a an apathy of organisation all over the county which is simply surprising where there are so many interests at stake.’45 Quarterly assizes saw a rash of white gloves handed to judges, to celebrate their ‘crimeless’ conditions. Reading repetitive monthly police reports at Dublin Castle obviously got to the ‘JBD’ – J.B. Dougherty, the Under Secretary Sir James Dougherty – who wrote in October of ‘the usual monotonous story of a peaceful country’.46 Concerning Ulster, there was sporadic reporting of the Papal Ne Temere decree on mixed marriages and on the McCann case (involving the messy collapse of one such marriage) from January to April – but by only four papers in total over the four months.47 Articles from the London press by John and Willie Redmond, saying that Unionists would not make civil war and that they did not speak for ‘Ulster’, were reproduced even less – in only two local papers for the first 62
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article48 and one for the second.49 Some reports covered the more outrageous remarks of ‘Carrion Crows’ or minor disturbances after the ‘Twelfth’, but until September there was no perceptible sense of a rising tempo of Ulster events. The Sligo Champion in June pronounced that the Orange drum had ceased to roll,50 while Hayden’s Westmeath Examiner in July saw Nationalist ‘faction’ as the main threat to home rule.51 That obsessive commentator on world and Irish affairs, Jasper Tully, carried no Ulster stories in the Roscommon Herald between January and September. A significant increase in Ulster coverage from September onwards was undoubtedly triggered by the public launch of the Unionists’ Ulster campaign at the end of August and by Carson’s rally at Craigavon, with its explicit threat of a provisional government. Though there was virtually no coverage of the Craigavon rally itself, threats by Unionist politicians, scare stories in the London papers and even a November arms seizure at Leith in Scotland were reported across much of the local press. Both belligerence and mockery were given expression by local Nationalists. While the Roscommon party boss and South Mayo MP John Fitzgibbon responded to Carson’s threat of marching to Cork by saying that if Orangemen came ‘we would be ready for them (cheers)’,52 the North Sligo MP John Scanlan said that he thought Carson had no more desire to lead a rebellion than he had to commit suicide by leaping into Lough Swilly.53 Sectarianism in Sligo town resurfaced when the Unionist Sligo Times wrote of a threatened ‘creed boycott’ against Protestants.54 The Sligo Champion retorted by threatening that if the army could not compel Protestants to accept home rule, nor could it compel home rulers to accept Protestants. Nationalists would fight ‘their ill gained and ill used supremacy’.55 A recurring theme of press coverage was, however, that the Unionist campaign was political, not military, designed from the outset to sway parliamentary and English opinion. Though there was clearly an Ulster Unionist ‘enemy’, his chosen battlefield was in England and his weapons were those of speeches, propaganda, ‘lies’ and ‘bluff’. In December, the Westmeath Independent noted that there was ‘no appearance of a Northern rebellion’,56 and the Sligo Champion reported the ‘utter failure’ of the Unionist campaign to shift English opinion – the English cared nothing for Irish Unionists now.57 The Roscommon Journal dismissively summed up the campaign as ‘a purely artificial adjunct to party politics’.58 However, there was now an awareness of a more permanent Ulster Unionist campaign against home rule. By late 1911, local coverage of that campaign had expanded materially and this coincided with renewed interest in the forthcoming Home Rule Bill.
The advent of the Government of Ireland Bill There was, with one exception, minimal debate of the detailed ‘contents’ of home rule during 1911. From the beginning of the year, as Redmond had indicated in January, the bill disappeared into a drafting limbo. The exception was, 63
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however, an important one: finance. At the heart of this discussion was the degree to which Ireland would have the power to raise and collect taxes, a key yardstick of just how independent she would be. Nationally, books published in 1911 by Tom Kettle, Erskine Childers and J.J. Horgan focused on this issue. Locally, debate was triggered in April by the disclosure of the composition of the Primrose Committee investigating home rule finance. In Roscommon, Jasper Tully was quickly on the attack, considering it a scandal that the veteran Irish party financial expert Thomas Sexton was not on the committee. Two key party-supporting papers, the Westmeath Independent and Sligo Champion, also criticised the committee’s composition and demanded full financial powers for Ireland, but both conceded that if the committee had the benediction of the party leadership they would trust it.59 The broader financial issue resurfaced in the autumn of 1911, coinciding with the launch of the Ulster campaign, as the Dublin Irish Independent called for ‘full’ taxation powers for Ireland and as a series of leaks appeared in the London press that the bill would, after all, cede control of customs and excise to the Irish Parliament. The Roscommon Journal, Longford Leader and Westmeath Independent all carried this story in October, while the Sligo Champion repeated it in December.60 John O’Dowd, the MP for South Sligo, also gave it currency in September, when he assured the South Sligo UIL executive that Ireland would have the same financial powers as Australia and Canada.61 Despite Dillon pouring cold water on the idea in October and Redmond playing it down as ‘pure speculation’ in November,62 the story did not die. Jasper Tully fulminated on the subject, and Hayden’s Roscommon Messenger was moved to criticise the ‘pitiable spectacle’ of the issue being used by factionists to undermine the bill.63 However, the story was promoted most by the non-factionist Westmeath Independent, which reiterated that full financial powers were necessary – ‘We do not want to have a gas and water bill’.64 As the bill’s publication became imminent in early 1912, debate continued in Dublin, and the Irish Independent continued to campaign. Dillon wrote to Redmond of his considerable unease about the bill’s financial clauses and the Independent’s attacks.65 Locally, the Longford Leader, saying that the bill would stand or fall on the strength of English public opinion, denounced those who continued to demand financial ‘impossibilities’ in order to make the ‘possibilities’ of the bill impossible(!).66 However, the Westmeath Independent recanted early in 1912, saying that a lack of control of customs and excise did not mean that the bill would be a bad one.67 Discussion of the subject in the local press dropped away after February. The impression that Denis Gwynn later described, of a ‘feeling of hopefulness and excitement pervading the country’ in early 1912,68 is hard to substantiate. The mood reported in the papers had more in common with that described by Charles Townshend, in which Irish opinion was relatively inert and unconcerned.69 On 13 January the Westmeath Independent’s column ‘In Gaeldom’ called on the young to cast off their apathy. On 20 January the paper wrote of ‘a very 64
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culpable apathy and indifference’, continuing: ‘We know the hearts of the people ring as true to the national cause as they ever did, but being filled with confidence in the nearness of a great victory they are apt to take things political easy’. On 24 February it returned sarcastically to the subject: ‘For very shame sake there is just the possibility that some patriotic feeling may be touched in the emergency of the present great national crisis’.70 These were not just the obsessive musings of one newspaper. In February, the Sligo Champion accused Nationalists of taking things too easy, as if home rule were a matter of concern for the Orangemen alone.71 The great Dublin home rule demonstration of 31 March showed for all its size as many signs of a quiet local popular mood as of the enthusiasm claimed by its organisers. Certainly the event was massive, with the only confusion about numbers being whether 100,000 or 200,000 attended. Sixty-four special trains were laid on and 150 or so bands played. It was covered extensively in almost all the local papers. However, the Roscommon RIC county inspector wrote that very few Roscommon people went to the rally. ‘They care a great deal more about getting land than about government.’72 Several papers carried the embarrassing revelation, derived from the Irish Independent’s tour of the Dublin termini, that the special trains laid on by the Midland Great Western Railway to carry 6,000 from the midlands and the west carried only 1,369.73 The Westmeath Independent pointed out that no more than 5,000 of the 20,000 around each platform could hear a word being said,74 and the admittedly biased Midland Reporter gleefully reported that the event was one of ‘Boetian dullness from start to finish . . . The speeches were the dreariest things on God’s fair earth. One might wade through the columns of them in the Freeman and not find a good phrase, an original idea, or even a happily phrased thought’.75 The demonstration was followed, almost immediately, by the publication of the Government of Ireland Bill. The full gamut of Nationalist responses to this bill, from wild enthusiasm to deep disappointment, has been described by historians. John Hutchinson has written: ‘As the third Home Rule Bill was introduced a feverish excitement gripped even the revivalists’;76 Roy Foster, in his biography of Yeats, that ‘mainstream Nationalist opinion was wildly enthusiastic’.77 In stark contrast, J.J. Lee concluded: ‘The measure was so limited that it required all the persuasive powers of the home rule leader, Redmond, to allay the chagrin of his followers’.78 Alvin Jackson described the bill as the foretaste of a succession of later humiliations, with a sense of disappointment already having set in.79 Overall, however, the response nationally seems to have been significantly more positive than negative. The previously nervous Dillon could write that there was an overwhelming feeling of ‘enthusiastic acceptance of the bill and of whole-hearted desire to make peace with England without any reserves. I confess that I have myself been quite taken by surprise by the universality of this feeling’.80 Both extremes of response, for and against, could be seen in the local press of 65
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the five counties. The Mullingar Westmeath Examiner was particularly enthusiastic, hailing ‘a Nation’s Triumph’, with Ireland placed on a par with Australia and Canada.81 The Boyle Western Nationalist said that all ‘honest’ home rulers would favour the bill, which was an enormous advance on previous ones.82 It was these two papers, in Mullingar and Boyle, which faced head-on the vehement denunciations coming from the Tullys. ‘This is not liberty’, wrote the Roscommon Herald. Nations that had freedom ‘conferred’ on them never thrived – it had to be fought for.83 The Midland Reporter wrote that ‘this sham home rule’ would disgust the country ‘beyond all bounds’. ‘T.P.’ (O’Connor) was ‘really selling the people like bullocks in Smithfield to the Saxon’.84 Specifically, the Tullys focused on three defects – the finance clauses, the nominated Senate and the lack of powers to redistribute land – and unreservedly condemned the bill as grossly inadequate.85 In the rest of the local press, the response was far more measured, and attempts to categorise the broad popular response as either wild enthusiasm or disappointed chagrin both appear wide of the mark. Thus, Hayden’s second paper, the Roscommon Messenger, was relatively terse in calling the bill ‘good’, said that many details would require careful attention and was confident Ireland’s representatives would protect her interests. A ‘very genuine attempt’ had been made to satisfy the national demand.86 The Longford Leader was positive and said that everyone in Longford had been ‘well pleased’, but it also urged overvehement critics in Ireland not to reject it, and to trust the party. The paper’s owner, J.P. Farrell MP, later emphasised that while the finance clauses were unsatisfactory, there remained enormous scope both to practise financial economy and to develop Ireland’s resources.87 The Roscommon Journal was relatively low-key and factual in its report, noting Redmond’s support, but a week later thought that an amendment to include powers over the land issue was desirable.88 The Westmeath Independent, that earlier opponent of a ‘gas and water’ measure, summed it up as ‘adequate and generous’.89 The Sligo Champion at the end of April said that the bill, as Mr. Redmond had said, was not a perfect one, but not as imperfect as at first sight. The only issues of controversy were the nomination of the Irish Senate and the financial clauses. Ireland would trust the Parliamentary Party to handle any amendments as it saw fit.90 The Champion had epitomised the positive but hardly rapturous response to the bill, when first writing on its publication that it was ‘far and away the best measure we have ever had a chance of obtaining’.91 Of the party’s opponents, the local Unionist press was strongly critical and, as noted, Jasper Tully’s two papers were categorical in their denunciations. However, Tully was quite alone in the five counties in voicing total Nationalist opposition. Tully’s closest ally, Laurence Ginnell MP, was far more equivocal. In mid-April, Ginnell met with his ‘Independent UIL’ executive in Mullingar. Like Tully, he attacked the provisions for finance, the Senate and land. An Irish Parliament lacking adequate powers would be a ‘hopeless object of contempt’, and he also said that a nation with no power to arm her sons was a nation in 66
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slavery. But, he then went on, he would do all in his power with other Irish MPs to amend the bill and if that failed he would still vote for it. Even a crippled Irish Parliament would bring to the front ‘the great virtue of self-reliance in the nation’.92 Three days later he said that the bill answered ‘to some extent the ambition of our lives’. There had to be ‘cordial co-operation’ to get it passed into law and even to pass it without amendment, ‘because even as it stands it would be an improvement on our present position . . . Let there be no bickering and finding fault with Nationalists who are working for home rule’.93 There was, therefore, considerable local interest in the publication of the bill, but the overall response was rather more prosaic than could be associated with any great sense of excitement, let alone crisis. In addition, with the exception of Ginnell’s reference to the right to carry arms, discussion of its contents had concentrated solely on the issues of finance, the Senate and land. None of its many other restrictions received any discussion. There was no local public debate on the bill from a separatist perspective, and separatist views, if they were expressed, went unpublished and unheard. By May, debate on the contents of the bill had almost vanished and coverage had shifted to the practicalities of its parliamentary progress. The Roscommon RIC county inspector noted that: ‘The Irish Government is not much discussed by the people who seem to care little where Parliament is if only they could get the land’.94 A month later, the Inspector General wrote that ‘outside Ulster the measure appears to be regarded with apathy’ citing in his support reports from Kerry, Kilkenny, Queen’s, Mayo, North Tipperary and Roscommon.95
Ulster resistance to the bill – 1912 As already noted, the local press had, from the autumn of 1911, begun to cover the prolonged Ulster Unionist campaign against home rule. During 1912 its aggregate level of coverage was far higher than in preceding years. The key events of the campaign – the upsurge of drilling, the Ulster Hall crisis of February, the great rallies at Balmoral Show Grounds (in April) and Blenheim Palace (in July, with Bonar Law’s distinctly unconstitutional language), the Castledawson riot in June, the Belfast riots and shipyard expulsions in July and August and the Ulster Covenant in September – were all reported, but to hugely varying degrees. Only four events were covered in considerable detail: three of them in Ulster – the Ulster Hall, the Belfast riots and the Covenant – and the fourth in Parliament (the ‘snap vote’ defeat of the bill’s finance clauses in November). Others were barely mentioned in passing. What is clear from the news values and leader columns of local editors is that there was in 1912 no sense of a mounting crisis in which each event cast a darker pall than the last. Nor was there a sense of an impending Ulster military juggernaut, getting larger all the time. Instead, if Ulster events were seen as part of a pattern, that pattern was still one of a purely political campaign to threaten and bluff ‘English’ opinion, so that the government, Parliament or electoral 67
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support would crack. As each event occurred, so its capacity to change English opinion was assessed, and, as it was seen not to have worked, dismissed. Only in July and August, with the crisis caused by physical attacks on Ulster Catholics, did this pattern not apply.
The Ulster Hall The events of January and February, in which Winston Churchill was forced by Unionist threats to back down from speaking in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, were the first great ‘set-piece’ of local press coverage, with almost every paper carrying the story. Tension mounted as ‘Orange’ threats were made, and then subsided as Churchill changed his plans. The reported purpose of this ‘thuggish’ Orange stunt was to scare English opinion, and it was seen as backfiring by instead alienating English support for the instigators. Redmond dismissed ‘Orange bellowings’ as ‘simply insolent bluff’,96 and the Western Nationalist leader, ‘The Orange Drum Burst’, was typical with its emphasis on the loss of English support for Ulster.97 Even independent and Unionist papers were sceptical. The Longford Independent asked whether the Orange dog had the courage to bite as well as bark – ‘it is very doubtful’ – while the Sligo Times believed that the threat was ‘not the wisest possible’ and gave ammunition to the English Liberals.98 The exception to all this was, predictably, Jasper Tully, who believed that the crisis had been provoked deliberately by Churchill, in order to pose as a hero defying Ulster bullies and thus disguise a climb-down on the financial clauses of the bill. Once Churchill moved the meeting away from the hall, Tully went on to have his cake and eat it by denouncing this ‘shameful surrender’.99 The overall Nationalist response was, though, summarised by the Westmeath Independent. In a leader, ‘As good as won – home rule’, it praised Churchill’s speech and pronounced that ‘the Orange opposition has broken its back’.100
The Belfast riots That the next major burst of reporting on Ulster did not occur until July is itself significant. For over five months, events that received only perfunctory coverage in less than a handful of papers included the drilling upsurge, the Balmoral demonstration and the Castledawson riot – nor was there any coverage of Ulster responses to the publication of the Government of Ireland Bill in April. The political events most covered – each in three or four papers – were the proposed Agar Robartes exclusion amendment to the bill in June, dismissed as a failed tactic to kill the bill, and Asquith’s visit to Dublin in July. Only two papers covered the Balmoral rally, and for these two, the Sligo Champion and Sligo Independent, the news angle was wholly parochial: the attendance of the Sligo Unionist, Colonel Wood-Martin, 100 or so Sligo Unionists and the YMCA brass band. The Champion’s lurid headline was ‘Sligo Orangemen on the Rampage’.101 68
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It took the Belfast riots and expulsions of Catholic shipyard workers significantly to reignite local press interest. This was comprehensive over several weeks, during which the papers wrote of the attacks and sufferings of those expelled. This time, the newspapers reported not just Ulster events, but actions being taken in Nationalist Ireland in response to them. For the first time, they were not just a spectator sport. Local responses included raising relief funds, boycotting Belfast traders and, to a much lesser extent, threatening reprisals and calling for rifle clubs. Far and away the most common was the first. Newspapers reported a plethora of ad hoc relief funds and of public bodies resolving to support the dispossessed. A widespread if imperfect boycott of Belfast goods took place, only petering out in February 1913.102 In the five counties, this was widely reported and promoted by figures as diverse as John Fitzgibbon in Castlerea,103 the party boss John Jinks in Sligo,104 Farrell’s lieutenant Frank MacGuinness in Longford,105 and Fr. Michael O’Flanagan in Roscommon, who preached that: ‘The time for retaliation has come’.106 Discussion of reprisals and rifle clubs was much less commonplace. The Western Nationalist threatened retaliation in July, pointing out that vacant jobs in the Belfast shipyards could be filled by southern Unionists who could no longer live in the south under home rule.107 The Westmeath Independent called for the organisation of rifle clubs. Preparations were under way in the north, it said, for extensive armed resistance. ‘If aggression is threatened in one end of the country, the means to resist and suppress it must be at the command of the rest of the country.’108 Such calls remained distinctly isolated, however, and neither press nor police carried reports of local politicians taking them up, nor of any reprisals, other than the temporary goods boycott, actually happening. Several papers blamed the inflammatory language of Unionists for stimulating the riots, and the syndicated ‘Home rule notes from the campaign’, published in most of the Nationalist papers, provided factual coverage of the Blenheim rally and Bonar Law’s notorious ‘No lengths’ speech. The Midland Reporter saw the riots as part of a Tory game, with Bonar Law and Carson seeking to provoke civil war for party political ends.109 The Longford Leader directly linked the ‘treason and disorder’ called for by Bonar Law to the Belfast ‘murder campaign’ now under way.110 The Belfast riots, a direct physical attack on Catholics and Nationalists, generated more coverage than any other Ulster event in 1912, in addition to being the only event that provoked any action by southern Nationalists. For the first time there was a sense of Ulster crisis. As Ulster’s autumn campaign loomed, the Westmeath Examiner, a month after Blenheim, picked up on Bonar Law’s ‘No lengths’ speech and feared ‘an epidemic of lawlessness’.111 The Western Nationalist predicted that Unionists would seize post offices in Ulster to force the government to make arrests.112 The Sligo Champion gloomily wrote a leader on ‘The Holy War’, citing the many rumours of ‘decisive’ actions in Ulster and the whipped-up sectarian mood there. The climax, it believed, would come with the proposed ‘Ulster Day’.113
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The Covenant Ulster Day and the Covenant formed the third major episode of local press coverage of Ulster events. However, the Covenant, quite unlike the Belfast riots, was not seen as creating a crisis but as defusing one, as a climb-down by the Unionists, even an object of mockery. It may well be, as Paul Bew has written, that ‘a logic of confrontation flowed from Ulster Day’,114 but not in the perception of the local press. To the Westmeath Independent the Covenant was instead ‘The Carson Squib’.115 From the end of August, it was clear that the autumn Unionist campaign would climax with the Covenant. This was immediately hailed by the Roscommon Messenger, which wrote that instead of armed resistance the pot had boiled down and previous Ulster threats had been all a bluff. They had let the rowdies loose, but had backed down when they saw the consequences – they were after all only lawyers and merchants who had to protect their own interests.116 This tone was sustained across the Nationalist press right up to and beyond Ulster Day. The Leitrim Observer emphasised the sense of ‘anti-climax’,117 while the Sligo Champion discussed the Covenant’s ‘safe and non-committal’ language. After all the warlike talk, it was a ‘milk and water affair’.118 The Midland Reporter’s ‘Gaelic Notes’ described the ‘bellowers’ now as ‘servile, crawling things’.119 It seems unlikely that this was just the Nationalist press whistling to keep its spirits up, or taking a pre-set Irish party propaganda line. The universality of the view taken, even by the Tullys, suggests that the Covenant was genuinely seen as the end of the crisis of violence which had begun in July. In October the Longford Leader wrote that home rule was again safe, and that ‘in a sign of returning good sense’ the Ulstermen appeared to have changed their tactics.120 Nor had the local Unionist papers played up a sense of crisis. The two Sligo Unionist papers confined themselves to factual if detailed news coverage of Ulster Day but made no comment, while in November the Longford Journal wrote that ‘moderate counsels’ among the Unionist leaders had prevailed, though this ‘restraint’ was again being tested.121 Nationalist contempt for the Covenant was reiterated by the Sligo Champion, months later, in May 1913: ‘Nothing could be more vague, harmless and capable of any interpretation its authors wish to put on it than the so-called “Ulster Covenant”’.122
The snap vote Though the Ulster campaign was seen as an unsuccessful device to bluff English opinion, symptoms of English ‘wobbling’ were nevertheless watched closely. In early October, the Midland Reporter’s leader was ‘Sold Again!’, after writers in the Liberal Daily News and the London Star called for a general election before home rule could become law.123 A week later, the Sligo Champion cited these articles, and a speech from Churchill calling for United Kingdom devolution, as the reason for there being ‘for some weeks a vague feeling in the public mind
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that all is not right with home rule’. In this case, a robust speech from Asquith stating that the government would not seek an election and would secure the passage of the bill ended the upset.124 However, a surprise parliamentary defeat in November, the result of a tactical ambush by Unionists and a mini-revolt by some Liberal MPs, led to the final 1912 set-piece of coverage by the local press. The ‘snap vote’ on 11 November was against the bill’s financial clauses. The whole weekly Nationalist press reported the vote, though by the time it came to print the government’s ability to reverse the vote was also known. This did not prevent initial excitement, and the Longford Leader reported that newsagents in nearby Edgeworthstown had been besieged, with the daily papers sold out in a few minutes.125 By the time the local weeklies reported, the vote was seen as a nuisance rather than a disaster, and coverage focused on scenes of parliamentary disorder and an inquest into which Irish MPs had missed the vote. Locally, three offenders came under criticism and had to justify themselves. T.F. Smyth (South Leitrim) made it clear that he had returned to Westminster, had been delayed and had only just missed the vote.126 Sir Walter Nugent argued that he had been in Dublin on party business with Redmond’s knowledge.127 John Fitzgibbon was on weaker ground. A member of the Congested Districts Board, he claimed that he had been in Castlerea on CDB business, but ‘a Castlerea man’ in the Roscommon Herald could not resist pointing out that Fitzgibbon had been seen working in his drapery shop for most of the 11th.128 Jasper Tully, who had previously unreservedly attacked the bill, was now the sternest critic of the missing MPs. He also drew attention to the loss of the Irish Parliament’s powers to vary local taxation by 10 per cent, when the defeated clauses were ‘restored’.129 However, the local party press took this loss quietly. The Roscommon Messenger insisted that Ireland would still retain the produce of taxation,130 while the Westmeath Independent was relaxed, stating that the reversal was an acceptable price to secure the bill’s progress.131 By late 1912, there was no sense of crisis in the local press. The real unease of July and August had dissipated by October, and the threat in November that the government’s majority could crack had proved to be a short squall. English opinion had not been shaken. In December the Westmeath Independent wrote that twelve months ago ‘the Ulster bogey’ had been the stock in trade, but now that weapon had been dropped as useless.132 Several papers portrayed the Unionists as demoralised by the utter failure of their tactics. Carson’s year-end ‘exclusion amendment’ was dismissed by the Sligo Champion as just another failed trick to waste time – ‘The new year for us is one of hope’.133 The flip side of such confidence was the continuing perception of Nationalist apathy. In November, the Leitrim Observer said there was a danger of being too contented. Unionists were citing the rash of white gloves still being awarded to judges as a sign not of peacefulness but of apathy.134 In December, the Western Nationalist wrote of ‘these quiet days of peace, with home rule so near’, in suggesting that ‘the smug man might ask what need is there for a [United Irish] League’.135 At the beginning of December, the RIC Inspector General observed, 71
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‘in rural Ireland generally political enthusiasm is not very marked’.136 His yearend report did note that Belfast traders were still complaining of a loss of trade but, excluding the Ulster counties, there was ‘little manifestation of political feeling throughout the country’.137
Still no crisis: January–August 1913 Local press coverage of Ulster events in the first eight months of 1913 was at a significantly lower level than in 1912. For all the reality of the drilling and arming of the UVF, coverage of this was minimal. No local paper, Nationalist or Unionist, reported the UVF’s formation in January, though there were during the year derisory references to ‘mock drills’ and dummy rifles. Indeed some announced the end of the Ulster campaign. The Roscommon Messenger in February reported that all the ‘make believe’ activity in Ulster of six months ago had now stopped.138 In March the Westmeath Independent said that it did not even hear the cry that ‘Ulster will fight’.139 Unionist papers did carry more reports of drilling, but the Longford Journal in May asked its readers not to imagine that Ulster opposition had slackened, even ‘if Ulster has not largely figured in the public press of late’.140 Only three Ulster events received any detailed coverage across the local Nationalist press – first, Nationalist victory in the Londonderry by-election at the end of January (the election of an elderly Protestant demonstrated Catholic tolerance, Protestant support for home rule and, according to the Westmeath Independent, that ‘the Ulster difficulty is as dead as Julius Caesar’141); secondly, the official seizure in June of some 500 rifles destined for the UVF (they were portrayed as obsolete, and their discovery as a publicity stunt by Unionists142); and thirdly, riots in Londonderry in August (again, as in 1912, attacks on Catholics were significant news. The Westmeath Independent asked if they were a foretaste of Orange actions to come after home rule143). That Ulster was not a pressing news story for much of 1913 was most obvious in the papers of the Tully brothers. Ever ready to spot a conspiracy and cover news from around the world, Jasper Tully gave almost no space to ‘Ulster’ through to June. Instead he wrote repeatedly on the power and ambition of Germany, the decadence of England, the Balkan wars, the suffragettes, French conscription and above all the Marconi scandal and what he perceived as Jewish and ‘money-ring’ corruption at the heart of government. In June, when Tully finally editorialised on Ulster, he wrote that if Carson were serious in wanting to finish the government, he would never have acted in court for Lloyd George during the Marconi scandal. The one thing that could be safely predicted, said Tully, was that there would be no rebellion in Ulster.144 It took until June for any paper to carry a seriously worried piece on the subject of Ulster. Then, in a leader ‘The Siege of Belfast’, the Sligo Champion argued that Tory leaders were allowing themselves to be taken over by ‘Carson’s project’. It could not know how civil war would break out, nor whether it would 72
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be confined to Ulster. However, the siege of Belfast (another boycott of Ulster trade) could be started any day in Sligo or any Irish town – it might be all the better if it were to start at once.145 The Champion did, however, not return to the subject and no Ulster boycott resumed, even after the Londonderry riots. Nevertheless, one UVF military gesture did arouse the ire of a local journalist. When in July the UVF ‘raided’ Drogheda and planted flags across the Boyne, Jasper Tully was prompted to call for volunteers. If Ulster could arm and prepare, what was the rest of Ireland doing? ‘It is time something should be done to give them an effective reception when they do come.’146 One other paper, the Westmeath Independent, was also agitated, as in 1912, by violence in Ulster. On 5 July, it wrote of ‘Orange bullies’ and of men who had attempted to roast alive innocent Catholic girls in factory yards! It stated that imported arms would be used against Catholics and predicted trouble over the forthcoming month.147 The paper’s August coverage of the Londonderry riots emphasised both the involvement of Orange rifle clubs and the retaliation of Ulster Catholics.148 However, it was not consistent. Only two weeks after its 5 July piece, and following a quiet 12 July, it dismissed threats of a provisional government as impossible, a bluff.149 Concerning the contents of the bill there was still only minimal discussion. In May, a hint of ‘compromise’ was detected, and denounced, by the Longford Leader and Westmeath Independent.150 Nothing came of these rumours and the matter dropped, but in the same week the Roscommon Journal launched an isolated attack on the bill’s financial clauses, claiming that they were unfair and directly criticising Redmond, asking why he would not take the Irish people into his confidence.151 The paper’s unusual, direct attack on Redmond was not followed up and it quickly returned to the party fold. By the end of the month, it was calling for strict adherence to the agitation which had brought so many benefits to Ireland.152 Other than this, the contents of the bill were given no serious mention, though there was debate as to its timing. In particular, having become law, would it come into operation before the next general election? T.P. O’Connor and the party’s constitutional expert, J.G. Swift MacNeill, both wrote reassuring pieces in the British press, reproduced locally, predicting an Irish Parliament sitting by early 1915 (O’Connor153) or even the autumn of 1914 (MacNeill154). If there was a threat to home rule, it was seen to come from Unionist campaigning on England. In early 1913, the political ‘battle’ was being fought at Westminster and at a succession of mass meetings in Great Britain. As a result, almost all the local MPs were virtually absent from their constituencies for much of 1913, either ‘whipped in’ at Westminster (there could be no repetition of the snap vote defeat), or on British speaking tours. When John Hayden returned to Ireland to speak at his first local meeting of the year in September, he announced: ‘I have come straight from where the battle is being fought and where the battle is being won’.155 In November, at his second Irish rally, he announced that he had just addressed a dozen British meetings in a fortnight, 73
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and asked his audience not to press too much for MPs to address meetings in Ireland. Where they were needed now was Great Britain.156 This emphasis on British campaigning was reinforced by the press, whose focus was on parliamentary tactics, speeches made in Britain by local MPs and Carson’s British speaking tour – matched city for city by Redmond. Events in Ulster were still assessed as part of Unionist propaganda, the ‘bluff’ of ‘English opinion’. For all its alarm at Ulster violence, even the Westmeath Independent could in August emphasise that the next great home rule campaign would be in England. This was where the ‘real theatre of war’ would be. The task of the party was to stop the English democracy being duped by lies.157 Any threat to the stability of the government was still monitored closely. It had to stay in office for home rule to pass and Irish MPs had to keep voting for it. A succession of government by-election defeats was explained away not as anti-home rule, but as the result of the unpopularity of National Insurance, or of Labour splitting the anti-Tory vote. The Marconi scandal was seen as part of the more general Unionist assault on the government. In June, writing on Marconi, the Longford Leader said that Ulster gun-running and by-election defeats were ‘of no moment besides the defeat of the present mean and unscrupulous Tory campaign’. Two weeks later it would assert of the Tories: ‘They are a dead duck in the political pit and they know it’.158 Again and again the message was reiterated – the Unionist campaign was not working. The government was united with its parliamentary majority secure and English opinion solid. This confidence was real, even if it had to be reasserted after each ‘failed’ Unionist stunt. The Roscommon Messenger in June wrote of Carson: ‘in truth, he is a beaten man. He has failed in the House of Commons; he has failed in the country’.159 It was thus in August 1913 that the Roscommon Journal could still ‘rest somewhat contented’. It would be quite wrong to argue that there was no home rule crisis in Nationalist Ireland before the First World War. 1914 would witness both the heightening of political emotions and the mobilisation of much of Nationalist manhood into the paramilitary Irish Volunteers. However, a study of the local press – both Nationalist and Unionist – indicates that there was no home rule crisis in the five counties studied here from the 1910 elections up to the autumn of 1913. In this period, only outbreaks of mob violence – in Belfast in the summer of 1912 and to a lesser extent Londonderry in August 1913 – generated a real Nationalist response. For the rest of the time, the publication and passage of the Home Rule Bill created a considerable volume of press coverage, but few great passions either for or against. ‘Ulster’s’ campaign against the bill, which only became apparent in the autumn of 1911, was not seen as a looming and ever-growing physical threat, but as a political and propaganda campaign, ‘a bluff’ to undermine British support for the bill before it could pass. For a long time, Nationalists’ confidence in their ability to defeat this political challenge remained intact and there was no sense of imminent defeat. Confidence, complacency, quietude and even apathy were more typical characteristics of the 74
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local debate than wild enthusiasm, chagrin, disappointment or alarm. Only in the autumn of 1913, when Ulster’s ‘bluff’ of England seemed suddenly to be working, undermining the resolve of Liberal politicians and making Ulster exclusion a serious prospect, did that complacent mood change and the home rule crisis, in provincial, Nationalist Ireland, become a reality.160
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4 T. P. O ’ C O N N O R A N D T H E S TA R , 1886–90 Ian Sheehy
‘All talk about nationality is dry and vain . . . What essential difference is there between an Irishman and an American, or an Englishman, or a Frenchman?’ So says Terence O’Connellan, the London-based Irish editor and MP in W.P. Ryan’s 1910 novel, The Plough and the Cross. To the ‘material-looking’ O’Connellan, Irish nationality is merely a rhetorical device used to generate ‘copy’. He cares little for the Gaelic revival and its re-evaluation of Irish identity, seeing the ‘infernal Irish Ireland Party’ as no better than a ‘“National Council” of “will-o-the-wisps”’. He ‘metaphorically’ kisses ‘hands to Eire from his mansion or his luxurious editorial rooms in London’.1 As his name suggests, O’Connellan is a thinly veiled portrait of T.P. O’Connor, the Irish party MP and newspaper editor. During the 1890s Ryan had worked on O’Connor’s London journals, The Sun and Weekly Sun, but by 1910 he was an ardent Gaelic League activist and a leading figure in the Irish Ireland movement, having returned to Ireland in 1905 to further the revival. The character of O’Connellan shows clearly his estimate of his old ‘chief’: that, in accepting the English way of life, particularly its materialism, T.P. had become culturally ‘corrupted’. He had lost sight of his Gaelic self, of what made him Irish (O’Connellan had ‘worked . . . against nature’). Unable to comprehend the revival, his outlook was more British than Irish.2 For O’Connor, this was a far cry from the Parnellite heyday of the 1880s, when United Ireland said there was ‘no better Irishman living than T.P. O’Connor’. But in the early 1900s nationality no longer simply meant politics. Instead, new standards of Irishness had arisen based on Gaelic culture, and zealots like Ryan were only too ready to argue that O’Connor did not measure up.3 Ryan’s damning assessment of O’Connor was typical of revival attitudes towards the ‘home rule’ generation of Irishmen to which T.P. belonged. Revivalists felt that this generation had, like T.P., lost its way, acquiring an increasingly British mindset. To them, this process was encapsulated by the political representatives of that generation: O’Connor’s colleagues in the Irish party, who, it was claimed, had been Anglicised by long service at Westminster. D.P. Moran denied they were ‘real Irishmen’. This was also particularly said about those who, again like T.P., had made their career in Britain. Such emigrants were no longer Irish to Moran, being ‘foreigners by adoption . . . interest 76
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and cultivation’.4 In O’Connor’s case, his career path had made the condemnation of Irish Ireland especially intense. Not only had he left Ireland for London (he emigrated in 1870), but, to the likes of Moran and Ryan, he was also peddling exactly the kind of lowbrow, cheap English journalism that they wished to drive out of Ireland due to its threat to Irish nationality and morals. Consequently, they regularly singled him out for criticism, denouncing the vulgarity and triviality of papers like M.A.P. (Mainly About People), the gossip weekly that T.P. founded in 1898 and which gave full rein to the ‘personal’ journalism he had helped to pioneer in the 1880s. Rather than resisting the baneful influence of the imperial culture, O’Connor was aiding its growth.5 Further, as O’Connellan shows, his critics felt that through such dubious means he had amassed a fortune, though his wealth was never as great as they imagined. Still, the money he had supposedly made was central to their depiction of T.P. as ‘corrupted’ by English ways. His tangled personal life – he separated from his wife around 1905–8 and had a Greek mistress – also contributed to this image, being especially distasteful to strict Catholics like Moran.6 O’Connor’s loose religious views did not help either. All these factors made him, says Patrick Maume, ‘a useful stick with which to beat his political allies’.7 But, equally important in this picture of a ‘corrupted’ O’Connor was the political angle. If the Irish party in general was accused by Moran, and separatists like Arthur Griffith and his Sinn Féin group, of being Anglicised, then O’Connor’s politics gave them greater cause than most for such charges, as his absorption in the British political framework seemed particularly marked. This was because emigration had led T.P. to combine his Irish nationalism with a strong commitment to British Radicalism, so that from the 1880s onwards (he first became a Nationalist MP in 1880) he tried repeatedly to insert home rule into a wider democratic front, to make it part of a mutual reform alliance between Irish nationalism and British Radicalism (and, where possible, the emerging labour movement). In 1909, for instance, he warned the Liberal government that if they dropped home rule ‘there will be a collision between the two . . . democratic forces, whose union may accomplish so much good and whose disruption may [bring] so much evil’.8 The main parallel here is Michael Davitt. He was another Irish emigrant who aligned the Nationalist cause with British progressive forces, particularly labour. Griffith and Moran, though, dismissed such ideas, considering the British democracy ‘degenerate’.9 To them, O’Connor was doubtless submerging Irish nationalism within the unwholesome stream of British democracy in the same way that he was destroying Irish culture with English vulgarity. Ryan clearly had this wider ‘democratic’ approach in mind when presenting O’Connellan’s sweeping rejection of nationality. Where Irish Ireland preached self-reliance and stressed what set Ireland apart, T.P. promoted co-operation and emphasised what the masses of the two countries had in common. It is the radical aspect of O’Connor’s politics that is explored here. The focus is on the 1880s and his first attempts to create an Irish–Radical union and so 77
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harmonise his two political passions. The specific concern will be The Star newspaper, which T.P. founded in January 1888 and edited until April 1890. For these two years he used The Star to promote his vision of an Irish–Radical reform alliance, the heart of which was home rule for Ireland and social reform in England. The context for such a project had been created by Gladstone’s adoption of home rule in 1886. Not only had this brought the Parnellites and Liberals together but within the Liberal party (and movement) the radical element had been markedly strengthened. While Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical leader, and his associates had seceded, most of the Liberal defections were from the moderate, Whiggish sections of the party.10 This meant that the combination O’Connor desired was starting to fall into place. But much work remained before his ideas could be realised, for his concept of a mutual reform programme cut across the home rule priorities of the Liberal front bench, especially Gladstone and John Morley. This essay will therefore look at both the content of O’Connor’s political project and the extent to which he was successful in implementing it. Although, as will be seen, there were various considerations behind the project, the chief one was T.P.’s radical beliefs. The depth of these will become clear when it is shown how The Star campaign was in fact a revival of an earlier idea. Thus, the importance of Radicalism to T.P. will be demonstrated and with it the dual political identity he had gained through emigration to Britain. Whatever the accuracy of the Irish Ireland charges, the fact that his politics went beyond nationalism was inescapable. The essay will begin, however, by tracing The Star’s foundation, as this will reveal the beneficial effect that the Liberal adoption of home rule had on the Fleet Street status of Catholic–Nationalist Irish journalists on the political press. The historiography of the period has not drawn the above considerations together in an effective fashion. The only sustained examination of T.P.’s career is L.W. Brady, T.P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (1983). Brady, though, does not show how The Star’s wider reform programme was from the very start an attempt to redefine the home rule alliance and so conflicted with Liberal front bench policy, and, while detailing O’Connor’s radicalism, he fails to note how The Star’s Irish–Radical mutual reform project was something T.P. had attempted before. Outside Brady, O’Connor and The Star have been ignored by Irish historiography, which has hitherto entirely neglected the part played by London-Irish journalists in the Liberal home rule campaign of 1886–93.11 Nevertheless, the central theme here – how an Irish Nationalist could also embrace British political influences – has certainly been explored by Irish historiography, most notably by Alan O’Day in The English Face of Nationalism (1977).12 This work challenged the idea that the early Parnellite Party was concerned solely with Ireland, and revealed the extent to which its political outlook was also British (especially Liberal). This essay, then, takes this approach further. By focusing on O’Connor, expanding the time period, and by incorporating his journalistic projects, it aims to show just how fully Irish nationalism could be combined with British Radicalism. 78
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More attention has been paid to O’Connor’s Star project in British historiography. This does not include works on late Victorian Liberal politics, which have overlooked not only T.P.’s challenge to the front bench but the whole home rule press offensive. Rather, it is understandably studies of London politics and the press that have touched on The Star, with Paul Thompson’s exploration of London politics from 1885 to 1914, Socialists, Liberals and Labour (1967), and Stephen’s Koss’s The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (1981) both noting how The Star’s Irish–Radical programme was an attempt to force the political pace. Naturally, neither is concerned with what this reveals about T.P. himself.13 Other analyses of The Star’s politics are less satisfactory. John Goodbody, for example, in a 1885 article revived the claim (first made by G.B. Shaw, who worked on The Star for two years) that the Fabians ‘collared’ The Star and so orchestrated its social reform campaign, and this despite the fact that Thompson had already dismissed such claims. Unaware of T.P.’s radical politics, Goodbody assumes he was merely a home ruler and does not consider that O’Connor may have sponsored The Star’s social reforms even though he was the editor.14 More generally, this chapter necessarily follows existing trends in British historiography in which the earlier ‘high politics’ model of self-interest has been replaced by a reassertion of the importance of ideology in Victorian politics and a renewed emphasis on the part played by those who disseminated such ideology, such as journalists and intellectuals.15 The fact that much of O’Connor’s home rule work after 1886 was carried out in the press is no surprise considering that he was already a well-established journalist. Yet, there were also wider, more significant, reasons why the newspaper world should have become the focus of his efforts, and it is by examining these that the advantages of the Liberal home rule alliance for Catholic–Nationalist journalists in London will come into view. The starting point here is the condition of the Liberal metropolitan press after the 1886 election defeat. Over the preceding thirty years the Whig–Liberal party had enjoyed a larger share of London press support than the Conservatives, but Gladstone’s adoption of home rule brought this Liberal press hegemony to an end. The balance of power shifted abruptly in favour of the Tories or, more precisely, the Unionists.16 The Daily News alone upheld the home rule standard among the morning papers, while the Liberal evening press suffered a grievous blow when the radical Echo defected to the Unionists. In the latter area there remained the Pall Mall Gazette, but its editor was the erratic crusader W.T. Stead, so that its reliability and effectiveness were questionable. Elsewhere, there were isolated points of Liberal support, such as Truth, the Radical MP Henry Labouchere’s weekly journal. Overall, though, the outlook was gloomy. Besides splitting the party asunder, home rule had ended Liberal dominance of Fleet Street. Liberal problems were compounded by the fact that the Daily News, supposedly the most prominent party organ, was in a moribund state. Until the start of 1886 Frank Hill had been the editor, but Labouchere (a major shareholder) had come to despair of him and so had helped replace Hill with H.W. Lucy, the 79
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famous parliamentary correspondent. However, this did not improve the paper’s fortunes and Labouchere soon realised that Lucy was as ineffective as Hill. ‘The difficulty of finding a good editor is greater than that of finding a good Cabinet minister’, he told Herbert Gladstone in February 1886. The editor has to understand about the working of the Press – arranging news – and getting Articles upon various social topics, as well as on politics. Lucy does not know much about the matter . . . so soon as we can, we will find a man, but he must . . . not only write clearly, but . . . put his ideas into that . . . common place, which is necessary in articles for people to read them.17 Labouchere’s conception of the ideal London editor emerges quite clearly here. Not only must he write in a popular, inclusive way, but he must also cover subjects other than politics. The conviction that a paper had to be accessible before it could become influential appears to be the basis of Labouchere’s thinking. Lucy did not meet these requirements and, as Labouchere indicated, the search for a capable editor was swiftly resumed. In the meantime the Daily News proved unable to shoulder the home rule burden. John Morley wrote several pieces on Ireland at the start of 1886, but after his promotion to the Cabinet (as Irish Chief Secretary) he no longer had the time for such work. Responsibility for the home rule cause rested with the unconvincing Lucy.18 It was painfully obvious, then, in the aftermath of the 1886 election that the Liberal metropolitan press was in a deplorable state. Few journals remained in Gladstonian hands and those that did were unsatisfactory. Such a loss of newspaper support could only be perceived as a serious handicap in an age when it was widely assumed that journalists had the capacity to sway a large number of voters. It was especially hard on the Liberals given that the rationalist approach was the bedrock of their political creed. If home rule was to triumph, the Liberal press surely had to be strengthened. This was particularly true in terms of London. The importance of the London constituencies was generally acknowledged in the late Victorian period, a fact reflected in the efforts made by various figures, including O’Connor, to induce Gladstone to speak in the capital during the 1886 election. These appeals were unavailing and in the event the Liberals only won 10 out of 72 London seats. After such a poor performance in London, a swift solution to the problem of the Liberal metropolitan press was clearly required.19 Naturally enough, the Liberals were fully aware of their press difficulties. Soon after the election defeat, Morley wrote to James Bryce: ‘What we want is an energetic and fighting newspaper. If only the D. News could be got hold of?’ As a former editor of the PMG, Morley must have been only too conscious of the gravity of the problem. The same could be said of Labouchere. He too was alive to the situation, as his concern for the Daily News showed. In the summer of 1886, he began floating plans for an evening paper with Sir Charles Dilke, who 80
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had been forced out of parliamentary politics earlier in the year by a divorce scandal. But Dilke was pessimistic about such a venture and nothing came of their ideas.20 By April 1887, therefore, the Liberal metropolitan press position had not improved, and so Morley could repeat his earlier lament. Writing to Gladstone on 10 April, he said: ‘It is certainly deplorable that at a pinch like this, we should be left as we are in the London press’.21 Unfortunately, the immediate sequel to this letter simply confirmed the Unionist dominance of Fleet Street. In March 1887 The Times had published the first of its ‘Parnellism and Crime’ series and then, only a week or so after Morley’s complaint, it reproduced on its front page the infamous letter in which Parnell appeared to condone the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. Its publication was clearly designed to convince wavering Liberal Unionists to back the government’s Coercion Bill. In the face of such direct and seemingly effective pressure from the Unionist press – as the bill passed – the case for a Liberal response became more obvious and urgent than ever. But what was also obvious was that the ‘energetic and fighting’ journal desired by Morley would require an editor conversant with Irish politics in general and home rule in particular. Unhappily, there were few suitably qualified Liberal publicists. Those who were, such as James Bryce, the historian and MP, were often already engaged with other aspects of the Liberal campaign.22 As for Dilke, his main motive was probably a desire to re-establish himself after his divorce scandal. Liberal options seemed sparse. Moreover, the problem had perhaps been exacerbated by Gladstone’s cautious handling of home rule in 1885–6, as this had left little room for educating Liberals on Ireland. The most likely candidate for a press venture was Morley, as he had both the editorial experience and the necessary Irish political savvy. Indeed, his letter to Gladstone of April 1887 reveals that even before the Parnell facsimile he was considering a return to Fleet Street. With Lucy’s editorial tenure coming to an end, Labouchere had asked Morley to take over at the Daily News.23 Morley eventually declined this offer, but he remained the Liberal most likely to try and restore his party’s press fortunes. That summer it was rumoured that Andrew Carnegie was to fund a new evening paper and that Morley would be its editor.24 It was at this point that O’Connor intervened. If the Liberals themselves lacked widespread press expertise on the home rule question, they could always turn to their new Irish allies for assistance. Liberal shortcomings meant that there was an obvious opportunity for someone like O’Connor, with his political and journalistic credentials, to exploit. As a result, in the summer of 1887 he began to broach the subject of a new London evening paper, being initially unaware of Morley’s similar scheme. One Liberal who responded enthusiastically to O’Connor’s ideas was Labouchere, who had already shown his awareness of Liberal problems in the London evening press in his discussions with Dilke. His help, notes Hamilton Fyfe, ‘was always at T.P.’s disposal and was worth a good deal . . . He and T.P . . . talked over the prospects of a progressive 81
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evening newspaper. He urged T.P. to start one: he promised help in raising the . . . capital among wealthy Liberals’. Elizabeth O’Connor, T.P.’s American wife, corroborated this story of an energetic and invaluable Labouchere.25 Two of the ‘wealthy Liberals’ that he brought O’Connor into contact with were James Williamson and the chemical manufacturer John Brunner. T.P., with Labouchere’s assistance, worked hard to raise the necessary capital from these men and also began negotiations for his staff.26 The crucial moment, it seems, was when O’Connor learnt of Morley’s plans for an evening paper. He was ready to abandon his own scheme, but Elizabeth O’Connor and Labouchere intervened and stiffened his resolve. Morley was told of T.P.’s venture and, in the event, Morley withdrew from the field rather than O’Connor.27 Accordingly, one of the important questions the episode raises is why should Labouchere have backed T.P. in preference to Carnegie and Morley when both schemes satisfied his desire for an evening paper? To begin with, the two men had been friends and political associates since the early 1880s. Several issues had brought them together, the most obvious being Ireland, for Labouchere consistently supported the Parnellites in their struggle against the then Liberal government’s coercion policy.28 In August 1886 Labouchere wrote to Herbert Gladstone recommending O’Connor as a ‘Radical’ and as someone prepared to keep the Parnellites tied to the Liberals.29 Besides their friendship, there were notable political reasons why Labouchere backed O’Connor. Significantly, these went beyond a simple recognition of his Irish expertise. However, the political angle will be examined later. For the moment, what needs considering is T.P.’s reputation as a journalist. Due to his parliamentary sketch work of the early 1880s, T.P. was well regarded in journalistic circles. What had brought him attention was the ‘personal note’ in his writing. He had developed a popular, lively style in which the details of a statesman – his manner, appearance and traits – were considered as important as the words he spoke.30 The relevance of this to Labouchere is immediately obvious. As his criticism of Lucy showed, Labouchere prized an editor who could make his paper accessible and attractive, since such qualities were the keys to influence. That he thought of O’Connor in this way seems clear, for Labouchere referred to T.P. as ‘an-always-to-be-depended-uponjournalist . . . continually interesting, and indeed with a touch of genius’. Thus, he arguably backed T.P.’s scheme because he felt that O’Connor could secure a readership and create a popular paper.31 The fact that, in contrast, Morley’s literary reputation was one of scholarly austerity rather than liveliness must have increased Labouchere’s desire to see O’Connor emerge as editor of the new Liberal paper. More immediately, the smoothing of the way with Morley meant that O’Connor was free to press ahead with his own plans. These were concluded by the end of the year and so on 17 January 1888 a new, halfpenny, radical evening paper, dedicated to the home rule cause and edited by T.P. O’Connor, appeared in London. The principal backer of the paper was John Brunner, for 82
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T.P. failed to agree terms with Williamson. Others who were induced to support The Star included J.J. Colman, the mustard magnate, and Isaac Holden, a Yorkshire woollens manufacturer, who were both Liberal MPs.32 From the outset, the paper was a tremendous success. On its first day 142,600 copies were sold and by June the paper was selling over 160,000 issues a day. Its weekly circulation greatly exceeded the number achieved by any London evening paper in the past. Much of this success was obviously owing to the lack of competitors. ‘We start with the immense advantage of supplying instead of creating a want’, said O’Connor in the first issue. ‘There is no halfpenny radical paper in London to-day.’33 However, this success was also due to the paper’s low price and the way that T.P. developed the techniques of the ‘new journalism’, for these two factors helped make The Star the first daily or evening paper to gain a large workingclass readership. The latter had a number of aspects. Typographically, The Star was attractively laid out. Articles were shorter, headlines were used to capture attention and the writing was lucid and striking. The paper also deemed nonpolitical topics worthy of coverage and so included regular articles on sport and society gossip, and gave more space to news.34 Unsurprisingly, a third element in the new method was the ‘personal note’. The so-called ‘human touch’ characterised the paper. It is through these innovations and the mass circulation newspaper they helped create that T.P. has won his place in the history of the press. Equally significant here is the fact that the methods O’Connor used on The Star had vindicated Labouchere’s judgement regarding his abilities. Labouchere had believed him to be someone capable of producing a popular, readable newspaper and now he had repaid that faith handsomely. Whether the desired political clout would follow such success remained to be seen.35 If T.P. helped change the world of Fleet Street, then his own position within that world had also changed considerably. Writing in 1912, he reflected: ‘I had never then had any association with a newspaper except as an ordinary contributor. I had never been an editor. My journalistic career had been somewhat interrupted by my entrance into the . . . Commons’.36 Certainly, his London press career had not progressed entirely as he might have expected. Since 1882 his contributions had been mainly to American and Irish papers. Now, he was back in Fleet Street full time and not merely as a journalist, but as the editor of an important evening paper. O’Connor, therefore, is a crucial example of the beneficial effect that the Liberal home rule alliance had on the Catholic– Nationalist position within the London political press. Throughout the past century Irish writers and journalists had flocked to the London literary scene in general and Fleet Street in particular. But the Catholic or Nationalist had nearly always been a reporter or leader writer on the political press rather than an editor (they were especially prominent as war correspondents).37 The press summit had tended to elude their grasp. This is not to suggest that Irishmen had been unsuccessful in Fleet Street (the evidence hardly points to this), but rather to define that success in more precise terms. 83
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In the late 1880s, though, this began to change, as the case of O’Connor shows. The Liberal party’s desire to establish the home rule cause in Fleet Street created a demand for commentators with Irish political expertise. This provided an immediate niche for Irish journalists on the Nationalist side like T.P. and so he took advantage of Liberal needs to become editor of a London Liberal paper. Party funds were at the disposal of such Irishmen in a way they had never been before the alliance. Of course, his advance was not solely due to such a pedigree. It was obviously aided by his growing reputation as a journalist and the fact he had the Liberal contacts, such as Labouchere, to facilitate the process. O’Connor’s radical past (which will be seen shortly) probably also helped the Liberals accept his claims. As a London-based Irish journalist with the Liberal links to complement his Nationalist identity, O’Connor had the right combination of qualities. This idea of post-1886 Irish advance in Fleet Street is strengthened by the career of R. Barry O’Brien, the Nationalist historian. Like T.P., he combined the necessary Irish expertise with Liberal connections, and this enabled him to become assistant editor of the weekly Speaker (a home rule rival to the Spectator) when it was founded in 1890.38 The most important consequence of The Star’s establishment, however, was the political platform that it gave O’Connor, for he was the first Irish Nationalist on the London press to be able to express his highest aspirations. Accordingly, while he had created a popular paper, it was the political rather than the commercial benefits that this might bring which mattered most at this stage of his career. Despite his development of the ‘personal’ tone of the ‘new journalism’ he was still enough of a product of the older tradition of the political press to believe heartily in the partisan purposes of a journal.39 For T.P., The Star’s purpose was of course to promote his version of the Irish–Radical alliance. In order to understand the full significance of his project it is first necessary to look at the nature of that alliance between 1886 and 1888. The Liberals responded to their 1886 election defeat by conducting a nationwide home rule crusade in which the Radicals played a leading role.40 It meant that home rule continued to be the dominant political issue of the hour, monopolising Liberal energies. Such a trend naturally reflected front bench priorities, especially those of Gladstone and Morley. ‘The satisfactory adjustment of the Irish question’, Gladstone wrote in mid-1886, ‘will now . . . be the supreme object of every member of the Liberal party’. Home rule was the chief interest of both men, and in their view its primacy was clear. They believed that until it had been passed domestic reforms could not be dealt with properly. Although Morley would later discuss other initiatives, he always insisted Ireland was the dividing line.41 For both men, ‘justice to Ireland’ through home rule represented the kind of ‘moral’ politics that they felt Liberalism should follow. Their position was strengthened in April 1887, for that month Balfour introduced coercion, thereby deepening the Liberal preoccupation with Ireland, as they mounted a vigorous response to his strong-arm methods. By early 1888 it was clear that hitherto the Irish–Radical alliance had been built wholly upon Ireland, whether 84
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that meant home rule or the coercion struggle. ‘The electoral question is now simply the Irish question’, stated the Daily News in September 1887.42 It was this political mould which O’Connor set out to alter on The Star. A concern with both countries, not just Ireland, would now be evinced. The Irish–Radical alliance would no longer be a one-sided affair. Thus, instead of presenting home rule as the sole Liberal policy (or even the most prominent), The Star made it part of a wider package of reforms. This change of approach was signalled from the start. In his opening leader O’Connor set out the paper’s political programme, but home rule by no means came first. On the contrary, domestic reforms took precedence. Some of these were of a familiar political hue, such as an end to plural voting and reform of the House of Lords. Of a more striking nature were the social measures that The Star promulgated. These included the improvement of working-class housing, particularly in the cities, and ‘vast’ land reform, which would ease urban overcrowding by restoring people to the soil. To these would soon be added a call for progressive taxation. ‘Our statesmen of all parties must make a step in advance’, said O’Connor, ‘and face boldly and soon the terrible problem of hopeless poverty, unhealthy homes and overwork or want of work among . . . the people’.43 It was only after such assertions that home rule was advocated. It was followed in turn by London local government reform. There was an urgent need for action in this area and so The Star took up the question from the outset. In his first leader T.P. called for a strong local council, one that would take control of monopolies like gas, water and the markets, and also be able to tax ground values. It could then improve housing conditions and sanitation. ‘Our first concern is for the people of London’, said The Star on 18 January. A shift in priorities had been manifested.44 O’Connor’s aim was therefore clear. Support for home rule would remain total, but, simultaneously, he was trying to enlarge the scope of the Irish– Radical alliance, to insert home rule into a broader programme of change which would embrace England as well as Ireland. Unlike the Daily News, The Star was pushing radical reform forward in both countries. Being based on the verdict of the majority, home rule fitted neatly onto this wider democratic canvas. Of course, T.P. was well aware of his new political departure. Addressing the ‘social problem’ in late 1888, The Star said: ‘We might have run away from it. We might have contented ourselves with working the rich vein of noble . . . sentiment which the Irish people . . . had touched. But we decided otherwise. We found there were wrongs in England as well as Ireland’.45 Accordingly, throughout its opening year the paper called for social amelioration in addition to Irish home rule. ‘A fair wage for the workman – fair hours – a fair chance for body and mind’, it said in January 1889, ‘are causes not less important than [home rule]’. Statements like this offered a direct challenge to the Liberal leadership and its concentration upon Ireland. Neither the call for a wider reform programme nor the social nature of those reforms was especially welcome to the front bench. They did not want the ‘moral’ politics of home rule replaced by 85
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T.P.’s state-sponsored social politics. O’Connor was trying to radicalise the Liberals, to make their policies reflect the change in the party’s make-up that home rule had provoked. The Whig exodus provided an opportunity to adopt a full radical programme that could not be missed. And, contrary to the impression given by Brady, this was an aim which, as seen above, T.P. held from the very outset.46 What were the reasons behind such a bold move? Before dealing with O’Connor himself, it is worth noting some of the external factors that may have been involved. Most obviously, by the late 1880s there was a growing interest in ‘the social question’. Publications like The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns (1883) had revealed the extent of the deprivation suffered by the poorest sections of society. It meant there was a danger that the Irish–Radical alliance could lose support by ignoring such issues.47 This was particularly the case in view of where the Liberals’ electoral base was now assumed to reside. The 1886 election was marked by a collapse in upper- and middle-class support, especially in London, so that the newly enfranchised working classes appeared to hold the key to a Liberal recovery. An appeal to working-class concerns thus had obvious attractions for the Gladstonians. The wider reform platform (and particularly the emphasis on housing) was designed in part to secure the support of those considered the new bulwark of Liberalism. A distinct electoral motive was built into The Star’s social crusade. An ‘appeal to the country on Ireland alone would . . . be a great tactical blunder’, said The Star.48 Naturally, to realise its goal of working-class backing, the paper first had to reach such an audience, but, as we have seen, a low price and the methods of the ‘new journalism’ helped it achieve this. This need to court the working classes was made greater by the pressure emanating from various political quarters, both inside and outside the Liberal party. First, there was Joseph Chamberlain. He had sponsored the original ‘Radical programme’ during the 1885 election. Like O’Connor’s, it was an attempt to radicalise the Liberal party by focusing on the ‘social question’. These plans were subsequently shouldered aside by Gladstone’s emergence as a home ruler, but Chamberlain still posed a threat to the Irish–Liberal alliance, for land and local government reform remained part of his platform. If the Liberals shunned domestic issues, it could allow him to win working-class support by arguing that he represented ‘true’ radicalism in that his main concern was the welfare of the British masses rather than the alien importation of Irish home rule.49 Another group to be considered were the socialists. The Fabians may not have ‘collared’ The Star, but the socialists still applied political pressure, with Sidney Webb, H.M. Hyndman and Shaw all assuring O’Connor and his staff that home rule alone was insufficient. The country’s social problems would also have to be tackled.50 As a result, while the socialists were in no way responsible for his reform campaign, O’Connor was mindful of their presence and wished, if possible, to bring them on board.51 Of more importance were the London Liberals and Radicals. They were 86
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especially keen to see the Liberal party enlarge its horizons and, understandably, wanted action taken on London local government reform.52 The Tories made some progress in 1888 when they created a London County Council (LCC), but London Liberals pressed for further reform, since, like The Star, they wanted a Council which would control the police and important resources such as gas and water. At the same time, as John Davis has shown, due to episodes like the ‘Bitter Cry’ controversy London Radicalism had a widespread interest in social issues. ‘Social questions permeated metropolitan Liberal and Radical politics in the 1880s’, he says.53 It was the wishes of London Liberals and Radicals, then, that T.P. was also recognising when he constructed a programme which stressed both the full reform of metropolitan government and the social measures that would follow. Having considered the outside factors, we turn to what were, in the final analysis, the two crucial influences on The Star: O’Connor and, to a lesser extent, Labouchere. Taking T.P. first, it is his personal politics and beliefs that provide the chief explanation for the paper’s wider reform programme. It was an approach entirely consistent with his background. Before 1880 he was more of a Radical than a Nationalist. A great admirer of Gladstone, he participated enthusiastically in his Eastern agitation of 1876–8, making his name at this time by penning a hostile biography of Disraeli. In the following years he was drawn closely into Radical circles and by 1880 was vice-president of the Lambeth Radical Association. Even after becoming a Parnellite MP in 1880, his radicalism persisted. That year he supported the right of Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, to take his seat, and, after the Lords had rejected the Compensation for Disturbance Bill in August, he helped organise a demonstration against the Upper House. In a periodical article that summer O’Connor also attacked the unreformed nature of London local government.54 More importantly, in 1880–1 T.P. sought to launch an identical combination to the one he was promoting in 1888. In the midst of the Land War he tried to widen the Irish agitation and create an Irish–Radical alliance that would resist coercion and instead pursue land reform not only in Ireland but in England too. At the heart of this alliance were to be the English working classes. Invoking the image of a common aristocratic enemy, T.P. welcomed a time when ‘men may . . . trample joyously in England and in Ireland on the ruins of the feudal oligarchy’.55 His campaign commenced in November 1880, when he and several working-class Radical friends formed the Anti-coercion Association in London, and then, under the Association’s auspices, he took his message of Irish–Radical unity to working-class audiences in northern England the next month.56 In this campaign T.P. drew on the long-standing Radical antipathy towards the landed aristocracy and the fact that the perceived iniquities of the Irish land system particularly evoked Radical ire.57 Ultimately, though, his grand vision was unrealised. Disturbed by Irish agrarian violence, the majority of Radical MPs (including many with past Irish sympathies, such as John Bright) supported the Liberal Coercion Bill in February 1881, and, as the year wore on, the earlier 87
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working-class backing fell away despite renewed wooing by O’Connor and Parnell’s adhesion to the ‘wider agitation’ line.58 The time was just not ripe for T.P.’s project, and so he drifted away from Radicalism after 1882. By 1886–7 things had changed. His desired Irish–Radical alliance had come into existence and matters were easier than in 1880–1. The founding of his own paper then gave him the chance to develop his own ideas. Understandably, he revived his earlier aspirations and again tried to enlarge the Irish cause into a wider programme of radical change affecting both countries. He had appealed to the English working classes in 1881 to join a mutual reform alliance and so it was natural for him to do so now. Land legislation was once more an integral plank in his platform, and the spectre of a shared aristocratic enemy was again raised (London was ‘burdened with landlordism . . . as well as Galway and Clare’, declaimed The Star).59 It meant that O’Connor struck a personal note when he wrote in July 1888 of how ‘the great reconciliation’ had been postponed from 1880 to 1886.60 He, for one, was only too aware of this. In a sense, then, it is unnecessary to look beyond O’Connor for the source of The Star’s new departure. The paper’s campaign to make home rule part of a broader democratic programme had its foundation in his past radicalism. It was similar to the kind of alliance he had tried to forge before and there was nothing unprecedented about many of the domestic issues (e.g. reform of the Lords and London government) that he was advocating. Rather than being a surprise for a Parnellite MP, The Star’s policy was in keeping with O’Connor’s deepest political convictions. That T.P. was resurrecting his earlier plans is shown by how in 1888 he again called the Irish–Radical alliance a ‘union of the two democracies’, a phrase he had first used in 1881. As it had in 1880–1, it provided the counterpart to his identification of a common landlord enemy, expressed the fact that his main aim was to enlist the English working classes (and he believed he could) and set forth the concept of a ‘new’ Union of popular consent (as Gladstone’s ‘union of hearts’ slogan was doing too).61 It also captured perfectly the idea of a combined Irish and English reform programme. At the same time, that programme of course emphasised just how much T.P. had renewed his radicalism in the present. It showed that radicalism had always been a genuine part of his political make-up. Party demands had enforced its temporary effacement, but within the congenial context created by the Liberal adoption of home rule he had reasserted his dual Irish–Radical identity. Indeed, so enthusiastic was his revived radicalism that it almost seemed to have eclipsed his nationalism, with O’Connor often submerging Ireland’s national identity within a wider democratic framework. This was implicit in the ‘two democracies’ approach as a whole, but at times was especially striking, such as when T.P. would refer to the ‘Democratic party’ in Parliament rather than Liberals and Nationalists.62 It was this wider democratic vision which later disgusted the likes of Griffith, and led Ryan to depict O’Connor as an Irishman who had lost his nationality. T.P.’s resurgent radicalism after 1886 confirmed that his identity was a product of both English 88
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and Irish political culture. The Star’s policy vividly reflected the fact that by the late 1880s he had lived in London for nearly two decades. The last factor to be considered in this examination of The Star is the role of Henry Labouchere. He too wished to see the Irish–Radical alliance extend its scope to include radical measures for England. As with T.P., this desire for an alliance of joint reform went back to the early 1880s. To Labouchere, it was the most effective way to implement the Radical programme (always his priority) because it would render the Whigs obsolete and so leave the Liberal party free to pass not only home rule but radical reforms for England.63 Accordingly, once that alliance was in place in mid-1886 he tried to mould it into the broader form he desired, repeatedly calling for home rule to be part of a full radical programme. He pressed this view on leading Liberals like Herbert Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt, and urged the same approach in his paper, Truth.64 He even employed the same ‘two democracies’ rhetoric as O’Connor. More significantly, the measures he had in mind were very similar to T.P.’s, with Labouchere also advocating social initiatives. In Truth his proposals included local government for England, rural land reform, land purchase in towns so as to facilitate the building of better housing and a progressive income tax. Such a platform was not at odds with The Star, and it shows that Labouchere’s stance on social reform was not as hostile as is often made out.65 Given this amount of common ground, the friendship between himself and T.P., and the fact he had a vital role in founding The Star, it is inconceivable that Labouchere did not also play a part in The Star’s programme, although this idea is usually overlooked. He surely had a hand both in pushing O’Connor towards a broader reform package and in outlining the nature of those reforms. He can only have encouraged O’Connor’s own convictions. At the same time, it is in these convictions that we find the crucial political reason why, in 1887, Labouchere backed T.P.’s plans for a new evening paper rather than Morley’s. Whereas Morley’s commitment to maintaining the primacy of the Irish question did not suit Labouchere at all, O’Connor’s political ambitions matched his own. An O’Connor-edited paper offered Labouchere the chance to forward his aim of radicalising the Liberal party through a full reform programme. It shows why T.P.’s journalistic skills were so crucial to Labouchere. They promised to advance not just home rule but the whole Radical programme. O’Connor was thus not only pushing the political pace himself, but was doing so in conjunction with Labouchere. The question that remains is how successful was their attempt to set the Liberal agenda? Certainly, by the end of 1888 there were signs that the Liberals were moving in the direction The Star desired. At its annual conference in November the National Liberal Federation adopted resolutions calling for better working-class housing and the taxation of ground rents and values. This ‘step in advance’, said The Star, was ‘partly, we have been vain enough to think, under the pressure from this journal’.66 Nor was it the only step. As well as rallying the faithful on Ireland, Gladstone’s speech before the NLF in November included a strong 89
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statement in favour of ‘one man one vote’. He followed this by speaking in London in December on the ‘urgent need’ for an initiative on the related subjects of ‘urban land reform’ and working-class housing.67 That same month John Morley spoke at Clerkenwell on the importance of social reform in the capital.68 The Star hailed these developments as proof that the Liberal party was gravitating towards its idea of a radical platform of social reform, although Gladstone remained at heart unenthusiastic about such state intervention. Also, other factors besides The Star had been involved in the Liberal party’s increased social awareness.69 Even so, that the paper had played a notable part is likely. Its profile was high and its politics were clear, while its record sales suggested that the latter had a good level of popular support.70 This move towards a broader platform culminated in 1891 when the Liberal front bench formally accepted the various resolutions of the NLF at Newcastle as its programme for the upcoming general election. Home rule remained the foremost objective, but the social reforms which the Federation had endorsed since 1888, such as land reform and improved housing, were now official party policy too.71 Needless to say, the immediate impulse behind the ‘Newcastle Programme’ had been the Parnell divorce crisis of late 1890. By imperilling the electoral viability of home rule, it prompted the Liberal leaders to look for alternative measures of English reform. Again, however, this should not detract entirely from The Star. Although the Liberal leaders may have adopted the Newcastle Programme mainly for reasons other than The Star, they had still come to recognise the strength of the paper’s argument. They had both accepted the need for social reform and, more importantly, strikingly endorsed the idea of a full radical programme as opposed to concentration on home rule. As Paul Thompson has written, the Newcastle Programme ‘must be regarded as the final triumph of the new approach for which the Star had called since 1888’.72 Events at Newcastle therefore showed how an Irish journalist such as O’Connor could, in harness with a radical associate like Labouchere, help determine the way that the Liberals handled home rule. By the time of the Newcastle departure, though, T.P. was no longer editor. Several factors were involved here, such as what Colman called the paper’s ‘vulgar tone’ and the memorandum circulated by H.W. Massingham, the assistant editor, which accused O’Connor of not fulfilling his duties. But a major reason why the directors pressed for T.P.’s resignation was his ‘excessive Radicalism’. While some, like Brunner, found T.P.’s social crusade acceptable enough, others, such as Colman, were less approving, and in this they represented the capitalistic elements of Liberalism that were lukewarm about social reform. What particularly disturbed these men was the support that the paper gave organised labour in such disputes as the London dock strike of 1889. It is ironic that it was on English issues that O’Connor, the Parnellite MP, gave his Liberal sponsors the most anxiety, but this simply reinforces how his politics ranged beyond Irish nationalism.73 Under increasing pressure to resign, he departed in mid-1890 after being offered £15,000 to leave. 90
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Later, O’Connor looked back on The Star with a sense of failure. He had created a successful newspaper only to be forced out within two and a half years. Yet, his Star days contained an impressive record of political achievement. As well as its influential role in pushing the Liberals towards a Radical programme, the paper contributed to some striking electoral successes. In January 1889 the Progressives won an outright majority in the first LCC election. While the heart of their campaign was the London Liberal and Radical Associations, The Star was also a crucial factor in their triumph, which was a clear endorsement of the social measures on which the Progressives and The Star had fought.74 Then, in 1892, the Liberals made a vastly improved showing in London at the general election, capturing twenty-four metropolitan seats. Moreover, it was a success largely based on working-class support. Of twenty-two working-class constituencies, the Liberals won seventeen. A major reason for this success had been the trade union expansion of the late 1880s, which London Liberals, by embracing labour interests, had turned to their advantage.75 But the results were arguably a vindication of O’Connor’s Radical programme too, even though he was no longer editor when the election took place. In 1888 he had sought via this programme to consolidate the workingclass vote behind the Liberals, and four years later this goal had been achieved to a considerable extent. It meant that O’Connor had helped fulfil one of the basic purposes behind the creation of The Star: the desire to start recapturing London from the Unionists. Most strikingly of all, Labouchere had backed T.P.’s plans for an evening paper in 1887 not only because O’Connor shared his political vision but also because he saw T.P. as someone capable of ensuring that the new journal, by being popular and dynamic, would realise that vision, would be influential. By 1892 it was clear, given the advance of the Radical programme and the Liberals’ electoral success, that, in spite of his editorship having been relatively short-lived, O’Connor had done just that. In so doing he had vividly demonstrated the dual nature of his political identity.
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5 A F I R S T W O R L D WA R TRANSITION State and citizen in Ireland, 1914–19 D. George Boyce
I Of all political quotations about Ireland, Winston Churchill’s summary of the Irish Question at the end of the First World War is the most celebrated: The whole map of Europe has been changed. The mode and thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.1 Neither the passage of time nor the familiarity of citation have sapped the resonance of these words; but they are nonetheless misleading. What Churchill went on to describe as the ‘integrity’ of that quarrel did not diminish; indeed it increased. But the steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone, and of the rest of Ireland, were to emerge in a country whose political landscape had changed profoundly, and in which the integrity of the quarrel was diverted by the deluge of world war into new directions. The First World War effected changes in the outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties in Ireland and even, arguably, the ‘mode and thought of men’. The observer of Ireland and of Anglo-Irish relations before the outbreak of war would have been struck by the vehemence with which Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist asserted their respective ideologies, and by the impact of Ireland on British politics. But he or she would at the same time have felt a certain familiarity in this, the third attempt by a Liberal Government to give home rule to Ireland. The alliance between the Liberals and the Irish Parliamentary Party held firm; that between the British Conservative and Unionist Party, and the Irish Unionists seemed as steady at it had been in the first home rule episode of 1886. There was a disagreeable novelty in the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to resist home rule; and a surprising one in the 92
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formation of the Irish Volunteers to defend it. Yet Unionists, especially in Ulster, had always threatened to band together to defeat the rule of Nationalist Dublin. And the crisis was still centred on the essentially domestic issue of devolution for Ireland, the special position (perhaps) of Protestant Ulster, and the question of whether or not a ‘union of hearts’ could be forged through the granting of home rule, as John Redmond, and before him Charles Stewart Parnell, assured England that it would. Special treatment of some Ulster counties was under review. But Irish separatism, the partition of Ireland, a brutal guerrilla and terrorist war, civil strife and sectarian conflict in Ulster on the scale that occurred after 1919 would have seemed unlikely. That these all happened after the war, and as a direct result of the war, revealed that Ireland too participated in the great changes that the deluge brought about; and that it was not Ireland, but England, that emerged from the world crisis with a determination to return things to what they had been before 1914. While the Liberals and their Conservative opponents were absorbed in negotiations in an attempt to find a way out of the Irish tangle in the summer of 1914, the Liberal Government discovered, rather to its surprise, that Ireland was gradually, then more speedily, edged aside by the European crisis. On 30 July the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, and Sir Edward Carson called on Asquith to suggest putting off legislation on Ireland in view of the international situation.2 On Monday 3 August, when Sir Edward Grey told the House of Commons that British interests, honour and obligations were at issue, Bonar Law and the Irish Nationalist leader Redmond, promised support. Grey’s often quoted observation that Ireland was ‘the one bright spot in the whole of this terrible situation’ was aimed as much at the Continent, and at Britain’s likely enemies in particular, as it was at anyone else; for he went on to draw attention to the fact that ‘the general feeling throughout Ireland . . . does not make the Irish Question a consideration which we feel we have now to take into account’.3 On 4 August, on learning of the German invasion of Belgium, Asquith and Grey drew up a telegram which was despatched at 2 p.m. repeating a request for German assurances of Belgian neutrality and, if these were not forthcoming, instructing the British ambassador to say that the British government would ‘take all steps in their power to uphold the neutrality of Belgium’.4 This focus on Belgium helped make Redmond’s decision to support the war easy; a small Catholic nation being bullied by a large (and mainly Protestant) one was a much more acceptable casus belli than the clashing ambitions of two great powers. But Redmond, like many other Nationalists such as Tom Kettle (who had been seeking guns for the Irish Volunteers in Europe), felt a genuine desire to help Britain uphold the rule of law and the rights of nations.5 Redmond’s offer on 3 August that the Irish Volunteers would be ready and willing to defend Ireland if the British military garrison there were withdrawn was much less deserving of Unionist cynicism than it first seemed.6 On 4 August, Grey replied to a French question about where the British Army would fight that ‘we have not contemplated the despatch of a military force to the 93
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continent’. The army was needed for home defence, and public opinion was opposed to sending it to France.7 On 6 August the British Government decided that it would after all send an expeditionary force to France, and what began as a Balkan crisis soon became a total war, with profound implications for the relationship between the British state and its people.8 The war had an immediate as well as long-term effect on this relationship. In the first stages of the conflict, it caused the Socialist movement throughout Europe to disintegrate: James Connolly, writing in Forward on 16 August (an article prepared a few days after the outbreak of war), reviewed the recent history of European socialism, claiming that ‘for a generation’ it had ‘progressed by leaps and bounds’; but now, ‘like the proverbial bolt from the blue, war is upon us, and war between the most important, because the most socialist, nations of the earth. And we are helpless!’.9 Connolly’s frustration at the failure of labour to reject an ‘imperialist war’ was understandable; but it also seemed to be irrelevant to the Irish political scene. On 18 September, when the King’s assent to the third Home Rule Bill was announced, a Labour MP cried ‘God save Ireland’, and Redmond replied ‘And God save England too’.10 But a closer analysis of the fate of the Home Rule Bill would have been worthwhile. For a few days before, on 13 September, Asquith, picking his words most judiciously, announced what he termed a ‘moratorium’ on the Home Rule Bill, rather than leave the bill ‘at the mercy of a chapter of accidents’. He referred to the ‘stream’ of ‘Irish loyalty’ flowing into the ‘great reservoir of Imperial resources’. The Home Rule Bill would be brought into ‘practical operation’ for a term not less than twelve months or, ‘if at the expiration of the term the war still continues, before a date to be fixed by Order in Council, not later than the duration of the war’. There would be an amending bill to secure ‘the general consent both of Ireland and of the United Kingdom’. He paid tribute to Carson’s encouraging the UVF to respond to the call: ‘No doubt they would be found not only among the most loyal, but the most efficient defenders of the power of the Empire’. The coercion of Ulster, he added, was ‘an absolutely unthinkable thing’.11 Redmond responded with similar tact and obfuscation. The moratorium was ‘a reasonable one’. He hoped for a united Ireland, and then there would be no coercion of a ‘single county’ in Ireland. During this interval the Catholic Nationalist Irishman and the Protestant Irishman from the north of Ireland would be fighting side by side on the battlefields of the Continent, and ‘shedding their blood side by side’.12 He denied that there was any significant anti-army feeling in Ireland; those who held such opinions were few in number and had always been ‘our bitterest enemies’. Ireland knew that this was a just war, and one undertaken for the defence of small nations and oppressed peoples.13 John Redmond had now cemented one of the most sensitive relationships of his life: that with the British Army. A Nationalist leader, anxious to demonstrate Ireland’s fitness for home rule, must put behind him episodes such as National94
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ist support for the Afrikaaners in the Boer War.14 The need to stress Nationalist affection for the army was strained by the Bachelor’s Walk shooting on 26 July, when the King’s own Scottish Borderers fired into a crowd which was taunting them as they intercepted Irish Volunteer gun-running. Redmond could hardly ignore this incident; but he chose his words carefully. ‘If these men . . . turned and fired on a motley crowd of men, women and children, they undoubtedly did a cowardly thing. But I am happy to think’, he added quickly, ‘in this connection that no soldier was hurt, and no one feels more deeply than I do that this is not the place to judge these men’. He deplored the ‘bad blood’ that the shooting might arouse between the Irish people and the troops and hoped that ‘our people will not be so unjust as to hold the troops generally responsible for what no doubt, taking it at its worst, was the offence of a limited number of men’.15 Now, on 15 August, Redmond went further. Not only would the Irish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists defend their own shores. He would feel himself ‘personally dishonoured if I did not say to my fellow countrymen, as I say today to them here, and as I will say from the public platform when I go back to Ireland, that it is their duty, and should be their honour, to take their place in the firing line in this contest’.16 This was the foretaste for Redmond’s appeal in County Wicklow on 20 September that it was necessary for the Irish Volunteers to drill and make themselves effective for the work, ‘and then account for themselves as men, not only in Ireland itself, but wherever the firing line extends, in defence of right and freedom and religion in this war’.17 His gesture was probably unavoidable; but it was nonetheless bold. Nationalists were now to join the British Army in substantial numbers; that army, and its performance in the war, and Nationalist Ireland’s attitude to it, and to joining it, would vindicate Redmond’s commitment to the imperial war effort: Redmondism and recruitment would stand or fall together. This new departure seemed justified by events, for there was little opposition from the Irish Volunteers, and only one in twenty followed the counter-call by Eoin MacNeill, President of the Irish Volunteers, to break from Redmond’s commitment.18 Carson, for his part, placed the UVF at the disposal of the War Office. So dramatic was this joint effort that when the British Government passed the Defence of the Realm Act to ensure state security, it did not initially cover arms importation, despite the recent gun-running by the Ulster and Irish Volunteers.19 But there was another view. Walter Long spoke for many Unionists when he urged that the one thing Ireland needed above all was ‘a strong unflinching attitude towards those who are openly disloyal’. The Irish were ‘very quick, and when they see that disloyalty not only goes unpunished, but is sometimes even rewarded they naturally do not hesitate to indulge in their own tastes’. They were ‘like naughty children’, in that they thought that ‘it is amusing to give way to their inclinations’.20 The state in Ireland, then, could not take Irish loyalty to a liberal state at war for granted. On 5 December 1914 the Defence of the Realm Act was amended 95
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to restore controls on the import of arms,21 but the impact of DORA was undermined by the fact that ‘any British subject (not being a person subject to military law) charged with an offence under the Defence of the Realm Act may claim to be tried by a jury in a civil court, instead of by court martial’.22 This halfway house was characteristic of the British state and its relationship with its Irish subjects. It must suppress seditious newspapers; yet it interfered as little as possible with anti-Redmondite Irish Volunteer activity. But in other respects the state was engaged in Ireland in renegotiating its relationship with its subjects, as it was in Great Britain. There is no doubt that A.J.P. Taylor was exaggerating when he wrote in his English History, 1914–1945 that ‘until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman’, and that this was changed by the First World War, when the people were ‘required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs’.23 Yet it is a pardonable exaggeration: for the state did indeed mobilise its people in the pursuit of victory, and did so, not only in regulatory ways, but in seeking to improve their health and welfare, the better to pursue victory in total war. Ireland, like the other parts of the United Kingdom, was the recipient of this changing relationship between state and people. This was foreseen by some long before the outbreak of the First World War. Hegel anticipated the link between war and politics in his prophecy that in modern war the maintenance of the state’s independence required the ‘sacrifice of property, life, opinion, and all else’. In his novel Mr Britling Sees It Through, published in 1916, H.G. Wells depicted the British people saying to their government here we are at your disposal. This is not a diplomat’s war nor a War Office war; this is a war of the whole people. We are willing and ready to lay aside our usual occupations and offer our property and ourselves . . . Take us and use us as you think fit . . .24 There is ample evidence that Wells caught the mood of most of the British people at any rate, if this description is applied to Great Britain alone. As Jay Winter noted in his work on popular culture in wartime, the British people ‘knew the ugliness of the war; how heavy the losses were; and how grim the accounting would be. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority believed in staying the course until victory was achieved’.25 Trevor Wilson, in similar vein, affirmed that, despite some of the less attractive aspects of the war, such as the ‘cheapjack politicians and sensation-loving press barons’, ‘other and worthier things, like national self-government and the viability of parliamentary democracy were the central issues at stake in Britain’s contest with Germany’.26 These great issues were tested out in the First World War. They were tested out also in Ireland, but in a place where the state and subject, parliamentary democracy and national self-government were operating in a very different environment. 96
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II The British state was redefining its attitude to its subjects before 1914, as it reappraised its attitude to public health and welfare. The introduction of old age pensions into Ireland occasioned a day of celebration; Sir Henry Robinson, President of the Local Government Board, remarked that ‘perhaps the pleasantest feature of the day – especially in the rural districts – was the hearty sympathy and good will with which whole localities entered into the happy feelings of the pensioners’.27 The National Insurance Act (1911) was a major step towards ensuring the maintenance of the ‘able-bodied poor’ when employed, and was applied to Ireland despite the Catholic hierarchy’s opposition to the bill because it would be ‘a heavy burden on many of our small struggling industries’.28 This tendency was continued during the war. Public health and housing were of particular concern. In 1915 the Notification of Births (extension) Act empowered local authorities to make such arrangements as they saw fit for attending to the health of expectant mothers and nursing mothers, and of children under five years of age. These powers were acted upon by the local authorities, which provided medical supervision and advice and kept records of cases: local authorities were informed that expenditure could be recouped from the exchequer grant. By 1918 the Local Government Board notified that it would meet half the cost of salaries and expenses for medicines, health visitors and nurses employed in maternal and child welfare work.29 Housing, especially in Dublin, a city notorious for its proportion of slum dwellings, came under scrutiny as well, and one investigator, C.P. Cowen, in his Report on Dublin Housing (1918) wrote that ‘the conscience of the nation has been awakened to this and other social problems’.30 The state’s intervention in health and housing was paralleled by its desire to mobilise Irish industry for the war effort. Here again pre-war trends continued and were enhanced. Irish trade unionism was notable for its militancy between 1911 and 1913, but this was an exhausting experience for the unions, whose power was further weakened by the departure to the Front of reserve soldiers, and the loss of employment in luxury trades. There was a shortage of skilled workers.31 War drove prices up, and the Irish Trade Union Congress called for the Government to take control of Ireland’s food supply. Government legislation was framed to ward off damaging industrial disputes.32 The need for Government to increase production, deal with labour shortages, and work towards collective bargaining gave new impetus to trade union power. Compulsory arbitration encouraged trade union organisation; trade unionism also developed among women workers. The increase in the cost of living was another major influence on the increase in trade union membership. One authority reckoned that membership in 1894 was about 30,000 trade unionists in Ireland; by 1918 there were between 130,000 and 140,000 members. Only a small fraction of state expenditure upon munitions of war came to Ireland, though this was offset by the large number of Irish workers who migrated to Great Britain to work in
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factories there. When Captain John Archer Redmond, Redmond’s son, campaigned as an Irish Parliamentary Party candidate in Waterford in the general election of December 1918, his campaign leaflet claimed that ‘to Mr Redmond alone was due the taking over of Irish railways by the government and the subsequent increase of wages which all sections of Irish railway workers are now receiving’.33 There was one essential industry in Ireland that benefited most from the war: agriculture. The relationship between the state and the farmer in Ireland was very different from that in England. ‘Peasant proprietorship’ was well on the way to creating a class of land-owning, rather than renting, farmers. Irish farmers were doing very well out of the war, but, like all farmers, they were exhorted from 1915 to increase their area under tillage for the sake of the British food supply. In 1917 the food crisis obliged the Government at last to pass the Corn Production Act. This was designed to oblige farmers to plough up their grasslands, in return for which the state guaranteed the farmer a price for his produce.34 In February 1917 John Dillon hinted darkly, ‘if the German Government had millions of acres of magnificent tillage land in their own country they would not leave it untilled for fear of the graziers of Ireland’ – a garbled phrase, but one whose meaning could be discerned.35 The problem, the Earl of Selborne (President of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries in the Coalition Government from May 1915 until June 1916) noted, was that Ireland was different from England. In Ireland, farming was ‘not intensive enough . . . the fact remains that the great majority of Irish holdings are still ludicrously and uneconomically small, and that the land could be redistributed into larger holdings and the farming become intensive with little or no call for additional labour’.36 Nationalist MPs were quick to defend their constituents’ farming interests. One home ruler pointed out that many farmers had already, under DORA, been compelled to till a certain portion of their land (‘10 per cent I think’). As to wages, the farmers ‘are supposed to be making a great profit. I doubt if they are making a very large profit. Wages are high, and are getting higher, and the other elements of the cost of production are also increasing in price’.37 Home rulers had their eye on the ‘large graziers’ for some time, and now they suggested that this problem should be tackled.38 There was even, from Dillon, a sideswipe at his old foes, the landlords.39 But in the event the Government, under the careful and sensitive guidance of H.E. Duke, Chief Secretary for Ireland, worked out a sufficient compromise to satisfy the worries of Irish farmers and their representatives in Parliament; as he put it on 15 April, ‘you had to find out on what terms the patriotic farmer was willing to take the risk’ in moving to tillage. The farmers had said, put us in the position in which we shall have a reasonable prospect of not being absolutely destroyed by the failure of the crops which we till or by the market being flooded, in the event of an early peace, with foreign corn . . . and we will do all we can.40 98
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Duke would work with the Irish MPs to get a consensus on the Corn Production Bill. Appropriate amendments were made to the bill to meet Irish observations and objections, and Irish agriculture continued to prosper, enjoying the ‘most hectic period of agricultural prosperity in Ireland’s history, surpassing even the best years of the Napoleonic Wars’; or as one contemporary put it more modestly, ‘the War has made farming a business in which a knowledgeable man can earn a fair living and some interest on his capital’, with the farmer now ‘selfsupporting’, despite the ‘operations of innumerable government controllers, for whose ineptitude most people have nothing but abuse’.41 Thus the farmers, still the backbone of the home rule movement, were able to rest on the profits of war, the profits war distilled. Urban workers were less well circumstanced, as wages lagged behind rising prices.42 But trade unions were enjoying more influence. It might seem that this, together with state intervention in health and welfare, must make for an Ireland more closely integrated into the United Kingdom than ever before. As Redmond put it in his preface to Michael MacDonagh’s The Irish at the Front, After long struggles the Irish people had won back from England a series of rights – ownership of the land, religious equality, educational freedom, local self-government . . . The culmination was reached when in the session of 1914 the Imperial Parliament passed the Act to establish national self-government. Ireland had said, ‘Trust me with this, and I will wipe out the past and be loyal to the Empire’; an answer – somewhat long delayed, no doubt, but still it came – was the King’s signature to the Government of Ireland Act.43 Redmond did not doubt that, as the ‘ranks of their brothers in the field are thinning under the wastage of war’, Ireland would ‘keep them filled’.44 But there was a note of anxiety in Redmond’s appeal, made in February 1916. He was sure that the ‘young men of Ireland could not think unmoved of the wistful bewildered faces of their noble brothers while they held back’, when all the time the ‘glorious regiments, brigades and divisions’ gradually filled up ‘with others than Irish soldiers until their character as Irish armies finally vanished and ceased to exist’.45 Sir Henry Robinson inserted a humorous, but nonetheless significant, detail about the recruitment appeal in Ireland. The police, whose duty was to remove anti-recruitment material, were puzzled about a poster which urged Irishmen to join up. They were warned that if the Germans won they would ‘flood our country with swarms of German Officials who would be a thousand times more overbearing, more dishonest, and more unjust than the English officials’. Germany had invaded Belgium, and was now trying to lay waste France; ‘Remember how the French helped us at Killala Bay in 1798’. But how were Irishmen to do their bit if they had no army of their own? ‘That does not matter. Join Any Army. Join the French Army, the Belgian Army, the Japanese Army, the Russian Army, or even the English Army. The 99
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English Army is the most convenient, and it will do just as well as any other . . . God Save Ireland.’46 There was evidence by 1915 that the young men of Ireland were not inclined to join any army, English or otherwise. This was no doubt a natural reaction once the shine of the early heroic days of the war faded into the background; Great Britain underwent the same experience. But in Ireland there was a deeper issue. Whereas in Great Britain the Government moved slowly and reluctantly towards a first, limited form of military conscription, safe from serious opposition, Irish Nationalists had the objection that the war that was ostensibly being waged for self-determination and parliamentary democracy was demonstrably achieving neither for Ireland. Redmond’s policy of unqualified support for the war was the only course he could follow in 1914; England expected no less. The attraction of home rule at some distant time diminished as Redmond was obliged to defend Ireland’s recruitment record, the right of her Nationalist Volunteer divisions to their own insignia and symbols, the apparent failure of the British to acknowledge the bravery of the Irish Catholic soldiers at Gallipoli, and the entry of Carson into the British Cabinet (though Redmond, too, was offered a Cabinet post, but refused on the traditional grounds that no Irish Nationalist leader should take a British Government position).47 These were symptoms of a deeper malaise: Redmond was caught in the dilemma that if he failed to campaign for Irish recruitment to the British Army, then he ran the risk not only of defaulting on his duty, but of tempting the British Government to think of conscripting Irishmen; but if he campaigned in less than enthusiastic Nationalist Ireland, then he might weaken his command of Irish nationalism. By the spring of 1915, in County Kerry, public opinion was retreating from the Government’s recruitment campaign; local National Volunteers, followers of Redmond, began to transfer their allegiance to the breakaway Irish Volunteers. In March 1915 one Volunteer reported that many Redmondites were ‘anxious’ to enter the IVF.48 County Inspector Ruttledge in Galway West told the Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland which investigated the background to the Easter Rising that ‘owing to the influence of the leaders [of the Irish Volunteers] the members of three brigades of Redmond’s Volunteers turned over and joined the “Sinn Féin section”’.49 County Inspector Hill of Kerry noted that ‘until Mr Redmond had declared in favour of recruiting the Sinn Féin movement was of no account, but afterwards he found that it would have to be reckoned with, as many of the leaders were pro-German and against recruiting’. Up to October 1914 nearly everyone in Kerry was in favour of winning the war, and assisted the police in hunting out spies. ‘But after that all that stopped.’50 County Inspector Power of Kilkenny said that ‘the attitude of Mr Redmond towards recruiting for the Army and also the fear of conscription rather gave an impetus to the Irish Volunteers’. He also observed that ‘the number of Irish National Volunteers rather decreased, and that movement more or less became dormant’.51 An Irish Volunteer captain 100
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had told his men that ‘some of you may not like to commit murder, but it is not murder, it will be only self-defence. You know well that if your arms are taken that the next thing will be conscription’.52 Mr J.C. Percy, JP, who described himself as an ‘honorary recruiting officer’, gave evidence that in Killarney, where Sinn Féin was operating, he ‘could not get a chairman to preside over the (recruiting) meeting’. One recruiting committee reported that Sinn Féin organisers were to be found ‘at fairs and markets, and that they were signing on the people not to fight for England. That was done openly, in broad daylight’.53 He also drew attention to the farmers’ attitude to the war: ‘They are too fat and prosperous. A great many farmers’ sons are joining the Sinn Féin movement, and using it as a kind of umbrella in excuse for not fighting’.54 Sir Morgan O’Connell claimed that from May 1915, following a seditious speech from a Sinn Féiner, ‘Sinn Féin spread in Kerry like fire on a mountain . . . Recruiting meetings still continued to be held, but the forces against recruiting became more and more hostile’.55 On 18 December 1915 the Under Secretary at Dublin Castle, Sir Matthew Nathan, wrote to the Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, expressing his concern about the state of Ireland, which he found ‘most serious and menacing’. He feared that there might be a rebellion ‘which undoubtedly will follow any attempt to enforce conscription, or even if there is no such attempt, might take place as a result of continual unsuccess of the British Arms’.56 The evidence given by the police after the Easter Rising must be treated with some caution; but it is reinforced by the, admittedly anecdotal but nonetheless convincing, account of T.M. Healy, the veteran home rule MP, who recorded that ‘according to my chauffeur Pat, everyone is opposed to his [Redmond’s] recruiting campaign. While the people are not pro-German they think the price too high for the kind of home rule that has been granted’. He added that he did not think there was ‘much pro-Germanism, but the farmers didn’t want their sons to leave their work, and perhaps return cripples, or not at all’.57 In County Longford, police intelligence reports described how ‘on the outbreak of war enthusiasm for the movement [the National Volunteers] fell away, drilling ceased to a large extent, and the membership declined’. The County Inspector attributed this to Redmond’s offer of the Volunteers to the Government, and to the fear on the part of the Volunteers that they might be called upon to ‘take the field’.58 In County Monaghan in 1915 the County Inspector surmised that ‘cowardice and laziness rather than any pro-German feeling are the real causes of their [those who professed to be Sinn Féiners] antipathy to military service during the war’.59 In County Clare the County Inspector reported that in 1915 ‘there was a very strong feeling against conscription, and that the feeling was supported and encouraged by the local clergy and other prominent men, and that there was a tendency on the part of the National Volunteers to join the Irish Volunteers . . . amongst whom there was increased activity, as a demonstration against conscription’.60 But what was as important as, if not more important than, the agitation over the fear of conscription was the significant 101
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number of reports in 1915 that enthusiasm for the National Volunteers and Redmondism had fallen away, in some cases to almost negligible proportions.61 Even as early as October 1914 J.P. Farrell, a home ruler, wrote from County Longford that they were ‘getting a great deal of trouble here as to Redmond’s action re recruiting’.62 Recruiting in Ireland was never as well organised as it was in Great Britain. A Central Council for the Organisation of Recruiting in Ireland was created in 1914, to be replaced in April 1915 by the Department of Recruiting in Ireland. Neither managed to sustain the initial surge in recruitment achieved in the first six months of the war. Regiments went on route marches, with some success, and 45 per cent of total enlistments were made between 4 August 1914 and the end of April 1915.63 Recruiting campaigners were disappointed to find that on one occasion the men in the village they visited played pitch and toss while the recruiters made their speeches.64 The Irish contribution to the British Army inevitably became a divisive issue: as T.M. Healy wrote on 10 December 1914, ‘the effect of the Ulstermen’s enlistments over-topping those of all the other three Provinces will not be ignored’.65 In November 1914 the Unionist Belfast Newsletter pointed out that the Catholic population of Ireland was 74 per cent but that its recruiting figures lagged behind those of Unionist Ulster.66 Cardinal Logue reminded critics of the Nationalist response that the Irish had been cleared out of their own country in the past and that it was ‘the revenge of time’ if the men were not now available. The country needed the men to look after the land, the cattle and their families.67 The Protestant Nationalist Stephen Gwynn took a juster view when he explained that ‘in Ireland, as in Great Britain, “gone for a soldier” was a word of disgrace for a farmer’s son’.68 Efforts to boost recruitment in County Longford were not helped by what one British Army officer described as the unrepresentative character of his recruiting party, containing as it did ‘a Nationalist or two, put in to save the faces of the authorities, but chiefly anti-Nationalists to persuade home rulers to fight for England’. There were, he added, ‘squires and their ladies, squireens and theirs – an excellent people in their way, but their way was not [that] of the Irish people’.69 The gap between the ‘squires’ and the people was recognised by a home ruler in County Mayo who informed Redmond in March 1916 that ‘our shop assistants, mostly farmers’ sons, became extreme Nationalists all in a moment that they would not dream of “fighting for England” and they are now regarded as Sinn Féiners’. He added that the ‘Protestant farmers’ sons in this district are even more hopeless slackers than our own [sic] people’.70 A street ballad in Cork contrasted the happier fate of the ‘slackers’ with that of the enlisted men: They taxed the pound of butter And they taxed the ha’penny bun But still with all the taxes They can’t bate [sic] the bleddy [sic] Hun!
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And when the war is over What will the soldiers do? They’ll be walking around with a leg and a half While the slackers they’ll have two. Now never marry a soldier A sailor or marine But put your eye on the Sinn Féin boy With his yaller [sic], white and green.71 Nevertheless, as Keith Jeffery has pointed out, the pattern of Irish voluntary recruitment closely followed that of Great Britain. During the first eighteen months of the war (to the end of February 1916), when voluntary enlistment applied throughout the United Kingdom, ‘Irish recruitment fell off quite dramatically, but in almost exactly the same proportion as in England, Scotland and Wales’.72 The difference, as Stephen Gwynn and other home rulers noted, was that Nationalist Ireland seemed to have more need to justify itself, to vindicate itself in the war, to demonstrate that it was indeed loyal to England: more loyal than ‘loyal’ Ireland. Yet England would not reciprocate. Redmond was obliged to complain that the official account of Irish troops landing at Suvla Bay ‘did not mention the names of the glorious Irish regiments – although the names of the regiments concerned in all the other landings were given with eulogies’.73 When his son, Archer Redmond, applied for a commission, the Commander of the 16th Irish Division replied that he could have one if he brought with him one hundred recruits. H.J. Tennant, Liberal Under Secretary of State for War, wrote to Sir Laurence Parsons saying that the Prime Minister pointed out that John Redmond had ‘by his courageous attitude in the House of Commons contributed many hundreds and probably thousands of recruits to the colours in this country as well as in Ireland’, and hoped that ‘you may be induced to allow Archer Redmond to have a commission’.74 Tennant’s plea worked;75 but it was a symptom of the feeling that Nationalist Ireland could hardly do enough to demonstrate that indeed it was willing to do its bit for England, and prove Carson wrong in his claim in March 1914 that the British Army was welcome in Ulster and that ‘it is the only part of Ireland where that can be said’.76
III This was the danger of Redmond’s bold venture of linking home rule with the character and exploits of the British Army. Yet the gesture, though risky, was not yet disastrous. When Sir Roger Casement visited Irish soldiers in prison camps and urged them to join an Irish Brigade to fight for Germany he was on one occasion obliged to defend himself with his umbrella, and was ejected with the advice that ‘in addition to being Irish Catholics we have the honour to be 103
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British soldiers’.77 The Easter Rising in Dublin was put down by the efforts of, so to say, both non-Irish and Irish British soldiers. The Irish at the Front seemed unmoved by the rebels’ exploits, though a sergeant in the Royal Irish Rifles confessed that his fellow soldiers ‘got fed up when they heard of the executions of the leaders’.78 A.M. Bonaparte-Wyse, a Catholic civil servant, detected a ‘menacing tone among the lower classes who openly praise the Sinn Féiners for their courage and bravery, and there is a lot of abuse of the soldiers’;79 but Ernie O’Malley, who later became a prominent IRA fighter, heard people in Dublin say that the rebels would ‘soon run away when the soldiers came’, and that they were ‘pro-German’.80 Families whose sons and husbands were in the British Army were unsurprisingly hostile, but one Irish soldier who fought against the rebels nonetheless felt ‘proud of the boys while I fought them’.81 Thomas Johnson, a trade union leader, who spoke to ‘many workingmen, some women and many of the shopkeepers and the “better off clerk” class’, found that they were ‘practically unanimous’ against the rebels but were compelled to ‘admire the courage and resources of the young men and their leaders’.82 The 1916 ‘blood sacrifice’ was consistent with the mood of the times. Redmond declared that Major Willie Redmond, his brother, who enlisted in the British Army aged fifty-three, was ‘convinced that his blood would prove a sacrament of unity to his own countrymen, and lift up their hearts to a higher plane’.83 In Willie Redmond’s life and death ‘we see how the Dark Rosaleen found a lover who poured out his life to win healing for her soul’.84 Willie Redmond was killed in 1917, but his whole military career was dedicated to demonstrating that Nationalist Ireland was loyal to the British cause. After the Rising he wrote a series of articles for the Daily Chronicle, under the pen name ‘An Irish Officer’, to convince British public opinion that Irish Nationalists were finding common cause in the war, and that Irish Nationalist soldiers, though true to their principles (‘Irishmen sang patriotic songs, one battalion to the other, as they charged’), were also loyal to England.85 The Rising, and the failure of Lloyd George’s attempt to rush through a settlement based on the application of home rule to twenty-six counties, with six Ulster counties excluded, the whole predicament to be reassessed at the war’s end, damaged the Home Rule Party;86 in February 1917 its candidate was defeated by Sinn Féin in the Roscommon North by-election. Yet in another sense the tide was flowing its way. The government of Ireland under martial law between April and November 1916 declined in draconianism after the ‘initial frenzy of executions, raids, arrests and internments’. The balance between military and civilian rule was reasserted, though the use of the DORA regulations and other emergency measures demonstrated that Ireland was not being governed ‘normally’, and that the army’s role in aiding the civil power was ‘thoroughly undermined’.87 More importantly, the exigencies of the war necessitated some positive response from the British Government, especially if it wished to win American support for the Allies. The home rulers could rest their claim 104
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for a new attempt at settlement on the principle of nationality and the rights of small nations for which the British and their allies were fighting. The Rising had demonstrated that Irish Volunteering could be as dangerous in its own way as National Volunteering: Ernest Blythe, later a prominent figure in the Fianna Fáil party, observed that ‘Mothers and Fathers urged their sons not to have anything to do with a movement which looked more dangerous than it had heretofore appeared’.88 It was in this context that Eamon de Valera in his East Clare by-election campaign stressed that ‘another Easter Week would be a superfluity’.89 The confused state of Irish Nationalist opinion as the Rising became part of the political campaign waged by Sinn Féin and the Irish Parliamentary Party was well caught by the County Inspector in Kerry who reported in November 1917 that he did not believe that the Sinn Féin movement was ‘taken as seriously by the people as it was a short time ago, yet few could dare to say anything against it’.90 The overall question confronting Nationalist Ireland was this: could the causes for which the war was being waged – parliamentary democracy and selfdetermination – be retained for their purposes by the home rulers, or captured by their Sinn Féin rivals? The answer to this, as measured in by-elections after 1916, was unclear: Sinn Féin won Roscommon North in February 1917, Longford South in May and East Clare in July; but the Irish Parliamentary Party was successful in Armagh South in February 1918, Waterford City in March and Tyrone East in April. However, de Valera’s victory in East Clare was perhaps the most significant of these results: this was Willie Redmond’s seat. He was killed at Messines Ridge in an act of self-sacrifice that moved even the most hardened Unionists; but de Valera campaigned on the slogan that a vote for home rule was a vote for putting every able-bodied man of military age into khaki.91 It was now that the Redmondite leap of faith of 1914, the tryst with destiny between Irish nationalism and the British Army, had its nemesis; for in March 1918, while Nationalists and Unionists (but not Sinn Féin) struggled to reach agreement on the government of Ireland in an Irish Convention, the great German offensive fell on the Western Front, causing casualties to the British Army that threatened to bleed it dry of manpower.92
IV This military crisis brought to a head what had been implicit throughout the war: the feeling in Britain that Ireland did not really understand the full importance of the war, and that she was not doing her bit, refusing to exert herself to the utmost in the cause. The Irish perception was that she was doing as much of her bit as it was her duty to do: as the Protestant Nationalist Stephen Gwynn put it in March 1917, ‘no one in Ireland expects justice’. Gwynn went on to remark that ‘at the end of the war we shall probably find ourselves (if we are not doing so already) part of an army whose task it is to hold Nationalist Ireland down’.93 This transition of the British Army, from an army that Irishmen should 105
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join, from one that as late as February 1917 Dillon could refer to as ‘our troops’ and ‘our army’, to an army portrayed as an oppressive force, was the direct consequence of the British attempt to impose conscription on Ireland.94 There had always been Nationalist warnings against conscription. In August 1916 the moderate Nationalist newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, warned that ‘no country that has been drained of its population by misgovernment as Ireland has been for the three centuries past, can equally be subjected to compulsory military service’.95 The County Inspector for Kerry noted in March 1918 that the number of men joining the Irish Volunteers increased in Kerry between October 1917 and November 1918 by over 900 per cent, but enthusiasm for Sinn Féin dropped away after 1918 when the conscription threat had long since passed. T.M. Healy warned the British Government that there would be ‘a strike en masse by the Irish people’.96 ‘You have Ireland under Martial law . . . Poor John Redmond! You have killed him, and you are using the election of his son in Waterford the other day practically to carry Conscription.’97 In February 1918, even farmers had shown their patriotic fervour when, following the extension of food control to Ireland to ensure that she provided sufficient supplies for Britain, Sinn Féin reciprocated with their own national food census, to retain Irish food for Irish people. A small incident on 22 February, when a herd of pigs on its way to the ports was ambushed and the pigs, sold locally, made the headlines, and farmers began to claim that they were ‘Irishmen first and traders afterwards’.98 How much would patriotic fervour among farmers be enhanced when they and their farm-working sons were threatened with the call to arms? One historian has argued that this call owed less to a realistic assessment of the real value of conscription, and its likely impact on the Irish political situation, than to an almost vindictive desire to expose and punish Ireland for her failure to match the sacrifices of England, Scotland and Wales.99 But there is no reason to doubt that Lloyd George represented British public opinion and even British Liberal Opinion. A survey conducted by F.E. Guest (Lloyd George’s Chief Whip and political fixer) of local Liberal agents confirmed that while ‘progressive opinion’ was strongly opposed to the application of conscription to Ireland, the ‘general feeling was equality of sacrifice was necessary and should be enforced’.100 The Irish predicament was made worse by the hostage to fortune that John Redmond had given years before, in December 1915, when, in a debate on the ‘Derby Scheme’ (by which men of military age attested their willingness to serve), he declared that, although Ireland was not included in the scheme, she had shown her willingness to contribute to military service by the number of men who had enlisted. But conscription was not necessary for the ending of the war. For Redmond it was ‘not . . . a question of principle; it is a question of expediency and necessity’.101 In January 1916 he reiterated the point: ‘Conscription is based on expediency; and wherever and however the necessity arose, then I said conscription will be justified’.102 Now, as the German offensive threatened to destroy the British Army on the Western Front, Redmond’s successor, Dillon, found that 106
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the hostage to fortune would be taken by Lloyd George (never a man slow to exploit an incautious remark by a man of honour). Lloyd George announced that ‘when an emergency has arisen, which makes it necessary to put men of fifty and boys of eighteen into the Army to fight for liberty and independence’, then conscription must be imposed on Ireland.103 The conscription crisis was the death blow to the Home Rule Party; one made all the more poignant by the Government’s belated attempt to pass a Home Rule Bill in parallel with conscription, while denying that the two were linked. The discovery of a ‘German plot’ in May 1918 was little more than an attempt to save the Government’s face, as it became clearer that the conscription policy was both politically disastrous and militarily useless. The bitterness it aroused on both sides of the Irish Sea was exemplified by one British MP who in June 1918, as the prospect of Irish conscription faded, demanded indignantly, ‘Are we to understand that no troops are to come out of Ireland for the purpose of the present campaign, and that the Military Service Act is a fraud on the older men in this country?’.104 In Great Britain, despite some misgivings about conscripting men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and making men of eighteen immediately liable for service overseas, there was no strong or sustained opposition to the measure; winning the war remained the chief, indeed the only objective. For Nationalist Ireland, the threat of conscription provoked a rehearsal of Nationalist discourse on the perfidy of England. The Freeman’s Journal warned that the ‘Irish people’ would have nothing to do with it, even if it were accompanied by home rule: ‘They are not serfs cowering at the feet of a master, but an ancient nation standing firmly on its rights’.105 On 20 April 1918 it wrote that it was ‘no longer true, as it was when Mr Redmond spoke the words, that the fight for Irish freedom is in Flanders’.106 Equally important was the contrast now revealed between Nationalist and Unionist concepts of the war, and of the place of conscription in it. Southern Unionists saw the war as the chance to vindicate their historic role as the natural leaders of the (now demonstrably) loyal people of Ireland. As R.B. McDowell put it, this might have been their finest hour, when they could ‘throw themselves wholeheartedly into serving the empire in time of peril’.107 The entry of the British Unionists into government in May 1915, and their strengthening grip on the Cabinet thereafter, seemed to confirm the end of unionism’s retreat from power, a retreat that appeared to be almost irreversible in 1914. But the changed circumstances of 1917, as the war went badly for the British and the search for American involvement intensified, meant that imperial considerations overruled local ones; and by l918 the southern Unionists were divided between those who believed that co-operation with the home rulers held out their best and indeed only hope, and those who would fight to the end. Carson, southern Unionist still, despite his close connection with the Ulster Unionist resistance to home rule in 1912–14, pleaded with John Redmond in January 1916 to support the application of conscription to Ireland: 107
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southern Unionists were crying out that Ireland be treated like everyone else in the United Kingdom, or ‘give up the whole idea of unity at all’.108 But there was also Carson, the defender of Ulster Unionist particularism. He found himself, at Bangor, County Down in 1915, emphasising Unionist Ulster’s contribution to the war effort, and staking a distinctive claim of loyalty to the British in this great struggle. ‘There seems to be more joy in political circles of a particular character’, he protested, ‘over one Nationalist that enlisted than over a whole Ulster Division. The men who served in the trenches had given Ulster Unionists ‘breathing time. How are we to take advantage of it? Today we may be able to do something; tomorrow the time may have passed.’109 For Carson’s Ulster Volunteer Army, the ‘blood sacrifice’ of the Battle of the Somme rivalled that of Redmond’s men at Suvla Bay and the Western Front. But, for a brief time at the war’s end, Ireland participated in the celebrations that followed the great struggle. On 21 January 1919, on the day that Dáil Éireann first met and issued its declaration of independence, a luncheon was held at the Mansion House, Dublin, to welcome home 400 repatriated prisoners of the Dublin Fusiliers. Dawson Street was a ‘blaze of Union Jacks’.110 But the time of stasis did not last long. While Sinn Féin waited in Dublin for an invitation from the British Government to treat – an invitation that never came – the Irish Volunteers, now calling themselves the Irish Republican Army, the very title of which suggested their political absolutism, were slowly preparing themselves to fight the Crown forces and to outflank political compromise. In the same year the Royal Irish Regiment, the Connaught Rangers and the Leinster Regiment (representing recruits from the length and breadth of Ireland) all found themselves in Upper Silesia, ‘to interpose between Germans and Poles’.111 ‘Interposition’ by armed forces between opposing and hostile national peoples would soon be necessary for other British regiments nearer home. It was an ironic end to the great Irish enterprise in the First World War. This war tested two important political principles, both derived from the French Revolution: the Rights of Man and the Duties of Man. Their place in the relationship between the state and its subjects (in the United Kingdom ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’) must not be obscured by concentration on local circumstances and the vagaries of British and Irish politics. Individually, and as members of groups, people in Ireland were concerned with farms, food and political fashions. But their choices in the war were informed by the most important European legacies of the nineteenth century, the question of the state’s duty to man, and of man to the state. The French revolutionaries held that ‘the source of all liberty resides essentially in the nation; no group, no individual may exercise authority not emanating from the nation’.112 The Duties of Man declared, among other items, that ‘every citizen owes his services to the Patrie’ whenever the law summoned him to defend it.113 For the British state, the Patrie was the whole British Isles; for Irish Nationalists (especially as home rule was indefinitely postponed) it was Ireland; and the Irish citizens’ duty did not extend to responding to the summons of the law to join the army. 108
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The Allies in 1914–18 listed as their war aims self-determination and the safeguarding of parliamentary democracy. But Irish Nationalists reminded the British that both these were denied to Ireland. T.P. O’Connor drove this point home when on 5 November 1918 he moved in the House of Commons that ‘it is essential that, before the British Government takes any part in any proceeding for the resettlement of Europe on the conclusion of peace, the Irish Question should be settled in accordance with the principles laid down by President Wilson, “that all nations, large and small, should have full self-determination as to their forms of government”’.114 By the middle of 1918, Ireland was governed by a Lord Lieutenant, Sir John French, who believed that Ireland was incapable of governing herself, and a Chief Secretary whose idea of a ‘body in the nature of a Cabinet’ was a ‘Viceroy’s Advisory Committee’ of which one historian has written that ‘a less representative collection of Irishmen it would have been hard to find: they were simply rich men who were afraid of Sinn Féin’.115 The government of Ireland, which in 1914 enjoyed a significant input from the Irish Parliamentary Party, now resembled the government of India as it stood in about 1892, with its non-elective ‘Viceroy’s Legislative Council’. The Rights and Duties of Man were incompatible in Ireland by 1918. The right to self-determination excluded, or perhaps transcended, the duty of Irish Nationalist citizens to submit to the summons to war. Parliamentary democracy as practised by the Home Rule Party was held to have failed. Ireland, in its own way, exemplified the political ideals and beliefs that proved so destructive of the defeated imperial powers of Europe and still have resonances today.
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Part II IRISH IRELAND AND A S E PA R AT I S T I D E N T I T Y
6 BROKEN GLASS AND B AT O N E D C R O W D S Cathleen Ni Houlihan and the tensions of transition James H. Murphy
The production in 1902 of Cathleen Ni Houlihan was a key moment in the AngloIrish literary revival. It was a play whose authorship was publicly attributed to W.B. Yeats but which, apart from the character of Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself, was in fact largely the work of Lady Gregory, collaboration between authors being common in the early days of the revival.1 Its significance lay in the fact that it signalled the high-water mark of the rapprochement – roughly from 1899 to 1904 – between the revival and the generally more Catholic and certainly more pro-Irish language Irish Ireland. Yet the play’s apparently explicit nationalism revealed rather than concealed the tensions that existed in such a period of profound transition. Cathleen Ni Houlihan brings into focus some of the contradictions in nationalism’s attempts to forge a common sense of Irish identity in opposition to the institutions of the British state, such as the monarchy. Its analysis of gender roles problematises Yeats’s version of that Celticism which sustained so many strands of cultural and political action at the time in Ireland. And at an institutional level it was further proof of the unavoidably political role of that new artistic formation, serious theatre, within the culture of Irish public life, while for Yeats all of these issues, as ever, were tied up with his personal involvement with the woman he loved, Maud Gonne. Those who were associated with what was generally called the Anglo-Irish literary revival were engaged in the cultural construction of a sense of Irish identity through the creation of an Irish literature in the English language. Douglas Hyde’s famous 1892 lecture ‘On the Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ was influential in the movement which led to the creation of the Gaelic League the following year, pledged to the creation of an Irish-speaking Ireland and literature. W.B. Yeats, Lady (Augusta) Gregory and their colleagues in the Anglo-Irish literary revival felt that they were seeking to create a complementary mode of Irish 113
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identity, though an Irish literature in English. Their version, however, has often been accused of suiting the class interests of at least that section of the declining Protestant Ascendancy, its grip on the land fatally weakening since the Land War, which was in search of a new role for itself in Ireland other than that of a Tory-Unionist rearguard. The ancient Ireland which they proposed as a template for the present was aristocratic, individualistic, pagan and heroic, quite the reverse of the bourgeois, democratic, Catholic and philistine society they were confronted with in contemporary Ireland. They were certainly in revolt against Victorian progress, as is evidenced by Yeats’s interest in the occult, though this simply aligned them with the Decadence of the 1890s. In the Irish context, however, their real battles tended to be more with competing versions of political and cultural nationalism rather than with any identifiable forces of ‘Anglicisation’. Yeats and Co. insisted on the autonomy of art and on the spiritual nature of literature. Yet it is hard not to suspect this position of being to some degree disingenuous. They were claiming to reveal the essential identity of the Irish people beneath its modern corruptions. That was a bold claim and one bound to have political repercussions, especially because of the highly particular nature of the identity thereby claimed to be revealed.2 Irish Ireland was the name that came to be associated with those political and cultural movements whose emphasis was on an Irish culture based on the Irish language. The three most prominent journals associated with the movement were An Claidheamh Soluis, the official organ of the Gaelic League, The United Irishman, whose editor Arthur Griffith was to found the radical Sinn Féin political party in 1905, and the Leader, whose editor D.P. Moran set out his conservative Catholic agenda for Ireland in his The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905). The first two journals were founded in 1899, while the third was established in 1900, and they brought a new scrutiny to bear on the Anglo-Irish literary revival. The attitude of these journals varied over the years but tended towards the hostile. The first edition of the Leader on 1 September 1900 trenchantly asserted that ‘we deny the possible existence of such a thing as Irish literature in the English language’, though it acknowledged the existence of Anglo-Irish literature. The year before, An Claidheamh Soluis had asserted that the ‘so-called Irish Literary movement is a hindrance and not a help to a genuine revival’ and that AngloIrish writers were ‘some of the most seductive and therefore dangerous emissaries of Anglicisation’. What support there was tended at times to sound rather tepid. Thus T.C. Murray wrote in 1899 that ‘the literary renaissance is a tributary, not a negative current, to the broad stream of the Gaelic revival’.3 The early years of the twentieth century were a time when Yeats tried to build bridges with Irish Ireland and succeeded in doing so to an extent. Griffith only really became hostile with the production of J.M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen in 1903. Central to cultural debates about Irish identity at the time was the racial 114
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typology of Celticism and its more modern and more flexible variant, Gaelicism. The debate about the Celtic roots of the Irish went back several centuries and had often been mired in frankly bizarrely ill-informed antiquarian speculation into the origins of the race, though the conclusions of such speculation had decidedly serious implications for Ireland’s cultural and political standing in a post-Enlightenment world. Were the Irish to be dismissed as the descendants of barbarians or respected as the inheritors of an ancient civilisation? Within Ireland during the nineteenth century scholarly interest eventually focused on Celtic Christianity and adopted a scholarly scientific methodology. The postChristian and anti-Victorian intellectuals of the Anglo-Irish literary revival, however, preferred to contemplate the pre-Christian Celt as a romantic model.4 Irish folk culture and language, especially in the west of Ireland where it was most pronounced, could be both an escape from the modern and a source of national cultural renewal.5 Abroad, meanwhile, theories of race were in vogue and were allied with national character, the emphasis now being on present racial characteristics rather than on ancestral lineage. Ernest Renan (1823–92) had focused attention on the Celts as a race in his La Poésie des races celtiques (1860). In England on the contrary the influence of the pro-German Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) had created a fashion for a Teutonic view of English racial origins. Influenced by Renan and others, Matthew Arnold (1822–88) published his On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867 in an attempt to moderate Teutonic excesses. He held that the English were a mixed race with elements of Saxon and Celtic ancestry. The Saxons he associated with a Teutonic warrior masculinity and the Celts with a cultured femininity. He praised the Celtic element as offering necessary corrective qualities to the racial mixture that had made the English so successful, though the Celts themselves were a beaten race who could never aspire to autonomy. Yeats integrated his own interest in the mythological past with an engagement with folk and fairy tales. In his early career he edited four anthologies in the area, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Stories from Carleton (1889), Representative Irish Tales (1891) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and produced his own The Celtic Twilight in 1893. In his developing thought he adapted the Celticism which had been fashioned by Arnold to his own purposes. His 1897 essay, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, envisioned the Celt in terms of the primitive. He retained notions of Celtic passion, belief and excess but rejected the effeminacy, which had rendered the Arnoldian Celt politically passive. The Yeatsian Celt was masculine and was most clearly seen in the heroic Irish peasant, struggling manfully against the material poverty of his situation. Celtic energy and imagination were the other side of the coin of the experience of economic subjection. Poverty rather than effeminacy characterised the Celt in a world in which an Anglo-Irish aristocratic leadership could once more be placed in a position of saving rule over the people. Whereas Arnold’s Celt could be made to serve a complementary view of the imperial relationship between the English and the 115
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Irish, Yeats’s Celt longed for the complementary leadership of the benign aristocrat, as in his play The Countess Cathleen (1899), written for Maud Gonne, in which the countess is prepared to surrender her own soul in return for those of her starving people.6 The origins of Cathleen Ni Houlihan can be traced to the Nationalist reaction to the ‘ornamentalism’ of the late nineteenth-century imperial British monarchy.7 The monarchy had been popular in Ireland, and its promotion in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a focus for imperial unity had caused increasing concern among Irish Nationalists, not least because cheering Irish crowds for royal visitors reassured British politicians about the contentedness of Ireland within the United Kingdom, enabling them to ignore the demands of Nationalist politicians.8 At times the Nationalist fashioning of a sense of Irish political and cultural self-identity took the form of a dialectic of opposition to the monarchy, albeit one which ended up mimicking much about the imperial adversary. This was true, for example, of the Nationalist commemoration in 1898 of the 1798 rebellion, which was a riposte to the 1897 diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. Cathleen Ni Houlihan has long been recognised as offering an Irish counter-allegiance to the monarchy of Queen Victoria in reaction not only to the jubilee but also to Queen Victoria’s own visit to Ireland in 1900, shortly before her death.9 What is not so well recognised is how closely the presentation of that counter-allegiance resembles perceptions of the very monarchy it was seeking to displace and replace. Both W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne, the English-born republican Radical who came to function as such a complex symbol in his writing, became embroiled in both events. The diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne was celebrated on 22 June 1897 not only in London but also throughout the empire.10 Two days before on Sunday 20 June jubilee religious services were held. This was the day on which Gonne chose to visit the graves of some Irish Nationalist rebels of the past. When she was refused admission to two Protestant churches in Dublin to do so she was furious and vented her annoyance in a letter to the newspapers the next day. Dublin was festively decorated for the coming jubilee. The night before jubilee day Gonne addressed a protest meeting which was held near the old Parliament house on College Green, under the auspices of James Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party which she had joined the previous January, though the meeting was disrupted by students from the nearby and intensely Unionist Trinity College. The following evening Connolly and Gonne organised a funeral procession for the British Empire, and by association for Queen Victoria herself, which ended up with a coffin being thrown into the river Liffey. This symbolic act touched on a whole network of associations. In 1878 there had been an attempt to throw the coffin of the highly unpopular and recently assassinated Lord Leitrim into the Liffey. Leitrim had been due for burial in the vaults of St Michan’s church, the special qualities of whose surrounding soil 116
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enabled bodies to be preserved intact for centuries. The Stoker family also had a vault in the church, and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula which was published in the jubilee year is now acknowledged as having its own Irish context, with Dracula as a figure who may represent landlordism.11 St Michan’s, indeed, was one of the churches to which Maud Gonne had been trying to gain entrance. The mock funeral thus began the connection between monarchy and ghouls and vampires which was to reappear not only during the course of Queen Victoria’s 1900 visit to Ireland but also in Cathleen Ni Houlihan itself. Yeats accompanied Gonne throughout jubilee night, and two other experiences of the evening affected both him and the shape of Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The first was Maud Gonne’s declaration at a meeting in the City Hall to plan for the 1798 commemoration that she would mark her opposition to Queen Victoria’s jubilee by making a series of visits to the battle sites of the 1798 rebellion. And, indeed, Cathleen Ni Houlihan is set during the French invasion of the west of Ireland in 1798. The second was what happened after the mock funeral. Gonne proceeded to the National Club in Rutland Square where she put on an open-air magic lantern show of eviction scenes for a large crowd. A riot followed in which an elderly woman was killed. Several days later Yeats wrote an account of the evening: I got a letter from Miss Gonne saying that she wanted me to help her in some political negotiations in Dublin and I had to start off in a hurry and when there got involved in the procession and riots which have been going on there. It was fortunate that I went, as I was able by main force to keep Miss Gonne out of a riot in which one woman was killed. Miss Gonne had organised the procession and felt responsible and thought that she should be among the people when the police attacked them. She was very indignant at my interference. I refused to let her leave the National Club. She showed a magnificent courage through the whole thing. I dislike riots and knew that a riot was inevitable, and went into the matter simply to try and keep her out of harm’s way. She is now the idol of the mob and deserves to be.12 Shortly thereafter Gonne told Yeats she was ‘born to be in the midst of a crowd . . . It is therefore impossible for us ever to do any work together where there is likely to be excitement or physical danger’.13 Six years later she was to repeat, ‘I have always told you I am the voice, the soul of the crowd’.14 Yeats was deeply ambivalent when it came to crowds. His jubilee night experience of the domination of the crowd frightened him and there was his ever-present assumed Anglo-Irish snobbery as in his reaction to Gonne’s 1903 conversion to Catholicism and marriage to the Irish Nationalist Boer War hero, Major John MacBride. ‘You represent a superior class, a class where people are more independent, have a more beautiful life, a more refined life . . . You are going to marry one of the people . . . This weakness which [has] thrust down 117
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your soul to a lower order of faith is thrusting you down socially, is thrusting you down to the people’.15 Though he prized heroic individuality Yeats knew that Nationalist politics was crowd politics.16 He came to fear the mob that significantly he often envisaged in terms of a Catholic and petit bourgeois philistinism. His interest in theatre came in part from a desire to mould the masses in acceptable ways, into his version of a nation rather than a mob, and he cannot have failed to note the deeply theatrical nature of the events that Gonne had planned for jubilee night. In Cathleen Ni Houlihan the central figure, created for Maud Gonne, is an allegorical embodiment of the nation calling the individual away from bourgeois security, though in terms of a merciless absorption of individual destiny into that of the nation. Cathleen Ni Houlihan is not simply a critique of Victorian monarchy. It is a replaying of the events of jubilee night in Dublin within what Yeats considered to be a proper symbolic framework, issuing in a nation rather than a mob. Queen Victoria’s 1900 visit to Dublin came at the height of the Boer War which was denounced by Irish Nationalist elites of all hues but which had oddly raised Irish popularity in Britain to unprecedented heights, due to the fact that 28,000 Irishmen were fighting in South Africa for the British Army.17 The once banned shamrock was almost universally worn on St Patrick’s Day 1900 in London, the formation of an elite regiment of Irish Guards was announced, and now the Queen herself, unable to travel to the Continent as usual in the spring due to Britain’s unpopularity, was coming on a visit to Dublin. Gonne was as active as ever and in October 1899 had established the ‘Boer Franco-Irish Committee’. However, she was ill with enteritis during the visit and Yeats found himself in the position of offering one of the more radical critiques of what was happening, the Irish parliamentary leadership being caught off guard by its suddenness. Yeats, in his most fervently Nationalist mode, wrote several letters to the newspapers.18 In the first he alleged that the reasons for the visit were recruitment to the army and ‘National hatred; hatred of our individual National life’. He went on to call for a protest meeting of Irish MPs, with his favourite old Fenian, John O’Leary, in the chair. His letter also reveals his growing sense of the need for a form of controlled political theatre in order to mould the crowd into the nation. ‘If the people are left to organise their own protest as they did on Jubilee night, there will be broken glass and batoned crowds’. His second letter, published on the day of the Queen’s arrival, framed the visit in terms of competing allegiances and warned that ‘whoever stands by the roadway cheering for Queen Victoria cheers for that Empire, dishonours Ireland and condones a crime [the Boer War]. But whoever goes to-morrow night to the meeting of the people and protests within the law, against the welcome that Unionists or timeservers will have given to this English Queen, honours Ireland and condemns a crime.’19 In fact the visit proved to be an enormous popular success and public protest 118
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was almost non-existent. Unabashed Yeats went on to amplify his views in an article entitled ‘Noble and Ignoble Loyalties’, published in the United Irishman on 21 April 1900, which can be read as laying more of the groundwork for Cathleen Ni Houlihan.20 After adducing Louis XVI’s popularity during the early stages of the French revolution as an example of the superficial nature of enthusiasm for monarchs and pointing out correctly that enthusiasm for Queen Victoria during her earlier visits to Ireland had often been followed by advances for nationalism, Yeats focused on the question of loyalty, pitting Queen Victoria against an allegorised figure of Ireland for the first time: It is for the best that they [young Irishmen] should have the two loyalties, loyalty to this English Queen, loyalty to her we call Kathleen Ny Hoolihan, called up before them, that they may choose with clear eyes, the harder way, for man becomes wise alone by deliberate choice and deliberate sacrifice. The article ends with a stunning class reversal in which British royalty is convicted of the crime of the lower middle class, vulgarity. Queen Victoria has ‘used her example and her influence to cherish mediocrity in music and in painting and in literature’, while her son, the future Edward VII, ‘has used his example to make the love of man and woman seem a light and vulgar thing among great numbers in his islands’. Those who greeted the Queen were themselves vulgar shopkeepers anxious for profit. Finally, Yeats evokes his world of Celtic peasants who respond to a true aristocratic leadership. This is the true loyalty of ‘poor Irish men and women . . . who walk in the procession of heroic and enduring hearts that follow Kathleen Ny Hoolihan through the ages. Have they not given their wills and their hearts and their dreams? What have they left for any less noble Royalty?’ Gonne’s public contribution to the controversy surrounding the Queen’s visit was twofold. On 1 July 1900 she held a picnic for several thousand children who had refused to attend the hugely successful gathering of Irish children in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, which Queen Victoria had attended on 7 April. This event loomed so large in Gonne’s own view of things that later generations began wrongly to believe that it had been more successful than its royal rival. Of much more importance was Gonne’s ‘Famine Queen’ article. Originally published in French as ‘Reine de la Disette’, the 7 April edition of the United Irishman was formally suppressed by the authorities because it contained the English version. Arthur Griffith, editor of the periodical, got into a fight with the editor of another paper who had insulted Gonne on account of it. Griffith went to prison for two weeks as a result. A later libel suit resulted in an apology to Gonne but she and Griffith had to endure a bruising time in the witness box. Associating Queen Victoria with blame for the Irish famine of the 1840s only dated from the time of her golden jubilee in 1887. Hailed as the epitome of imperial success in Britain, Queen Victoria ought equally to be tarred with 119
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Britain’s failures in Ireland, some Irish Nationalists felt.21 According to Gonne’s ‘Famine Queen’ article, the Queen whose soul was ‘vile and selfish’ hated Ireland, a country ‘whose inhabitants are the victims of the criminal policy of her reign, the survivors of sixty years of organised famine’. She contrasted the fate of ‘poor Irish emigrant girls, whose very innocence makes them an easy prey’, with ‘this woman, whose bourgeois virtue is so boasted, and in whose name their homes were destroyed’. What is of most interest for present purposes, however, is the climactic presentation of Queen Victoria, transformed into a mythic hybrid of ghoul and witch, confronting a defiant personified Ireland. The English were afraid of losing the Boer War and [i]n their terror they turn to Victoria, their Queen. She has succeeded in amassing more gold than any of her subjects, she has always been ready to cover with her royal mantle the crimes and turpitudes of her Empire and now, trembling on the brink of the grave, she rises once more to their call . . . Taking the Shamrock in her withered hand, she dares to ask Ireland for soldiers – for soldiers to fight for the exterminators of their race. Ireland’s reply, ‘Queen, return to your own land . . . See! Your recruiting agents return alone and unsuccessful from my green hills and plains, because once more hope has revived and it will be in the ranks of your enemies that my children will find employment and honour’.22 Ironically, Yeats’s personification of Ireland in Cathleen Ni Houlihan would garner much from the supernatural repertoire that Gonne had deployed against Queen Victoria implicitly in 1897 and more explicitly in her 1900 article. As for Gonne herself, she positively courted the image of a queen, though one with regal dignity, often dressing in flowing robes and accompanied by an enormous dog. Though years later she entitled her autobiography A Servant of the Queen, she used ‘Erin’ as a pseudonym for her articles on ‘L’Irlande sous Victoria’ in 1897 in L’Irlande Libre, and others saw her as a regal embodiment of Ireland itself. Griffith fondly called her ‘Queen’ or ‘Queenie’, for example.23 The theatricality of Maud Gonne’s persona and of her political engagement points to a central aspect of the relationship between politics and theatre in Ireland. The Anglo-Irish literary revival was notable for its engagement with theatre. The emphasis it placed on the theatre was at the time quite a novelty. The English-speaking theatre in nineteenth-century Ireland, though popular, has often, and mostly rightly, been considered as merely an ersatz version of the British Victorian theatre. There was no tradition of Gaelic-speaking drama. It is true that the Gaelic League, which had 75,000 members in 1906, did encourage such drama and Irish-language plays were put on at its cultural gatherings. But these were mostly seen as occasions for practising the Irish language, for singing and for wearing traditional clothes.24 Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin, 120
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which was written with the help of Yeats, was a rare example of a successful literary drama in Irish.25 The theatre movement that was sponsored by Yeats, Gregory, Edward Martyn, George Moore, J.M. Synge and others was therefore in some ways a radical new departure. In other ways it was part of a continuity of which Maud Gonne was herself implicitly aware. The irony was that, for all that Ireland had until then lacked a serious theatre, Irish public life and the serious matter of politics had for a century been intensely theatrical. In a pre-democratic age the size of crowds mattered and crowds needed to be entertained. The costumes, banners and parades of the Orange Order are all that today remain of a public culture which had once encompassed the monster meetings of Daniel O’Connell, some of which individually attracted hundreds of thousands of people. For O’Connell’s urban public appearances the Liberator was sometimes transported in oversized vehicles, supported by allegorical statues and vast quantities of drapery. There was a theatricality, too, about the temperance movement of the 1840s, during which half the population took the pledge, with the supposedly ecumenical figure of Fr. Theobald Matthew casting the spell of a more ancient priestly power over the crowds. The Catholic parish mission and the Protestant revival meeting were also times for large public gatherings. As has been seen, royal visits, to the dismay of Nationalist leaders, were occasions for vast crowds. One million people were said to have seen Queen Victoria on her visit to Dublin in 1853. Later in the century there were amnesty meetings for Fenian prisoners, and a growing cult of the Nationalist funeral. Indeed, when the ‘Manchester Martyrs’ were executed in 1867 dozens of massive pseudo-funerals were held throughout the country. That tradition had reached its early apogee in 1861 with the funeral in Dublin of Terence Bellew McManus, the exiled Young Irelander. Barred from Catholic churches, the funeral had begun at the Mechanics Institute in Abbey Street. The Mechanics Institute was on the site of what would become the home of the Anglo-Irish literary revival’s theatrical endeavours, the Abbey Theatre.26 Another feature of the theatricality of Irish public life was the cannibalising of the weaker by the stronger movements.27 Thus in the 1840s O’Connell’s Repeal Association effectively consumed the temperance movement, with temperance bands playing at O’Connell’s monster meetings. And in the 1880s it was not long before the Irish Republican Brotherhood made strenuous and largely successful moves to take over the newly founded Gaelic Athletic Association. Thousands of young men throughout the country in disciplined local branches proved too tempting a prospect for the recruiters of physical-force nationalism. All of this is the backdrop to the movement that led to the Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his collaborators must have realised that serious theatre was bound to be interpreted in political terms, and reviews certainly tended to treat drama as a form of political allegory.28 There was certainly an ambivalence in the position of Yeats, Gregory and their collaborators on all of this. On the one hand, they wanted to make an impact on Irish society, and what they were doing could not 121
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avoid being political. Yet they did not want to be controlled by the crowd and cannibalised for the purposes of Nationalist propaganda. That is perhaps why they were so insistent on the relative autonomy of their art from politics. It was not that they did not know that they were political. It was just that they wanted to be political in their own way and did not want to be constrained by what they saw as the narrow agenda of formal Nationalist politics. To keep their freedom they thus posed as being apolitical. When considering the controversy which The Countess Cathleen had caused, Yeats was to remark innocently, ‘in using what I considered traditional symbols I forgot that in Ireland they are not symbols but realities’.29 Again, in their prospectus for the Irish Literary Theatre its founders wrote: We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.30 The passage presents English stereotypes of Ireland as the enemy in an endeavour to which all Irish people might subscribe, irrespective of politics. The key phrases in the passage, however, are ‘uncorrupted and imaginative audience’ and ‘ancient idealism’, and they tellingly indicate a covert preparedness for an intramural battle of quite a different sort. Courting the crowd to control rather than be controlled by it may also have been a reason why Yeats sought to distinguish his theatricality from the visual flamboyance of its rivals. In an age before voice amplification the theatricality of Irish public life had been distinctly visual. So had the existing Irish stage. In J.W. Whitbread’s Queen’s Theatre in Dublin, for example, one scene in Boucicault’s Arrah-na-Pogue was staged by opening the theatre onto an adjoining laneway so that horses and carts could be seen.31 Yeats thus insisted on recalling ‘words to their ancient sovereignty’, and in his famous articulation of his theatrical principles in 1903 he called for speech to have the vitality of poetry and for acting styles and scenery to be simple as well as asserting that in the theatre art comes before politics or morality. Significantly, though, Griffith thought this a betrayal of Yeats’s own practice in plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan.32 Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn discussed the possibility of a theatre for Irish drama in the summer of 1897, within a few weeks of the jubilee riots in Dublin. Three seasons of plays between 1899 and 1901 took place in various Dublin theatres under the auspices of the Irish Literary Theatre, though 122
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it was at the outset a pluralist undertaking, with Gregory interested in dramatising legends and folk tales, and Martyn and Moore committed to Ibsenite and Wagnerian views of drama respectively. There was a good deal of controversy in May 1899 over the very first production, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, with a pamphlet by the maverick Nationalist politician Frank Hugh O’Donnell attacking its depicting of Irish peasants selling their souls, and disturbances in the theatre on the first night.33 The figure of the aristocratic countess who offers her own soul to save those of her people was inspired of course by Gonne. Ideologically, the play combines the notion of egalitarian national unity with the continuing leadership of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy in typical Yeatsian fashion, though in contrast to other such figures, including the poor old woman of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the countess sacrifices herself rather than demanding the sacrifice of her followers.34 Yeats’s opposition to the 1900 visit of Queen Victoria cost him the support of some important, non-Nationalist backers of the theatrical project.35 By the time of the last performances of plays sponsored by the Irish Literary Theatre in October 1901, Moore and Martyn had begun to distance themselves from the project. Yeats, however, had found an important new resource in the area of acting and production in the brothers Frank and Willie Fay of the Irish National Dramatic Company. The Fays were pronouncedly Nationalist and, indeed, Frank Fay had recently attacked Yeats’s form of theatre in an article in the United Irishman.36 Cathleen Ni Houlihan and George Russell’s Deirdre were played by the Fays, under the auspices of Maud Gonne’s Nationalist women’s organisation Inghinidhe na hÉireann at St Teresa’s Temperance Hall in Clarendon Street, Dublin, on 2 April 1902. Gonne played the part of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, with Yeats and Gregory taking a back seat during the production.37 In August of that year the Irish National Theatre Society was established, with Yeats as president. Gonne, Russell, Douglas Hyde and, later, Gregory were participants. By December 1904, with the help of Annie Horniman, an English heiress, the company had found a permanent home in the Abbey Theatre. The next six years saw mounting tension both political and personal between Horniman, the theatre’s financial backer who opposed its involvement in politics, and the Fays. By 1908 the Fays had departed. Two years later Lady Gregory bought out Horniman’s interest in the theatre. By this stage, Yeats had largely gained artistic control over the theatre, though the appointment of Lennox Robinson as manager in 1910 marked, in retrospect, the beginning of its decline from early energy. The high point of that creative energy had undoubtedly been the production by the Abbey of the plays of J.M. Synge. The staging of his In the Shadow of the Glen, a play about sexual politics in a loveless marriage, in October 1903 marked the end of that conciliation between the theatre and nationalism of which Cathleen Ni Houlihan was the zenith. Hyde and Gonne broke their links with the Society as a result. Most controversial of all though was Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in January 1907. Its raw depiction of longing and 123
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hatred in the west of Ireland outraged bourgeois morality, while others found it offensive for political reasons. If The Playboy of the Western World had represented the final sundering of relations between Yeats’s Abbey Theatre and conventional nationalism, then Cathleen Ni Houlihan five years before had partly enabled that Nationalist consensus which had allowed the Abbey to claim recognition as the national theatre. It was therefore one of the central events in the cultural politics of the period. The play is set in Killala, County Mayo, at the time of the French invasion during the 1798 rebellion. Michael Gillane is to be married to Delia Cahel. His mother Bridget is delighted with Michael’s wedding clothes, and his father Peter with the dowry he has secured for the wedding. They are visited in their cottage by a poor old woman, later identified as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, who speaks mysteriously of strangers who have entered her house and stolen her four green fields. She speaks of ‘[t]he hope of getting my beautiful fields back again: the hope of putting the strangers out of my house’.38 She seems to mesmerise Michael and, forgetting his wedding and ignoring his family’s pleas, he goes off to join the local men in welcoming the French. ‘Look at him, Peter; he has the look of a man that has got the touch’, cries Bridget.39 When Michael’s father enquires after the old woman, his younger brother Patrick reports seeing ‘a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen’.40 The play was a stunning success, with a daily audience of three hundred. Maud Gonne’s performance made a particular impact. By drawing herself up to her full height for a moment before leaving the stage, Gonne’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan hinted at the rejuvenation to come.41 Yeats wrote the day after the first performance to Lady Gregory: Kathleen Ny Hoolihan was also most enthusiastically received. Its one defect was that the mild humour of the first part before Kathleen comes in kept the house in such delightful laughter, that it took them some little while to realise the tragic meaning of Kathleen’s part, though Maud Gonne played it magnificently and with weird power. Two days later he was even more reassuring: ‘the audience now understands Kathleen Ny Hoolihan and there is no difficulty in getting from humour to tragedy’.42 Critics have noted both the theme of hypnotic power within the play and the hypnotic effects it seemed to exercise on its audience.43 It certainly engendered a Nationalist fervour in many who watched it. Stephen Gwynn commented, ‘I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot’.44 Late in life Yeats himself was to ask, in ‘Man and the Echo’: Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?45 124
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In the play Michael is mesmerised not only by Cathleen Ni Houlihan but also by the unseen crowd. He must lose his individuality in his absorption into the crowd as nation, personified by Cathleen Ni Houlihan – ‘if anyone would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all’46 – though Yeats always feared its likeness to the crowd as mob.47 The crowd in this play is certainly explicitly in the physical force tradition of nationalism. At the beginning of the play Bridget remarks, ‘I suppose the boys must be having some sport of their own’.48 The phrase ‘the boys’ had complex connotations in Ireland, indicating affection and collusion but also fear and respect in relation to organised groups of young men engaged in unlawful violent activity in pursuit of political goals.49 Indeed, Bridget’s remark is intended to soothe anxieties about the sounds of cheering which are heard as the play opens. The Gaelic provenance of the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan has been extensively explored. She is a composite figure of the supernatural enchantress, the war goddess and devouring mother.50 C.P. Curran’s comment though that the central character was ‘a vampire Hag of Beare’, the hag being another mythological embodiment of Ireland, indicates non-Gaelic as well as Gaelic backgrounds to the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan.51 The poor old woman makes several comments that come from the world of the legends and literature of ghouls and vampires. She hypnotises people, ‘Come nearer, nearer to me’, and induces a state of forgetfulness. ‘Why do you look at me like a stranger?’, Michael’s fiancée asks him. After her intervention, people seem to be drained of blood, ‘Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked’. And those who follow her will not only ‘be remembered for ever’, but also be undead, ‘alive forever’.52 The connections between the play and Queen Victoria have long since been noted.53 The play is often seen as offering an alternative royalty to that of Victoria, in the manner of Yeats’s ‘Noble and Ignoble Loyalties’ article. But what is more remarkable is the similarity between Cathleen Ni Houlihan and perceptions of Queen Victoria, similarities indicative of the cultural complexities of a period of transition in Ireland. It was a time which seemed to offer stark alternatives between the old and the new, between an Ireland within the United Kingdom and a new, politically and culturally independent Ireland. What was new, however, often ended up mimicking what was old rather than offering a real alternative to it. Cathleen Ni Houlihan and the Queen Victoria of the jubilee riots and the 1900 visit resemble each other in a number of ways. The poor old woman of the play is engaged in recruiting, and opponents of Queen Victoria’s visit in 1900 alleged that this was the purpose of her visit. In her role as ghoul and vampire she resembles the Queen Victoria of Gonne’s ‘Famine Queen’ article. She is initially welcomed into the home of the tense Gillanes because she appears as a harmless old woman. One of the reactions in Nationalist Ireland to the 1900 visit was that ‘The Queen is a woman and an old woman and in Ireland these two facts would save her from insult’.54 125
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Finally, there is the matter of the poor old woman’s transformation at the end into a young girl with the walk of a queen. Allegorically, it represents the rejuvenation of Ireland by the sacrifice of a new generation of young men. At another level, though, it absolves nationalism from moral responsibility for the often-horrific consequences of revolutionary self-sacrifice. Ghoulish old women may demand a commitment leading to destruction but young girls are innocent. Yeats was imagining an Ireland that could demand self-sacrifice without being tainted by moral responsibility for it. Once again this is a strategy which was learned from the public perception of Queen Victoria. As far back as the 1840s Daniel O’Connell had presented Queen Victoria’s compliance with the policies of Sir Robert Peel’s government in terms of her youth and susceptibility of manipulation. At her death in 1901 the Nationalist newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, depicted her as an ‘aged lady’ who had been ‘deliberately deceived’ about the Boer War and forced to visit Ireland.55 She had entered her second childhood and was once again absolved from moral responsibility. One final area, that of gender and Celticism, also reveals Cathleen Ni Houlihan as a play of significant complexity, and as much a critique of certain forms of nationalism as a rallying cry for the nation. Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself is masculinised. She sings of ‘yellow-haired Donough that was hanged in Galway’ and ‘died for love of me’.56 Over a decade later, in his bitterly satiric ‘September 1913’, Yeats imagines the commercial classes derisively dismissing the idealism of those who had suffered for Ireland, in a manner that restores conventional sexual stereotyping by attributing the alluding power of sexual attraction to the woman rather than the man: You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair Has maddened every mother’s son’:57 Part of the ghoulishness of the play is its disruption of family life. Michael is about to marry when he is summoned to his destiny. However, his marriage is presented as a loveless, commercial arrangement in a satire of the materialistic priorities of petit bourgeois Ireland.58 When he decides to follow the poor old woman, his family plead, ‘You have plenty to do; it is food and drink you have to bring to the house’.59 The effect of all this commercialisation is the corruption of the masculine Irish peasant. Michael has been feminised by his economic subservience to his father. All that is left to him is to be concerned with his wedding clothes. And he finds himself the object of the female erotic gaze rather than being the sexually dominant partner. His mother, who herself only paused briefly from digging potatoes to give birth to him, tells him that Delia’s lack of interest in his money is because she has ‘yourself to look at, a fine, strong young man’.60 The commercialism of marriage thus deforms traditional gender roles, and results in the reconstitution of something resembling the Arnoldian Celt. It requires a masculinised Cathleen 126
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Ni Houlihan to set things to rights. Though presented humorously, this aspect of the play warns its audience against the dangers of what Yeats would have considered as its own corruptibility. Cathleen Ni Houlihan stands, perhaps at times unwittingly, as much more than Yeats’s nearest approach to political propaganda. Its ambivalences are distinctly illustrative of the tensions within Ireland during a period of enormous political and cultural transition.
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7 N AT I O N A L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N George Russell (Æ) and the Irish Convention Nicholas Allen
The Irish Home Rule Convention was held in Regent House, Trinity College Dublin, from 25 July 1917 to 5 April 1918. It was formed to enable Irish political parties, Unionist and Nationalist, to reach agreement over the status of Irish government before the end of the First World War. The British administration was faced with an enormous task of reconstruction after the end of a conflict whose outcome was still uncertain. Imperial reorganisation was complicated by the suspension of an increasingly outmoded 1914 Government of Ireland Act on the statute books. The Irish Parliamentary Party, architects of this earlier settlement, no longer represented the full range of Irish Nationalist opinion after the Easter Rising; proof of this was Eamon de Valera’s election for Sinn Féin at East Clare in June 1917. To enjoy any claim to legitimacy, delegates to the Irish Convention had to be selected from outside the traditional consensus. Accordingly, fifteen places were reserved for delegates with specific economic, political and social skills.1 George Russell was one such delegate. Born to a Protestant family in Lurgan, County Armagh, in 1867, Russell moved with his family to Dublin in 1878. He spent his early years between the Metropolitan School of Art, where he met his lifelong friend and occasional antagonist W.B. Yeats, and a clerkship in Pim’s drapery store. Fascinated by the Theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatsky, he was a central figure in the society’s Dublin lodge at Ely Place.2 But even in meditation Russell never retreated from the world around him and he developed his skills as a vigorous pamphleteer and editor in a range of occult publications. Then came a strange chance. W.B. Yeats was aware that Horace Plunkett, then a Unionist MP and a founder of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, sought a recruit to his organisation. Russell was persuaded to join the IAOS in 1897 and spent the rest of his working life as a rural organiser and editor of the society’s two house journals, the Irish Homestead and the Irish Statesman. The Irish Homestead was read widely throughout Ireland, in co-operative soci128
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eties, libraries and by private subscription; a number were also exported internationally. Russell was fortunate that Plunkett had complete faith in his editor as an insightful, intelligent, if sometimes wilful, commentator on Ireland’s economic and social conditions. Russell’s evangelical desire for public reform of Irish rural culture perfectly complemented Plunkett’s progressive paternalism. The Irish co-operative movement was incredibly successful, enjoying huge turnover and membership by the early twentieth century. It formed an attractive constituency for campaigning politicians and found itself under regular pressure to express an opinion on the national question. Russell kept the Irish Homestead explicitly neutral. But his editorial interests, in education, rural development, self-help and self-sustaining communities, suggested the synchronicity of his ideas with those of advanced nationalism. Independent of any formal party, Russell could not be accused of particular bias. It is likely, however, that his political contemporaries were able to decode the implicit meanings of his Irish Homestead editorials. There is, we might think, no better place for the cultivation of ideas than an agricultural journal. Russell urged Irish farmers to new efforts at self-organisation throughout the First World War. He warned continuously that world food shortages could only be met by increased efficiency. Whatever influence he had before the conflict was greatly increased after 1914 as he spoke directly to one of the critical production centres for the British war effort. This was a dangerous position for a political radical to hold; for all his public neutrality he was very much a partisan in his personal views. Witness this contribution to the Nationalist journal, Bean na h-Eireann, in February 1911, written on the occasion of the death of anarchists in London in a fire from which watching police made no apparent attempt to rescue them. They may have been low rascals, but they Showed before they died, The many-millioned Nation which had no Soul inside, The fire of the primeval man, a flash of the Promethean Will, Before life’s candle guttered down and Sidney Street is still.3 We can identify some typical forms of Russell’s thought in these few lines; the romantic sacrifice of the dead anarchists is pitched against the imaginative deficiency of their English antagonists, while their death is evidence of the heroic individual’s inner transformation to partial divinity. Cuchulain may have been W.B. Yeats’s archetypal symbol of Irish revolutionary heroism in 1916, but Prometheus was Russell’s essential symbol of human defiance. Russell was forever at watch for some new revelation of the coming world that he felt would replace our present. In Russell’s mind a great sequence of history was at 129
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work, revealing itself to the perceptive in one testament, the First World War, a rupture that led to the Russian Revolution and Irish independence. Gifted with this knowledge, Russell promoted himself as the prophet of Ireland’s destiny. Early twentieth-century Ireland was a country possessed of as many seers as ancient Israel; Arthur Griffith, Standish O’Grady, Patrick Pearse, all had their visions of a future nation. But Russell’s advantage was his connection to Plunkett. From a landed family, independently wealthy and devoted to Irish economic development, Plunkett moved politically from early unionism to a moderate nationalism that favoured Dominion home rule, a settlement that required Irish self-administration and complete fiscal self-control as part of the empire.4 Intelligent, modest and perceptive, Plunkett had a reputation as a skilful mediator. Evidence of this in the early 1890s was his formation of the Recess Committee at Westminster by which opposing politicians could progress non-sectional Irish issues. Plunkett attended Eton with Gerald Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1895 to 1900, and was appointed by him to the Congested Districts Board at the end of the Chief Secretary’s term of office.5 Russell in turn contacted Balfour’s brother, the Conservative politician Arthur Balfour, in June 1916 to put his own view forward of the significance of the Easter Rising. He noted that colonial self-rule with a Protestant-dominated Senate might satisfy Ulster Unionists and Nationalists alike. At any rate, ‘Mr. Redmond cannot speak for the Irish people on this matter. He has lived so long out of Ireland that he cannot gauge the feelings of the present generation and his ignorance of the power of the Sinn Féin movement is proof of this’.6 Russell in contrast wondered if I may mention that the last time I met Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein policy, was just after the introduction of the Home Rule Bill. He thought it bad and said this which is worth remembering, ‘If a good Bill accepted by Ulster had been introduced I and my party would have disappeared from Ireland. Nobody would have listened to us’.7 While distant from Sinn Féin’s inner workings, Russell puts himself forward as a medium for their thought. His purpose here is to encourage Arthur Balfour, a trusted confidant of the Unionist position, to propose Russell’s own scheme of Irish self-government. There is no evidence of Russell’s success in this regard but it is obvious that Russell, from 1916 at least, presented himself as an authority on Irish settlement. By March 1917, letters were circulated among prominent English newspapers and political figures proposing Dominion status for Ireland. There were three signatories to the documents: Russell, Maurice Moore and James Douglas. Moore was the brother of the novelist George Moore, with whom Russell had shared a friendship during the author’s stay in Dublin. He had served in the Connaught Rangers during the Boer War, rising to the rank of colonel, and was instrumental in the organisation of the Irish 130
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National Volunteers. Douglas was a Quaker and Dublin merchant, who later helped found the Irish White Cross and served as a Free State Senator. The three men co-ordinated circulation of their proposals with the arrival in London of the Dominion premiers at the Imperial War Conference. First among these was the South African general Jan Christian Smuts who was a member from March 1917 of the British War Cabinet. Alice Stopford Green, the Irish historian and political activist, knew Smuts from time she spent in South Africa during the Boer War.8 Green provided the three men’s connection to the Dominion leader but her warm personal relationship with Smuts, based in part on Green’s past campaign for the improvement of prisoner-of-war camp conditions, would not convince the general to entertain these Irish Radicals. In the event he met only Douglas to dismiss the possibility of Britain ever accepting Ireland’s Dominion status, as it would amount to effective independence.9 Russell, Moore and Douglas’s proposals did not enjoy popular impact. But their circular can be seen as part of Russell’s continuing attempt to position himself as an Irish constitutional theorist. Russell’s support for Dominion home rule opposed him both to the majority of parliamentary Nationalists and to Sinn Féin. The Irish Parliamentary Party wanted immediate enactment of the Home Rule Bill; Sinn Féin wanted complete independence. Russell and his associates proposed a third way to Irish devolution by Dominion selfgovernment. When the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George announced the formation of an Irish Home Rule Convention in the House of Commons on 21 May 1917, Russell saw his chance. He immediately published his own views on Irish national organisation. Russell gathered his ideas in ‘Thoughts for a Convention’, published in three consecutive instalments in the Irish Times from 26 May 1917. Russell’s choice of newspaper seems at first an odd one. The Irish Times was Unionist and antagonistic to any Nationalist demands associated with what it perceived to be the extremism of the 1916 Rising. But, as the paper’s accompanying editorial note suggested, while ‘We take no responsibility for Mr. Russell’s opinions, many of which we are unable to accept . . . It is important that, on the eve of this National Convention, Irish Unionists should have an understanding of the various currents of Nationalist opinion which this Memorandum affords.’10 Russell was popularly understood to be a fair analyst of his opponents, a quality that may have commended him to the Irish Times. But equally likely is that Horace Plunkett’s influence with the paper led to Russell’s publication as the privileged voice of ecumenical Irish nationalism.11 Whatever the case, Russell constructed his thoughts in a twenty-four-point memorandum of three definite sections; the ideals of the Irish parties, the limits of the necessary relationship with Great Britain and the possible scope of future reform. Russell dealt first with Irish unionism. Southern Unionists had survived centuries of Irish life to become closely associated with their neighbours by intermarriage and assimilation. Yet ‘they still retain habits, beliefs, and traditions from which they will not part’.12 Northern Unionists ‘form a class economically 131
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powerful. They have openness and energy of character, great organising power, and a mastery of materials, all qualities invaluable in the Irish state’.13 The cliché of northern Protestant practical ability is familiar but it is important to note Russell’s recognition of their virtue in the context of an Irish state. This is critical to his approach to both his memorandum and to the Irish Convention. The Irish nation required heroes of Promethean stature, men, preferably, who sacrificed themselves to the ideal of a future state. With that state in reach the hero is obsolete. What Ireland must have, Russell suggests, are the tools of material as well as moral progress. His great dilemma is to associate this industrial impulse with national, rather than global or imperial, economics. As Russell observes, Ulster Unionists ‘consider that security for industry and freedom for the individual can best be preserved in Ireland by the maintenance of the Union, and that the world spirit is with great Empires’.14 We have two fundamental aspects of a future Irish identity exposed here. Ulster Unionists suggest that Ireland can remain part of the Empire and involve itself in economic expansion. Sinn Féin, according to Russell’s memorandum, rather believes ‘that the Union kills the soul of the people; that empires do not permit the intensive cultivation of human life, that they destroy the richness and variety of existence by the extinction of peculiar and unique gifts and the substitution therefore of a culture which has its value mainly for the people who created it’.15 With the twin poles of his argument established, Russell spends little time in consideration of the Irish party, still by 1917 the major constitutional force. Referred to as the ‘Middle party’, parliamentary Nationalists are credited with the reforms of the previous century, of ‘land reform and security of tenure.’16 The reader cannot doubt but that their time has passed. This is partly evidence of Russell’s antipathy to constitutional nationalism. As editor of the Irish Homestead Russell came into regular conflict with the Irish Parliamentary Party as its constituency base in the traditional rural economy came under economic pressure from the establishment of co-operative produce and retail societies. Russell’s admiration for Charles Stewart Parnell certainly did not extend to his lesser followers, as one of Russell’s first political pamphlets was an attack on John Dillon.17 What then was Russell’s prescription for Irish settlement? We can see that Ulster unionism and Sinn Féin nationalism form the two far boundaries of any future constitutional agreement. Southern Unionists and Irish parliamentary Nationalists currently occupy the middle ground. But their moderate ideals do not fit Russell’s vision of the modern world, changed utterly as it is by the devastation of the First World War. Capital, with its great security of investment and interest, is the required catalyst to change. For, as Russell argues in his memorandum, ‘The instability of the political system has prejudiced natural economic development. Capital will not be invested in industries where no one is certain about the future’.18 Russell continues to wonder what Ulster ‘could not do as efficiently in an Ireland with the status and economic power of a selfgoverning Dominion as they do at the present? Could they not build their ships 132
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and sell them, manufacture and export their linens?’19 To argue this point in 1917 is to argue that an independent Ireland would not be the agriculturally dominated state that Northern Unionists negatively predicted. Furthermore, Russell’s idea of an Irish economy independent of landholding suggests a belief that future Irish citizens might require a new identity in a reformed state separate from the demands of nineteenth-century rural reform. Russell argues for a new Ireland in the final passage of his memorandum, with a sceptical audience very much in mind. Irish members of The brotherhood of Dominions . . . would be inspired as much by the fresh life and wide democratic outlook of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, as by the hoarier political wisdom of Great Britain. Does that not indicate a different form of Imperialism from that which they hold in no friendly memory? It would not be Imperialism in an ancient sense, but a federal union of independent nations to protect national liberties, which might draw into the union people hitherto unconnected to it, and so beget a league of nations to make a common international law prevail. The allegiance would be to common principles which mankind desire, and would not permit the dominance of any one race. We have not only to be good Irishmen, but good citizens of the world.20 Here Russell moves beyond his earlier achievement in the Irish cultural revival. He forwards the possibility of international conciliation during a world war, a gesture progressive and revolutionary. Russell looked beyond the immediate depressions of the Western Front to a world federation, arranged for the common good. He had the vision, in 1917, to see through a British Empire that would, in time, reorganise itself on principles similar to those put forward above. But Russell was not so naive as to think his words would be taken up easily; he knew from his rebuttal by Smuts that the brotherhood of Dominions was a fraternity still very much under the influence of its single parent. Russell admits the deficiencies of British imperialism but it had its attractions; his assimilative vision of universal law contains a parallel impulse to govern and incorporate. Russell struggles here to combine the terms of imperial and national association. His compromise is to rewrite the standard language of Irish nationalism in order to incorporate northern business to the new state. Capital development is to be the new engine of Irish secular civilisation. Allied to it are the rational self-disciplines of industry and science. Immediate reaction to Russell’s national redefinition was mixed. Positively, the Irish Times accompanied the first instalment of Russell’s ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ with its own thoughts on the possible make-up of the assembly. The Irish Times felt that ‘politicians must be represented, but this personal representation should not be more than adequate, and they should have no influence at all in the selection of those men of business, professional men, 133
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industrial and agricultural men, who ought to constitute a majority of the Convention’.21 Unionists at this date still argued over participation in the Convention; they did not want to enter an assembly constituted by numerical majority, as Nationalists would have an inbuilt advantage. Part of this anxiety can be read in the Irish Times’s endorsement of the Convention as an opportunity for those outside politics to take their role in Irish affairs. But it is hard not to think that the Irish Times was partly influenced by Russell’s vision of a modern Ireland reorganised along capital concerns. The Convention has typically been understood to be a discussion of Ireland’s constitutional condition. But it was also an attempt to create a secular Irish identity adaptable to the demands of a new state. Unable entirely to free itself from sectarian comment, the Irish Times still hinted at a civic future. Unionists in the Convention will insist, however, on one essential principle. The basis of representation must be, not the numerical strength of parties in Ireland, but the relative importance of the various national interests – political, industrial, social and economic. Intelligent Nationalists would be the first to realise that a Convention in which a majority of delegates represented the agricultural interest would be quite useless for the highly scientific task of framing a constitution. The delegates must be chosen, in the main, for their knowledge of affairs and in their proved capacity in their several departments of work and thought.22 Efficient modernity could drive evolving unionism. The Irish Times’s position precedes that of Italian fascists the following decade, which delegated power to vocational councils of specialist skills. That the Irish Times, on the eve of a Convention that might settle the island’s future, could admit that the ‘larger knowledge and wider experience of this kind reside today among the Unionist than among the Nationalist communities in Ireland’23 should not mask the fact that its vision of an Irish assembly is technocratic. This is a Radical moment. The precedent of ability over privilege was set. But the Freeman’s Journal, newspaper of Irish parliamentary nationalism, was unconvinced. It argued that the Irish Times’s promotion of a specialist delegation to the Convention was evidence of its desire to create a Unionist majority within it.24 This was true. But the Irish Times’ development of its position as a progressive, scientific possibility was an important step in the process of Unionist acceptance of any Irish self-government. Russell meanwhile orchestrated a media campaign in support of his memorandum. His ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ was first published as a penny pamphlet in the week following its Irish Times serialisation. It took its public place among tracts by William Martin Murphy, industrialist and owner of the Irish Independent, William O’Brien, a constitutional Nationalist, and James Ashe, whose ‘The Work Before the Convention’ argued, like Russell, for a full measure of colonial self-government. Murphy’s ‘The Home Rule Act Exposed’ was advertised in the Irish Independent the day after the last instalment of Russell’s 134
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memorandum appeared in the Irish Times.25 Murphy listed the essential requirements of a self-governing Ireland as control over trade with other countries, taxation, tariffs, external affairs and credit. Commenting on both Murphy’s and Russell’s pamphlets, Nationality, the Sinn Féin paper edited by Arthur Griffith, thought that ‘Mr Russell . . . in “Thoughts for a Convention”, adopts Mr Murphy’s idea, and clothes it in more picturesque language”’.26 There is certainly truth in the accusation that Russell’s memorandum was a composite of advanced Nationalist thought put forward under his sole name. Maurice Moore was offended that Russell took all the credit for ideas that he believed to be originally his own. Russell was moved to finish his last memorandum to the Irish Times with the acknowledgement that his thoughts were framed in discussion with Moore, Diarmuid Coffey, James Douglas, Joseph Johnston and Edward Lysaght. The Irish Times welcomed ‘George Russell’s brilliant “Thoughts for a Convention”’,27 but, ironically, in context of the personal rivalries of even Russell’s small coterie, feared that not all Convention members would ‘have even a small share of Mr Russell’s severe aloofness from all the distrusts and jealousies of our national life’.28 Russell had in the meantime prompted The Times (London) to acknowledge his devotion to national life. The Times announced Russell’s ‘brilliant analysis of the present state of parties in Ireland’.29 His memorandum ‘has been read with keen intent by Irishmen of all parties and has produced a sequel which must be regarded as a far from negligible factor in the political situation’.30 This sequel was James Douglas’s submission to the Irish Times on 1 June 1917 of a list of individuals in support of Russell’s memorandum. Fed to The Times the day before its publication in Dublin, this document was designed for maximum media effect. Its signatories expressed their general agreement with Russell but reserved the right to differ on unspecified points. Edmund Curtis, George Gavan Duffy, Nugent Everard, Alice Green, Sir John Griffith, Douglas Hyde, Lord Mounteagle and, most significantly for The Times, the Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, were among the notables listed, a spontaneous upsurge of support that had been planned since at least the month before.31 A laudatory letter to the Irish Times from Plunkett praised the ‘tone and temper’ in which Russell handled ‘the whole magazine of Irish controversy’ and hoped that Russell’s memorandum would be widely read.32 Russell next submitted a private letter to the same newspaper from George Bernard Shaw, whose permission he had to publish it. Shaw argued that Russell’s preference for imperial federation was impossible; Russell prefaced Shaw’s letter with the observation that his general idea ‘was much more akin to that Council of Dominions suggested by General Smuts in a recent speech than to the scheme of federation advocated by Mr Joseph Chamberlain’.33 Irish politics had two other trajectories beyond the Dominions. Radical Nationalists looked to America for democratic salvation, and Unionists relied on Great Britain to secure their rights. To Russell, Dominion status offered both acknowledgement of national difference and security of association. Such settlement was anathema to Sinn 135
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Féin. When the constitution of the Irish Convention was finally ratified, the separatist party refused to take the five seats offered it. This left the assembly in a potential bind. Its supporters could no longer argue that it represented all shades of Irish opinion, political and economic, to create consensus. Sinn Féin’s disquiet arose not only from what it considered to be its under-representation but also from its absolute demand for Irish independence. Its hopes rested on the Peace Conference it hoped would follow armistice, with the rights of small nations asserted. Of the fifteen delegates invited to attend by Henry Duke, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Russell and Edward Lysaght were chosen as representatives of the advanced Nationalist position. Russell was asked to join the Convention on 12 July 1917. Russell wrote immediately to Lysaght to ask if he too would accept his invitation. Lysaght contacted Sinn Féin and made sure that it privately supported his acceptance.34 When it was made clear that Sinn Féin would appreciate an inside view of the Convention, Lysaght accepted and Russell, in apparent innocence of such intrigue, followed suit. Throughout his entire term as a Convention delegate, Lysaght reported regularly to Sinn Féin in the person of Eoin MacNeill. Russell took his place alongside Lysaght, William Martin Murphy and Plunkett in a Convention whose members included fifty-two constitutional Nationalists, twenty-four Ulster Unionists, nine southern Unionists, six Labour delegates and two Liberals, besides a sprinkling of advanced Nationalists and independent thinkers like John Pentland Mahaffy.35 The first meeting of the assembly was held at Regent House, Trinity College Dublin, on 25 July 1917.36 It was opened by a speech from Duke that ended with an unfortunate quotation from Cicero that one should never lose faith in the republic. Lysaght’s ironic cheers did nothing to soothe members’ irritation.37 The Convention’s first task was to select a chairman and here Russell repaid his lifelong debt to Plunkett handsomely. The select committee appointed to elect a chairman had agreed on Lord Midleton’s candidate, Southborough, when Russell threatened to raise the matter on the floor of the Convention if Plunkett was not afforded the honour. Under pressure from John Redmond, Midleton withdrew his candidate and Plunkett was elected unopposed.38 The Convention then debated through August which forms of self-government were appropriate for assembly discussion. Delegates were overwhelmed with huge amounts of documents, memoranda, precedents and statistics to inform them of the full range of legislative possibilities both within and without the British Empire. Lysaght himself remembered interminable rounds of lunch and dinner, all designed by Plunkett to encourage co-operation between members outside normal party bounds. This was an intelligent strategy but there was from the beginning little hope of settlement, the Ulster Unionists unwilling to compromise when they already possessed an assurance from Lloyd George that, whatever the outcome, the north of Ireland would not be coerced into a settlement it found disagreeable. The Irish Convention’s slow death has been documented at length before. But what has perhaps not been shown is the 136
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attempt the Convention made under Plunkett, its technocrat Chairman, to develop ideas of Irish material progress. Recognition of this point suggests Russell’s own contribution to the Convention as the publicist of an Irish identity capable of accommodation with industrial modernity. From the start of proceedings Plunkett encouraged Convention delegates to experience a variety of Irish environments. The entire assembly decamped to Belfast to hold three sittings on 4, 5 and 6 September 1917. While in the northern city, delegates toured its commercial centres; visits to the York Street mill and Gallaher’s tobacco factory were followed by tea in Belfast Lough aboard the Musgrave steamer. The journey ended with a tour of the Belfast Ropeworks, an enormous factory whose products enjoyed global export. On his return to Dublin, Plunkett determined to show northern delegates that industrial organisation was equally possible in the south. A visit to the Dublin Guinness brewery was the immediate result. Neither was Cork to be outdone. The Convention travelled to the southern city for three sittings on 25, 26 and 27 September. That they sat in the Crawford Technical Institute says something of the image that Cork wished to project to its visitors. The delegates were first taken by motor car around Cork’s ‘principal factories and places of public interest’,39 and this convoy of Irish peers, politicians and civil servants must have been an impressive sight. Plunkett offers brilliant evidence of the degree to which he associated the Convention with industrial development in his record of the Lord Mayor of Cork’s entertainment of delegates aboard ship in Cork harbour. The delegates enjoyed a luncheon on board, at which the Lord Mayor made a very good Convention speech, specifying certain industrial possibilities of Cork which, under Home Rule, were going to make Belfast look to its laurels! All the other sight-seeing was strictly related to the main purpose of the visit, and was intended to impress upon us, in the light of small beginnings, the industrial and commercial potentialities of industry and commerce in the South, awaiting only the end of political unrest and the restoration of confidence for their development. Already Henry Ford, one of the most remarkable products of Irish genius, had shown his confidence in the industrial capacities of the Southern Irish. This wonderful organiser of mechanical engineering hopes soon to be employing 10,000 artisans on the banks of the Lee. The Lord Mayor assured us that although there was little to show above ground, an immense amount of work had been done upon the foundations and the superstructure would be rigidly erected when the materials were obtainable. I told him the Convention was in much the same position as the Ford factory.40 The main point of these visits to Irish cities was to assure the Ulster Unionists that a self-governing Ireland would be sympathetic to their industrial concerns. 137
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Plunkett knew by early October 1917 that southern Unionists would accept a home rule compromise and so their northern brethren remained the major obstacle. Russell himself was appointed on 11 October 1917 to a select committee of nine members of the Convention asked to report on a basis for general agreement, the thought being that concentrated attention on detailed matters was best directed by a representative selection of delegates. Russell’s co-members were Hugh Barrie, Joseph Devlin, Lord Londonderry, Lord Midleton, William Martin Murphy, the Most Reverend Patrick O’Donnell, then Bishop of Raphoe, Hugh Pollock and John Redmond.41 Russell found the process of committee work entirely disagreeable; he remarked to Lysaght that working for settlement with the stubborn Barrie was degrading. There was disappointment when the committee ended in deadlock over the issue of fiscal autonomy, which the Nationalists desired, as opposed to fiscal union, which the Unionists demanded. The committee composed a draft of its findings by 15 November 1917 and Russell signed an appendix that stated the minimum economic requirements of an Irish Dominion; Russell, Redmond, the Bishop of Raphoe and Devlin all thought it essential that Ireland raise and collect its own taxes, control its foreign trade and be guaranteed of no disadvantage in the British market. The final words of their appendix suggest again the limits to which the definition of an Irish nation was stretched by the necessity of material reorganisation; ‘We regard’, they wrote, ‘Ireland as a nation, an economic entity. Governments exist to foster the economic interests of their peoples. Self-government does not exist where those nominally entrusted with affairs of government have not control of fiscal and economic policy’.42 It is hard to imagine a definition of Ireland further removed from the epic inspiration of most Irish Nationalist literature and propaganda of the early twentieth century. Russell grew increasingly frustrated with the Convention as October passed to November. Plunkett in fact warned him of his conduct in committee in early November; Lysaght later remembered Russell’s absolute disillusion with the lack of what he perceived to be any Ulster Unionist good faith in attempting a compromise that would avoid partition.43 A major development was Lord Midleton’s secret November 1917 ‘Memorandum of Southern Unionists’, circulated among delegates to suggest that ‘We are ready, if the Irish parliament be constituted as proposed with fair representation of the minority and other effective safeguards which are in our view essential, to concede to it control of internal taxes, administration, legislation, judicature and police’.44 Midleton’s clever use of the word ‘internal’ qualifies his enthusiasm for the scope of Irish home rule but he does at least acknowledge such a project’s legitimacy. The next major submission to the Convention was the formal submission of Russell’s committee’s findings on 18 December 1917. With the Convention’s absolute failure to make any compromise between Unionist and Nationalist demands it is no coincidence that Russell’s next move was to publish an inflammatory open letter in the Irish Times the very next day. As a preface to a poem, ‘To the Memory of Some I Knew Who are Dead and Who Loved Ireland’, in praise of 138
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Ireland’s dead from the First World War and the Easter Rising, Russell observed ‘The modern Irish are a race built up from many races who have to prove themselves for the future’.45 ‘We are a new people’, he wrote, ‘and not the past, but the future, is to justify a new nationality’.46 But what did the future hold? Russell considered himself the prophet of a nation as yet unveiled. He had warned delegates of the consequences of their failure to recognise this new era in his very first speech to the Convention. Plunkett reported that ‘if failure followed our deliberations’, Russell ‘felt that he could “hear the whistle of bullets in the street; see the gutter filled with blood while the souls of young men part prematurely into the wisdom of their God protesting against the Convention and its want of wisdom”’.47 His warning ignored, he stormed into Plunkett’s office on the last day of December 1917 furious at a lack of progress. The same month he wrote to Lysaght that the Convention was bound to fail, as it was unrepresentative of Irish opinion; but he would ‘not withdraw unless there was a ghost of a chance of it [the Convention] doing any good’.48 Russell’s retreat to a world of spectres suggests something of his withdrawal from the blunt reality of Convention politics. He was absent from the Convention sittings of 9 and 10 January but reappeared on the 15th to be listed by Plunkett as a member of the advanced Nationalist caucus that centred around him, the Bishop of Raphoe and William Martin Murphy. A critical moment was Lysaght’s resignation from the Irish Convention on 22 January 1918. Russell soon made what was to be his own last speech to the Convention before he too resigned on 1 February 1918. Russell, in Plunkett’s words, gratefully acknowledged the sacrifice of feeling made by the Southern Unionists and would have accepted their proposals had Ulster come in. Failing that essential of a settlement, which would ensure the setting up of an all-Ireland parliament, he could not accept a compromise which meant ‘a bow to God and a wink to the devil’. He longed for an end to political agitation in the interest of the Arts and civilisation, and for the friendship of England in order to end demoralising racial animosities. Above all, he wanted to throw upon Ireland the responsibilities of self-government before the socialistic and revolutionary ideas now rampant in Russia had, as they inevitably would, developed to be vast. ‘There is going to be wild weather through the world, and we want an Irish captain and an Irish crew in command of the Irish ship’.49 Russell’s naval metaphor was well chosen as his prediction of social disturbance was aimed directly at the Ulster Unionist delegates, fond as they were of the Belfast shipyards as symbol of their success. Plunkett reports this speech in a spirit of melancholy, depressed at Russell’s withdrawal from the Convention.50 But his words were a coded threat. Only two weeks before his final Convention 139
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speech, the Irish Homestead predicted apocalypse. The first two seals were broken in 1789 in France and in 1917 in Russia. Russell felt the next rupture was imminent. We are only on the outskirts of that commotion, but we will not escape from it, though as we are not, except in North-East Ulster, a highly industrialised people the most revolutionary effects will in all possibility not be felt here. The revolutionary ideas will, we believe, affect the great city populations and must in turn affect the rural populations, especially due to the determination of workers in towns that there must be no profiteering in foodstuffs.51 Russell conveniently ignores the urban centres of Dublin, Cork and Galway to concentrate on Belfast as the centre of industrialisation and of contagion. Open to the world’s goods, Belfast is also open to the world’s ideas – and socialism, like linen, travels to its most suitable market. Russell’s experience of Ulster unionism had evidently persuaded him that the Belfast working classes were as frustrated as he was. His final gift to the northern leaders was the threat of a revolution that would make nonsense of their claims to industrial protection within the empire. He left Plunkett on better terms, unwilling to offend a man who was both his proprietor at the Irish Homestead and a close friend. Russell kept his letter of resignation confidential from the press but it stated his belief that the new Irish nationalism inspired by the Easter Rising was akin to a religion among Irish youth. The rebellion had unleashed a national feeling that could not be countermanded; ‘any government established’, he wrote, ‘which does not allow this national impulse free play will be wrecked by it’.52 There was little immediate sign of such possible accommodation; Edward Carson arrived in Belfast to advise Convention Unionists the same day Russell resigned, and the Irish Times published a bullish editorial that condemned what it perceived to be bullying Sinn Féin election tactics.53 The Convention stuttered on until 5 April 1918, when it adjourned without agreement. Miss Lily Power was the greatest immediate beneficiary of its failure, winning a competition by Paterson’s matches in the Irish Independent to guess the nearest number of Convention sittings. She predicted forty-seven, four off the actual total of fifty-one. Any interest in the assembly’s failure took second place to the announcement of the intended application of conscription to Ireland. The Irish Homestead marshalled its opinions the day following. Russell maligned the generation of British political leaders associated with policies that resulted in the Irish Convention. In a fit of rage, he damned Lloyd George, Asquith, Andrew Bonar Law and Arthur Balfour as publicists of whom the public had no private knowledge. Individuals opposed to them had ‘no real influence of any kind’, and his vote – that ‘one forty-millionth part of power’ – awarded the citizen ‘as much effect on the policy of his country as a flea upon the movements of an elephant’.54 With a bitterness born of months of frustra140
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tion, Russell, who called for an end to race hatred in his last speech to the Convention, suggested that The trouble with our neighbours across the Channel is that they have always despised science, literature, learning, thought, art, all but a few, and they are reaping the reward of their contempt for intellect in a crisis that demands all the intellect, science and knowledge possible. In Ireland we want intellect, science, culture, humanity, and these things spring up where the human conditions are favourable, and the main thing people desirous of a civilisation of which they would be proud would do is to create a good human spirit among its people. The purpose of the co-operative community is to do this.55 Russell’s criticism of British culture is untenable. But his doctrine of ‘intellect, science, culture, humanity’ was a new departure for Irish nationalism. Parading the virtues of civic society, Russell is already convinced of the inevitability of an independent, if partitioned, state. He has allied his co-operative ideal in the Irish Homestead to the preparation of citizens for this new order. To do this, he employs a new vocabulary, instructing individuals to accept his redefinition of their Irish identity. Ethnicity is no longer the mark of Irish difference; evidence of rational thought is in contrast offered as proof of the progress that Ireland would make beyond the decadence of a failing British Empire. The Irish Convention prompted Russell to believe that scientific culture was essential to the foundation of a new state. He needed a new class of experts to promote this vision, and, with the development of the Irish Free State after 1922, the Anglo-Irish Boyle and Kelvin emerge as heroes of his scientific society.56 The Irish Convention pushed Russell to this resolution by its frustration of any alternative compromise between unionism and nationalism that he might support. Faced with stalemate, Russell redrew his plans for an Irish project. This had little effect on Convention proceedings. But it prepared Russell for one of his most important achievements of the 1920s, the positive engagement with Anglo-Ireland through the pages of the Irish Statesman, successor to the Irish Homestead from 1923. Anglo-Ireland was refigured for the Free State as an impetus to indigenous scientific self-development. For Russell, a man who experienced visions from adolescence, to see an outcome entirely unexpected is confirmation of his intellectual resource; for the Convention to have this later effect on national reconstruction is evidence that, as a delegate remarked, nothing in Ireland ever turns out as predicted.57
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8 T H E E N D O F PA R N E L L I S M A N D THE IDEOLOGICAL DILEMMAS OF SINN FÉIN Matthew Kelly
Irish nationalism tends to be understood in terms of two distinct traditions, constitutionalist and separatist. Although each tradition embraces a range of aspirations and strategies, most figures from the pantheon of Irish nationalism invite classification as one or the other. However, it is immediately obvious that this Manichaean classification is problematic – in which box does Charles Stewart Parnell during the Irish Parliamentary Party split or Michael Collins during the treaty debates belong? Irish Nationalist identity was continuously shifting and malleable, embracing to a varying degree both traditions and highly sensitive to changing political circumstances and fortunes. It is right to think in terms of a spectrum, rather than a dichotomy. To reduce to political cunning Parnell’s ability to talk agrarianism in the west, Fenianism in the United States, and imperial home rule in the House of Commons, would be to reduce the movement he led to an elaborate artifice, as opposed to something that could, and did, embody the spectrum of Irish nationalism, albeit one where the dovetailing heavily favoured constitutionalism. Central to Parnell’s achievement was his ability to articulate a constitutionalism that enveloped separatist aspiration. This idealised characterisation of Parnellism should not disguise its fundamental instability; its epiphany came with the centrifugal sundering of the split and the vulgar Parnellism that survived in the strategy of the Redmondites in the 1890s. At the turn of the twentieth century the primary separatist and constitutionalist Nationalist bodies entered a period of ideological retrenchment that implicitly repudiated the modus operandi of Parnellism. This invites adjustment to Tom Garvin’s three broad phases of separatism that end with the ‘romantic revolutionism’ of 1891–1923.1 Although Garvin’s aim is to offer a broad analysis to help understand the emergence of the separatist elite that had such impact in 1916–23, it appears that his second phase, inaugurated by the New Departure, remained in contention until 1900. With the reunification of the Parliamentary Party, Parnellism, already marginalised, came to an end;2 the New Departure 142
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was implicitly rejected in the interests of party unity. Symptomatic of this process was the marginalisation within the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) of the leadership that enabled the co-operation between the Redmondites and the Fenians. The younger generation seized the opportunity to open up clear water between themselves and the constitutionalists. In October 1899 they nominated John MacBride against the party candidate in the South Mayo by-election and in 1900 established the Cumann na nGaedheal, which mopped up Fenians cast adrift by the Redmondites and courted by the United Irish League (UIL). Sinn Féin, as this new grouping increasingly became known, worked to reconfigure the centreground of Irish nationalism. By identifying the Home Rule Party as conservative rather than moderate, Sinn Féin situated itself at the heart of the mainstream tradition. Notwithstanding their evident failure as a popular movement prior to the second half of the First World War, it seems that the retreat of the Parliamentary Party from the subtleties of Parnellism nonetheless heightened Sinn Féin’s effectiveness. But Sinn Féin’s doctrinal ascendancy within advanced nationalism did not go unchallenged; Fenians worked from within, intent upon defending the principle of total separation against Arthur Griffith’s apparent apostasy. Uncompromising political identities rubbed up against strategic considerations, against the demands of Sinn Féin as outlined in the Hungarian parallel.
I At the turn of the twentieth century Irish political identity was in a state of flux. The Irish Parliamentary Party remained divided and impotent in the face of a reforming but fundamentally hostile Conservative Government. The nearcollapse of the Irish National League and the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation in 1898, the sudden uncountenanced emergence of the UIL under the leadership of William O’Brien, and the unexpected organisational prowess of the IRB in the 1798 centenary celebrations contributed towards a crisis of legitimacy. Ostensibly, the two home rule parties were divided on matters of principle. The anti-Parnellites were wedded to the Liberal party, close to the Catholic hierarchy, and hostile to the involvement of the IRB in constitutional politics. Parnell’s appeal to the ‘hillside men’ had left the IRB an anathema to respectable God-fearing Irish politics. The Redmondites developed their estrangement from the Liberal party into the principle of ‘independence’ and they nurtured close links with the IRB, in particular through the Amnesty Association, active throughout the 1890s. This became a source of considerable tension within the party, spurring Timothy Harrington’s overtures to the anti-Parnellites.3 Yet both factions registered their opposition to the Boer War and both worked to influence the organisation of the 1798 centenary. Ultimately, their differences were less significant than their shared commitment to a non-revolutionary political strategy and devolution as a solution to the problem of Ireland’s constitutional status. 143
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With the survival of the party in the balance, differences were overcome and reunion was achieved in early 1900.4 At the same time Irish separatism faced less a crisis of confidence than a profound sense of unease. Millenarian hopes were high and expectations of a European war, or ‘Ireland’s opportunity’, exercised the separatist imagination. In particular, separatists promoted the idea that the prolongation of the Boer War exposed the fundamental weakening the British Empire had undergone. These feelings were captured by ‘Clovis’ in a January 1900 piece in the United Irishman prophesying an apocalyptic struggle: Her [Ireland’s] people uneasy, dissatisfied, apathetic, despairing, agitated by conflicting counsels and impulses, face the coming century without a leader whom they can trust or a plan which they can confidently follow . . . we await the coming of the chosen one . . . She [Ireland] bids us look to the East, beyond her once invincible but now failing enemy, to where the nations of Europe are girding their loins for the greatest struggle the human race has ever engaged in.5 The christological metaphors that became so characteristic of Patrick Pearse’s later oratory are evident here, implicitly transfiguring Parnell, an earlier reification of the chosen one, into a sacrificed Christ. Packed with presentiment, this passage is also a call for clarity amid the confusion. Separatist expectations were fuelled by the 1798 centenary and they hoped that the energies marshalled could be channelled into a resurgent activism and organisation. In its second number United Irishman urged that the ’98 Clubs be maintained as the ‘rallying centre of Nationalism’,6 but ‘Celt’ soon decried committees that resolved too much and did too little, parodying the innumerable resolutions chalked up: ‘“That we the members of ‘This and That’ hereby commend (or condemn) the action of ‘Somewhere else’” &c., prefaced by long platitudes and followed by lugubrious ratiocination is not a task productive of enthusiasm or of the exercise of any qualities of mind or body’.7 This sarcasm became astute commentary, identifying the problem often faced by frustrated ideological ambition: an over-zeal in the practice and exposition of principles repels by its very monotony and turgid reiteration . . . [A]nyone that has experience of political, even patriotic and literary, societies in Ireland, can bear testimony to the negative pleasure given by their variation of the old theme. Over the next decade the ’98 organisation gradually disintegrated, dominated by internal disputes over expenditure and undermined by a plethora of embarrassingly unfinished building projects.8 Central to Irish separatism’s sense of dislocation was the dismantling of the Redmondite–Fenian nexus, the primary source of motivation for separatism 144
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in the 1890s. With the collapse of the Irish National League in 1898 and the release from prison in 1900 of the last of the Fenians convicted of dynamite offences in the early 1880s, the chief foci of the Redmondite–Fenian cooperation were removed. William Redmond MP increasingly tempered his Fenian-tinctured rhetoric: party propriety saw him abandon his role bridging the two traditions. Fenianism was thrown back on itself; for the first time since the 1870s it was unable to hitch a lift with the constitutionalists. At the same time, the outburst of separatist sentiment generated by the 1798 centenary celebrations gave separatists a much-needed confidence boost, leaving a younger generation of polemicists determined on political self-definition and independence. Building on the dynamic established by the Belfast separatist journals of Alice Milligan and Anna Johnston – the Northern Patriot and the Shan Van Vocht – the United Irishman printed innumerable declarations of ideological purity from a range of contributors that, in effect, were a repudiation of the Parnellite conceit that constitutional nationalism could be conceived of as Fenianism by other means. John Redmond was subjected to continual scrutiny and abuse: derided as an ‘ex-Hillsider’, his friendly reception to the royal visit of 1900 apparently exposed his fickle hypocrisy. Taking in his apparently new-found subservience to the Catholic Church and to the Boer War recruiting sergeant, as well as mocking his earlier association with Fenianism and the United Irishman commemorations, he was dubbed ‘John Genuflection Redmond, Hillsider, Foundation-Stoner, and British Army Panegyrist’.9 Alice Milligan, William Rooney (widely touted as the future leader of Irish separatism until his death aged twenty-nine in 190110) and Arthur Griffith, founding editor of the United Irishman and the principal figure in early Sinn Féin, were the dominant evangelists for the revivified separatist faith, giving it the national voice it had lacked since the demise of the Irishman in 1885. In his objection to the tendency to describe his nationalism as ‘advanced’, Rooney gave expression to the more flexible thinking of the younger generation: The movement of ’48 and Fenianism were decidedly Nationalist movements, but not one whit more ‘advanced’ than any legitimate National movement has ever been. It is a mistake to call the Nationalism of any period a policy; it is a tradition, a belief, an ideal, an end, but in no sense the means which a policy is most certainly . . . its means are merely determined by the circumstances of each generation.11 In distinguishing between policy and tradition Rooney intimated a loosening of the linkage of separatism and revolutionary violence maintained by the IRB, implicitly challenging the IRB’s exclusive possession of the separatist tradition. The breach between Redmondism and Fenianism was the necessary outcome of Redmond’s need to ingratiate himself with his new allies. Parnellism had allowed the constitutional and separatist traditions to work together, fashioning a mode of rhetoric that provided space for both traditions to interact, effectively 145
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during the Land War, as a fighting faction during the split.12 Moreover, as well as facilitating IRB involvement in Parnellism, this rhetoric gave expression to the separatist sentiment characteristic of many constitutional politicians.13 This effectiveness in part stemmed from Parnell’s ambiguity as to whether home rule gave full expression to Irish Nationalist aspirations or was a strategy necessitated by the overwhelming strength of Britain. However, the abandonment of Parnellism was not wholly intentional, but a consequence of the dynamic established by the reunification of the party and the renewed truculence of the separatists. The by-elections at South Mayo in February 1900, when John MacBride challenged the party candidate, and at Galway City in October 1901, when Arthur Lynch stood as the official party candidate, set the tone for relations between constitutionalist and separatist nationalism until the Home Rule Party dissolved in 1918. Michael Davitt’s failure to temper this estrangement and position himself as a bridge between constitutionalism and separatism confirmed the end of Parnellism as a political identity. MacBride and Lynch were heroes of militant Irish separatism owing to their leadership of the Irish Transvaal Brigades. Both were glamorous and popular figures. Great symbolic importance was attached to MacBride’s possible election. Not only did the United Irishman assert that his election would demonstrate the Irish people’s opposition to empire, but it would ‘render inviolable the friendship of the Irish and the Boer nations’.14 This was the orthodox voice of romantic Irish separatism, of a present irreversibly bound by the acts of the past, of the mentality of the anti-Treatyites. MacBride was defeated by John O’Donnell, William O’Brien’s protégé and adoptee of the newly reunified Irish Parliamentary Party; Lynch was approved by a UIL convention and was victorious as the official party candidate. Ultimately, the outcome of these by-elections was the result of this simple statement of affairs. Yet recent work suggests that these two elections were far from simple contests between respectable and unrespectable candidates.15 Philip Bull has persuasively argued that in opposing MacBride the Irish Parliamentary Party missed an opportunity to conciliate Irish separatist opinion. Patrick Maume has countered that rather than the by-election being understood as a dramatic confrontation between constitutionalist and separatist nationalisms, it was instead propelled by internal Irish Parliamentary Party rivalries, by the need to affirm the attachment of O’Brien’s UIL to the party against Healyite suspicion.16 Redmond’s leadership owed much to the intervention of Davitt and O’Brien who believed Redmond was more sympathetic to the UIL than the more popular candidate Timothy Harrington.17 On this reading, the alienation of the separatists was an unfortunate by-product of intra-party wrangling. Compelling though his case is, Maume is a little too brisk in dispatching Bull’s schema. If the by-elections are regarded in the context of the dismantling of the Redmondite–Fenian nexus then the broader implications of Bull’s analysis take on a fresh vitality. Rather than a missed opportunity to embrace the New Nationalism, the by-elections provided a propitious opportunity to repudiate 146
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Fenianism, freeing Redmondism of the taint of the disreputable. Indeed, this retrenchment was mutually beneficial; the Young Turks at the United Irishman forced the confrontation by their last-minute nomination of MacBride. At the very least, the failure of the IPP to accommodate MacBride’s candidature was a symbolic rejection of the politics of the Parnellian gesture. John O’Leary compared the possible election of MacBride to the defiant returns of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and John Mitchel in Tipperary in 1869 and 1875,18 but it might be more profitably contrasted with constitutional acquiescence in the election as MP for Limerick of the ex-convict John Daly in 1895. Tom Kettle retrospectively regarded the MacBride candidature as a turning-point, terminating the possibility of separatist co-operation with the unified Home Rule Party: ‘But then came South Mayo! and another opportunity of shewing that we have not mastered the great art of politics, the art of forgetting the stupidities of our friends’.19 Police superintendent John Mallon drew the same conclusion. He argued that William O’Brien’s involvement in the campaign left it unlikely that the extremists would work with the UIL: if the Cork provocateur was ousted, then ‘the most dangerous class . . . would be prepared to back up the League and act as its secret police as they did in former times’.20 Police observers noted that the Catholic clergy played no role in the campaign;21 their low profile was probably an attempt to conciliate the Parnellites. That only a third of the electorate voted indicated both the grave unease the contest provoked and the small number of voters the separatists could rely upon.22 Lynch’s nomination made for a more confusing contest than the transparencies of the MacBride case.23 Lynch embodied much that was characteristic of the Redmondite milieu in the 1890s. Defeated as the Parnellite candidate in Galway in 1892, he spent time in the United States with the leading Belfast Fenian Robert Johnston, possibly as a Clan-na-Gael delegate of the IRB splinter group the Irish National Association. Back in Ireland, he frequently worked with leading suspects, notably the Amnesty Association activists Thomas O’Gorman and John Crowe. When Mark Ryan came to the end of his term as president of the London Irish Political Prisoners Amnesty Association in early 1894, he successfully advocated Lynch’s election as his replacement.24 Despite certain reservations, it was clear Lynch broadly had the approval of the London Fenians. Yet in 1893 Lynch had identified himself as ‘a thorough believer in the doctrines of Parnell’. He added that if he had ‘ever ventured to differ from [his] friends, the Parliamentary representatives of the Parnellite Party, it [was] in the direction of urging a more strenuous and resolute course of action than has recently been pursued’. Only in this way could Nationalists tap Irish-American resources.25 Consequently, Lynch’s Boer War involvement was not an aberration but entirely consistent with the peculiar texture of Parnellite politics in the 1890s. To see his candidature in 1901 as a betrayal must stem from the fallacy that the pro-Boer campaign was an exclusively separatist affair; in practice, constitutional Nationalist sympathy for the Boers was widespread.26 Indeed, the equivocality of Lynch’s position was evident when Seamus MacManus urged that Terence 147
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MacSwiney establish a Cork branch of the UIL to work in the interest of both the IRB and Lynch’s candidature.27 Separatists faced similar dilemmas at all elections. The United Irishman advocated abstention during the 1900 general election,28 but as one county inspector revealed, there was little sense of an enforceable party position: The most advanced section of the Irish revolutionists expressed their intention of taking no part whatever in the elections, but the mass of the I.R.B. sympathisers in the county took their share of the excitement and worked and voted for candidates of their choice on no fixed principle whatever.29 The progress of the Galway campaign further ensured that the by-elections functioned as an affirmation of the unity of the party. In a letter to John J. Forde (honorary secretary of the UIL in Galway and the Redmondite Galway National Independence Association), Lynch stated: ‘I adhere to the general policy of the Parliamentary Party, and, as its methods are constitutional, it is therefore implied, of course, that I am in accord with that part of its programme’.30 Forde’s position in both organisations was suggestive of the depth of Irish Parliamentary Party reconciliation. Lynch’s election addresses were anodyne, effortlessly assimilating a bland Irish Ireland agenda with the rhetoric of constitutional nationalism: My programme amounts to this: I want to see Ireland’s resources and Ireland’s industries developed by Irishmen, so that the riches of the country will be sufficient to keep the whole population in comfort, and so that emigration will cease, because Ireland itself will become the promised land. This is not an impossible programme, and I will lend my energies to its realisation.31 Lynch’s Unionist opponent was Horace Plunkett, the target of Redmond’s conciliatory strategy in the 1890s.32 Michael Davitt privately claimed that the party wished to give Plunkett a ‘bad beating’, presumably in repudiation of Redmond’s earlier rapprochement. Redmond appears to have been complicit in this, for along with the MPs Mooney, Duffy, Loudon, Joyce, Lurden and Hayden, he was active in Galway during the campaign. Lynch attracted particular support from William Redmond – he was just the kind of dynamic constitutionalist Redmond liked and he was keen to assert that Lynch was not being imposed by the party leadership on the constituency.33 Following Lynch’s selection by a UIL convention, Galway County Council proved unanimous in its support.34 The United Irishman’s contempt for Lynch’s victory was unconcealed. ‘The Galway people think they have done well in electing this man, and that they have vindicated something or another; but I say again that they vindicated 148
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nothing but their invincible ignorance and lack of judgement.’35 This was a voice in the wilderness. For although MacBride’s supporters opposed Lynch as a ‘traitor’, and Galway IRB man Joseph O’Sullivan returned from Dublin with instructions ‘to go dead against Lynch’, the police concluded that most separatists backed Lynch. In part this was because Frank Dineen, a local IRB activist, supported Lynch and few Fenians saw through their threat to vote for Plunkett.36 Michael Davitt’s role in both of these elections highlighted the party’s departure from the expansive political identity personified by Parnell. A well-known former Fenian and the inspiration for the militancy of the Land League in 1879–82, Davitt, despite his Federationism, recognised the necessity of nurturing intimacy between the constitutionalists and the militants. Sympathy for the Boers had brought him closer to the IRB: he spent time in the Transvaal in 1899, and back in Dublin he occasionally attended the meetings of the Griffithite Celtic Literary Society.37 By resigning his South Mayo seat in protest at the war and inadvertently providing MacBride’s opening, Davitt liberated himself from the demands of party politics, better placing him as a possible coupling between the separatists and the party. From the outset Davitt worked hard to promote the UIL, making near-treasonous speeches calculated to appeal to the ‘hillside men’; in particular he approved of William O’Brien’s use of the Irish People to attract Fenian support.38 According to the Dublin police, Davitt ‘never fails to do anything he can to attract the extreme party and constitute himself a connecting link between the two parties’.39 Not only was Davitt’s strategy reminiscent of his leadership of the Land League, the response of the IRB was similarly ambiguous. Contrary to the Supreme Council’s formal repudiation of the UIL,40 and the active opposition of the separatists in Dublin, the UIL agitation at the De Freyne estate (County Roscommon) saw ‘the Physical Force men . . . making so little progress with their own movement that, where the U. I. League is active, they feel bound to support it or lay themselves open to the taunt of being traitors’.41 Moreover, the proclamation of County Longford saw the UIL and the IRB co-operating under the influence of J.P. Farrell MP,42 a precursor of his energising leadership when Longford leapt to the fore of the anti-grazing campaign in 1907.43 Davitt’s hope that these local tendencies could be given a more formal national basis was fatally undermined by his record as an anti-Parnellite. The police observed that ‘many of the old Parnellites, who embrace some of the staunchest physical force men, are slow to forget the bitterness of his [Davitt’s] animosity towards them in the years of the “split” and are slow to trust him again’.44 Not merely symbolic, the South Mayo and Galway City campaigns were part of the evolution in political identity that saw the Home Rule Party and the separatist leadership adopt uncompromising political positions. They formed part of the wider process that included separatist opposition to the Boer War and to the royal visits of 1900 and 1903. As Senia Pašeta has shown, the latter campaign in particular served to regenerate separatist political organisations.45 But it is worth 149
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noting that in contrast to the by-elections, attitudes to the Boer War and the royal visits did not divide along simple party lines. Through the nomination of MacBride the differences between constitutional and separatist nationalism were made fundamental, demanding that the party reject the most prominent Fenian of the younger generation. By opposing Lynch, the separatist leadership affirmed the new dispensation. This process was suggestive of the way in which the separatists, despite their marginality, could influence the texture of constitutionalist politics. Eighteen months later discussion of the Hungarian parallel began.
II The Hungarian policy was given its most sustained articulation in a series of articles written by Arthur Griffith in United Irishman in 1904. Its key ideas were further developed in innumerable articles, and Griffith’s original articles were published as the best-selling pamphlet The Resurrection of Hungary. The United Irishman claimed it sold 25,000 copies in twenty-four hours, an Irish record; Tom Kettle said it had 15,000 readers by February 1905; the second edition went on sale on 18 December 1904.46 This peculiar mixture of history, prescription and satire with its numerous veiled references to recent political history pointed to a knowing, collusive readership. It was also the most ambitious attempt yet to assert and frame the separatist implications of the Irish Ireland movement and the industrial revival. An Claidheamh Soluis, the Gaelic League newspaper edited by Patrick Pearse, recognised this: ‘“The Resurrection of Hungary” marks an epoch, because it crystallises into a national policy the doctrines which during the past ten years have been preached in Ireland by the Irish Ireland movement”.47 The pamphlet also sowed the seeds of controversy, raising the question of the relationship between physical force and constitutional nationalism, between the efficacy of a withdrawal from Parliament represented by Deak and the insurrectionary strategy personified by Kossuth. The themes central to ‘the Hungarian policy’ – a withdrawal from Westminster, industrial revival, autarky – had been in circulation prior to Griffith’s seminal articles.48 Griffith addressed a Cumann na nGaedheal meeting in October 1902 and United Irishman had briefly editorialised on the Hungarian parallel in November;49 Terence MacSwiney, later one of the policy’s sternest critics, lectured in the same month: ‘Our one true ideal is – Sovereign Independence – and we will agree to no compromise; but in the meantime we must adopt some attitude towards the Parliament to which we are supposed to send representatives and the attitude should be the Hungarian one – that is to send no representatives’.50 One United Irishman correspondent called for ‘more light on the Hungarian policy’, without which the National Council could not fulfil its potential as an alternative to the Irish Parliamentary Party.51 Griffith sought to establish an historical precedent for the strategy of withdrawing from Westminster, suggesting that the policy was less a new departure than an ex150
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humation. O’Connell’s aborted Council of the Three Hundred scheme of 1843 was one obvious reference point, the Tithe War of 1831–9 was another: the refusal to purchase confiscated goods was identified as a response to the call to ‘Trust in yourselves’ and was therefore the ‘Sinn Féin policy’ in practice.52 Griffith was praised for his practicality and it is certainly true that United Irishman fetishised the idea.53 By focusing on nation-state building Griffith and the United Irishman gave separatist rhetoric a more analytical and functional purpose, supplanting as the dominant mode the Mitchelite model of the ‘revolutionary leveller’. United Irishman’s early enthusiasm for W.B. Yeats’s Irish National Theatre can be understood in this context.54 It was touted as a national institution that was part of the fabric of the emergent Irish nation-state. That the support for Yeats’s project rapidly turned into active hostility should not obscure the fact that the Griffithites initially celebrated the theatre company’s anticipated provision of plays to ‘rouse every noble emotion and rekindle the fires of patriotism’.55 Principal among Griffith’s financial backers was John Sweetman. Scion of an old Catholic landed family, an anti-Parnellite who became Parnellite following Gladstone’s retirement, by this stage he used Meath County Council as a political base and attempted to carve a new position for himself at the heart of the Sinn Féin movement. Sweetman was a conservative, and was typical of many among Griffith’s followers who believed that although Ireland could not fight England at the present moment, they could lay the foundations for Irish independence by working to ‘create an Irish nation in Ireland’. To Nationalists of this bent, developing Irish industry was as great a priority as the regeneration of the Irish language and customs.56 The determination to demonstrate the practical application of Griffithite thinking was exemplified in a series of dry articles exploring Ireland’s ‘Industrial Possibilities’. They explained how the country was capable of producing its own supplies of essential goods such as pipes and tobacco, buttons, groceries, bacon, hosiery, leather, machinery, carpets, glass and silk.57 As one correspondent revealed, there was concern that the economic strength of England would lead to the ‘practical assimilation of Ireland and England’, with the Irish consigned to lower wages.58 The conviction that Irish producers could not compete with their English counterparts owing to economies of scale provided the basis of Griffith’s marshalling of the protectionist ideas of the German economist Fredrick List. The appeal of Sinn Féin to men such as Sweetman was further confirmed in a letter Griffith printed from the president of the National Society of Great Britain, Thomas Martin, announcing that they had aligned with the Hungarian policy owing to the failure of parliamentarianism. Repudiating the ‘windy futility of the past’, a sure reference to physical-force posturing, the society was in favour of ‘honest work and practical methods’. Their model was Deak rather than Kossuth; they advocated contesting every electoral vacancy, presenting an ultimatum to the British (undefined) and returning to Dublin to devote their energies to developing the industrial resources of Ireland, arresting depopulation, reviving the Irish language, encouraging Irish art and literature.59 It is 151
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striking that Griffith’s ideas could appeal to disillusioned constitutionalists such as Martin, while young and influential Fenians were decidedly more ambivalent. MacBride, although praising the Hungarian policy, argued that its promulgation was a hundred years too late; under present conditions it could only work if the people were prepared to back it with force. Moreover, MacBride argued, if the Irish Members immediately withdrew from Parliament, the government of Ireland would remain qualitatively the same, for collaborators would fill the offices of government. MacBride regarded the farmers’ sons who filled the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary as presaging this outcome. By contrast, a withdrawal in the aftermath of the Union would have produced a more genuinely national government owing to its recent experience of independence. ‘If the Irish members of the English Parliament withdrew from Westminster to-morrow the government of the country would be carried on just as it is to-day, and it will and must be as long as the people forget that they are Irishmen with a country to free from foreign yoke’.60 The subtext seemed to be that winning independence through physical force would force the current generation of collaborators to make way for a new generation of authentic Irishmen who would form the nucleus of the new state. This was a version of the orthodox Fenian position that the military defeat of the British would allow the Irish nation to emerge cleansed from the indignity of colonialism. Something akin to this took place during the revolutionary period 1916–23 when middle-class home rulers, the infrastructure-in-waiting, were to some extent supplanted by the emergent revolutionary elite.61 MacBride’s assertion of the specificity of Ireland’s case is illustrative of the literalness of much of the reception of Griffith’s ideas. ‘There should be sufficient brains in Ireland to plan a new movement to meet the requirements and the conditions of our country in the twentieth century. Imitations are never successful. An imitation puts one in the mind of the real object, that’s all’. Alice Milligan broadly agreed, additionally noting that Ireland differed from Hungary in rejecting any role in the empire. The ethos under which an independent Ireland should be governed had to be created and Milligan went further by rejecting the efficacy of physical force as a means to achieve this transformation. Separation would be premature, the necessary revolution in people’s minds was far from complete and the bulk of the population had little sense of what they would be fighting for. ‘If without grasping any social ideal, and destitute of firmly implanted democratic principles, we were liberated, our country might be tyrannical and grasping and unjust, and have no such perception of injustice as at present.’ Thomas O’Looney concurred: ‘We must first make our young men and, as it takes twenty years to make a man, long before that time we will have the Hungarian policy well in hand’.62 This revolution in thinking was also required by the emotional separatism of MacSwiney. Fighting off pressure in 1905 from within the Cork Celtic Literary Society to abandon educational work in favour of political organisation, MacSwiney wrote that they were not yet ready and required at least a further five years. Interestingly, his 152
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prime concern was that the membership was not ‘thoroughly conversant in . . . public administration’, which was required if they were ‘to succeed in bringing order out of chaos’.63 MacBride soon moderated his critique, introducing the distinction that the Hungarian policy was an advance for those allied to constitutional principles, but he would not like it to divert ‘young Irish Irelanders’ from the teachings of ’98, ’48 and ’67.64 Discussion of the Hungarian policy soon shifted from this initial focus on the efficacy of physical force to the problem of the 1782 constitution and whether this represented true separation. This was a matter of the gravest contention, and the insistence on practicality could not indefinitely postpone a debate about ends. The basis of the Hungarian policy lay in the claim that the 1782 constitution reified the right of the Irish to self-government through the aegis of a constitution that guaranteed legislative independence and did not contain any provision for its own dissolution.65 Ultimately, Sinn Féin’s revolution would rest on this legal precedent, on the restitution of illegally withdrawn rights. In recognising the King of England as potentially the King of Ireland, Griffith asserted that under the 1782 constitution it was not necessary for the King of Ireland and the King of England to be the same person. Again on the prowl for an historical precedent, Griffith cited the example of the Irish parliament’s exclusive offer of the crown to the Prince Regent when George III went insane. Had the regent accepted, George III would have remained the King of England. To the claim that the restoration of the constitution of 1782 would mean that Catholics would be excluded from government Griffith responded that this was to misunderstand its provisions. The fundamental point was that the 1782 constitution gave the Irish the right to decide how they were to be governed. There is more than a passing similarity between this and Michael Collins’s claim that the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 gave the Irish ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’. Despite formulating a policy based upon the acceptance of the 1782 constitution, Griffith personally looked towards a settlement for Ireland that was closer to orthodox separatism. Following Sweetman’s call for an Irish Deak and the suggestion that Griffith should take on this role,66 Griffith clarified his personal position. First, he argued that an Irish Deak would have to accept the final settlement between Ireland and England as being the restitution of Ireland’s constitutional rights – the constitution of 1782 and 1783 – and this he found insufficient. If he were Hungarian he would have supported Kossuth and his 1849 proclamation of independence. When it was evident that Kossuth could not succeed he would have supported Deak, ‘whose wise and brave policy involved the sacrifice of no principle nor loss of self-respect in any Hungarian Separatist’. However, Griffith was adamant that the constitutional and separatist wings of Irish nationalism could cohere around the Hungarian policy. The evident failure of parliamentarianism meant there were many men who could potentially play the role of Deak. Griffith’s reply acts as a reminder that from his point of view the ‘non-violence’ of ‘early’ Sinn Féin was as much the product 153
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of pragmatism as of idealism. Whether Sinn Féin should be a pragmatic or an idealistic body troubled it for the length of its existence.67 Griffith’s position was further clarified when he distinguished between constitutional and national rights in his response to the suggestion that the 1782 constitution represented a usurpation of the true constitutional rights as embodied in the Brehon laws.68 Griffith responded that although in effect he agreed with the writer, 1783 only left the sovereign in common between the two nations. Substantively, the 1782 constitution and the 1783 Renunciation Act granted Ireland the national right to be a ‘sovereign, independent State’. In other words, the legislation gave a constitutional basis to Ireland’s national rights. To return to the 1782 constitution would give Ireland the legal authority to exercise its national rights, to transform Irish government in any direction that conserved the sovereign independence enshrined in that constitution. Consequently, to adhere to the Hungarian policy demanded a substantial imaginative leap. Irish separatists had to learn to see that to share a monarch with the British was not to be subservient to the British; constitutionally the monarch was no more British than he was Irish. In contrast to the literalness with which MacBride approached the Resurrection of Hungary, the sceptical home ruler Tom Kettle regarded the pamphlet as reading ‘like a fairy tale, or, rather like an epic, spacious and rapid; and by his over-idealisation and dramatisation the author has put himself in the difficulty that he cannot know how many of his fifteen thousand readers have bought the pamphlet for the policy and how many for the style.’69 Kettle’s critique centred on the absence of ‘exact designs’, of ‘details’; indeed, ‘We are not told clearly enough what it is’.70 The pamphlet was to be regarded primarily as a rather exciting polemic that had justly generated much comment and enthusiasm but ultimately was only vaguely suggestive of the direction Irish nationalism should take. Although not citing Kettle explicitly, Griffith addressed this criticism between March and June 1905 with ten articles under the heading ‘Working of the Policy’. Although reiterating the theoretical and constitutional basis of the policy, the articles were largely free of allusion to the Hungarian precedent and examination of the tension between separatism and constitutional nationalism that suffused the parallel. Rather, they were an attempt to delineate a strategy for immediate effect, a prelude for revolution, rather than an urge to revolution itself. Consequently, although monitoring the complexion of local government was an increasingly prominent concern of United Irishman, these articles contained little encouragement towards overt organisation on this basis. A classic Griffith fudge perhaps: apparently full of bold strategies for nation-state building, the ‘Working of the Policy’ avoided advocating overt engagement, taking the fight to the ballot box and demonstrating they had won the argument. In this it echoed Griffith’s early United Irishman article advocating a loose federation of advanced Nationalist societies, each with the ‘utmost liberty of action’, and the vague conclusions of the first annual convention of the National Council in November 1905.71 154
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There is a well-established narrative of the amalgamation of Sinn Féin in 1907.72 Formed of the National Council, the Cumann na nGaedheal and the Dungannon Clubs, the amalgamation proceeded in two stages. First, the more aggressively separatist bodies the Cumann and the Dungannon Clubs merged as the Sinn Féin League in April at negotiations in Dundalk. Griffith and the National Council did not join the new organisation, denying its legitimacy by refusing to report its activities. United Irishman’s silence was indicative of the tension and resentment generated on both sides by differences over strategy. By refusing to countenance the Sinn Féin League as the organisational basis of the new separatism, Griffith and the National Council denied them the exposure and legitimacy they needed to make a success of the venture. This controversy has been generally understood as a struggle for the leadership of the new nationalism. The IRB activist Patrick McCartan wrote regular letters updating Joseph McGarrity of Clan-na-Gael on political developments in Ireland. They were littered with remarks concerning the rivalry between Bulmer Hobson, the founder of the Dungannon Clubs, and Griffith. ‘I’m beginning to think Gr. is really jealous of Hobson. It looks very like it’.73 Michael Laffan has described the defection of C.J. Dolan from the party to Griffith’s ideas in June 1907 as a fortuitous strengthening of Griffith’s hand at just the right moment.74 So although Dolan’s re-election for North Leitrim on a Griffithite platform was never likely, the prominence it gave to Griffith’s circle gave it greater leverage on entering negotiations with the Sinn Féin League in September. However, the situation was more complex then this analysis suggests. For as well as strengthening Griffith’s hand, Dolan’s defection also forced it, pushing the National Council towards a premature engagement with the rigours of electoral politics. Despite modest successes in local elections, the National Council did not put up candidates in the 1906 general election and Griffith showed little eagerness to do so in the near future. The demands of the Hungarian parallel provided good reason for resisting formal political engagement. Rather than demanding the creation of a new political party, the policy demanded the conversion of the Parliamentary Party. The latter could then act in tandem with the more radical forces that Griffith represented. However, the trickle of IPP defections stymied Griffith’s projections; how were the Sinn Féin bodies to respond? Esmonde, Sweetman and then, in 1907, Dolan and O’Mara all pushed on the National Council the need for an alternative organisation to the IPP. This was in direct opposition to Griffith’s plans. The Hungarian parallel demanded not that the party be replaced, but that it adopt the policy of withdrawal. This would then allow the IRB under the aegis of the Cumann na nGaedheal, to play the role of Kossuth. Fenianism could reinforce the new radicalism of the party without betraying their political ideals – this would be in line with the IRB constitution. The irony, of course, was that the more orthodox separatists, notably those associated with Bulmer Hobson and the Dungannon Clubs, were also pushing for the establishment of a political organisation that drew together the variegated nodules of the new separatism. Griffith was caught between these two 155
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conflicting positions. How could the wishes of the Fenian separatists be reconciled with those of the radicalised constitutionalists? This was the dilemma that Sinn Féin failed to resolve. The private papers of MacSwiney and McCartan clearly demonstrate that young IRB members did not seek reconciliation, but to ambush the movement from within. In January 1906 McCartan believed that the Dungannon Clubs would support an amalgamation, but that the ‘young men will then be able to force the pace’,75 meaning that they would push for the adoption of more extreme ends. At the end of the year he reported: Griffith is a newspaper man. Take him out of that and he is useless. Hobson is an organiser and a businessman. I think Griffith would not be jealous of Hobson getting power but he may fear he would go too far and spoil the movement. He wants men whom he can command, men who will run to him to see what they will say. This he knows Hobson will not do. He fears the ‘immoderates’[.] He is a man of unbounded ability and hence all are slow to differ with him. He may be right but I think that he is mistaken. He has the greatest admiration for the Volunteers and considers their triumph the greatest in Irish history. The Nat. Council would be purely another repeal movement only for the Dungannon Clubs.76 MacSwiney complained that the National Council was ‘taking precautions to prevent themselves . . . being considered separatists. Grattan is the ideal not Tone or Davis or Emmet or Hugh O’Neill.’77 This was somewhat unfair given Griffith’s consistent denigration of Grattan against the militancy of Flood. In October McCartan was more optimistic, anticipating a tripartite amalgamation on the basis of republican aspirations.78 By July 1907 MacSwiney reckoned that the Cork branches of the Celtic Literary Society and the National Council would draw up a plan for the amalgamation of the Sinn Féin League and the National Council. But this attempt to seize the initiative was confused by P.S. O’Hegarty’s insistence that the amalgamation be completed on separatist terms. MacSwiney disagreed, and in a pragmatic retreat from his earlier orthodoxy, he argued that unity could only be achieved on the basis of the Sinn Féin policy. MacSwiney summarised the difficulty the separatists had in defining their aims: the parliamentarians had effectively appropriated ‘independence’; the old commitment of the Young Ireland Societies to ‘sovereign independence’ had failed to clarify the situation; consequently, the Celtic Literary Society stated that their objective was an Irish republic: ‘our aim was to make it clear to all that we wanted to break the English connection’.79 For the Hungarian policy to have any hope of succeeding, the Deaks and the Kossuths had to remain organisationally separate. In entering into the Sinn Féin League in September 1907, the National Council effectively abandoned the Hungarian policy. Sinn Féin attempted to impose conformity on the right 156
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and the left of the movement and to pose as an alternative to the Irish Parliamentary Party. Under the precepts of the Hungarian policy neither was necessary. What was necessary was the continued propagation of the plan.80 Griffith’s reluctance to engage in the contests of conventional politics surely stems from this vital insight. It was not just that the formation of Sinn Féin was premature, it was also doctrinally the wrong thing to do. Sinn Féin as an amorphous political movement could oblige all sides by avoiding clear articulations of policy and focusing on individual issues; above all, Sinn Féin could function as a conversation among those opposed to or disillusioned with constitutionalism. Once it emerged as a political organisation on broadly conventional lines, the debates concerning the efficacy of physical force, passive resistance and ’82ism became increasingly fraught, destabilising the IRB Supreme Council and emboldening the younger Fenians. The establishment of the unambiguously Fenian Irish Freedom in November 1910 stemmed from the perceived need to articulate a separatist challenge to Griffith’s ideological predominance. Moreover, in attempting to reinvent the Nationalist middle ground, Sinn Féin should not be interpreted as pursuing a form of Parnellism. The IRB bolstered the political organisation of Parnellism on the condition that the strategy did not impose limits on Ireland’s potential constitutional separateness. This was not the equivalent of Griffith’s claim that the 1782 constitution gave Ireland the authority to determine its own constitutional status under a shared monarchy. Whereas Parnell accepted that Westminster would provide the mechanism for the settlement of the Irish question, Griffith’s legalism was unmistakably radical, wholly rejecting the legitimacy of any decision made by Westminster regarding the constitutional status of Ireland. Sinn Féin’s attempt to occupy the middle ground required the rejection of the status quo and a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the contours of Irish nationalism.
III Following the defeat of Dolan the Irish Weekly Independent published a cartoon showing a home ruler approaching a Sinn Féiner with his hand outstretched: ‘We agree upon the gospel of self-reliance in industrial and social matters, and there is no reason in the world why we should not work hand in hand upon these lines’. An editorial pursued this theme: Parnell asked men as advanced as any Sinn Féiner to march along with him as far as their roads lay side by side. It is surely deplorable to see so many young men, who ought to be the backbone of the Nationalist movement, standing aside in an attitude of hostility towards the majority of their country-men. Could not some means be now devised to bring about a better feeling, without humiliation or sacrifice of principle, on either side?81
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Parnell’s name could be bandied around, but its very invocation was no longer guaranteed to generate a warm response from Irish separatists. The orphaning of Parnellism meant that the constitutionalists and the separatists were no longer working within the same strategic framework. Sinn Féin’s principal achievement before the First World War was to fashion a Nationalist paradigm, however fragile, which could contain a range of advanced opinion but was invulnerable to constitutional gesturing. Protestants, Catholics, language enthusiasts, women’s suffrage campaigners, Irish Irelanders, socialists, Fenians – all were acknowledged as legitimate contributors to the debate; acceptance was conditional on their rejection of devolution as the means to solve the problem of Ireland’s constitutional status. Indeed, this phase in the development of Irish separatism might be understood as one in which this series of sub-cultures – more often than not a product of the heightened national consciousness generated by the successes of land agitation and the home rule campaign – salted by generational tension, coalesced into a more generalised counter-culture that identified the Irish Parliamentary Party with the status quo. Between the reunification of the Parliamentary Party and the 1916 Rising clear boundaries were established between advanced and constitutional nationalism – the National Volunteers’ split left this in no doubt. Both sides entered into internal debates concerning aims and aspirations, both embraced a host of political identities, but, thanks in part to the vigilance of the IRB, dallying with the other side ceased to be an acceptable part of Irish Nationalist manoeuvring – only defection would do.82 Irish separatism’s last act of unambiguous political autonomy had been the rising of 1867. The innovations of Sinn Féin hinted at possible future action, but by what means remained profoundly unclear.
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9 ‘WITH THE EYES OF ANOTHER RACE, OF A PEOPLE ONCE H U N T E D T H E M S E LV E S ’ Casement, colonialism and a remembered past Margaret O’Callaghan
England is the landlord of civilization, mankind her tenantry and the earth her estate . . . The Empire that began upon an island – Ireland – ravaged, sacked and plundered shall end on an island . . . England deprived of Ireland resumes her natural proportions, those of a powerful kingdom.1 The hacendade holds the peon (indentured Peruvian or Putamayo slave) by a debt bondage. His palace in Mexico city, or on the sizal plains of Yucatan, is reared on the stolen labour, whose bondage is based on a lie. The hacendade keeps the books and debits the slave with the cost of the lash that scourges him into the fields . . . Ireland is the British peon, the great peon of the British empire.2 the fatal disease . . . deep buried in certain Irish men and women – Casements, Greens, Devoys, Wolfe Tones.3
I A superficial view of Roger Casement is that, having been born in Dublin in 1864, translated to the environs of his father’s family in Antrim, and orphaned early, he became a mild Parnellite in his teens, prior to going to Africa. After that a variety of events conspired to result in his emergence as an extreme Nationalist in the years before the First World War. This essay seeks to demonstrate that such a chronological trajectory distorts our ability to understand the nature of his political evolution, and that as a first step in its rereading we need to put at the centre of his story the two notebooks of poetry that he wrote as a young man in Antrim, long before his departure for Africa.4 This material has either been 159
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ignored or misunderstood by most of his biographers,5 partly because of a failure to treat it seriously as a historical source, and also because of their shared weaknesses in understanding the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and the profoundly complicated relationship between Protestant Ireland, antiquarianism, affective senses of national identity and nationalism.6 The exception is Brian Inglis, who does acknowledge the constancy of Casement’s nationalism, although he slightly glosses it. A further factor leading to the marginalisation of the notebooks has been the evidence of subsequent reordering, refining and additions by the author. Roger Casement’s social formation in a series of sites in Antrim, from Ballycastle to Waterfoot, would seem to indicate a fairly standard Irish Protestant background. Though his family are cousins of the gentry family of Casements at Magherintemple, or Magherinteaumpul as he later preferred to call it, and though the Jephsons of Mallow, his mother’s alleged family were wealthy, it is clear that there was no immediate family money and that Roger, his sister Nina and brothers Charlie and Tom had to make their own way.7 He, however, did have a small amount of land at Barnheally, Waterfoot, near Cushendall with a rental of about £20 a year.8 The consular service was a fairly obvious career choice for an Irish Protestant male of his generation, particularly one who had already spent time in Africa. Most accounts of his ‘conversion’ to nationalism indicate a period of accelerated Nationalist intensity in the early years of the twentieth century. Angus Mitchell’s edition of the Amazon Journal, supplemented by a rereading of Casement’s Congo experience, indicates the fusing in Casement’s mind of a sense of the history of colonialism in Africa and South America in the nineteenth century, and the experience of Ireland two to three centuries earlier.9 This connection, highlighted and returned to the debate by Mitchell, is explicit and central to all of his published work on Ireland. It is clear that aspects of the foundational supports of his complex politics are to be found in the relationship between imperialism and Casement’s own engagement with it, his humanitarianism and his Irish nationalism, in the context of his career as a British consular official. Casement’s relationship with Whitehall, if we use the term as a euphemism for British governance in its widest sense, is a profoundly unclear one. It is partly to be seen in the huge body of material either from or about him in the Public Record Office at Kew. In his early phase there are approximately fifty Foreign Office files detailing his career as a remarkable British consular official from 1892, when he entered the service of the Niger Coast Protectorate under the Colonial Office, until 1913 when he resigned. From early on he is someone who is both extraordinarily competent and dynamic – in Nigeria, as consul at Lourenço Marques in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique after 1895, and at Loanda after 1898, when he was British consul to the Portuguese possessions in West Africa, as well as to the private brutal fiefdom of Leopold in the Congo. His pre-consular African career is even more interesting, though, as yet, less well documented. Joseph Conrad’s characterisation of him as the archetype of a new type of European in 160
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this crucial stage of African penetration is not superficial.10 In many ways Casement saw himself as having ‘gone native’ in Africa, and he later recalls that, through much of the 1890s, he thought of himself as ‘an African’. This is a complex mode of self-comprehension and can be seen as part of a chapter in the complex history of imperial Irish identities. In the run-up to the Boer War, in July 1899 he wrote from Loanda to his oldest, and at that time probably closest, friend Robert Morton expressing fairly orthodox imperialist views on the war: ‘I like Milner and I think him a fine specimen of the Englishman’. He refers to ‘we’ and ‘us’, and appears fully to identify with the emerging British pro-war line. To me the South African question is in a nutshell. It is either Boer or Briton. It can’t be both . . . the Uitlander question is not so much getting the franchise for a certain large number of our own folk whom we think – rightly – ought to have it, as a final showing of who is master in South Africa.11 In the same letter he does, however, talk playfully about ‘your race, the English’, and ends by mocking his pontificatory style: ‘Oh, for an hour of Casement as Prime Minister! And if I wouldn’t paint things a lively green all round’. So, at this particular point, Roddie Casement, as he is known to his family and friends, has no difficulty accommodating a sense of himself as Irish and British, with a strong commitment to the British empire in the heyday of its Victorian imperial expansion. How then does he become so much more committed an Irish Nationalist – which he clearly is at this point, albeit of an imperial home rule variety – the Nationalist of the Volunteers, of the Howth gun-running, of the German alliance? More importantly, how does he become so absolute and brilliant a polemicist against the British empire, and why does he come to despise it? Before Mitchell’s edition of Casement’s Amazon Journal it was usual to compartmentalise Casement, the consular official, from the man he became – the Irish Nationalist, convicted of high treason under a fourteenth-century English statute, and hanged as a traitor. But the relationship between Casement’s British consular career, his mounting anti-imperialism and his increasingly self-conscious nationalism is complicated and dialectical, not linear and sequential. His experience as a consular official, and his earlier careers as an explorer, surveyor, manager and assistant to missionaries, enabled him, by 1903, to see the Congo through wellinformed eyes. He says repeatedly that, as a child, the destroyed city of Carthage claimed his sympathy – a city razed to the ground by triumphant Rome. ‘In the case of Carthage we know her only from her victorious destroyer.’12 Carthage destroyed – ‘delenda est Carthago’ – was of course a recurrent trope in nineteenthcentury Irish self-representation, history writing and memorialising. He is haunted by the idea that destroyed civilisations leave no record, except what survives in the records of their conquerors. The Congo experience of 1903 was 161
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crucial in that he revisited territory – now ravaged through genocide – in which he had spent much time, and known intimately, fifteen years previously as a young man fresh to Africa. In an often-quoted passage, Casement wrote to Alice Stopford Green: If things go as I wish I shall be back in Africa before long. It is a mistake for an Irishman to mix himself up with the English. He is bound to do one of two things – either go to the wall, if he remains Irish, or become an Englishman himself. You see I very nearly did become one once. At the Boer War time. I had been away from Ireland for years – out of touch with everything native to my heart and mind, trying hard to do my duty, and every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer to the Ideal of the Englishman. I had accepted imperialism. British rule was to be extended at all costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun and those who opposed that extension ought rightly to be smashed. I was on the high road to being a regular imperialist jingo – although at heart, underneath all and unsuspected almost by myself, I had remained an Irishman. Well, the war gave me qualms at the end – the concentration camps bigger ones – and finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold – I found also myself – the incorrigible Irishman . . . I knew that the Foreign Office wouldn’t understand the thing or if they did they would take no action, for I realized then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race, of a people once hunted themselves whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellowmen and whose estimate of life was not of something eternally to be appraised at its market ‘price’. And I said to myself then, far up the Lulongo River, that I would do my part as an Irishman and just because I was an Irishman, wherever it might lead me to. Since then, each year has confirmed me in my faith in that point of view, I got back to Ireland early in 1904 and all the old hopes and longings of my boyhood have sprung to life again . . .13 (my emphasis) A few years after his Congo trip he expressed, at this key moment in his emerging public career as witness to, and exposer of, Leopold’s Congo and its degradation and genocide of native peoples, a core interconnectedness formed in his mind between his ability to understand the actualities of what is really going on in the Congo and his renewed consciousness of himself as Irish, which the actual experience rekindled. But why, so stagily, does he describe himself as ‘the incorrigible Irishman’? When his powerful report on the Congo was published, in mutilated form, in early 1904,14 Casement spent eighteen months in Ireland, and deepened his Nationalist connections, specifically with old friends like Ada McNeill in the Glens of Antrim and around Ballycastle.15 He moved too in the circle around Francis Bigger, his solicitor, the antiquarian and moderate Nationalist relative of 162
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the Parnellite MP and briefly member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Joseph Bigger. Ard Righ, Bigger’s house on the Antrim Road in Belfast, was a meeting-point for Belfast and northern Nationalists, particularly northern Protestant Nationalists.16 The considerable Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) file on Casement, opened in 1914, refers to the frequenting of this house – which had been under RIC observation for years – by Bulmer Hobson, Ernest Blythe, Robert Lynd, Alice Stopford Green, John MacDermott, Dennis McCullough and Casement. Bigger is also said by the RIC to be familiar with James Connolly. Casement still has a range of Irish Protestant gentry friends who are not Nationalist, but the political sea in which he swims in Belfast over the next decade is ideologically Nationalist and, indeed, militantly so. This is the circle of the Dungannon Clubs, the renewed Irish Republican Brotherhood, and eventually the Volunteers. This Belfast circle is linked with his London circle through key figures in Liberal London, and Nationalist and cultural-Nationalist Dublin.17 Of these figures the most significant is undoubtedly Alice Stopford Green. It initially seems that, through conversations in this circle, Casement increasingly identifies the experience of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland with what he has seen of colonial rapacity in Africa. He sees the Congo in 1903 through what he refers to as specifically Irish eyes, and then seems to bring this perspective back to early twentieth-century Ireland. The company that Casement is keeping in the early 1900s thus provides a particular context in which the shift in perspective from the imperialist Casement of 1899 can be understood. The argument of this essay, however, is that Alice Stopford Green and the Ard Righ circle acted as reinforcers, rather than as the fount and source, of Casement’s linkage between the contemporary experience of empire by the natives of the Congo, and that of Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The early writings of Casement provide a startling key to the source of this radically original comparative perspective. They demonstrate clearly that Casement’s ability to observe this tragedy with the eyes ‘of a people once hunted themselves’ came out of his passionate juvenile engagement with the Gaelic experience of Tudor and Stuart Ireland. It is with the defeated of Tudor and Stuart Ireland that he identifies. These are his ‘hunted people’. It is their civilisation with which he aligns himself. They are the people written about only by their conquerors. It is in the sites of these early-modern wars of religion, territory and culture that his ‘national sense’ has its roots.
II Seamus Ó Siochain has pointed out that the young Casement’s early Parnellism was also characterised by an interest in Land League meetings in Antrim in the early 1880s.18 Ó Siochain convincingly argues that many of Casement’s ideas on the proper relations between owner and occupier of the soils in other contexts may have been derived from the land rhetoric of these years in Ireland. 163
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One of two Casement notebooks from the early 1880s has newspaper cuttings of Land League meetings around Ballycastle, a newspaper summary of the 1881 census, a map of the proclaimed districts of Ireland in 1881, and a newspaper note on the arrest of Michael Davitt at Euston station, pasted inside the coversheets.19 The notebooks also contain poetry, some personal, but mainly political, written in the early 1880s. While much of this poetry has been collected and published – some by Gertrude Parry in the years after his death,20 and, more comprehensively, by H.O. Mackey in 1958,21 no clear chronology or dating of the poems is available. A superficial reading of the poems in these later published forms suggests that they are the work of the later ‘Nationalist’ Casement. These poems were, however, mainly written in the early to mid-1880s. They are militant in their political nationalism and display a clear adolescent identification with the heroes of Gaelic Ireland, particularly Gaelic Ulster, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the earliest poems, available in the notebook but not in the Mackey collection, ‘O’Rorke’s Warning’ (Spanish Armada, 1588), is dated both September 1882 and 20 December 1882.22 It is prefaced by a long note of historical introduction describing how The O’Rorke at the time of Elizabeth I was induced by a Spaniard – Don Antonio de Leva who had sought refuge on the coast of Leitrim – to engage in a war with the English with an offer of protection from the Spanish monarchy. When the Spanish captain was drowned on his return to Spain, O’Rorke was left to face the English single-handed. Failing to reach ‘the ancient seat of his race’ at Dromahaire Castle for a final rally, after a series of defeats, O’Rorke had scarcely time to escape alone to Scotland. He was later captured, imprisoned in the Tower of London, ‘executed in Tyburn as a rebel and a traitor’. Casement writes of the end of Dromahaire: Hasten, hasten, time is fleeting, every moment brings them near ’Tis for very life you fight. Oh hasten, what sound is that I hear? See o’er yonder hilltop streaming, hark their hated war cry swell. Oh, my country, and thy freedom, oh my master, all farewell. Hark, above thee crack the heavens, all the skies are lit with flame (Fitter tapers never lighted from this earth so proud a fame) Look thy last upon these turrets, look thy last upon these walls. Thou and they must part forever, Breffini’s freedom with them falls. Thou to death and bondage carried, they to ruin and decay, Soon unsparing time shall sweep them and thy very name away. Far thy children from this country are by Saxon hatred banned, None are left to mourn or weep thee, slaughter reddens all the land. ‘The Song of Tyrconnell’23 is dated July 1883, according to the notebook. The date is not given in Mackey, nor does he include Casement’s expansive historical notes. Again, the period evoked is of the Elizabethan conquest and its aftermath, with a long note of historical introduction on Red Hugh O’Donnell, 164
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son of the chief of the O’Donnells, who was captured ‘by the English in Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. Captured in Lough Swilly, the young Hugh was brought to Dublin, where he suffered for years imprisonment in the Birmingham Tower of the Castle, before escaping in 1592. On escaping he allied with ‘his great ally and leader’, The O’Neill, who, according to the young Casement, was ‘the most bitter and violent opponent English rule had ever encountered in Ireland’. According to Casement, ‘O’Donnell defeated many English armies, and not only succeeded in completely freeing his own territories of all Saxon garrisons, but also drove the Queen’s troops from Connaught and for a period regained a great portion of that province to the cause of Ireland’: Far in their glens the wild clans are assembling Dark mists envelop each steep mountain path Soon in their Pale shall the Saxons be trembling Dublin and Drogheda shall bend to our wrath. Meath too, and Uriel, both shall be ours Fires of victory blaze to the sky! Ruin and ashes shall mark their proud towers Death shall o’erwhelm them, vainly they fly. Short was the triumph their perfidy brought them Long shall they now that black perfidy rue Little they recked of the evil it wrought them When with their fetters they bound our Red Hugh. But, for each moment of bondage and sorrow, Spent in the damp-reeking cells of the foe, Soon while the hall shall re echo our ‘farragh’ Rivers of blood from their bosoms shall flow. Tremble, already the banshee is wailing, Her death-song in many a Sassenach hall Flight or submission – all, all unavailing Swift as the lightning our vengeance shall fall. Up with our banner then, bright as the morning Victory follows the path of Red Hugh, Oh while our foe men shall hark their death warning Borne on our slogan ‘O’Donnell Abu’. In ‘Dunluce Castle’,24 dedicated to that topographically and historically compelling fortification on the Antrim coast, Casement writes within the conventions of the nineteenth-century romantic antiquarian celebration of the Gothic and mysterious, making the ruins of the castle a symbol of a broken history. He is also partly evoking what he represents as the resistance of Sir Randall MacDonnell and Sorley Boy MacDonnell to Sir John Perrott.25 165
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Can these be the walls that once mocked the fierce Dane Where the wrath of the Saxon was poured in vain Where the bard and the harper were loved and caressed, And the stranger was ever the welcomest guest? How often at morning would gaily ride forth From these high-pillared portals the chiefs of the north O’Neill and O’Donnell, McQuillan the proud Too soon to lie bloody and cold in his shroud. In thy storm shattered turrets so hoary and grey The banshee at midnight laments thy decay And the sea bird screams shrill on the night breezes breath While thy halls are the dwelling of darkness and death. The morning sun breaks and still hushed is that song Yet its walls in my bosom doth memory prolong And grief’s wasted hand strikes a chord in my heart Whence the murmur of sorrow shall never depart. Notes on the margins indicate that Casement had read James Clarence Mangan and Florence McCarthy.26 The poems are in a style derivative of both and in the style of The Nation. As a young man Casement sang Moore’s melodies.27 He was clearly familiar with the nineteenth-century Nationalist written tradition. Ada MacNeill writes of his constant reference and recourse to what she claims to have been the very considerable library of Irish history and literature at Churchfield or Magherintemple, near Ballycastle.28 Why then do his biographers so consistently overlook this core aspect of his formation? Sawyer, in particular, ignores a body of material which he dismisses as irrelevant, but oddly reproduces a poem of Casement’s in which he affectionately parodies the antinationalism of an admired friend’s house, the home of the Alexander family at Portglenone, who were clearly strong anti-home rulers. Read out of the context of the other poems it is misleading. The poem ‘Portglenone’ was written ‘when a boy at Portglenone in February 1883’, so it is broadly contemporary with all of the others cited: Och! Portglenone House, is a place for the grouse Or a frolic or freak And the rabbits and hares May be seen there in pairs Every day of the week If you’re quick with your gun You’ll have plenty of fun Any day that you like, 166
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Or if fonder of fishin’ You may bring a nate dish in Of salmon or pike . . . And if a home ruler should be such a fool or Ass as to come with his preachin’ up here He’d get a backhander from Bob Alexander Would have him a black eye for many a year Shure ’tis landlords dipindents are all on me word The lineal discendints of William the Third And though Bigger or Healy, may mouth it so mealy Far down in the South Yet they’ll alter their tone Here in swate Portglenone29 Other poems of the same time are ‘Cathal More of the Wine Red Hand’, about a king of Connaught in the thirteenth century,30 and ‘O’Donoghue’s Daughter’, dated in manuscript as 5 July 1883.31 The latter is a classic piece of neoantiquarian celticist verse. Though it is not overtly political it deploys the usual range of late nineteenth-century iconography – the silent harp, the mysterious Abbey, the evocation of place, in this case Mangerton. ‘The Triumph of Hugh O’Neill’32 (Baile an Átha Buidhe – Battle of the Yellow Ford, 1598) is selfexplanatory, and ‘Rory O’More’ addresses the events of 1641. While the poems first discussed were clearly written in either 1882 or 1883, ‘The Battle of Benburb, 1646’ is apparently published in United Ireland over a decade later, and may not represent Casement’s views in the early 1880s.33 It is, however, sufficiently similar in tone and sentiment to the earlier poems to merit inclusion. In ‘Benburb’ the style anticipates G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’, its tone millennial and prophetic. The moment celebrated is the Battle of Benburb, where Owen Roe O’Neill is represented as battling to retrieve Ireland from the Elizabethan conquest, particularly the conquest of Ulster and the fight of the native aristocracy after Kinsale. While recent historiography would present that episode in more complex terms, in the context of the Counter-Reformation and the war of the three kingdoms, Casement’s view clearly had a valency in the tradition of nineteenth-century patriotic histories of ‘the story of Ireland’.34 It was moreover an engagement that was to characterise the cultural Nationalists of the early twentieth century. It opens with a bleak picture of post-Plantation Ulster: The barren hills of Ulster held a race proscribed and banned Who from their lofty refuge viewed their own so fertile land O’Neill’s return is represented as a battle to redeem the past, to win again, as Hugh O’Neill had done at the Yellow Ford. This time the victory is to be permanent, not one leading to another Kinsale: 167
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And fair it was to see them in the golden morning light, Climb up the hill by Caledon and turn them to the right; As they neared Yellow Ford, where Bagnell met O’Neill, Joy gathered in our throats and broke above their cannons’ peal, And oh a thrill went through our ranks, as straining through the foe, Like hounds in leash we panted for the words of Owen Roe. Ho! ring your bells, Kilkenny town; ho Dublin burghers pass In open day, with open brow, to celebrate the Mass. The Sword of State that Tudor hate laid sore on Church of God Hath fallen here with shattered hilt and vain point in the sod. Ho! Holy Rinuccini and ye high lords of the Pale, Lay by your sheets of parchment, and put on your sheltered mail, For God hath spoke in battle, and His face the foe is toward, And ye must hold by valour what he hath freed by sword, Yea, God in fight hath spoken, and thro cloud hath bent his brow In wrath upon the routed, but in hope o’er Owen Roe.
III In an important recent essay on Casement as a humanitarian, the text of a paper delivered at the 2000 Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Roger Casement, the distinguished historian Andrew Porter makes many innovative and interesting points.35 But in one crucial area he perhaps epitomises a prevailing view of Casement that requires qualification. Porter suggests that, even in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Casement may have evinced at least a measure of disillusionment with the diplomatic pretences of high politics and the harsh realities of early concessionary capitalist development in the tropics. It seems likely that here were important roots both of Casement’s strong sense of the practical contradictions and falsehoods which lay beneath the official humanitarianism and free trading rhetoric, and perhaps a personal commitment, reinforced by his religious conversion at the same time, to bridge the gap between them.36 Porter goes on to suggest that, even before the Congo investigation Casement, through his prolonged experience of Africa, had ample opportunity to develop a sophisticated critique of imperialism. He then cites Casement’s scathing comments on the British handling of Natal in 1905, the Dinshawi incident of 1906 in Egypt, with which George Bernard Shaw was deeply preoccupied, and other key imperial moments. However, according to Porter:
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it remains difficult to locate him on the spectrum of thought about development policy and humanitarian politics. The Amazon scandal, for instance, in his words ‘not merely slavery but extermination’, ‘a bigger crime than that of the Congo’ nevertheless seems to have failed to prompt Casement to any sustained or what might be called mature reflection on the general issues involved . . . In 1911, he was still only starting to see the whole problem of slavery and ethnocide in a global dimension. [my emphasis]37 Porter goes on to state that ‘there is no sign that Casement was ever inclined to draw his thoughts together in a way that would point to clear and developed suggestions for the future’, and rounds off a passage citing the words of the Putamayo Select Committee, which thanked Casement for his remarkable work – ‘The truth has been established, the worst infamies have been terminated’ – with the rather strange conclusion, ‘beyond that the future was unclear’. Casement’s pragmatism, and willingness to opt for a variety of methods to assist people in dire necessity, his willingness to countenance ‘good’ industrialists like Cadbury, various Protestant mission societies in Africa, Catholic missions, if necessary in the Putamayo, are all evidence to Porter of his inability to contribute any original perspective to the terms of late-Victorian and early Edwardian debates on these matters. He is represented as at least partially embodying some of the alleged contradictions of New Liberalism, but to lack the capacity of J.A. Hobson, for example, to conceptualise his position. It seems clear, from Casement’s reading, and his range of contacts, that he was well aware of the diversity of positions, theoretical and doctrinal, emerging in this period. A highly complex sequence of quotations from Casement leads to Porter’s summation, which goes as follows: It was not only Casement’s trial and execution which explains the infrequency with which his name was recalled by these later activists of the humanitarian movement . . . As many of the emotional outbursts [my emphasis] quoted above might suggest, Casement did not emerge as an obviously systematic thinker. He wrote no book of lasting importance. Comparatively few humanitarians shared either his unequivocal identification of Irish conditions with colonial oppression . . . and so in their eyes he ultimately identified himself with a cause of lesser importance than their own.38 The early poems advance a highly particular view of a violence at the heart of the consolidation of English power in Ireland at the expense of Gaelic Ireland in the early modern period. It is in Casement’s awareness of this foundational violence that one can locate the grounds of his local and national identity. It coexists with all kinds of other understandings of the Protestant Ireland in which he was formed. Contrary to Porter’s claim, this is the essential basis to understanding what becomes a highly sophisticated critique of the British empire that 169
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is developed over several years, and is partially stated in his collected works of 1915. Casement does have a theoretical model of colonial expansion. It is grounded in the case of Ireland and expressed coherently in the Crime against Europe, his extensive and scattered journalism and in hundreds of letters, as well as in his prison writings. The basis of Casement’s critique is affective, but its grounding in one specific place and time in Ireland does not render it redundant for other times and contexts. In effect he constructs a method, derived from early reading and culture, whereby he understands the process of colonial expansion through an identification with the point of view of the exploited. He then projects the deep consequences of such damage, which he sees as lasting for centuries. He does not choose Ireland over and against his other concerns. He merely believes that Ireland is the earliest British theatre of conquest and it is in this theatre, albeit one profoundly altered by the intervening centuries, that he should act in his later years. He had, by any reckoning, probably done more practically elsewhere than any other theorist of the evils of empire. His theory protests against the destruction of existing cultures, the view of all land as a commodity and what he sees as the damage to ways of life and coherent cultures caused by the unbridled drive of capital. He does not appear to believe in the possibility of a cosmopolitan ethic given what he has seen, and how he has theorised what he has seen in the light of habits of understanding laid down since his adolescence. His sister Nina claimed that as young people she and Roger were vividly aware of the slaughter perpetrated on Rathlin Island by the Earl of Essex. This passionate attachment to Rathlin and the Glens ensured that they remained for Casement the key foundational sites of his material and romantic investment in the topography, history and memory of Ireland. His detestation for destruction elsewhere is derived from his Irish experience. That this identification is not of descent he makes clear in numerous letters to Alice Stopford Green: Have you ever felt what I feel daily grows stronger; that the Irish character is a nobler heritage to claim than anything else on earth? . . . You are a descendant of a Cromwellian invader, but your heart has gone to Ireland – just as Parnell’s went – just as Grattan’s went . . . The ‘soul’ in every country is something more than Race; more than nationality more than any reason I have yet seen put forward. There is something in the soil, in the air, in the inherited mind of a country that is as real, more real, than the rocks, the hills and the streams. No historian defines the thing, yet it exists in all lands – and in Ireland, its influence has never failed.39 More importantly this can perhaps be fully understood only in the context of nineteenth-century antiquarianism in Ireland, and what Joep Leerssen has characterised as its propensity towards the auto-exotic.40 Protestant patriots in the eighteenth-century mould were often antiquarianism’s initial drivers. But, via 170
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the refracting lens of Samuel Ferguson’s sensibility and politics, antiquarianism, through Yeats, became the forcing dynamic of the Celtic revival. Conservative and reactionary, as well as innovative and a ground of modernism, it was the mechanism through which Protestant Ireland staked its claim to the ‘new Ireland’, which it partially invented. It carried within itself traces of earlier battles about who constituted ‘the people of Ireland’, about who owned its ancient history, and served as a partial antidote to the weight of Catholic numbers and their democratic political consequences by the late nineteenth century. It is further developed and transformed, however, in the world-view of Casement and Alice Stopford Green. For they stand against certain of their Protestant fellow-countrymen, particularly the Unionist historians of the early modern period, and seek to extend that antiquarian turn to the point at which they identify with the more immediate Gaelic past of the early modern period. For Unionist historians it is essential, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, to represent all of pre-conquest Ireland as empty and void, a tabula rasa before outside ‘improvement’. Casement and Stopford Green return to what they see as the spirit of 1798, and assert from there a role for Irish Protestants in a new Ireland. For them this must incorporate an ability to empathise with the defeated of Gaelic Ireland. This is important not just for Casement and Stopford Green, however, as this passionate engagement with the primary colonial experience of Ireland in the early modern period provides a vital and neglected strand in the rhetoric and memory of a new nationalism in this period. It might be said to be the Gavan Duffy turn, which Yeats rejected. In this context Alice Stopford Green is a central figure,41 with J.F. Taylor42 as her initiatory mentor. Casement’s historical sense of Antrim and of Down also incorporated the Presbyterians of the north-east of whom he wrote with love, affection and admiration. It incorporated the historical memory of Cave Hill, MacArt’s fort and the men of 1798. And, as with his sense of the Glens and the end of Gaelic Ireland, his understanding of the men of 1798 as revolutionary Nationalists was infused with a keen sense of the violence with which the British state responded to their rebellion and its emancipatory aims. As a child Casement saw Donegore Hill, where forty United Irishmen went to the gallows. His great grand-uncle, Dr Casement of Larne, was a loyalist in 1798 and was, according to Casement’s sister Nina, ‘instrumental in sealing the fate of William Orr’. Nina claimed (inaccurately, though it may represent a local history they had heard) that Orr was not active as a rebel, but merely ‘saved a hunted rebel from being caught when, like a beast of the field he was hunted from one end of the country to the other’. Here again is the image of the hunted.43 The adolescent Casement, so fascinated by the role of Antrim men resisting English rule in Elizabethan times and in 1798, was also an avid follower of the Land War as it manifested itself in Antrim. Born in Dublin in 1864, Casement was fifteen in 1879 when the Land War began. It now seems that he followed the land and home rule controversies closely until, as he later says, like so many others, he became disillusioned with Irish politics after 171
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the death of Parnell in 1891. Like Yeats and Joyce he too wrote a poem on Parnell’s death. In his notebooks of poetry from the early 1880s he has pasted notices of Land League meetings in Antrim. During the Land War a rhetoric, and an intimately sanctioned code to enforce it, put together a historical memory of dispossession with a modern mode of behaviour that formalised rituals long practised through agrarian secret societies. More politically ambitious than a bid simply for land control, it was in fact the route through which the next field and an independent Ireland became synonymous in popular perception.44 Ó Siochan convincingly argues that the Land War provided Casement with a model for what he chose to view as the correct relation between the occupier and the owner of the soil, and a philosophical basis for opposing commercial exploitation of lands and peoples in both Africa and South America. Travelling to see John Devoy in New York from Montreal along the shores of Lake Champlain in July 1914 he thought about the lives of the disappeared former inhabitants. His poetry about Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is similarly infused with a mourning for destroyed ways of life. ‘You had life – your white destroyers only possess things. That is the vital distinction, I take it, between the “savage” and the civilised man. The savage is, the white man has. The one lives and moves to be, the other toils and dies to have’. In 1898, on his way to Loanda, he began a long poem ‘The Dream of the Celt’, on the pre-plantation defeat of Gaelic Ulster. Elizabeth! Though England dare not name Those dead, how can an Irish heart forget The reddest jewel in your Crown of Fame Was Erin, wet with blood and rent with flame By your white hands thus deftly wrought and set.45 He claimed that his father was a Fenian sympathiser. One of his first Nationalist publications in Griffith’s paper was an account of his father, racing on a horse halfway across Europe, to save Kossuth, the Hungarian rebel, ironically through the intervention of Lord Palmerston.46 This episode is substantiated in Kossuth’s memoirs. He wrote to Gertrude, ‘I am a queer sort of British consul, alanna, I really ought to be in jail instead of under the Lion and Unicorn’.47 The imagined and remembered histories of Antrim and the Glens which made Casement ‘such a queer sort of British consul’ had not come to him in a historical vacuum. Nor is their later reinforcement to be understood without reference to specific political and cultural contexts. The complexity of the mutable identities of nineteenth-century Irish Protestants has been highlighted by Roy Foster. An antiquarianism tending to the auto-exotic has been identified by Leerssen as one of the characteristic propensities of nineteenth-century Irish Protestant intellectuals.48 So, one way of understanding the historical infatuations and investments that Casement carried with him from his adolescence is to compare them with those 172
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that drove Ferguson, William Wilde or Yeats. Antiquarianism, like the literary Gothic of Maturin and LeFanu, may have been a way of imaginatively dealing with the sense of multiple dislocations of identities – personal, national, regional and imperial – that many Irish Protestants experienced during the century after 1798 and the Act of Union. In many cases, notably among the clerical denizens of the Royal Irish Academy in the heyday of Victorian celticism – Caesar Otway and J.H. Todd spring to mind in this context – it undoubtedly functioned as a cultural escape route from a resurgent Catholic political power.49 But with Casement, where antiquarianism was fused with a passionate engagement with what he viewed as the primary colonial experience of Ireland, it provided the affective and intellectual basis of a new critique of imperialism and a vital and neglected strand in the construction of a new nationalism in the late nineteenth century. In the Irish, rather than imperial, context Alice Stopford Green is a central figure, with J.F. Taylor, the voice of that particularly passionate nationalism in Joyce’s Ulysses, as her initiatory mentor. Alice Sophia Amelia Stopford Green, the daughter of a distinguished Church of Ireland deacon from Meath, married one of the most important historians of late nineteenth-century Britain, J.R. Green.50 She completed his study of the Norman conquest of Britain after his death. Her history of Ireland, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, published in 1908, provided a key text for the revolutionaries of the 1916 generation. She met the important Nationalist J.F. Taylor in either London or Dublin in the mid-1890s. Her history is best understood in the context of the critical debates of the 1890s and 1900s on the Irish incapacity for self-government, which became one of the initial bases of Unionist opposition to home rule, until it was replaced by the more defensive line of Ulster. The case was supported by a range of Irish historians of Unionist politics who emphasised in their works the incapacity of the Irish for self-government at all times in the past.51 Her London context, the one in which she perhaps first met Casement, was of high liberalism, and is loosely the context which later produced J.L. Hammond’s pro-Gladstonian history of home rule,52 and much of the moral ground of the anti-slavery movement outlined in Adam Hoschild’s study King Leopold’s Ghost.53 It is also, as we have seen, partly the context that produced J.A. Hobson’s classic study Imperialism which was published in 1902. Alice Green and Casement, from early on in their close relationship, thought of Ireland in comparative contexts. Peter Clarke’s Liberals and Social Democrats is the most important study of aspects of these circles.54 Though both Clarke and Stefan Collini are conscious of the role of George Bernard Shaw,55 neither Casement nor Green are visible in these circles in their work, though Green’s friendship with Beatrice Webb was very close at one time. Since Casement is, in the contemporary context of pre-First World War humanitarianism, second only to E.D. Morel and Harris in public reputation as an international human rights campaigner, 56 his later absence from the historical record is surprising. The record of his extraordinarily prolific writings has been lost in the endless debate and public curiosity about the Black 173
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Diaries. A.J.P. Taylor’s review of Brian Inglis’s biography is the only mainstream twentieth-century historiographical testament to his links with that crusading, partly anti-imperial, anti-slavery liberalism of the years before the First World War.57 Alice Stopford Green’s often rancorous exchanges with establishment historians of Ireland concentrated on what she saw as their desire to present pre-conquest Ireland as a quasi-barbarous tabula rasa. Casement bombarded his acquaintances with her writings and, though he does not idealise the Congo pre-Leopold, or indeed the Amazon prior to penetration, he sees the forms of colonial penetration he has witnessed as the instruments of damage, genocide and destruction of pre-existing cultures. Irish Protestants in Nationalist revolutionary circles in the decades before the First World War cannot all be dismissed as relative eccentrics, aberrant class and caste traitors or, in the case of intellectuals and writers, bidders for intellectual and cultural power in the wake of material dislocation. But from the work of F.S.L. Lyons through to that of Tom Garvin we have a highly deterministic class, religious and geographical analysis of political choices in this period, which are not necessarily supported by an empirical or analytic base.58 The circle around Casement and Green does not fit in with the profile of the revolutionaries that we have to date. The planning of the Irish Volunteers by Moore, Whyte, MacNeill and Casement, the gun-running of July 1914 and Casement’s last landing on Good Friday seriously undermine the ‘blood sacrifice’ interpretation of 1916. The nationalism to which Casement and Green subscribed was a much broader church, as this letter which outlines his attempts to resist the exclusion of most of Ulster from the Home Rule Bill illustrates: Since you left great events are happening. I wrote to you in haste telling you of the proposed meeting in Ballymoney – when lo in the afternoon Captain White came up and called me about it. He is the son of Sir G. White of Ladysmith and Cushendore (DUN) landowner – you must come, I’ve almost pledged you to come. It will be a meeting, mind you, of extraordinary significance. A protest from the heart of Antrim men – Presbyterians, Protestants and a flaming appeal to Ireland. It will have much of the spirit of 98 and will be definitely Irish – not of an English party at all. When I told Capt White you’d come he telegraphed over to Ballymoney that evening and he said; let me bring a truck full of her Irish Nationality – possibly FJB, too altho’ Captain White fears he’s too much of a popish. His kissing of Cardinal Logue’s ring has upset the midriff of the Antrimers . . . If you come it will be a trilogy of Protestants. Lord A said he might come, but I don’t think he will. He will do nothing except the language. This essay has argued that Casement’s ways of seeing European imperialism during the years beginning with his Congo exploration of 1903 were deeply 174
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informed by the perception articulated in his juvenilia of a violence at the core of English power in Ireland that had, from his point of view, manifested itself to catastrophic effect in the early modern period, and again in 1798. His sense of the injustice of exploitation of the soil and its traditional occupiers was likewise informed by the nationalism he had espoused during the period from the start of the Land War in 1879 to the death of Parnell in 1891. The grounds of Casement’s later anti-imperialism, and anti-imperialist Irish nationalism, were laid by the local and national identities he acquired and put together during his early years, when he was a boy. This identity was not set aside for two decades in Africa, and then was reignited after 1903 in the Antrim Road Ard Righ circle in Belfast. As the poems he wrote in the early 1880s show, his adolescent view of the savagery inflicted upon Gaelic Ireland became part of the ground for his gradual estrangement from what he had initially seen as an exciting, challenging exploration of Africa. The source of his ability to look at the Congo in 1903 with what for him were specifically ‘Irish eyes’ lay in those Antrim Glens, where he had learnt to see ‘with the eyes of a people once hunted themselves’. Casement’s theory of empire is scattered through his countless out-of-print works, and cannot properly be assessed until the body of this work is reassembled. It seems difficult not to believe that the manner of his death, and the never-ending debate on the Black Diaries, have conspired to ensure that little of what he wrote has been read.
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Part III REFORMED IRELAND OR ‘RISEN PEOPLE’?
10 UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES The national schools and Irish women’s mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries1 Janet Nolan
Rebellion In the spring of 1886, in Aghaloora, County Cavan, girls’ national school teacher Margaret Smyth refused to turn in her school key after being dismissed from her post for fighting with Mathew Comisky, her male counterpart in the boys’ classroom next to hers.2 According to the local school manager Terence Brady, when Smyth’s replacement Suzanne Wilson arrived to collect the key, Smyth’s sister pulled the newcomer’s hair as Smyth, ‘forcibly [held] possession of the school’. While Wilson was being attacked by Smyth’s sister, Brady watched ‘a crowd headed by Miss Smyth’s brothers with a flag c[o]me . . . to take the boys from my school if I would not put out Miss Wilson’. Smyth’s relationship with Comisky had never been good and Comisky already faced charges of intimidating schoolchildren, drunkenness, and assault before Smyth lost all patience with him. Comisky’s reputation was so bad, in fact, the local ratepayers supported Smyth in her battle with him. ‘We the undersigned’, local farmer Daniel Kiernan and thirteen other signatories wrote to the Commissioners of National Education in April 1887, ‘consider it necessary for us to appeal a second time to the gentlemen of the National Board . . . we reported Master Comisky last February for his bad conduct [and] it is not in the power of any person inside or outside of the County Cavan to give Master Comisky a good character’. In fact, the letter continued, Margaret Smyth had been driven to distraction by the outrageous conduct of her male counterpart. Master Comisky permitted his scholars to knock part of the wall between the Male School room and the Female School room and he 179
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would allow his scholars to spend their time throwing stones and gallons of water into the female school . . . a few days ago, he threw a coal out of the fire into the Female School and struck a little girl in the face . . . which nearly was the cause of depriving her of her eyesight for life. Furthermore, Kiernan told the Commissioners, ‘There is also a summons against him for assaulting another young girl’. Kiernan concluded by reminding the Commissioners that ‘respectable Farmers withdrew their children from his school . . . [and we want] to put an end to such scandalous proceedings which is [sic] a disgrace in any Civilised District’. Comisky replied to these accusations in his own letter to the Commissioners. Answering the charge that he had allowed his students to break through the wall separating his classroom from Smyth’s, Comisky excused the action, telling the Commissioners that ‘The partition between the fire places of the two schoolrooms is only the thickness of a brick’. In fact, he reported, ‘The scholars in Miss Smyth’s school broke our partition on several occasions. They often threw stones and burning turf onto the boards of my school, and on one occasion they threw one so violently as to cut a boy’s head with a stone’. Despite this harassment, Comisky informed his employers that he had ‘repeatedly mended the hole myself with mortar and stones’. Smyth’s students did not agree with Comisky’s version of events, however. One of them, nine-year-old Maria McCabe, maintained instead that she had seen ‘stones and coals thrown out of the [boys’] school often but I never saw any thrown back’. Convinced that Miss Smyth had legitimate reasons for her refusal to surrender her classroom, Kiernan and other local farmers urged the Commissioners to ‘grant [the school] key to Margaret Smith [sic] who commenced to teach in [Aghaloora] in . . . April 1886 and has since conducted the school to the satisfaction of the said inhabitants’. In this, Kiernan was reasserting traditional local control over the schools in the face of outside authority. Insisting that if ‘any [teacher] vacancy occurs . . . a native of the . . . townland if fairly qualified should be appointed as Teacher in preference to any outsider’, Kiernan also reminded the Commissioners that ‘the inhabitants maintained the privilege of appointing teachers . . . for the past thirty years and in 1886 a vacancy occurred in the Female School Room and a native . . . named Margaret Smith got possession by the sanction of most of the inhabitants . . . and the said Margaret Smith has since conducted the school to our satisfaction’. Despite the strong local support for Smyth, School Manager Brady informed the Commissioners that the charges against Mathew Comisky were untrue and had been trumped up by the friends of Smyth because Comisky had chosen Wilson rather than Smyth to be Aghaloora’s female teacher. Wilson, Brady contended, ‘outranked Miss Smyth in [the] competitive teachers’ examination’, coming in first while Smyth failed the arithmetic qualifying test and was the fourth out of the four candidates for the post. School District Inspector F. Eardley had also strongly disapproved of Smyth’s candidacy. In his 28 September 1886 180
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report, Eardley noted that ‘Miss Margaret Smyth, 18, R[oman] C[atholic], not competent, [but nonetheless] took possession of the school on 4 May 1886, in opposition to the manager’.
The best intentions The saga of Margaret Smyth’s brief sojourn in the Aghaloora Female National School illustrates the Dublin Commissioners’ steady usurpation of local school autonomy. Smyth was eventually evicted from the Aghaloora school, forced to turn over her key to Suzanne Wilson, Manager Brady’s favoured candidate. By the 1880s, in fact, qualified candidates like Wilson were taking teaching posts from less prepared local favourites like Smyth. The National Commissioners spearheaded this change by issuing a series of ever-stricter standards for teacher training and hiring. Smyth’s short-lived teaching career marked the end of an era of local control over hiring teachers. Despite this loss of school autonomy at the local level, as women’s chances for marriage and cash incomes diminished in post-famine Ireland the national school served as a training ground for female emigration, equipping girls with the necessary skills to seek their fortunes outside the country.3 In fact, by the late nineteenth century, and continuing into the twentieth, young, unmarried women who had spent their childhoods in national school classrooms were a majority among those leaving Ireland for cities in the United States, the most popular emigrant destination in those years, and most of these women had been students in a national school.4 While the lessons Irish girls learned in school taught them how to husband their resources and earn their own livings, the evolution of Ireland’s classrooms into preparatory schools for female emigration was not the intended result of the national school curriculum designed in 1833 by the then chairman of the National Commissioners, Church of Ireland archbishop Richard Whately. As a former Oxford professor of political economy, Whately subscribed to the theory that a laissez-faire capitalism regulated only by Adam Smith’s invisible hand and David Ricardo’s iron law of wages was an unchanging universal law of nature. Believing that lessons in political economy would change the profligate personal behaviour of the Irish poor, Whately had edited versions of his ‘introductory lectures in political economy’ published in 1835 under the title Easy Lessons on Money Matters for the Use of Young People and placed in the hands of all Irish schoolchildren aged eight and upwards.5 Readers of Whately’s text learned that wages, work hours and social position were based on unchanging economic laws. Poverty was the result of bad behaviour on the part of those who embarked on early and improvident marriages that produced children who could not be supported. Self-help, based on work discipline and steady habits, would prevent failure and guarantee a secure life in a benign and prosperous world. Frugality and humility would ensure their economic survival. Whately gave no thought to changing the status quo, however. To him, 181
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laziness and other individual character flaws caused personal failure, not the prevailing political and economic system. Class envy was also fruitless and wrong-headed, since the rich provided the jobs and wages the poor needed to survive. Like Whately, most Catholic clergy also saw the schools as mechanisms of social control rather than social mobility. On this issue, at least, Ireland’s sectarian divide was overcome.6 Moreover, school authorities forbade teaching controversial subjects like Irish history or even geography in the schools, substituting lessons in the history of Great Britain and its empire instead.7 Only when then-Commissioner Starkie authorised the distribution of former Marlborough Street Training School principal P.W. Joyce’s pro-establishment Irish history text in 1900 did Irish history become part of the school curriculum for the first time. After the 1916 Rising, however, the Commissioners withdrew Joyce’s text from the classroom, once again declaring Irish history too dangerous a subject for the national schools.8 Starkie’s short-lived Irish history teaching initiatives seemed to have had very little impact on students, who remained well versed in the English, not the Irish, past. When District Inspector C.E. Wright observed a history class in Queen’s County (Laois) in May 1910, for instance, he ‘questioned the class on the events of Queen Anne’s reign [and] the girls were delighted to give in answer a list of Marlborough’s victories, with dates’. Although he was disappointed that one girl ‘had never heard (or so it seemed) of Milton, Cromwell, or the Battle of Trafalgar’, he was pleased to find that when he tested the class ‘on the early history of England, [I] never received such an intelligent account of Britons, Angles, Danes, and Normans. They knew the original settlement of the Angles and Saxons: a rare bit of knowledge’. Despite the class’s mastery of the origins of the English people, Wright noted that ‘Their only weakness was in Irish history’, although they were ‘better on the geography of Ireland’. Furthermore, the two lowest classes in the school ‘knew their English History and Geography courses excellently, [but] the portion prescribed of the History of Ireland was not known at all as well’. Wright found the state of Irish history to be even worse in Protestant schools, ‘where teachers and children dislike the tone of the school book’.9 The Irish language was also kept out of the classroom for most of the nineteenth century. Although Irish was the sole language of a large minority in the country at the time of the schools’ inception in the 1830s, the schools offered no Irish language instruction. In fact, the Commissioners allowed Irish language lessons in the schools only in 1878. This innovation was undermined by the fact that it was not until 1897 that Irish language lessons were offered to teachers. Nevertheless, after Starkie assumed office in 1899, Irish language instruction expanded rapidly. According to one count, fully one-quarter of the over 8,000 national schools were teaching the Irish language within regular school hours by the early twentieth century.10 The introduction of the Irish language into classrooms came too late to stem 182
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the tide of English language usage among schoolchildren, however. In 1911, only 13.3 per cent of the total population, ranging from 3.5 per cent in Leinster and 6.1 per cent in Ulster to 22.1 per cent in Munster and 35.5 per cent in Connaught, spoke Irish.11 By then, most national school pupils were fluent in English rather than Irish, and their parents supported their fluency. In fact, even after independence, when new government policies required all teachers to be fluent in Irish and all school lessons be conducted in the language, language enthusiasts were ultimately forced to acknowledge that English was the mother tongue of all but a shrinking minority in Ireland. School district inspectors’ reports provide insights into the actual state of language instruction in the classroom. According to Inspector J. J. O’Neill’s observations of the classes of Miss McCarthy, Miss Tuomey and Sr. Ambrose in County Dublin in October 1909, for instance, ‘The Irish teaching . . . is in the hands of very young teachers [who] are, however, native speakers of the language . . . and have . . . followed progressive lines in teaching’.12 In contrast, the teaching of other languages was often problematical. After an April 1910 visit, Inspectors R.C.B. Kerin and T. Rea reported that a teacher in County Monaghan ‘is not properly qualified as a teacher of French [and] the class is extremely dull’. In another classroom in the same school, the inspectors noted that ‘The Preparatory . . . German is taken by Miss Clarke, who has insufficient qualifications and knows little of method’. After all, the inspectors concluded, ‘German could be made interesting even for beginners’.13 In a Tipperary school, the inspectors found ‘only one girl [who] took Latin. She is the last survivor from the former state of things, when the school had to take Latin as a subject . . . The languages are now Irish and French’.14 Literary studies apparently fared no better than those of history, geography or foreign language. In a Louth school in April 1910, for instance, Inspectors Kerin and Rea were amazed to find ‘two girls [who] told [us] that Oliver Twist and Oliver Cromwell were two famous names in Irish literature in the eighteenth century’.15 After their March 1910 visit to a County Carlow school, Inspectors Wright and Ensor offered the observation that ‘country-bred girls are not well read, and sometimes lack intelligence’.16 Inspectors O’Neill and Rea apparently agreed, observing that in an Antrim classroom that same month ‘little or nothing is known of general literature’.17 Sometimes inspectors placed the blame for the low level of literary studies among students squarely on the shoulders of teachers. In February 1910, Inspectors Wright and Ensor reported that a County Tipperary teacher ‘took a lesson on one of Steele’s Essays. She read the essay to them sentence by sentence, and then asked questions on the meaning of the phrases. There was no merit in her way of teaching’.18
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inspectors visit all classrooms between two and three times a year. By decreeing that ‘classes shall be at all times open to the Inspectors . . . who will report . . . as to the character and efficiency of the instruction’, the Commissioners overrode local taxpayers’, like Daniel Kiernan and his Aghaloora neighbours’, influence over school policy and teacher appointments.19 Commissioner guidelines instructed inspectors to evaluate the physical as well as the intellectual conditions in the classes they visited, and a teacher’s responsibilities included keeping schools ‘properly furnished, lighted, cleaned . . . and dusted every day’. Oversight of the ‘internal whitewashing or distempering the walls at least once a year and washing out the rooms with carbolic soap, or other disinfectant, at least three times a year’ fell on teacher shoulders also.20 Teachers were also assessed on the basis of the availability and condition of such classroom furnishings as clocks, maps, blackboards and books. The condition of outdoor toilets, the notorious ‘out offices’, was another constant concern to classroom observers. The tone of an inspection report varied with the school, the teacher and, of course, the inspector, and schools earned and lost their reputations over time. In February 1907, for instance, Inspector Louis S. Daly observed classes in the Caherciveen National School Number 2 in Kerry. ‘[The] teacher ought to superintend pupils at play’, he suggested since, ‘the playground is rather muddy and the dividing wall is beginning to give’. Furthermore, ‘the [out] offices ought to be cleaned out’. In January 1908, Daly revisited the school and reported that ‘the pupils of this little school are bright and nicely mannered [but] the teaching of arithmetic ought to be sounder . . . Unless these defects . . . are removed it will be impossible that the school can retain the grading now assigned’. Daly finished his report by cautioning the teacher to ‘endeavour to avoid undue loss of time . . . [A]t one lesson today twelve minutes was lost while the teacher distributed copies, sharpened pencils for Drawing, etc., while all the time a class of infants stood on the floor idle’. Moreover, Daly observed that ‘some of the [school’s] woodwork wants painting. The clock should be out in working order. There is no globe’.21 On 20 October 1908, Inspector J.V. Doody visited the school and reported that ‘the decline in attendance has been followed by a decline in general proficiency’. Furthermore, ‘the walls require limewashing and [the] woodwork painting . . . [M]aps of the British Islands . . . and a globe are required’.22 Eventually a map arrived but, as Inspector D. Lehane noted in his report dated 12 September 1910, ‘a map of the British Isles [has] been provided but . . . not suspended in the school room’.23 Inspector Kane visited a year later on 18 October 1911, and reported that while ‘the tone of the school is good . . . there is [still] no globe’.24 The school lacked even more basic amenities. According to Inspector Doody, the school’s ‘out offices’ were missing a door.25 In May 1917, Caherciveen’s National School Number 2 received its last inspection, and Inspector E.T. Darmon’s enigmatic entry suggested a sad fate for a school that had steadily lost students over the past several years. ‘At least three days notice of all closings should be sent to the Inspectors’, he testily reported.26 184
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In addition to the all-seeing district inspectors, school managers watched teachers closely. In 1895, former teacher W. Erskine summed up teacher antipathy to this tight regulation in a pamphlet calling the largely clerical managers ‘an interfering lot’ who saddled teachers with two masters, the district inspectors and the local managers. ‘Cases are turning up every week’, Erskine told his readers, ‘of the injustice which teachers suffer from cruel, tyrannical managers, and [teachers] have no redress’. To support his accusation, Erskine gave the example of a female assistant teacher given three months’ notice to quit her job because she ‘had not been an enthusiastic participant in working for the [school manager’s wife’s charity] bazaars, [or] collecting money for the church’, or performing ‘other extraneous duties’. Despite such obvious wrongs, teachers ‘are ashamed to parade their degradation and they are afraid to rebel lest it should prevent them from getting another situation’. According to Erskine, taking a teaching job in a national school subjected the teacher to a system of ‘perpetual espionage’.27 The scrutiny teachers faced both inside and outside the classroom that had so outraged Erskine stemmed from the Commissioners’ 1869 Rules and Regulations for teachers which stipulated that they ‘be persons of Christian sentiment, of calm temper, and discretion . . . [obedient] to the law and [loyal] to their sovereign’. Required to promote ‘by precept and example, Cleanliness, Neatness, and Decency’, teachers were to be exemplars of ‘the great rule of regularity and order – A TIME AND PLACE FOR EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PROPER TIME AND PLACE’. Furthermore, despite their low wages, teachers were not to moonlight on other jobs, especially in pubs. They were also to avoid all public political gatherings in order to ‘abstain from controversy’, and they were forbidden to attend all fairs and markets.28 Isolated as they were from these popular community events, teacher rectitude would therefore be unassailable. Almost a half century later, the Commissioners’ 1914 edition of the Rules and Regulations continued to forbid teachers to moonlight ‘in any job that will interfere with their teaching’, or ‘assist in or run pubs or even to live in a house owned by a pub keeper’, or ‘attend political meetings or run for Parliament’. Voting, the only political activity left open to them, was of course limited to males alone. The same rule book required teachers to ‘sign in and out under the principal’s supervision every day’.29 If a teacher failed to keep her classroom clean, or violated the rules in any other way, The manager shall have the absolute [emphasis added] power to determine the . . . employment [of a teacher] at any time, without previous notice, on payment . . . to the teacher of three months’ . . . salary . . . The manager shall also have the power to determine [a teacher’s] employment, without previous notice, for misconduct . . . [If the] manager shall obtain [the approval of] the Commissioners of National Education . . . the teacher shall not be entitled to any compensation.30
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The competition between the less-qualified but popular local favourite Margaret Smyth and her more qualified rival, the outsider Suzanne Wilson, for the Aghaloora female teaching post also illustrates the changing nature of teacher training in the late nineteenth century. In fact, teacher training had been a perennial issue of debate in educational circles since the beginning of the national system in the 1830s. Throughout this debate, the Commissioners sought ways to prevent political favouritism in the hiring of teachers, especially in cases like Smyth’s where the local candidate had scored badly on qualifying examinations. Originally, the training of teachers in Irish schools followed Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster’s monitorial system pioneered in England in the 1790s. Designed to provide non-denominational education for the poor, each Lancastrian school was to be run by an adult ‘model’ teacher assisted in the classroom by her most promising senior pupils, or monitors. Monitors, who were often the same age as their charges, kept order in the classroom. On the basis of their classroom experience, monitors could eventually become teachers themselves.31 By the late 1830s, the monitorial system was under fire, accused of producing inadequately trained teachers, and a new method of teacher preparation was introduced, that of the ‘pupil-teacher’. Henceforward, the most intelligent pupils were apprenticed at the age of 13 for five years in their own schools. During their apprenticeships, these pupil-teachers taught younger children during school hours and received further instruction themselves after school. At the age of 18, female pupil-teachers were required to pass an entrance examination for the Marlborough Street Model School in Dublin, which offered two three-month courses of instruction for would-be teachers each year. There, teacher trainees studied the ‘theory and practice of teaching’, along with instruction in ‘plain needlework . . . the art of cutting out and making up articles of female wearing apparel . . . [and] the arts of domestic economy, such as cottage cookery, washing, ironing, mangling, and other useful branches of household management’.32 Only graduates were granted teacher certification. By 1900, there were three teacher training colleges for Catholic women in Ireland, and the training course now lasted for two years. The uncertified teachers who lacked this preparation earned lower salaries than certified teachers until they completed a one-year training course after teaching for three years.33 Despite the Commissioners’ hopes that teacher training would improve with the advent of formal preparation at the Marlborough Street School, many teachers remained uncertified.34 As a result, more stringent methods were implemented to upgrade teacher education. In 1862, the ‘Revised Code’ for schools in England made the results earned by pupils on an annual examination in the three Rs the criterion of teacher salaries for the next year. This innovation, known as ‘payment-by-results’, was adopted in Irish schools in 1872. Meant to motivate teachers to excel in the classroom, the results system made little noticeable improvement in overall teacher competence, although observers 186
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remarked on the improvement in student handwriting, spelling and arithmetic as teachers drilled for results on examinations. Eventually, in the late 1890s, the payment-by-results system was jettisoned.35 In the midst of the ongoing debates about their qualifications, teachers were expected to master a strictly structured curriculum. According to the Commissioners, ‘ordinary subjects’ for classroom instruction included English (‘reading, spelling, writing, composition and grammar’), geography, history, arithmetic, singing, drawing, needlework, laundry work, physical drill, manual instruction, elementary science, and cookery. Lessons in hygiene and temperance were also part of a teacher’s repertoire.36 Teachers were further enjoined to focus on ‘reading, spelling, prose, and poetry’, as well as the ‘general outline of the history of Great Britain and Ireland’, and citizenship. Writing classes practised penmanship, composition and grammar, while geography classes studied maps of Ireland and Europe. Arithmetic lessons gave instruction in money, weights, measures and ‘mental arithmetic’, which in the upper grades included decimals, averages and square roots. Drawing and singing classes rounded the school day out. ‘Physical Drill’ consisted of callisthenics and marching classes and girls’ ‘deportment during games’.37 ‘Cookery and laundry-work’, the Commissioners instructed, ‘form part of the ordinary school programme for girls enrolled in the fifth and higher standards (and all girls over age eleven)’, and women teachers were expected to have mastered these skills themselves. Teachers taught their first-year students the ‘cleaning and care of the kitchen stove [and/or] fireplace’, along with ‘disposal of refuse [and] the simple treatment of cuts and burns’. ‘Practical Cookery’ was practised by preparing tea and cocoa, porridge and gruel, poached eggs and toast, fried bacon and fish, cabbage, and potato soup. Second-year students learned how to create daily and weekly household schedules, set a dinner table and keep ‘simple’ household accounts. Laundering instruction taught girls how to clean and otherwise care for tubs, irons and clothes-lines, and the chemistry of cleaning materials like soap, soda, borax and starch. Removing stains and fancy ironing completed the curriculum. The daughters of farm families were also taught the importance of personal as well as household cleanliness. Needlework stood above all in the hierarchy of domestic instruction, and an hour of each school day was devoted to classes ranging from knitting for beginners to dressmaking for advanced pupils. Domestic education classes were so important to the Commissioners, in fact, that they offered schools 5s premiums for each girl who attended at least half of them each year.38 Teachers, of course, could also lose their jobs for poor performance or for breaking the Commissioners’ rules by living over a pub, joining political groups or running for office. Dismissal was not supposed to be arbitrary, however. According to the Commissioners’ rules, a teacher had to be given ‘fair warning’ and due process before she could be fired, and the report of a solitary inspector alone was not sufficient to get a teacher ousted from her job. Furthermore, a 187
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teacher was allowed to write directly to the Commissioners if she had a complaint about an inspector or manager.39 Teachers had to be between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five at the time of their first hiring, and all teachers were on probation during their first years in the job. Principal teachers topped the teaching hierarchy, followed by two ranks of probationary assistant teachers. Each teacher rank was subdivided into three divisions, and promotion from one division to the next depended on an individual’s training, seniority, service and ‘general attainments’.40 A teacher’s ability to attract students and keep them coming to school was perhaps the single most important factor in gaining her a promotion and an increase in salary, however. Nevertheless, no matter how large her class, no teacher could move up to the next grade until she had spent a minimum of three years in her current position. Furthermore, the Commissioners insisted that ‘the successful teaching of cookery has an important bearing on the award of increments of salaries and the promotion of teachers’.41 In order to reach the highest teaching rank, therefore, a young woman had to win appointment as a pupil-teacher, graduate from the training school course, win a first appointment as a probationary assistant teacher, and work her way up through the subdivisions of each teaching rank. Since no teacher could move to the next highest rank in less than three years, a woman hired at age eighteen at the entry rank of junior assistant teacher would be at least age 36 before she reached the lowest division of the highest teaching rank, that of principal teacher. Since only teachers with ‘higher ability’ could win promotions, and these abilities were largely determined by inspector reports, many women were considerably older than thirty-six before they attained the highest teaching rank, if they reached it at all. In addition to the rigorous promotion system, teacher ability could also be recognised by money ‘gratuities’, paid on a half-yearly basis at the end of March and again at the end of September. ‘Ordinary’ national school teachers could earn these premiums for ‘Order, Neatness, and Cleanliness’. If a school manager or a district inspector knew, however, ‘of any just cause for withholding the Premium from the Teacher’, he was ‘to return the receipt [authorising the payment] unsigned, and state his reasons for so doing’.42 ‘Good Service’, or supplemental salaries, could also be earned by teachers who maintained an average daily attendance of at least thirty-five pupils and who had amassed at least eight years of service. Nevertheless, ‘no teacher [is] eligible for such Supplemental Salary who shall have been . . . fined for misconduct or neglect of duty, or on whose school a decidedly unfavourable report shall have been made within the preceding three years’. Supplements were also not paid to a teacher ‘who shall not have shown . . . throughout [her] whole career, to have been attentive and painstaking, and mindful of all details of schoolkeeping’.43 Despite these safeguards, however, as the case of Margaret Smyth in Aghaloora and other cases elsewhere in the country indicate, inspectors and 188
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managers wielded considerable influence over teacher job security and promotion. One notorious inspector, W.H. Welply, was even accused of deliberately making hostile reports so that particular teachers were denied promotions. After Welply visited principal teacher Mary Morris’s Kerry classroom in August 1907, for instance, he damned her with faint criticism when he reported to the Commissioners that ‘Miss Morris will do well to study . . . the part I have marked – p. 9 – in Notes for Teachers . . . carefully and apply the suggestions contained in them’. Furthermore, Welply criticised Morris for poor record-keeping. ‘Miss Morris’, he wrote, should ‘without delay . . . enter any other [reports in] arrears in [her] books’.44 In 1911, Welply was transferred to the Tipperary school district, and teachers there accused him of deliberately trying to ‘reduce’ all teacher evaluations. In an August 1912 speech that was later published, a Tipperary teacher, one Mansfield, publicly objected to Welply’s tactics. News of the dissent reached the Commissioners and they fired Mansfield in October of that year. With their manager’s approval, however, Mansfield and his wife, an assistant teacher at the same school as her husband, continued in their posts without pay. When a Dublin newspaper, under the headline, ‘Ottoman Tyranny in the Education Office’ reported Mansfield’s dismissal, the Commissioners, perhaps fearing further negative publicity, reinstated him with pay in November 1915.45
Resistance Although the existence of husbands and wives drawing combined salaries caused resentment among local taxpayers in many school districts, spousal teaching teams like the Mansfields were fairly common, especially in rural areas, since marriage was not a bar to a woman’s teaching career until 1933.46 The Mansfields are also indicative of another trend in relationships among teachers, that of significant differences between the salaries paid to male and to female teachers. In the Mansfields’ case, the husband was a principal teacher, earning a far higher salary than his assistant teacher wife. At every teaching rank and at every grade level, in fact, male teachers earned considerably more than their female colleagues, even if training levels and length of service were equal. In 1914, for instance, the maximum annual salary for the highest-paid female teacher was £151, while top-ranked male teachers received £185 for the same work. Male and female teachers were paid four times a year, on the 15th of January, April, July and October, although the Commissioners reserved the right to reduce a teacher’s salary at any time, ‘on account of inefficiency or other sufficient cause’.47 As teacher training and hiring practices became more rigorous in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, women teachers began to demand more economic and political equity with their male colleagues. Female teachers joined their male colleagues at the first Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) Congress held in Dublin in August 1868 and, 189
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in 1907, the organisation’s Executive Council gained its first women members.48 This organised counter-force to the growing regulation of teachers by Dublinbased school bureaucrats gave women a public voice in a period when women’s suffrage remained a distant goal and Nationalist politics largely ignored the possibility of a gender dimension in the quest for Irish independence. No teacher, male or female, had job security when INTO was founded in the late 1860s. Managers could fire them at will and without notice by simply refusing to continue to pay their salaries. In 1879, however, teachers were granted the right to at least three months’ notice of dismissal or, if they were removed from the classroom immediately, three months’ salary instead.49 When a manager sided with a teacher against the Commissioners, however, the Commissioners could overrule the manager, as they did in the Smyth case in Aghaloora in 1886 and the Mansfield case in Tipperary in 1912. The majority of school managers were priests, and they distrusted INTO from its start, insisting that ‘the efficiency of our schools comes before the comforts of our teachers’. Between 1899 and 1905, in fact, school managers in Ulster banned the hiring of INTO members, and in Armagh a new teacher had to swear, ‘I am not a member of the National Teachers’ Organisation and I furthermore undertake not to become a member of the aforesaid association . . . without first tendering my resignation’.50 What have been seen as ‘strained relations’ between teachers and district inspectors were another ‘hardy annual [item] on the INTO Congress agenda’ in the early years of the twentieth century. INTO members especially resented the 1899 appointment of Dr Starkie as the new Resident Commissioner of the National Schools.51 Starkie, a former professor of Greek at the Queens College Galway and a Catholic, possessed a domineering personality ‘entirely unsuited for [his] position’ as Resident Commissioner, according to INTO members. His willingness to fire teachers who dared to criticise him, and the fact that his district inspectors were given wide new powers over classroom instruction and personnel matters were the chief complaints levelled at him by teachers. INTO members also claimed that Starkie ignored teacher appeals against unfavourable inspector reports, and ‘hundreds’ of teachers were fired for alleged ‘inefficiency’ during Starkie’s first twelve years in the job. Furthermore, since incremental pay depended on three successive ‘satisfactory’ inspector reports, many teachers found themselves receiving two ‘satisfactory’ ratings only, followed by an ‘unsatisfactory’ rating that denied them the salary increment.52 INTO members singled out two inspectors as being particularly unfair to teachers, and one of the two was the same Inspector Welply who had denied Kerry teacher Mary Morris her third ‘satisfactory’ report in 1907 and who had caused Mansfield’s dismissal from his Tipperary post in 1912. In 1913, at closed hearings, the Commissioners learned that in the course of one year, over 900 teachers had appealed to Starkie against unsatisfactory inspector reports such as Welply’s. Starkie had, without consulting the other Commissioners, denied the vast majority of these appeals. Moreover, some appeals were even sent back to 190
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the inspector who wrote the offending reports, often causing reprisals against individual teachers by the same inspectors in future reports.53 The Commissioners overruled Starkie’s request to allow Welply to testify before them, and instead made recommendations designed to prevent abuses of power in the future. Henceforward, all appeals against inspectors’ reports were to be given full consideration, and the inspector’s dreaded ‘Observation Book’ would be renamed the more teacher-friendly ‘Suggestion Book’. Furthermore, annual increments in salary would be automatic in the absence of a bad report. Even with these reforms, however, inspectors retained the right to deny promotions, and teachers continued to dread the inspector’s visit. Inspectors were aware of these fears. In May 1910, for example, two inspectors complained that their visit to a school in Queen’s County (Laois) ‘was hampered by the unwillingness of the [teacher] to teach. Where no refusal was made it was clear that the teacher was in such a condition of nervousness that she could not do herself justice’. They found the same fear at a school in County Kilkenny. Here, ‘the teacher claimed to be quite unable, and even unwilling, to teach before an inspector’. Another inspector, one McGuire, had even worse luck when he visited a school in Mayo in that same year. ‘I visited [the school]’, he reported, but ‘the Headmistress informed me that she . . . did not wish the school to be inspected.’54 Despite teacher nervousness, when local managers disregarded the Commissioners’ rules, many individual teachers took their protests to court. In 1897, for instance, the school manager fired Mrs O’Sullivan, a County Kildare principal teacher with thirty-two years of classroom experience, without severance pay on only four days’ notice because of her reaction to a complaint about the behaviour of her girls’ choir. Like Margaret Smyth before her, O’Sullivan refused to turn in the school key until she received the three months’ severance pay due her. When the manager forced the school door open and installed a new teacher in O’Sullivan’s place, the veteran teacher took her case to court and won a £200 settlement.55 Some school managers tried to interfere in their teachers’ lives in even more drastic ways than denying them their salaries. In September 1914, for instance, County Clare teacher Michael O’Shea was fired by his manager, the local parish priest, when O’Shea refused the priest’s demand that he marry the school’s assistant teacher. Since O’Shea occupied the school’s official teacher residence and the priest believed female assistants were hard to keep, marriage to O’Shea would provide the assistant with both housing and incentive to remain at her post. O’Shea refused to go quietly, and as in so many of the controversies between managers and teachers, he also refused to give up his key, in this case, to the teacher’s residence. When the priest finally evicted him, the parents of his students gave O’Shea and his new non-teacher wife a cottage and sent their children to O’Shea for lessons, withdrawing them from the local school. The priest retaliated with denunciations from the altar, going so far as to deny 191
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Confirmation to children being tutored by O’Shea, and the other Sacraments to their parents.56 O’Shea lost his job for balking at making a colleague his wife. Although the colleague’s feelings about her very public rejection have not been recorded, the priest/manager’s attempts to dominate his teachers in even their most personal decisions, and the local population’s active resistance to these attempts, indicate that even in 1914, teacher rebellion had not been entirely quelled. Even feisty teachers who resisted managers and inspectors, however, rarely kept their jobs.
Unintended consequences Despite the conservative nature of the curriculum and the unevenness of classroom learning, women teachers at the turn of the last century inspired the girls sitting in their classrooms to look beyond the parameters of their own lives. The seemingly independent, educated, well-groomed ladies teaching in Irish schools offered a new role model of female potential to the girls under their care.57 In an era when few went beyond four years of primary education, teachers were women who had achieved their status not through birth or marriage, but through diligence at school, a diligence any schoolgirl could imitate. Although national school teachers faced professional restrictions, Kerry-born Nora O’Leary was one of the girls who never forgot her Castle Gregory teacher Mrs Crowley’s elegant clothes and graceful figure even after Nora emigrated to Chicago in the early 1920s. Even more importantly, Nora never forgot how Mrs Crowley introduced her to the possibilities open to an educated woman, a legacy she passed down to her American-born daughter Joan, a teacher in Chicago’s public schools.58 The national schools had a profound impact on pupils like Nora, although not necessarily the one designed by school authorities. Instead of creating thrifty workers satisfied with their lot, national school teachers like Mrs Crowley opened a window of opportunity for young women like Nora O’Leary, destined to leave their homeland for American cities like Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, cities where the daughters of former national school pupils like Nora’s Joan became the largest single ethnic group among public school teachers at the turn of the last century.59 Inspired by their memories of their own teachers in Ireland, Nora and her generation saw their American daughters achieve the same lady-like and educated status as the glamorous women in the classrooms they remembered from their Irish childhoods. This female geographical and educational mobility was the unintended consequence of a conservative Irish school system.
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11 ‘THE CHARM OF ALLOWING PEOPLE TO MANAGE THEIR O W N A F FA I R S ’ Political perspectives on emergency relief in late nineteenth-century Ireland Virginia Crossman
Introduction In April 1886 John Morley, recently appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, introduced a measure to relieve destitution in the west of Ireland caused by the failure of the potato crop. The Relief of Distress Act relaxed the provisions governing the distribution of outdoor relief and authorised grants up to a total of £20,000 to be made to six western Poor Law unions to supplement the resources of the Poor Law. The six boards of guardians – Belmullet, Clifden, Galway, Oughterard, Swinford and Westport – immediately set about putting the provisions of the act into operation, and the number of people receiving outdoor relief soared. Within five weeks the total number of recipients had jumped from under 2,000 to over 96,000. It was soon clear that far more than £20,000 was going to be expended by the boards and they were warned by the Local Government Board that any expenditure above the amount of the parliamentary grant would have to be met out of the rates. This led to a rapid reversal of the relief policy that had been adopted in the six unions and the summary removal of large numbers of people from the relief lists. Despite this attempt to limit the cost of relief, over £36,000 was spent administering outdoor relief in the scheduled unions during the late spring and early summer of 1886 of which only £19,400 was covered by grants under the act, thus leaving the boards facing considerable debts. An official inquiry into the administration of the Relief Act concluded that the manner in which relief had been distributed was both extravagant and careless. The guardians had made ‘no genuine effort . . . to restrict the relief to those who were properly entitled to it’, considering it unnecessary ‘to check the excessive relief so long as they anticipated that the cost would be borne . . . by the public funds’.1 Tracing the history of the 1886 Relief Act provides a means of exploring 193
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both policy and identity formation. The episode came to be seen as highly damaging to the boards of guardians and the cause of Irish self-government, the distribution of relief having generally been directed by elected, Nationalist guardians. As the Dublin Mail gleefully noted in 1888, the inquiry report ‘surely . . . affords a golden text for the Unionist platform’.2 Nationalist representatives and commentators were forced onto the defensive in a striking reversal of their usual approach on issues of famine relief. Ever since the Great Famine, the provision of emergency relief had provided good propaganda for Nationalists. What were seen as inadequate and tardy relief measures had been presented as symptomatic of the failures of British rule in Ireland and of the subordination of Irish to British interests. In this case, however, the victims appeared to be not the starving poor but the ratepayers. Those seemingly at fault were not the representatives of British rule, but the representatives of the Irish nation. A major theme in Unionist rhetoric was the portrayal of a home rule Ireland rapidly descending into chaos. Drawing on traditional stereotypes of the Irish as wild and savage, Unionist propaganda represented Irish Nationalists as congenitally incapable of self-government. Allegations of maladministration and corruption by Nationalist Poor Law guardians thus provided excellent material for Unionist propagandists. As we shall see, Nationalists found it difficult to counter such propaganda. Focused primarily on attacking misgovernment and oppression of the Irish by the British and their agents in Ireland, Nationalist rhetoric could not easily accommodate a reversal of this position. Debate over the best way to govern Ireland split the British establishment. With the Liberal party committed to home rule, Conservatives evinced misgivings regarding any form of Irish self-government, local or national. Leading Conservatives such as Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour believed that the answer to Ireland’s problems lay in strong, centralised government directed from the centre by British ministers and administered in the localities by government officials. This view dictated Balfour’s approach to the distressed unions in 1887 and was to lead him to establish the Congested Districts Board in 1891. It was also to bring him into conflict with the department responsible for overseeing the activities of boards of guardians, the Local Government Board. Unlike Balfour, the Board sought, wherever possible, to avoid open confrontation with local representatives, preferring to achieve its objectives through co-operation and consensus. While Balfour wished to impose solutions from above, the Local Government Board sought to achieve assimilation from below. Board officials saw their role as both supervisory and advisory, tutoring local guardians in the art of government. This can be seen as part of a broader political agenda, for by teaching the Irish how to be efficient administrators they would also be teaching them how to be British. The more effectively the Irish were assimilated into the administrative system, the more securely Ireland could be assimilated into the United Kingdom. Balfour’s rejection of this approach reflects his rejection of consensus politics. The Relief Act of 1886 was introduced at a critical moment in the develop194
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ment of political identities in Ireland. The act was intended to embody a new spirit of government following the conversion of the Liberal party to the cause of home rule. The official inquiry into its operation, and the subsequent condemnation of the western Poor Law boards for their lax administration, took place after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill, in a very different political climate. Far from wishing to foster local autonomy, Conservative ministers wished to restrict it. In the Irish localities, the political power of landlords was on the wane, a process evidenced most clearly in their declining influence on Poor Law boards. Thus while the leaders of the Nationalist movement were attempting to forge a national identity whose strength and cohesiveness derived in part from a sense of victimhood and alienation, local activists were grappling with the problem not of how to gain power, but of how to exercise it. The tensions between regional and national identities were reflected in political discourse. Unionists celebrated Ireland as a distinctive region within the United Kingdom. Nationalists rejected regional status as a denial of their national destiny and prioritised national over regional or local identity.3 The following discussion explores the troubled relationship between the local and the national through an examination of responses to the Relief Act.
Emergency relief in post-famine Ireland During the 1880s and 1890s, there was growing concern within government that the succession of emergency relief measures introduced since 1879 was having a demoralising effect on the small farmers and labourers of the west, encouraging them to rely on outside assistance rather than on their own efforts. Reporting from Ballina in County Mayo in March 1883, the future vice president of the Local Government Board, H.A. Robinson, then a local government inspector, observed that the people in these vastly overpopulated and distressed localities are living in the hope that government interference will come to their aid and prop them up in their untenable position a little longer, and they seem also to have formed the opinion that the government can take the place of private enterprise, and speculate in schemes of possible and impossible desirability. Robinson believed that economic conditions in the west were basically unsustainable. Distress, he predicted, would ‘only be felt by that class of persons who live in a state of chronic poverty on holdings, the gross produce of which could not maintain them, at the best of times, from harvest to harvest’. If extraordinary measures of relief were adopted, he warned, ‘the discontinuance of them at any time hereafter must invariably leave this class of small tenants in the same state that they are at present’.4 Having been acting as a local government inspector in the west since the beginning of 1880, Robinson had become 195
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convinced that the nature and extent of poverty in the region made it both impractical and irresponsible to attempt to relieve ‘distress’. All government could and should do was to prevent starvation. These views were shared by Robinson’s senior colleagues and were reflected in official policy. Emergency relief was restricted to the destitute, and its distribution governed by the same principles as ordinary relief. When the boards of the scheduled unions attempted to administer the 1886 Relief Act on the basis that emergency relief was different from ordinary relief, and should be governed by less punitive principles, they found themselves in direct conflict with government. The Local Government Board successfully resisted demands for the introduction of emergency relief works in 1883, with, according to Robinson, entirely satisfactory results. Finding ‘they had no relief to expect but the workhouse, [the people] husbanded their resources, worked hard at the fishing and kelp making, an increased number migrated to England to obtain employment, and the cheapest Indian meal took the place of the usual flour and oatmeal. In this way . . . the distress was tided over.’5 The longer-term effect was held to have been equally beneficial. ‘No more was heard of famine’, Robinson recalled in his memoirs, ‘or the need for relief works till John Morley came to Ireland . . . to govern the country according to Irish ideas’.6 Robinson’s account of the 1886 Relief Act presents Morley as the victim of circumstance. Committed to home rule, and supported by Irish MPs ‘who wanted to see English gold circulated in Ireland’, Morley was in no position to resist the demands for government intervention. For, ‘how could the most evil-disposed person succeed in depriving the farmers of their famine, which heretofore had always meant free grants for work, relief, and seed potatoes?’7
Relief of Distress Bill The genesis of the Relief Bill was, however, rather more complex than Robinson suggested. Ever since the summer of 1885, Dublin Castle had been receiving reports of serious crop failures in the west, coupled with warnings of widespread destitution.8 Local Government Board inspectors were sent to the west to investigate, and voluntary relief schemes encouraged. The Quaker philanthropist, James Hack Tuke, was approached, for example, to see if he would organise a relief fund. Tuke initially declined but he was eventually prevailed upon by Morley to establish a fund to purchase and distribute seed potatoes to remote parts of the west such as Achill and Tory islands.9 Other charitable schemes were set up under the auspices of Dublin Corporation, the Irish Times and the local clergy. The reluctance of government to act caused irritation but little surprise in Ireland. Just as in 1847, when ‘political economy . . . would not permit English statesmen to move a hand to stay the tide of distress until it was too late’, so now, the Nation observed in March 1886, ‘the foreign Government cannot move, and private benevolence must do its best to relieve temporarily the sufferings of the
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unfortunate creatures who are famishing in the midst of a plentiful supply of food’. The lesson was clear: ‘we could manage these things better ourselves [and] the sooner this tinkering, unreasonable system of management is altered the better for all of us’.10 This was to argue for self-government by reason of British incapacity. Since Britain had proved itself incapable of governing Ireland, the Irish did not need to prove themselves proficient. Having visited the distressed areas, Tuke rapidly came to the conclusion that further aid was necessary. Not only would his own fund need to be expanded to include the mainland as well as the islands, but ‘it appeared evident that other relief measures were absolutely required to bridge over the time which must elapse between the planting and gathering of the crops’.11 He travelled back to Dublin to make the case for government intervention. Tuke’s report, combined with other representations and the reports of local government inspectors, prompted Morley to act. Tuke was later to claim that he had advised Morley to place the distribution and management of any relief fund in the hands of an independent commission, arguing that ‘no local board or authority then existing in the districts, had the courage and strength requisite to withstand the combined influence and importunity for a share of the spoil which would at once be brought to bear on the guardians by friends and neighbours’. Morley’s reply, he recalled, ‘was most significant, “We must make use of the Local Authorities!”’12 The Relief Bill, Tuke implied, had reflected political not welfare priorities. The measure introduced by Morley on 1 April 1886, made available a sum of £40,000 to be expended in grants to the boards of guardians of five western unions (Belmullet, Clifden, Galway, Oughterard and Westport13) to enable them to fund an extension of outdoor relief. The money was to come from the Irish Church Surplus Fund.14 Irish MPs welcomed the spirit of the bill but were less enthusiastic about the content. A number questioned the wisdom of distributing relief through the boards of guardians. Poor Law guardians in the west, T.M. Healy maintained, were almost all ‘people of a class who have very little sympathy with these poor cottars . . . these are the people who will not give outdoor relief’.15 Considerable disappointment was expressed at the absence of any provision for public works schemes. The advantage of such schemes, Thomas Sexton argued, was that people would be given wages rather than hand-outs: ‘you will not injure their self-respect or demoralise them, while you will give them effectual means of maintaining themselves’.16 Anxious to appear responsive to Irish opinion, Morley amended the bill. The sum to be made available to Poor Law guardians was reduced from £40,000 to £20,000; the remainder being set aside to fund the repair and construction of roads and piers in the distressed districts. And the government was empowered to appoint special agents to assist in the administration of relief in the western isles should this prove necessary.17
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Operation of the Relief Act Irish MPs appear to have been afraid that the guardians would adopt a restrictive and parsimonious approach to the distribution of relief, as they had in the past. From the number of references to ex-officio guardians and landlords, it seems to have been assumed that their interests would dictate the actions of the boards. Yet the power of ex-officio guardians had been considerably eroded in the scheduled unions.18 Elected guardians standing on a Nationalist platform had controlled the board of Belmullet Union since 1882, and by the time the bill became law, Nationalists controlled three of the six scheduled unions. The Poor Law elections that had taken place shortly before the introduction of the Relief Bill had seen significant Nationalist victories, and these advances were consolidated when the boards came to elect their officers. On 10 April the Nation welcomed the fact that in various unions throughout the country where the positions of chair, vice-chair and deputy vice-chair had previously been held by ‘representatives of the old inimical garrison, a determined and in most cases a successful effort has been made to oust them and substitute men possessed of national sympathies and independent spirit’. Westport was one such union. On his election as chair, following the retirement of Lord John Browne who had filled the position for the previous thirty years, J.J. Louden noted that when he was first elected a Poor Law guardian he had been the only Nationalist on the board; now the board was ‘essentially and intrinsically national’.19 Even in Swinford, Galway and Clifden where ex-officio guardians occupied some or, in the case of Clifden, all of the board offices, their influence over board decisions could no longer be taken for granted. So many ex-officio guardians in western unions were non-resident that it was relatively easy for the elected guardians to command working majorities on the boards. The failure to acknowledge this development reflects the primacy of national over local politics. Local activists were valued primarily in relation to their contribution to national campaigns. Thus while Nationalist victories in Poor Law elections were welcomed as indications of popular support for the movement, their significance for the conduct of local administration was a secondary consideration. The pursuit of local interests would, it was feared, undermine the unity and strength of the wider movement. T.M. Healy had declared in 1885 that the electoral aim of Nationalists must be ‘to efface and blot out every local distinction and recognise only the interests of the country at large’.20 A central flaw in the Relief Act lay in the confusion over whom it was aimed at and what it was intended to achieve, a confusion that left Poor Law guardians and government officials operating at cross-purposes. The title of the measure – ‘An Act to make temporary provision for the better Relief of the destitute Poor in Ireland’ – implied that it would only apply to those actually destitute. But it was described in Parliament and was welcomed in Ireland more as a measure to relieve people who were not technically destitute but who had very little in the way of provisions and no credit. In Westport, Louden welcomed the act as ‘a
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gift to help the people’, declaring that ‘no money expended under [it] would be in any way chargeable to the rates’.21 Nationalist guardians believed that Morley had publicly endorsed a more generous and inclusive approach to emergency relief as advocated by the Catholic hierarchy in 1883. The impression that the act was aimed at a different class of people from those relieved under the ordinary Poor Law was strengthened by Morley’s acceptance of a suggestion from the Dublin North MP, J.J. Clancy, that no one receiving relief under the act should lose their voting rights.22 (Under the Poor Laws, paupers were debarred from voting in elections.) Further confusion arose from the provision that all able-bodied men in receipt of outdoor relief should be set a task of work. To many guardians this was equivalent to setting up relief works to provide people with employment. The confusion is evident in a resolution passed by the Westport Board on 1 May recommending that people giving labour under the Relief Act be paid in cash each week. The proposer of the resolution, P.J. Kelly, argued that these were poor but ‘high-spirited’ people, ‘who do not want to beg but seek employment, and who do not wish to be so demoralised as to receive in return for their labour a little Indian meal’.23 The Local Government Board responded by reminding the guardians that the act restricted relief to food and fuel. Food was given not as the price of labour but as relief of destitution, and should not therefore be regarded as wages.24 Those receiving relief appear to have regarded it in the same light as the guardians, as a gift from government. As a gift, it represented a different kind of assistance from that normally available under the Poor Laws. It was assumed that the cost would not fall on the rates, and, more importantly, that there was no shame or stigma associated with accepting it. Indeed, so many people were receiving relief that some non-recipients felt a sense of exclusion. As Patrick M. Nicholas from Swinford Union explained to the Inquiry Commission, ‘when I see them all going, I went’.25 Once it was known that the relief would have to be paid for locally, attitudes towards it changed. Acceptance of relief now threatened to brand people as destitute and consequently as lacking in respectability. As a result, people now sought to disassociate themselves from the relief operation. A number of witnesses before the Inquiry Commission claimed that though they had accepted relief, they had not really needed it. When asked whether he had been destitute, Patrick Burke replied, ‘in a manner, but then I could do without [relief]’, adding, ‘there was richer than me did it’. Like other witnesses, Burke did not want to be seen as being on the same level as ordinary paupers. Significantly, he tried to associate himself through his acceptance of relief with the rich rather than the poor.26 Much of the criticism of the administration of the Relief Act related to the failure to impose any effective check on applicants or to restrict relief ‘to those properly entitled to it’. Such criticism failed to acknowledge that the guardians and relieving officers in the scheduled unions were utilising a different definition, and thus a different test, of destitution in their distribution of relief from that normally applied. They were operating an inclusive rather than an exclusive 199
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interpretation of relief policy. Patrick Molloy, a relieving officer in Oughterard Union, told the Inquiry Commission that he had considered people destitute if they had nothing to sustain them. Asked for his definition of a destitute man, Molloy replied, ‘a poor man [who] has no means . . . he would be destitute if he had something and could get nothing for it, and if he was refused credit’. Peter O’Malley, chair of Belmullet Union, accounted for the presence of men with cattle and sheep on the relief lists by explaining that ‘the markets were bad – there were no prices. They could not sell at any price. A man with a few head of cattle could not make sale of them, and they were as much in need of relief as people with nothing at all’. Under these circumstances it was thought that an application for relief was in itself sufficient qualification of entitlement. It was enough to ensure that relief was given in food, generally Indian meal. John Nolan, a relieving officer in Belmullet Union, told the Inquiry Commission that the majority of applicants received only meal, ‘just as a test of destitution’.27 Such views were not shared by Local Government Board officials who insisted that a much stricter definition of destitution must be applied. Many ex-officio guardians also adhered to a conventional interpretation of entitlement. Recipients of poor relief were classified as paupers and as such excluded from respectable society. Logically, therefore, a respectable person could not be a pauper. In their evidence to the Inquiry Commission a number of ex-officios alluded to the status and appearance of certain recipients of relief as demonstrating their lack of entitlement. An ex-officio member of the Clifden Board, Cornelius King, claimed that there was ‘no more respectable man in the county’ than one recipient, describing how his son ‘comes in [to town] wearing kid gloves, with a horse and car, and one of the grandest little ponies’.28 Such remarks indicate the rigid demarcations that normally divided the respectable and the non-respectable, the pauper and the labourer. Eroding such demarcations threatened to erode the principles on which the Poor Law operated, and this was something that ex-officio guardians and government officials were determined to prevent. Reports of maladministration began to circulate in Ireland soon after the act came into operation. Local government inspectors alerted the Local Government Board to irregularities in the way in which the guardians were administering relief, and a number of ex-officio guardians appear to have contacted the Board to complain about relief going to unqualified applicants. Critical comments also appeared in the Irish press.29 On 8 May the Local Government Board wrote to the six boards of guardians reminding them of the need to consider each application for relief and to apply a strict definition of destitution. The cost of the relief was to be charged on the poor rates in the usual way. Only if satisfied that a particular electoral division required assistance would the Board approve a grant to assist in paying the charge.30 This letter prompted the end of the relief-on-application policy. The guardians found it difficult to understand the apparent turnaround in government policy. The Local Government Board appeared to be behaving not like followers of Glad200
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stone, Louden complained, but of Lord Salisbury, the leader of the opposition: ‘Their policy would be the extermination and destruction of the Irish race’.31 The intemperance of Louden’s language reflected the stark nature of the division he perceived between Ireland’s friends and her enemies. Those who were not friends were enemies determined to maintain Ireland’s subjugation. Lord Salisbury replaced Gladstone as Prime Minister in July 1886 following the defeat of the Home Rule Bill and the subsequent general election. At the end of August, the boards of the Swinford and Westport unions sent deputations to Dublin to put their case for a further grant to be made to the unions. The Chief Secretary was away and the deputations were received by the Lord Chancellor for Ireland, Lord Ashbourne. Both deputations claimed that they had taken great care over the distribution of the relief, and argued that given the continuing distress in the district, it was unrealistic to expect the ratepayers to take on the burden of the relief debt. As Louden explained, the guardians ‘might be told to strike a rate, but they might as well strike a rate to pay off the National Debt. It was impossible’.32 Editorials in the Irish press were broadly supportive of the guardians. Having taken the opportunity to attack Morley for not acting quickly enough to assist the distressed people of the west, the conservative Irish Times commented that it was ‘not alleged that the unions squandered the money. They spent it under such pressure as was not before known in the west even in very bad times, and it would have been impossible to avoid spending it’.33 Approaching the issue from a very different political perspective, the Freeman’s Journal came to a broadly similar conclusion, arguing that while the guardians might have been ‘technically unwise in cutting through the trammels of red-tape, their conduct needs no justification’. They had ‘made out a very strong case for relief from the crushing liabilities which they had no option consistently with their primary duty, but to assume’.34 Even the Lord Chancellor thought that the Swinford guardians at least had a good case, noting on their papers that he ‘would be glad if the arrears . . . of Swineford [sic] (and possibly Westport) were remitted’. The Local Government Board, however, dismissed the Westport guardians’ case as ‘a very feeble attempt . . . to escape the consequences of their maladministration of the Poor Relief Act, and to relieve them from responsibility in that respect’. While accepting that some electoral divisions might ‘soon require some consideration on the part of the Government’, the Board argued that granting further aid to Westport or any other union as a whole, was ‘unnecessary [and] would have a very demoralising effect’.35 To endorse, even indirectly, the guardians’ administration of the Relief Act and their flexible interpretation of terms such as destitute and non-destitute would be to undermine the primacy of the Poor Law in government relief policy. The story of Morley’s relief measures attracted the attention of the special correspondent of The Times who was touring Ireland in the autumn of 1886. A letter from Galway published on 19 October outlined the various relief schemes that had been established in the west including the grant of £20,000 ‘to six of the poorest unions for relief works’. The expenditure of this money, it was 201
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noted, ‘seems to have been attended with the grossest abuse’. Instances of maladministration were linked directly with the political allegiance of the guardians. Additional relieving officers had been appointed in Westport Union, ‘whose only recommendation was that they were advanced Nationalists, and they dealt out the [relief ] tickets wholesale’. The citation of detailed figures for the amounts spent on relief and the numbers relieved, and the illustrations given of alleged abuses, suggest that the author had access to official sources of information as well as disgruntled ex-officio guardians. The Times had acted as a conduit for government propaganda in the past,36 and was almost certainly doing so in this instance. Criticism of the boards of guardians was tempered by the acknowledgement that ‘if there had not been some exceptional relief this year there would have been starvation, and that in such cases it is impossible to avoid a certain amount of abuse’.37 The note of censure became sharper the following month in a letter devoted to the performance of Nationalist boards of guardians. The administration of the Relief Act was now cited as ‘the worst instance of abuse . . . in connection with Boards of Guardians’, and the guardians accused of politically motivated extravagance. In the poorer unions, it was explained, ‘almost the entire poor-rate falls on the landlords [so that] the amount of poor rate is almost a matter of indifference to any one but the landlords, and the elected guardians, who are almost invariably Nationalists, can afford to be reckless in their expenditure’. Morley had been warned of the consequences of entrusting public money to the boards, ‘but the charm of allowing people to manage their own affairs was too great’.38 The Nation refused to be discomforted by this attack, declaring that the attempt of The Times correspondent to demonstrate the unfitness of the Irish for self-government was ‘a conspicuous failure’. Not only had he revealed the failure of ex-officio guardians to attend board meetings, and thus perform their local duties, but he had also demonstrated that the elected guardians ‘did actually prevent the victims of landlord-stimulated famine from dying of hunger in their cabins or in the ditches, by a generous supply of outdoor relief’. The fact that this was largely at the expense of local landlords was bound to annoy readers of The Times ‘to whom a Celtic famineholocaust is ever grateful [sic]’.39
The Commission of Inquiry In October 1886 the Conservative Chief Secretary, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, proposed to appoint a commission of inquiry to investigate the financial condition of the scheduled unions. There would be two commissioners, one paid and one unpaid. The men selected for these positions were Christopher Talbot Redington, described as a ‘private gentleman who has done occasional work for the government’, and the local government inspector, H.A. Robinson.40 Robinson had considerable experience of distress in the west of Ireland and, as we have seen, had strong views about its relief. He had argued against government intervention in 1883 and had doubted the wisdom of extending outdoor relief in 202
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1886. The two commissioners were duly appointed on 3 November 1886, and the inquiry opened in Belmullet on 16 November. It was immediately clear from the line of questioning adopted by Redington and Robinson that they believed it their duty to expose the irregularities and maladministration that had taken place. With most of the questioning focusing on alleged infringements of Poor Law regulations, witnesses were forced onto the defensive. A number of guardians and relieving officers did attempt to explain and justify their conduct, but their efforts to do so often sounded unconvincing juxtaposed with their admissions of procedural irregularities. The most confident defenders of the relief policy adopted in the unions were the local Catholic clergy who were forthright in their insistence that the relief granted had been absolutely necessary and the amount of abuse very small. The Revd Patrick O’Connor of Achill Island was typical in his praise of local guardians for preventing a repetition of the events of 1848. They had kept many hundreds of people alive who would otherwise ‘have been left not only in danger of starvation, but would have actually died of absolute want’.41 Answerable neither to government nor to ratepayers, Catholic clergymen were unconcerned by questions regarding the administration or cost of the act. Their concern was the welfare (and good opinion) of the people, and they judged the relief measures accordingly. By the end of December the commissioners had visited all six unions. It was not until the beginning of April 1887, however, that the final report was delivered to government, by which time Arthur Balfour had replaced Hicks Beach as Chief Secretary. The report was highly critical of the guardians’ administration of the act, but it did acknowledge some mitigating factors. The powers granted by the act, the commissioners noted, were new ones and ‘it was therefore reasonable to expect mistakes would be made’. Furthermore, the elected guardians had received very little assistance from their ex-officio colleagues, who thus bore ‘some responsibility for the abuses which they complained of’. Observing that it would be impossible to levy the full rates that would be necessary to meet the guardians’ debts, ‘without great hardship to all classes of ratepayers’, the commissioners recommended that the government consider making a loan available to the boards to be spread over a certain number of years.42 Asked for their views on the report, the Local Government Board concurred with both the commissioners’ conclusions and their recommendations.43 Faced with this unanimity of opinion, the Under Secretary, General Sir Redvers Buller, observed to Balfour that he did not see how they could escape giving a loan to the scheduled unions, but suggested that they might take the opportunity to make wilful negligence a misdemeanour punishable by law: ‘The present state of Ireland is putting all the power in the hands of the Nationalist guardians and I think they should be forced to be responsible for their actions in person when they cannot be in pocket’.44
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Response to the Inquiry Commission report Following the publication of the commissioners’ report, public support for the guardians of the scheduled unions virtually evaporated. While expressing confidence in the manner in which the majority of Irish guardians discharged their duties, the Freeman’s Journal concluded that it was ‘impossible on the evidence presented . . . to acquit the local bodies of the grievous charges which are brought against them’. Public money granted for the relief of distress ‘was jobbed away in the most iniquitous fashion . . . All Ireland is covered with contumely through the misdeeds of a few provincial swindlers’. The only comfort the Freeman’s Journal could draw from the report was that the ‘repulsive picture of fraud and jobbery’ that it presented was ‘also a picture of what the bureaucratic system of administration can produce. We say advisedly that with a National Government such things would be impossible. (The rogues would hang first)’.45 It was left to some of the local papers to present an alternative viewpoint. The Mayo Examiner reminded its readers of the beneficial effects of the relief measures, observing that if ‘hunger, disease and death were averted by the outlay of a few thousands or more, in each union, that is a matter of administrative congratulation’. Taking issue with the Freeman’s Journal’s condemnation of ‘provincial swindlers’, the Mayo Examiner pointed out that provincial swindlers were neither worse nor better than city swindlers. The central issue as far as the Mayo Examiner was concerned was not that of corruption or abuse, the extent of distress having made it ‘very difficult to discern and refuse’, but the role of central government. Having left ‘the whole weight of the work on our local and unpaid rulers, doing little or nothing themselves’, the onus was now on government to make ‘a prompt settlement and an end of this matter’.46 In contrast to the Freeman’s Journal’s preoccupation with the political fall-out from the Inquiry Commission, the Mayo Examiner focused on the practical consequences for local people. Action was urgently needed since a large number of contractors were pressing for settlement of their unpaid bills. On 12 May, Balfour admitted to Buller that he was ‘afraid that any day the creditors may sell up the workhouse property and the contractors refuse to supply more food’.47 Balfour’s solution to the impending crisis in the scheduled unions was very different from that recommended by the inquiry commissioners and the Local Government Board. He did not want to help the guardians out of their difficulty, but to get rid of them. Balfour was convinced that the boards had proved themselves incapable of effective administration and that their replacement with paid officials would be in the best interests of the ratepayers and the poor. He was sure he would agree, he wrote to J.H. Tuke, ‘that we are right in not continuing the purely eleemosynary system, which has, I am convinced, done great harm in this particular district’.48 The Local Government Board already had the power to dissolve a board of guardians and appoint paid vice-guardians to administer the union, but this was only a temporary measure. Balfour wanted to be able to supersede the
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boards on a permanent basis. This, he believed, was the only way to reduce expenditure and ensure efficiency. ‘We shall have to instruct our commissioners to administer relief in the sternest possible fashion’, he warned Buller: ‘Nothing more must be done than to prevent actual starvation. Out-door relief will have to be reduced to the smallest limits compatible with preventing actual starvation in pressing cases’.49 Balfour’s proposal met with strong opposition from within the Local Government Board. Buller recounted on 14 May that he had had ‘tremendous trouble’ with Sir Henry Robinson, the vice-president of the board (and father of H.A. Robinson). The Chief Secretary was unmoved by the scruples of Sir Henry, an official for whom he had little regard.50 As he had remarked to Buller on 12 May, the matter ‘is really a question not of Local Government administration, but of high politics’.51
Distressed Unions Bill Balfour published his bill at the beginning of July. It empowered the government to appoint commissioners to administer the unions of Belmullet, Clifden, Oughterard, Swinford and Westport. (Galway was not included as it was thought it would be able to raise enough money from the rates to meet its liabilities of just over £850.) The commissioners would be able to borrow money for a period not exceeding ten years, and all the property of the board of guardians was to be vested in them, ‘free from any charge, lien, or encumbrance’. The act was only to come into force on the application of a board of guardians stating that they ‘are unable to levy rates sufficient to pay their existing debts and to make proper provision for the discharge of their duties’.52 In other words, the boards had to declare themselves bankrupt. This was not the measure that the guardians wanted or expected. Their own representations having failed to elicit the desired response from government, they now turned to their parliamentary representatives to press their case. The Westport Board passed a resolution on 7 July protesting against the bill and requesting Parnell and his party to oppose the measure.53 The Swinford Board had been writing to their MP, John Dillon, since June requesting him to bring the union’s financial problems to the attention of ministers and to ‘induce them to give a free grant for the payment of the debt under the Poor Relief Act’.54 On 12 July the guardians requested Dillon to impress on government that the Board would be able to discharge its duties if it was given borrowing powers. Should the government persevere with the bankruptcy clause, the Irish Parliamentary Party should use every effort to prevent the bill becoming law as the Guardians believe that the debts contracted by them in a crisis of extreme distress acknowledged by the Government in scheduling the union under the act, should be paid, and the Board defy the Government from the evidence produced before the Commissioners to show that maladministration occurred under the act in the union.55 205
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Balfour’s bill was extraordinarily punitive. What is surprising is not the opposition it faced but the relatively weak nature of that opposition when the bill was first introduced. Despite the lobbying of Swinford, and the hostility of the other unions, the opposition offered by Dillon and other Irish MPs to the bill’s second reading was far from total. Dillon did object to the proposal ‘to entirely abolish representative Government in the five unions in the west of Ireland, while at the same time giving the unions no relief except by enabling them to cut off the remedy of their creditors’. But he accepted that there was evidence of ‘the gross maladministration of the £20,000’, and insisted that it was not his intention ‘to defend the actions of these guardians at all’.56 Dillon’s stance suggests that he remained unconvinced by the protestations of the Swinford guardians that no maladministration had taken place. Colonel J.P. Nolan, MP for Galway North, was broadly in favour of the measure and seemed unconcerned about the threatened loss of local autonomy. Echoing the Freeman’s Journal, he urged central government to take direct responsibility for the congested districts, ‘as we should do if we had home rule in Ireland’.57 Two weeks later Dillon mounted a much more vigorous attack on the bill. The more he examined it, he said, and the more opportunity he had had to communicate with people in the west of Ireland about it, the more he was convinced it was the duty of Irish members to oppose it. He was now more supportive of the guardians, drawing attention to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the explanatory memorandum that had been circulated with the bill. It was claimed, for example, that the £15,000 spent in excess of the parliamentary grant had produced ‘no other permanent effect whatever upon the district than to plunge it more deeply into debt, and to increase the demoralisation of the population’. What ‘permanent effect’, Dillon asked, did the government hope to bring about? The guardians, he reminded MPs, had ‘hoped to save the people from starvation, and in that effect they were successful’.58 It is unclear what caused Dillon’s change in attitude. What is clear is his reluctance to associate himself too closely with the guardians. He was far more energetic and forthright in attacking the bill than in defending the guardians. Dillon successfully blocked the passage of the bill through the Commons in the hope that Balfour would agree to amendments. The Chief Secretary had anticipated opposition but had assumed it would be tactical rather than principled. Irish Members might block the bill, he had warned Buller at the beginning of July, ‘hoping by that means to compel me to support the poor out of public funds, and to give better terms to the creditors’. Balfour had resolved to meet this by calling their bluff and letting ‘the unions “stew in their own juice” . . . If the Irish see that we are quite prepared to take the responsibility of such a course it is possible they may give up all idea of protracted parliamentary opposition’.59 With neither side prepared to shift, the situation dragged on through the summer. Anticipating that in some of the unions the contractors would initiate legal proceedings, the Local Government Board had been authorised to buy any goods, such as workhouse furniture, seized by the boards’ creditors and 206
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return them to the guardians. £1,500 was set aside for this purpose of which just over £400 was spent. The amounts expended in the different unions ranged from £131 in Clifden to £32 to in Oughterard. This had been intended as a temporary solution but, in the absence of legislation, no further action was taken to extract the guardians from their financial difficulties. The boards of guardians of Clifden, Oughterard and Westport were left to try and pay off their debts from the rates. The Belmullet and Swinford Boards were dissolved in October 1887 and February 1888 respectively, and the unions administered by viceguardians until March 1889.60
Conclusion Conservative ministers, and their supporters in the press, sought to ensure that Morley’s Relief Act would be seen as an illustration of the potential pitfalls rather than the benefits of self-government. The evidence from the Inquiry Commission was used to condemn the boards of guardians as unfit to perform their functions, despite the fact that the commissioners had not stated this to be the case. The intention was to humiliate the guardians and through them the Nationalist movement. The ‘facts’ of the case were presented as open to only one interpretation. The way the money was ‘squandered’ afforded, according to the Daily Mail, ‘an exquisite proof of the people’s capacity for spending without caring a rap out of whose pocket the money comes’.61 Morley himself was accused of allowing his anxiety to placate Irish Nationalists to overrule common sense. A letter to The Times in November 1887 condemned Morley’s ‘wild official action in yielding to the Parnellites and in granting £20,000 for outdoor relief in these unions, whereby he pauperised and demoralised the whole of these districts’.62 The grant of £20,000 to the distressed unions was intended to relieve suffering and also to empower local bodies. As a result of the act, starvation was prevented, people were not forced to pauperise themselves, and the government demonstrated its determination to inaugurate a new era of emergency relief. This was a good-news story. That it was not reported as such, except at the time of the act’s introduction, is highly revealing about Nationalist rhetoric and self-perception at this period. Unionist propagandists set the agenda for the debate over the act, focusing on the issue of maladministration. Few Nationalists attempted to challenge that agenda, or to shift the parameters of the debate to other, arguably more relevant, issues such as the efficacy and legitimacy of the Poor Law system. The readiness of Nationalist politicians and journalists to believe the allegations of wholesale fraud and corruption once they were endorsed by an official inquiry suggests a fundamental lack of confidence that had serious implications for the development of Irish national identity. They were beset by a lurking fear that the Irish really were as bad as their critics claimed: incompetent, inefficient, corrupt and unable to distinguish truth from lies. This fear emerged as a kind of metropolitan snobbery, a process 207
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of transference by which national faults became the attributes of Irish provincials, symptomatic of local not national politics. The desire to curb local autonomy under a national government was rooted in the same fear. The leaders of the national movement displayed little awareness of, or interest in, the challenges facing Nationalist Poor Law guardians. Basing Irish identity on a rejection of all things British had the effect of marginalising those who were in any way associated with the existing system of government. As regional identities were increasingly absorbed into a broader national identity, so national subsumed regional issues. Local politics operated as a second front to the national campaign, strengthening the movement but weakening local democracy.
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12 TRUE BOLSHEVIKS? The rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Ireland, 1917–21 Emmet O’Connor
Marxist parties in colonial Ireland have usually had more historians than members. The Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI) of 1917–21 vintage, on the other hand, has received no more than passing treatment in studies of what is a very crowded period in labour history. The SPI was a strange sort of party. It claimed to be Marxist, and included the most powerful figures and some of the best organisers in the contemporary trade union movement. Yet, it subscribed to an amorphous mix of political ideas, had an ill-defined leadership, gave a low priority to organisation and recruitment, produced no newspaper, and fielded just one candidate in an election. It surfaced and receded in obscurity, and its influence is debatable. For the most part, it has been dismissed as a vain attempt by labour leaders to cloak their moderation in the mantle of James Connolly. Despite its weaknesses, the SPI was neither inactive nor inconsequential. Its very existence was indicative of the importance of radicalism during these years. The party offers a rare window on the political outlook of labour leaders at a time when labour was highly politicised, and deeply involved with the politics of the independence struggle, but declined to create a conventional political party. In particular, the SPI played a role in developing Labour’s foreign policy and acting as an ambassador to the international socialist movement. The SPI also became a battleground over the question of relations with the socialist and communist Internationals, and the embryo of communism in Ireland.
Formation and aims The SPI was the third party to bear that title. The first of the name had been founded on 4 March 1904, following the departure of Connolly to the United States in 1903 and the decline of his Irish Socialist Republican Party. Like Connolly at this time, the SPI was heavily influenced by the syndicalist precepts of Daniel de Leon and the Socialist Labour Party of America. In line with the
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antipathy of syndicalists to ‘labour fakirs’, it resolved in 1905 that ‘no official of a Trades Union . . . be eligible for membership’. The implacable party made derisory progress, and news of Connolly’s doctrinal disputes with de Leon contributed to its dissolution on 4 June 1908. In January 1909, Connolly urged the Dublin left to regroup in a broad-based party, open to leftist Nationalists and non-Marxists as well as revolutionaries. The outcome was the launch of another SPI on 13 June 1909.1 The second SPI became indelibly associated with Connolly on his return from the United States in July 1910 to work as party organiser. Branches were formed in Belfast and Cork, and a new programme adopted. Though obviously impressed by American syndicalism, the manifesto confirmed Connolly’s drift to the centre, and was broadly social democratic in philosophy and open on method and aims. By 1912 Connolly had become more anxious about reaching the masses. On Easter Monday 1912, shortly before he proposed to the Irish Trade Union Congress that it create a Labour Party, he formed the Independent Labour Party (of Ireland) to act as a ginger group within the Congress party.2 The Independent Labour Party comprised the SPI, the Belfast branch of the British Socialist Party, and four of Belfast’s five branches of the British Independent Labour Party, united around a minimum programme of class unity. Again reflecting American syndicalism, its aim was an ‘industrial commonwealth’, to be realised through elections, and through industrial unionism, or the organisation of workers in industrial, as distinct from craft, unions. The unity did not survive internal tensions inflamed by the home rule crisis and the outbreak of the First World War. The Belfast branch disintegrated after August 1914. The Dublin branch reverted to the name ‘SPI’, but took a back seat to Connolly’s work with the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) and the Citizen Army.3 To all intents and purposes, it was defunct before the Easter Rising. The decision to revive the SPI was taken on 29 January 1917, and William O’Brien was elected chairman.4 The precise context of the decision is unclear, but it was almost certainly part of O’Brien’s design to place himself at the heart of the resurgent ITGWU. O’Brien had worked for the ITGWU from its inception, though a member of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors. During his internment following the Easter Rising, he confided in Cathal O’Shannon his ambitions for the ITGWU.5 On his release from prison in August 1916, he collaborated with ITGWU president Tom Foran in rebuilding the union from the wreckage of Easter Week. With Connolly dead, Jim Larkin – the union’s titular general secretary – in the United States since 1914, and Foran reluctant to take on the secretary’s job, O’Brien had a unique opportunity before him. On 30 December 1916 he applied for membership of the union. Rapid promotion followed. Admitted to the no. 1 branch on 6 January, he was elected vice chairman of the branch committee at the branch’s annual meeting on 21 January.6 The committee was, in effect, the union executive, and Foran was happy for O’Brien to serve, de facto, as general secretary. While O’Brien lacked agitational skills and popular appeal – his forte was management and bargain210
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ing – he had the cachet of having been active in Dublin socialist groups since 1899, and a personal friend of Connolly.7 The revival of Connolly’s party was the first of many initiatives on O’Brien’s part to associate himself with labour’s national martyr; and not without effect. ‘I did not like him’, Peadar O’Donnell recalled, ‘but I respected him. We regarded him as the Lenin of the Labour Movement. The Petrograd Revolution had occurred: we admired it and looked to someone like O’Brien to lead the way’.8 In contrast with its forerunners, the SPI was not a fringe group. Not only would it become the best connected, best resourced Marxist party in Irish history, but it operated during a very propitious period. Between 1917 and 1920, the number of trade unionists in Ireland rose from under 100,000 to about 250,000, with membership of the ITGWU rocketing from 5,000 to 120,000.9 The SPI operated initially from room three in Liberty Hall, and drew its leaders largely from prominent ITGWU men. Other luminaries included Tom Johnson, ideologist of the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILPTUC) and leader of the Labour Party in Dáil Éireann from 1922 to 1927.10 When Congress acquired the weekly Irish Opinion, later renamed the Voice of Labour, in November 1917, the SPI had ready access to coverage. In March 1918 Cathal O’Shannon was appointed editor of the Voice; and after the Voice was suppressed in September 1919, O’Shannon edited its successor, the Watchword of Labour. O’Shannon was to be the most important figure in the SPI after O’Brien. Like O’Brien he had been in the second SPI, close to Connolly, interned after Easter Week and was employed by the ITGWU.11 But if O’Shannon was the party propagandist, he was subordinate to O’Brien in the union, and ultimately that meant the subordination of the party to the union. The SPI advertised itself as founded by Connolly, and adopted the same Irish language title as its predecessor, Cumannacht na hÉireann, sometimes using the Irish title only. O’Shannon, in particular, was a keen Gaeilgeor, and articles in Irish by Pádraic Ó Conaire and W.P. Ryan were published occasionally in Irish Opinion, the Voice and Watchword.12 Ó Conaire spoke on ‘Cumannachas in Éirinn’ in Liberty Hall in March 1919, the proceedings being entirely in Irish.13 Theoretically, the SPI derived its ideas from Connolly’s version of industrial unionism. Its object was: ‘An Industrial Commonwealth based upon common ownership of the land and instruments of production, distribution, and exchange, with complete political and social equality between the sexes’.14 Yet despite its formal adherence to syndicalism, the leading brand of revolutionary socialism of Connolly’s day, party propaganda displayed a livelier interest in Bolshevism, the pre-eminent form of revolutionism after November 1917. O’Shannon delighted in describing himself as an ‘Irish Bolshevik’ and insisted that the SPI was Bolshevist.15 From December 1917, the Labour weeklies gave favourable coverage to communism in Europe, in addition to welcoming soviets – or the seizure by workers of land, creameries and factories – at home; and the Communist, organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, advertised the Watchword as ‘Ireland’s Revolutionary and Communist Organ’.16 211
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A fatal lack of clarity surrounded the role of the SPI. Like the Independent Labour Party (of Ireland), it was to be a party within a party and its principles were to be realised by both industrial and political means. The syndicalist impact on labour was very evident by 1918, in the ITGWU especially, but while most ITGWU leaders were members of the SPI, the party was not perceived as a distinctive influence. Politically, the SPI was committed to the organisation of labour ‘to take political action on independent lines for securing the control of all public elective bodies, and for the mastery of all the public powers of the state’.17 Yet it was reluctant to act independently of the ITGWU or the Labour Party. It found a role in propaganda and education, and its most celebrated initiatives came in foreign policy, on Soviet Russia and assertions of Ireland’s right to self-determination. Arguably, the affirmation of national rights through internationalism was the hallmark of the party.
Activity and organisation The SPI held its inaugural public meetings in March 1917, and enjoyed a promising, if low-key, infancy. O’Brien’s diary of 25 March noted that a lecture on ‘The national revival of Bulgaria’ – not the most obvious of topics – attracted twenty-two recruits, raising membership to 100.18 This mixture of nationalism and internationalism proved to be a popular cocktail, and was encapsulated by the Bolshevik revolution, acclaimed initially in Ireland as a blow to imperialism and for the Bolsheviks’ recognition of the right of national self-determination. On 4 February 1918 O’Brien chaired a meeting in Dublin’s Mansion House to welcome the revolution. The attendance of some 10,000 ‘far exceeded the too modest expectations of the promoters and the gathering overflowed from the Round Room into the anterooms and passages and out onto Dawson Street’.19 ‘Wonderful enthusiasm’, O’Brien confided to his diary.20 An ebullient SPI then embarked on a hectic lecture programme. On 9 March Irish Opinion gave notice of forthcoming commemorations of the Paris Commune, May Day and the centenary of the birth of Karl Marx, a lecture in the Dublin Trades Hall on ‘Ireland and the International’ and a lecture to Cumann na mBan, in addition to its usual weekly business meetings. In October the SPI and Dublin trades’ council formed a Russian revolution and republic committee to mark the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Although the British banned the proposed festivities, two illegal meetings were held and the SPI published the pamphlet The New Russia.21 The party also moved from Liberty Hall to more spacious accommodation at 42 North Great George’s Street, and reported rising membership.22 Rounding off the year, a mass rally was held on 1 December in the Dublin Trades Hall to ‘celebrate the downfall of imperialism in Central Europe, welcome the German and Austrian Republics, and make common cause with the Social Revolution’.23 The SPI’s participation in the international socialist conference in Berne in February 1919 marked
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the height of the party’s self-confidence. O’Brien attended a number of SPI meetings in January and February 1919 on Berne and labour’s relations with Sinn Féin, noting of one on 28 February: ‘a good attendance . . . the future looks promising’.24 Other SPI activities included running internal discussion groups and a library, which introduced Peadar O’Donnell, among others, to Marxism.25 Its edition of Labour, Nationality, and Religion was intended to be the first in a series of Connolly’s selected works.26 In October 1918 Walter Carpenter undertook a lecture tour of Scotland for the party, addressing sixteen meetings on the Irish question.27 The party started courses of lectures in economics and industrial history in early 1919, and was instrumental in the development of the James Connolly Labour College. On 5 June 1919, Connolly’s birthday, O’Brien chaired a fund-raising concert in the Mansion House. Police barred the entrance after about 100 people had been admitted, but the SPI made good the financial loss through selling a handsome Connolly souvenir. Other subventions came mainly from the ITGWU and support rallies in Manchester and Glasgow, which SPI members were prominent in organising.28 An appeal for lecturers in the Watchword of Labour advised that ‘the working class outlook’ was an essential requirement of their curricula vitae, ‘for unless ye become as proletarians ye cannot enter the Workers’ Republic’.29 The college was founded at a conference of trade union, co-operative and SPI delegates in Banba Hall on 2 November 1919, and located in 42 North Great George’s Street, where it offered lectures to workers on history, economics, literature, public speaking and the social sciences. Charles Kenny, literature secretary of the SPI, served as the college’s first secretary.30 Party members enjoyed too a lively entertainment scene, featuring regular Saturday socials at 42 North Great George’s Street. On 27 September 1919, the Watchword of Labour reported that ‘The great event of the SPI programme [for the coming season] is the Ceilidh next Saturday in the Round Room of the Mansion House’. ‘Several combinations of musicians’ were promised. Why the SPI was slow to construct a branch network is puzzling. Irish Opinion had reported on 2 February 1918 that the Dublin branch was ‘preparing for a forward move in Socialist propaganda in the city and outside’ and urged the creation of branches in the provinces. ‘Scatter the seed to the “four winds of Eirinn” and build a branch now’, ran an advertisement in the Voice of Labour on 10 August 1918. O’Donnell later claimed that his efforts to start branches in Monaghan and Derry in the summer of 1919 were frustrated by internal feuding in Dublin.31 A Cork branch was reported in late 1919, and others in Belfast, Sligo and Newbridge, County Kildare, in 1920.32 It was a bewilderingly meagre performance for a party with the Labour press, the ITGWU’s extensive infrastructure and most of the sharpest organisers in the trade union movement at its disposal.
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The SPI and Labour policy With members in the highest councils of the Labour Party, and links with the Easter Rising, the SPI was well placed to influence both Labour and Sinn Féin. Even as O’Brien was founding the SPI, he was canvassing for Count Plunkett in the Roscommon by-election. Subsequently he assisted Sinn Féin in the South Longford and East Clare by-elections of 1917. He was also a grey eminence behind the ‘national assembly’ summoned by Count Plunkett in April 1917, though Dublin trades’ council recoiled from association with Sinn Féin at this time and instructed him not to attend.33 The conscription crisis in the spring of 1918 shifted Labour’s position to one of enthusiastic involvement with consensus nationalism; the more so as the general strike against conscription on 23 April contributed to a significant growth in trade union membership over the following weeks. In September Labour was sanguine enough to appoint O’Brien, Johnson and O’Shannon to write its manifesto for contesting the forthcoming general election on an independent, abstentionist platform. Subsequently, O’Brien, O’Shannon and Tom Farren held secret talks with Sinn Féin on an election pact.34 The collapse of the national consensus on abstention from Westminster – precipitated by the approaching end of the World War and the conscription threat – left Labour timorous about a deal with Sinn Féin, while its lack of a political machine made it uneasy about standing independently. Although a high proportion of those who spoke against withdrawal from the election at Labour’s special conference on 1 November were SPI men, other members, such as O’Brien and Johnson, argued in favour.35 Over the next two years the pattern repeated itself; SPI leaders were at the heart of Labour’s collusion with republicans, yet the party was redundant to Labour policy on nationalism. The SPI retained a niche role in Labour’s foreign policy. It was perceived as being more acceptable to continental parties than the ILPTUC, which did not adopt a socialist programme until November 1918; and more easily intelligible than Labour’s syndicalist format and non-existent political structures. The SPI is perhaps best known for its insistence on recognition of Ireland at international conferences. The demise of the second International on the outbreak of the World War had closed one chapter in socialist internationalism. The first Russian revolution opened the prologue to another. While four inter-allied socialist meetings were held in London during the war, a universal conference was regarded as an essential symbol of a new beginning. In a prescient reading of the times, Dublin trades’ council called in February 1917 for separate Irish representation at all international labour conferences.36 When the Petrograd soviet and a Dutch–Scandinavian socialist committee called for an international labour conference to meet in Stockholm, the ILPTUC executive agreed to send a delegation, mandated to ‘seek to establish the Irish Labour Party as a distinct unit in the international labour movement’, and to support peace without annexations or indemnities, on the basis of national self-determination. The SPI too intended to send a representative, but the initiative came to nothing as the
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British government refused passports to the delegates.37 O’Brien, however, attended the conference at Leeds in June 1917, convened by the British United Socialist Council to salute the Russian revolution, and insisted on speaking as a fraternal emissary from the SPI, and not as a ‘British’ delegate.38 In January 1918, a joint Labour Party and SPI deputation met Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet plenipotentiary in London, and appealed for Russian backing for their objectives at international conferences.39 The deputation then proceeded to interview a group of continental socialist leaders attending the British Labour Party conference at Nottingham. Another mission to England followed in April, and secured the opposition of the British labour movement to the application of conscription in Ireland.40 Labour formulated a foreign policy in late 1918. At its annual conference in August, the ILPTUC called for the re-establishment of the second International. The motion enjoyed SPI approval, though the International was opposed vehemently by the Bolsheviks, and subsequently a Congress–SPI committee was created as the ‘Irish section of the International’. In November, an ILPTUC special conference endorsed a ‘statement of international aims’, proclaiming Labour’s adherence to ‘the Russian formula’ of peace based on self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities; demanding that the right of self-determination be extended to all subject peoples; and protesting at the ‘capitalist outlawry’ of Soviet Russia. The ‘international committee’ of the Labour Party also addressed an open letter to the workers of Britain, seeking their support for self-determination.41 Sinn Féin’s landslide victory in the 1918 general election left Labour with misgivings about its pre-election timidity. Anxious to assert itself within the new order, it determined to make the most of the forthcoming conference in Berne on reviving the International. Congress appointed a four-man team for Berne on 28 December.42 The SPI was unanimously in favour of participation. It later pleaded to Moscow that its aims were: First: to cleanse the working class movement from the elements of social patriotism and coalition with capitalism which had characterised, in particular, the British, French, Belgian, and German constituents during the war. Second: to bring before the world the subject condition of Ireland under a military terrorism fully endorsed by the British Labour Party. Whatever sympathy Moscow had with this excuse for collusion with the hated social democrats would not have been augmented by the footnote that ‘The first aim was defeated by the abstention of the Communist elements’.43 On 1 January O’Brien and Séamus Hughes, secretary to the ITGWU executive and an SPI activist, met Richard Mulcahy regarding Berne. After republican TDs assembled on 14 January to prepare constitutional documents for the first Dáil, a Sinn Féin press release stated: 215
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A document drafted by the Irish Workers’ Delegation of the International Conference was submitted to the members present, and it was decided that the statement of national claims set out were heartily approved. A committee was appointed to draw up the draft of a programme of constructive work on democratic lines in consultation with the Labour leaders. The upshot of this quid pro quo was Dáil Éireann’s Democratic Programme, drafted by Johnson and O’Shannon, though modified by Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh to make it more palatable to his party.44 The programme served the twin functions of providing Dáil Éireann with a social manifesto, and Labour with something to offset its lack of parliamentary representation as it strode onto the international stage. In the event, only Johnson and O’Shannon travelled to Berne, accredited by the Labour Party and SPI respectively.45 Both were received as a national delegation, and carried with them lengthy memoranda on Ireland’s case for self-determination. The conference passed two resolutions on Ireland, endorsing its right to self-determination and calling for peace talks. Prior to the votes, the Irish persuaded the British Labour Party delegation, led by Ramsay MacDonald, to replace home rule within the empire with self-determination as its policy on Ireland. In return, the Irish agreed not to seek recognition of the republic. Johnson and O’Shannon were elected to the Permanent Commission of the conference, and drafted a memorandum on Ireland for the congress’s delegation to the Paris peace conference. On returning via Paris, they also briefed the Dáil mission to the conference.46 In April President Eamon de Valera acknowledged: ‘When we wanted the help of Labour in Berne, Labour gave it to us’.47 ‘Thomas Johnson and Cathal O’Shannon have done a good day’s work in a very short space of time’, commended the republican weekly New Ireland, which published a variety of features on Russia, Bolshevism and soviets – not uniformly approving – in March and April.48 On the main issue at Berne the Irish sided with the far left, voting against a motion favouring parliamentary democracy as it ‘tended to condemn the Soviet system of government’, and backing instead a minority resolution calling for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.49 O’Shannon attended the next meeting of the International’s Permanent Commission in Amsterdam on 26–29 April, and Labour called its second general strike on May Day as a gesture of international proletarian solidarity and for the self-determination of all peoples. But, though Irish-Americans urged a Labour visit to the United States, there was to be no further SPI or ILPTUC presence at international conferences.50
The communist challenge The foundation of the Communist International, or Comintern, on 4 March 1919, presented the ITGWU leadership with the dilemma of continuing to 216
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associate the SPI with the socialist International, and suffering the wrath of the left for discarding Bolshevism, or offering a hostage to fortune by committing the SPI, and by extension the union, to the Comintern and revolutionism. Policy towards the Comintern became a litmus test of revolutionism in the eyes of SPI militants. When Johnson and O’Shannon reported on Berne at a mass rally in the Mansion House on 7 April, O’Brien judged it ‘a good type of meeting’.51 The hard left took a colder view, criticising the Irish delegates’ ‘satisfaction’ with the conference, despite its rejection of Bolshevism. The SPI resolved to cease all further contact with the second International.52 In the spring of 1919 the first splinter group from the party, the ‘Revolutionary SPI’, claimed the backing of seven ITGWU organisers.53 Three of the group were instrumental in the seizure of thirteen Limerick creameries in May 1920 during a strike in the Cleeve Company. The ‘soviets’, as they were called, were run by the employees until a wage settlement was reached.54 In September 1919 a soi-disant Bolshevik faction, led by Roddy Connolly, won temporary control of the SPI, renounced ties with the Berne International and passed a resolution for affiliation to the Comintern.55 Though not yet nineteen years old, Roddy was the son of James, brash, self-assured and impatient. The incident prompted a hostile reaction from clergy and the press. An editorial in the Irish Independent denounced the anti-Christian doctrines ‘championed by the Russian Soviets and by the late James Connolly, doctrines which the “Socialist Party of Ireland” distribute among the illiterate in Dublin from their headquarters in Liberty Hall’.56 It has been suggested that the ‘red scare’ threw the left on the defensive, frightened the Watchword of Labour into publishing the front page article, ‘A Catholic may be a socialist’, on 19 October and panicked the ITGWU into reining in the SPI; all of which is doubtful.57 There was little fear of Russia or the Church in the contemporary labour movement. ‘A Catholic may be a socialist’ reviewed Fr. J.E. Canavan’s pamphlet How Far May a Catholic Agree with Socialists?, which the Watchword commended as a refutation of the ‘childish effusion on Socialism in Studies’ by Fr. Peter Finlay, theological censor of the archdiocese of Dublin. Moreover, O’Brien, Johnson and O’Shannon joined the SPI leftists in convening a well-attended celebration of the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution on 8 November.58 After the speeches, the festivities continued with an ‘all-night social and dance’ at 42 North Great George’s Street, interrupted only by a midnight lecture on, inevitably, ‘the Bolshevik revolution’. Other SPI commemorations were held in Cork’s City Hall, and the Co-operative Hall, Queenstown, and O’Shannon devoted the next issue of the Watchword to Russia.59 O’Brien’s, and by extension his union’s, attitude towards the SPI appears to have shifted in early 1920. O’Brien did not stand for an officership at its biannual meeting on 2 January 1920, though O’Shannon did and was elected president.60 When the party made its sole electoral intervention in the Dublin municipal elections that month, nominating Walter Carpenter, secretary of the 700-strong International Tailors’, Machinists’, and Pressers’ Trade Union, known 217
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colloquially as the Jewish union, the ITGWU fielded its own slate of six candidates – including O’Brien and an SPI colleague, Thomas Kennedy. Due largely to a long-running dispute between O’Brien and P.T. Daly, secretary of Dublin trades’ council, the union had recently withdrawn from the council and wished to counter the council’s list of candidates. Both Carpenter and the ITGWU men stood on a ‘Workers’ Republican’ platform, but unlike the union aspirants, Carpenter was not returned.61 The escalation of British counter-insurgency in 1920 – with over 4,000 military raids in February alone – inevitably affected the increasingly republican labour movement. Weekly seizures of the Watchword of Labour during the local elections continued over the ensuing months. More than a dozen ITGWU officials were arrested. Branch meetings were disrupted by soldiers, and union offices and Liberty Hall searched repeatedly.62 O’Brien was detained, rearrested on 3 March, and imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs, where he joined republicans on hunger strike. Irish sympathisers in Stockport, Cheshire, took advantage of a Westminster by-election in the constituency to lobby the British Labour Party on Ireland, and O’Brien’s treatment. Receiving little satisfaction, O’Brien was nominated to contest the by-election in protest at ‘the apostasy of the [British] Labour Party on the question of Irish self-determination and against the inactivity in the face of military tyranny in Ireland’. O’Brien himself accused the party of retreating from the promises it had made at Berne to the British government policy of home rule. The ILPTUC and SPI invested heavily in the campaign. Under the pseudonym ‘Conor Hayes’, O’Shannon spoke at several meetings, and met his future wife, Margaret Doris Finn, at a rally in Manchester Free Trade Hall. O’Brien polled 2,336 votes, drawing the support of virtually the entire Stockport Irish community. He had earlier ended his hunger strike on being transferred to a nursing home and was released on 12 May.63 O’Shannon, who was not in good health, was arrested at an international labour meeting in London on 11 April. He was eventually released from Mountjoy gaol on 5 May after an eight-day hunger strike.64 In the midst of this pressure, on 12 April, the ILPTUC enjoyed its finest hour, when it called an immediate, indefinite general strike for the release of political prisoners on hunger strike. Co-ordinated by workers’ councils, some of which assumed a ‘soviet’-style command of local government for the duration, the strike was a spectacular demonstration of Labour power. Dublin Castle released the prisoners after two days, leaving the ILPTUC cock-a-hoop about its prospects. Possibly the absence of the ITGWU grey eminence allowed the party to renew its efforts to link up with Moscow. Repeated requests were sent to Sylvia Pankhurst, secretary of the British Workers’ Socialist Federation, and Albert Inkpin, secretary of the British Socialist Party, requesting them to pursue its affiliation to the Comintern.65 In fact, Pankhurst and Inkpin were in cahoots with Connolly. When his faction, now styling itself the Workers’ Communist Party, forwarded a statement of its analysis to the Comintern, the International’s Amsterdam sub-bureau circulated a copy, which described the SPI as 218
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‘now nearly defunct, it never survived the blow when O’Shannon, Hughes [sic] and Johnson went to Berne . . . it is now practically in the hands of the Office staff of “Liberty Hall”, who are anything but Socialists’.66 A clearly peeved SPI despatched a stiff rebuke to Moscow, deploring the Amsterdam sub-bureau for its ‘un-comradely, indeed dastardly conduct’, suggesting the report was the work of a Dublin Castle spy and affirming the party as the only ‘true’ Bolsheviks in Ireland.67 In June the SPI sent a more substantial and reasoned defence to the Comintern, citing its record in propaganda and education, and claiming to have maintained its ‘Marxian character’ and to have exerted a seminal influence in the development of the ITGWU’s syndicalism and on the ILPTUC’s direct action since 1917. Failure to make greater progress was attributed to British terrorism, ‘approved and confirmed by the inaction of the British Labour Party’, and ‘the preoccupation of the people with the struggle against British Imperialism’.68 If the latter was a lame excuse, the British harassment was all too real, and Labour leaders must have felt they deserved more credit for actions like the political prisoners’ strike. Connolly sustained his attack with an article in the Communist International, dismissing the party as ‘small and ineffective’: it is now a party numbering scarcely 150 members in Dublin, about 30 of whom may be considered effective members, and a few hundred throughout the country, badly organised and having no direct communication with each other or the Dublin headquarters.69 By the summer of 1920 the left had split into three factions. Seán McLoughlin, the ‘boy commandant’ of Easter Week and a former president of the SPI, had founded a breakaway Communist Labour Party and on 20 May wrote to the Comintern for assistance to launch a newspaper.70 Connolly, however, had Moscow’s favour. It is unlikely that his name or enterprise in networking with communists abroad were sufficient recommendation. The Workers’ Communist Party report to the Comintern had stressed that while the Irish Republican Army (IRA) leadership were straightforward Nationalists, the rank and file, ‘for the most part proletarians’, were ‘the factor in Ireland’ and could be won to a workers’ republic. The strategy conformed with Comintern thinking, and Connolly prepared for illegal activity in reforming his circle as the clandestine Communist Groups. Modelled on the conspiratorial Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Groups aimed to cultivate influence within the executives of the IRA, Irish Republican Brotherhood, ITGWU and SPI.71 When the SPI received notice of the Comintern’s second world congress on 21 June and appealed to members for expenses to subvent two delegates, Connolly and Eadhmonn MacAlpine were already bound for Petrograd, funded by Captain Jack White, the former Citizen Army commander.72 With help from Pankhurst and Erkki Veltheim, the Comintern’s emissary to Britain, they travelled illegally via Hull, Norway and Murmansk.73 The credentials they received on 24 June made no 219
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reference to the SPI, Connolly being described as an Irish communist, and MacAlpine as ‘presently with the American communist party’.74 The SPI’s tenuous relationship with international communism continued. In August it announced that it was ‘unable’ to send an envoy to the foundation conference of the Communist Party of Great Britain, though it posted fraternal greetings: ‘no difference of principle or tactics divides us from the Communist international’, stated the message, which pointedly went on: ‘a Socialist Party which does not arise from the popular masses is no more than a Socialist sect’.75 The ILPTUC’s annual conference in August marked the end of Labour’s flirtation with communism, signalled the beginning of a long isolation from internationalism and further undermined the SPI’s credibility. When the national executive’s report cited division and disorganisation among the socialist parties of the world as its reason for not affiliating to either International, Eamonn Rooney, a member of the Communist Groups, tabled a resolution challenging Congress’s specious neutrality. In the ensuing debate O’Shannon alone defended the SPI from disparagement from the right and denounced the second International as ‘a moribund body, dead and done with, having nobody supporting it except the pro-war Social Democrats in Germany and the pro-war Labour party in England’. Pointing out that the Comintern’s decision to limit its membership to communist parties debarred the ILPTUC, he implied that the SPI would pursue an independent line to Congress, declaring ‘the Socialist Party of Ireland is a Communist Party’. By contrast, O’Brien treated the debate with some amusement. When a delegate dismissed the SPI as ‘cranks who thought they were Socialists’, he interjected, ‘Mr Chairman, I can produce documentary evidence that I am not a Socialist, and have never been a Socialist (laughter)’, a reference to the Workers’ Communist Party report. O’Shannon alone among the ITGWU delegates voted for Rooney’s motion, which was rejected by 97 to 54 votes. Dublin trades’ council then withdrew a resolution calling on Congress to affiliate to the Comintern.76 O’Shannon persisted, publicising Moscow’s call for the creation of the Profintern, and printing its manifesto – for the first time in western Europe – in the Watchword of Labour on 2 October.77 If O’Brien wanted an excuse to be rid of his nagging proto-communist colleagues, the British provided it. Aside from a summer recess, the Dublin SPI had sustained its usual weekly lectures up to November 1920, while greater activity was reported in the spring of the year from Belfast and Newbridge.78 In November the Auxiliary Division twice raided 42 North Great George’s Street, confiscating SPI literature, records, regalia and furniture, causing extensive damage to its rooms and creating major financial liabilities. The Auxiliaries inflicted similar attention on the James Connolly Labour College, seizing its entire library and available lectures notes and records, and on Liberty Hall, arresting various officials, including O’Brien and George Spain, SPI secretary and an ITGWU clerk. The disruption compelled the suspension of the Watchword in December, which left Labour without a paper until October 1921.79 220
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The suppression of the Labour College, from which it never recovered, removed a focal point of the left. The SPI remained inactive up to the AngloIrish truce on 11 July 1921. Moscow, however, had long since lost faith in the party.
The birth of the CPI Since March 1919 the Comintern had made a few favourable references to the Irish national struggle, but it was the second world congress that marked the real beginning of communist policy on Ireland. Connolly and MacAlpine arrived with a paper which envisaged a conventional type of communist party in Ireland, but soon warmed to the Comintern’s view that the Irish should prioritise the anti-imperialist struggle.80 Aware of their weakness, the Comintern hoped that through the republican movement, Irish communists could augment their strength and tap the strategic potential of the national struggle.81 The Irish headed home with approval for a party, only to encounter setbacks. Undaunted, Connolly attended the third Comintern congress in Moscow in June and July 1921, where he discussed the Irish situation with Lenin and again received approval to form a party.82 The SPI had been revived by about ten members after the truce, and had held a few meetings. On 9 September, with the O’Brienites largely absent, the Bolshevik tendency captured a majority of seats on the executive. Connolly was elected president, and his sister, Nora, elected treasurer. Walter Carpenter Jr became secretary. The Communist Labour Party had dissolved on 1 September, and its twenty-five members rejoined the SPI.83 On 8 October the SPI voted to apply for affiliation to the Comintern. Several members were expelled, including O’Brien and O’Shannon for ‘reformism, consecutive non-attendance . . . and consistent attempts to render futile all efforts at building a Communist Party in Ireland’; the removal of reformists and centrists from all responsible positions being one of the twenty-one conditions of admission to the Comintern. Not all present approved of the pace of change. Having turfed them out, Connolly argued that the SPI needed to collaborate with reformists initially, to consolidate its strength.84 The final criteria of Comintern affiliation were met on 28 October when the SPI adopted a new constitution, committing it to struggle by political, economic and military means for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The constitution renamed the party as the CPI (Section of the Communist International). A report to the Comintern, requesting affiliation, seeking funds and claiming a membership of 120, followed on 9 November.85 This time there was no protest from the ITGWU.
Conclusion There is compelling evidence to contradict the dismissal of the SPI as a deceptive propaganda exercise by the ITGWU. From 1917 to 1920, union leaders 221
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displayed a commitment to the party’s development. During these years the SPI promoted socialist ideas among ITGWU officials, acted as a conduit of internationalism within the labour movement and an instrument of Labour’s foreign policy, which helped to secure Dáil Éireann’s endorsement of the Democratic Programme, and laid the basis of a communist constituency. But the SPI was not a conventional rank-and-file party in the mould of its namesakes. It was built from the top down, and in the last analysis controlled by O’Brien, who clearly regarded it as subordinate to union interests. The party survived his diminishing patronage after January 1920, and might have recovered from the British military terror; but its proclivities for affiliation to the Comintern set it on collision course with union policy. The SPI is best understood as a true reflection of the politics of the Labour and ITGWU leadership. If that politics ultimately balked at revolution, it was genuinely influenced by syndicalism and Bolshevism before 1921. In many respects the story of the SPI paralleled that of the contemporary labour movement. It began in imitation of pre-1914 precedents, developed with modest expectations, blossomed in the flush of radicalism that followed political revolution abroad and at home, and then faltered as the international labour movement retreated before the capitalist counter-attack in 1920–1 and divided into mutually hostile camps of communists and social democrats.
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13 OLD AND NEW UNIONISM The seventh Marquess of Londonderry, 1906–21 N.C. Fleming
Introduction Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart (1878–1949), seventh Marquess of Londonderry, reluctantly entered British politics in 1905, first sitting in the House of Commons as Viscount Castlereagh and, following his father’s death in 1915, in the House of Lords as the Marquess of Londonderry. He was the last member of his immensely wealthy family to play a leading role in the politics of Great Britain and Ireland.1 Londonderry married Edith Chaplin, the daughter of a Conservative MP and through her mother granddaughter of the third Duke of Sutherland. She played an important part in her husband’s political career and was viewed by many Tory MPs as influential in her own right. Her own role as a politically astute society hostess complemented and supported her husband’s political opportunities, making his career a synthesis of their shared efforts, aspirations and peculiar talents. As a Conservative MP for Maidstone with strong aristocratic connections to Ireland and County Durham, the seventh Marquess was acutely aware of the diverging strains within unionism that from 1905 increasingly separated the interests of Irish unionism from British Conservatism. As a highly placed member of the landed Anglican Ascendancy with a large estate in Ulster, he was also caught up in the growing gulf between the landed patricians of southern Irish unionism and their more militant bourgeois-led Ulster Unionist counterparts in the north.2 In many ways he had more in common, in method and temperament, with the paternalist and imperialist nature of southern unionism and British Conservatism than the social and economic factors that motivated Ulster Unionists.3 And although the Londonderrys came from a long line of County Down landlords, they no longer controlled their county palatine as they once had; nor were they compelled to support unionism for business or financial reasons.4 That the family successfully maintained a senior position within the movement, securing a place in the first government of Northern Ireland in 1921, illustrates that the rapid decline of landlord influence in Irish 223
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affairs at the end of the nineteenth century was not universal, although this should not hide the reality that their remaining high-level presence owed much to the patronage and tolerance of the dominant business-class leadership.5 The Londonderrys’ interest in allying themselves to Ulster unionism came from several sources. Like Edward Carson, the Ulster Unionist leader from 1910, both the sixth and seventh Marquesses sincerely believed that the Union benefited Ireland and that the loyalists of the north-east presented the only opportunity of creating a broadly based mass movement in opposition to home rule.6 The family were not new to pro-Union politics. The second Marquess, the famous Viscount Castlereagh, had helped to create the Union of 1801, and the sixth Marquess was well grounded in Ulster politics from his period as MP for County Down and later as Viceroy of Ireland.7 But of equal concern to the Londonderry family was the fate and strategic interests of the Conservative Party; from 1905 it had been in opposition and greatly weakened by internal divisions over tariff reform. The Ulster Unionist mobilisation against home rule presented an opportunity for Conservatives to focus their patriotic and imperialist zeal on the Irish question and away from Joseph Chamberlain’s divisive campaign for imperial preference. As highly placed Conservatives and aristocratic members of the Ulster Unionist Council, the Londonderrys experienced at first hand the changing relationship between the various strands of unionism that had been marshalled to work side-by-side before the First World War only to unravel during it. While their comfortable political position before the war reflected the relative cohesion of the broader movement, the subsequent decline of southern Irish unionism, growing disinterest of British allies and militant determination of Ulster Unionists presented the seventh Marquess with a more complicated set of allegiances than that which had faced his father. It was also a period when aristocratic power and influence throughout Britain was on the decline. This analysis of Londonderry’s political career from 1905 to 1921 will demonstrate how a broader movement simplified and narrowed its aspirations, a reflection of the Ulster Unionist preoccupation with unity that became gradually fixed on the relationship between the movement’s business-class leadership and their working-class constituents. This symbiotic relationship exacerbated the dominance of parochial regionalism over broader imperial and British concerns, and propelled the estrangement, rejection and alienation of many of their British, southern Irish and aristocratic supporters.
Conservative politics, 1906–10 The years from Londonderry’s election to Parliament in 1906 as Lord Castlereagh to the end of the First World War forged his political consciousness and greatly influenced his subsequent political career. He entered the stormy arena of Edwardian politics at a time of major reform and constitutional upheaval. His close connections to the discredited leadership of Arthur Balfour ensured 224
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that Castlereagh found little success on the opposition backbenches, despite their depleted ranks. This was not a period of success for Castlereagh, nor was it one for his caste. He witnessed the culmination of major reforms against the landed interest, the emasculation of the House of Lords, and the passage of the third Home Rule Bill. Although he would survive the war, it was not certain that his political and class interests would be equally fortunate. The sixth Marquess had served in Balfour’s Cabinet prior to the 1906 election and was determined that his son would follow in his footsteps. With the help of his father’s former Cabinet colleague, Aretas Akers-Douglas, Castlereagh received the Tory nomination for Maidstone in Kent.8 His successful election against the incumbent Liberal was soon dampened by Castlereagh’s long and unpromising career on the back benches. Although in most respects a conventional Conservative, he was never simply a party man. In an era when party discipline was tightening, Castlereagh maintained an independent attitude that on occasion put him in opposition to his political chiefs, especially on the issue of tariff reform. If this stubborn independence set Castlereagh apart and hindered his chances of promotion, it would prove significant for his later approach to Irish affairs. Castlereagh nervously made his maiden speech in the House of Commons three days after taking his seat. He dealt with Ireland, the safe Conservative issue that had brought him successfully through the nomination and election, and one in which he claimed a ‘hereditary interest’.9 He ‘expressed sympathy with the claim that Ireland should be ruled according to Irish ideas, but insisted that they should be consistent with the unity of the empire. He very much doubted whether Nationalist views would stand that test’.10 While not a prolific speaker, Castlereagh was a regular participant in parliamentary debates and took an interest in economic and social issues, opposing many Liberal reforms that vitiated the principle of laissez-faire. He often accused the Liberals of abusing their majority – especially during the crisis over the Parliament Bill – to enact reforms that many Conservatives believed to be both repugnant and unconstitutional. He became exasperated early in his career with the parliamentary process as a means of checking the executive, but as a traditional Conservative he did not lay the blame on the doorstep of the Constitution, instead he believed the fault lay in the hands of the government that operated it. During his first term in Parliament, Castlereagh’s characteristic zeal and, to some extent, his patrician independence of party thought, were exhibited through the five issues with which he was most concerned, army reform, alcohol licensing, mining legislation, land taxation and Ireland. Liberal reforms to the local militias in 1907 caused division among the Tories, and Castlereagh placed himself on the losing side of both the government and his own party whips. His reservations were based not only on previous military experience, but also on an instinctive opposition to what he regarded as yet another Liberal reform to demolish the old order that the senatorial class had overseen for centuries.11 225
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Despite his somewhat romantic view of the militias, Castlereagh was not persuaded by populist views on the empire, especially concerning international trade. He passionately opposed state intervention in domestic industry as a hindrance to the economy and carried on his father’s opposition to Chamberlain’s movement for imperial preference.12 Coal-mining, Castlereagh frankly acknowledged, was his chief industrial concern, and ownership of extensive mines in County Durham placed his family among the country’s wealthiest people.13 Industrial unrest from an increasingly militant labour movement prompted the Liberal government to usher in a series of reforms; these concessions to the unions inevitably meant costly interference in the running of mines, an expense borne by owners. Castlereagh became a leading opponent of such legislation. He defended existing practices and argued against nationalisation on the basis that local districts had peculiar requirements.14 Observing local criteria, however, was not an argument he applied universally. In his long-running opposition to alcohol prohibition, Castlereagh criticised the concept of local option that he had advocated for mining, although the essence of both views was his belief in laissez-faire. Various Liberal attempts to legislate for the restriction of the alcohol trade, particularly in Scotland, aroused Castlereagh’s opposition, and although his underlying objection was based on the damage it would inflict on business, his arguments were practical and coloured with paternalistic concern for the lifestyle of his employees and manual workers in general.15 Once again he believed Liberal support for temperance to be another measure deliberately harmful to Conservative interests.16 The Londonderry dynasty, like other prominent landlords and mineowners, lived through revolutionary years in land ownership, especially in Ireland, and had been among the most vociferous opponents of reform. The Londonderrys were not so much motivated by property interests; in comparison to their coalrich lands in County Durham their Irish estates were relatively worthless. But in the Irish context the issue was bound up with constitutional and militant politics to a much greater extent than in other parts of the United Kingdom. Unlike his early views on business and social questions, Castlereagh’s concern for Irish affairs was more passionate and rooted in ancestral pride, and often led to uncharacteristic outbursts of frustration on the floor of the House of Commons. In the closing months of 1909 a constitutional crisis gathered momentum with the introduction of the ‘People’s Budget’ by David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an effort to rejuvenate flagging support for the government. This attempt to raise and invent new taxes in order to pay for social reform and naval construction would be borne most by the rich. The acrimony aroused by this debate created a deep personal animosity between Lloyd George and Castlereagh that lasted for many years; in the longer term it hindered Castlereagh’s progression in the post-war Lloyd George coalition. When Castlereagh pointed out a punitive purpose to the People’s Budget his reaction typified that of most of the great political landowners including Balfour and Lord Lansdowne. However, unlike some of his patrician contemporaries, 226
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Castlereagh refrained from bombastic threats and instead focused his opposition not on the principle but rather on the level of taxation.17 Despite this and other relatively moderate opposition, Lloyd George was able to pillory hysterical outbursts from aggrieved landowners and drum up support among his traditional constituency. The landlords flexed their muscles in the Upper House by voting to block the budget in November 1909. By convention, the peers did not block money bills from the Commons; therefore H.H. Asquith, who replaced Campbell-Bannerman as Liberal Prime Minister in April 1908, dissolved Parliament and went to the country to get a mandate for the budget and reform of the House of Lords.
Ulster crisis, 1910–14 Castlereagh’s defence of business was the most notable theme of his first term in the Commons. But during his second term, in common with most Conservatives, it was the crisis over House of Lords reform and Ireland that absorbed his efforts. The dual basis of aristocratic power – inherited wealth and inherited political privilege – came under attack. The general election of January 1910 failed to provide a conclusive result. The Unionists gained 100 seats, Castlereagh retaining Maidstone, but the Liberals still had a majority on their own strength and reinforced with the support of the Irish Nationalists and Labour.18 The peers, realising how close they were to self-destruction, allowed the second incarnation of the People’s Budget to pass unhindered in April. However, the damage was done and the Liberals could not risk another standoff with the inherently Conservative and Unionist Upper House which had blocked many of their important reforms. Nationalists also demanded change as the last Home Rule Bill had been scuttled in the Lords. On the heels of his budget victory Asquith proposed in the Parliament Bill to restrict the veto powers of the Lords – completely in the case of money bills and to a delaying power in all others. When Asquith introduced the bill, the Unionists’ anger focused on the cooperation between the Nationalists and the Liberals. They protested that this alliance was morally incapable of altering the Constitution.19 In April Castlereagh argued that ‘the conduct of the Government deserved the deepest censure’ and that Unionists ‘saw the whole fortunes of this country thrown into the melting-pot and prostituted before Mr Redmond’.20 The powerlessness of the opposition led to acts of desperation; on one occasion Castlereagh attempted to block government business on the issue of women’s suffrage, demanding that no other issue could be dealt with until this democratic deficit was rectified. It was not an argument many of his fellow Conservatives would have approved of, but it reflected the influence of his wife.21 By November 1910, following the failure of an inter-party conference to resolve the dispute over the Lords’ veto, the stalemate between the two houses reached new heights and Asquith called the second general election of the year. 227
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Castlereagh retained Maidstone. Once more there was an indecisive result that left further confusion as to whether a proper mandate existed, but the Liberals with Nationalist aid were able to retain control of the House of Commons. Asquith pressed on with the Parliament Bill in 1911. In contrast to Carson and the Tory die-hards, Castlereagh’s attitude remained fundamentally patrician though not intransigent, arguing that ‘the only solution of the question was one arrived at by compromise’.22 In this he acknowledged a perennial problem – a more representative second chamber would challenge the moral monopoly of the Commons as the people’s representatives. Castlereagh’s amendments were unsuccessful; he ‘felt in a hopeless position because the Government had taken up an absolutely uncompromising attitude towards amendments, and orders had been issued to their followers to adopt a negative line’.23 He accused them of abusing their majority to the detriment of others in the Commons: ‘for the purpose of maintaining the coalition upon which the Government rested Ministers were abusing the mandate they had obtained to alter the legislative machinery of the nation’.24 He objected to the ‘unscrupulous and increasingly rigid’ application of the ‘guillotine’ and, adopting a measure of bluff, vaguely threatened to stop what he and other peers called a ‘revolution’.25 The Commons passed the bill to the Lords in May, which in turn amended it beyond recognition, but the Lower House refused to back down and Asquith revealed the royal agreement to create the necessary number of Liberal peers in order to pass the bill. This coercive threat was not as effective as he intended; many in the Lords wanted to fight to the very end. A large number of these were motivated by the fear that home rule was imminent; indeed this concern triggered the beginning of a more militant form of Unionist mobilisation in Ulster. Although prominent Unionists such as Carson, leader of Irish unionism since 21 February 1910, stood with the ditcher camp, Castlereagh and his father agreed with the more moderate Tory leaders Balfour and Lansdowne. In the end, enough ‘ditchers’ relented under pressure from the Tory leadership for a majority of the peers to assent to the bill, 131–114 in the division. However, this new Conservative split added to existing fractures; Balfour resigned the leadership in November 1911, leaving a fraught legacy to his successor, the compromise choice, Andrew Bonar Law. The political turmoil surrounding the third Home Rule Bill dominated British politics from 1912. In the wake of the Parliament Act it presented a more ominous threat than its predecessors and this allowed British Unionists to mobilise opposition behind an ‘Empire in danger’ slogan that brought some unity to the battered party.26 Attention focused on the increasingly militant posturing of Ulster unionism and, crucially, Bonar Law gave his full support to Carson’s resistance. For a while it seemed that the interests of the Conservatives and Ulster Unionists had converged. However, the tariff question did not disappear and in January 1913, addressing the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council, Castlereagh, despite his own distaste for tariff reform, had to state his support for the leader’s compromise stance; he also attempted to divert imperialist228
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minded attention from divisive economics to Ireland by arguing that imperial preference to him meant not tariff reform but support for the Union.27 The Government of Ireland Bill was introduced to the Commons on 11 April 1912. Castlereagh, one of the first speakers, claimed it would ‘postpone indefinitely the great settlement to which the country was rapidly coming’.28 His speech embodied many of the ideas that differentiated him from fellow Ulster Unionists, including the need for all Ireland co-operation, United Kingdom federalism, non-partisan legislation and ancestral patrician obligations to the Union. Although he felt home rule would be disastrous to Ireland, and it lacked the consent of Unionists in Ulster, he asked that the measure be applied to the rest of the United Kingdom and concluded, ‘only by the hearty co-operation of the different sections, races, and creeds in the island could real Irish prosperity be reached’.29 Castlereagh’s belief in the deleterious economic consequences of a protectionist Dublin Parliament arose not only out of concern for Belfast business, it was an extension of his parliamentary defence of the laissez-faire economy. In June 1912 a backbench Liberal amendment proposing the exclusion of Ulster from home rule led to a conference of Unionists at Londonderry House. They decided to back the amendment in case it was a trap to allege nonco-operation; in so doing they initiated the most lasting question of post-1921 Irish politics, partition. Reflecting the change, Castlereagh’s argument became more sectional and regional: The men of Ulster were not anxious to go into the Union, they were forced into it; but since they went in they had realised that the Union made for their prosperity and interest. Having prospered they wanted to remain as they were . . . The hon. member for East Mayo [John Dillon] was going about saying that the Protestants of Ireland would not be satisfied with anything less than a position of ascendancy. They had never asked for that and did not want it. All they desired was to be left alone.30 The speech reflected two philosophical assumptions that animated northern Irish unionism, that the Union had been to the economic benefit of Ireland, and that Ulster Protestants were a distinct socio-political group.31 Castlereagh’s role in the Ulster cause was elevated by his father’s leading position in the Ulster Unionist Council and the friendship between his mother, Theresa, a leading political hostess, and Bonar Law.32 Yet despite these close connections and potential for prominence, Castlereagh failed to make a mark at this point. The sixth Marquess stood alongside Carson at most political events including the Ulster Covenant and in the formation of the provisional government; he attempted to counter growing militancy with a calming patrician influence.33 Castlereagh followed his father’s example and remained relatively pragmatic when attacking the bill and continued to make amendments that 229
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reflected his vision of a federal United Kingdom.34 The gravity of the crisis grew following the great Unionist rallies at Balmoral, County Antrim and Blenheim Palace in 1912. From the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, Bonar Law committed British Conservatism to Ulster Unionist resistance. Even these extraordinary sentiments, however shocking to the Liberals, did not dispel all their doubts as to the seriousness of Unionist resolve.35 To do this, and to maintain control over local supporters, the Unionist leadership devised the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant.36 It gave expression to the contractual nature of Ulster unionism by expressing both a loyalty to the King and a defiant determination to fight against the imposition of a settlement that they felt jeopardised their citizenship. In the week before the signing the Unionist hierarchy – into whose social company Castlereagh was accepted by virtue of his father – met on the outskirts of Belfast at the house of James Craig. Despite his close proximity to the leadership, Castlereagh resented the fact the he was unable to play a major part in the mobilisation and that the middle-class leadership granted his father a leading role for reasons of friendship, history and symbolism rather than personal influence. Nor could Castlereagh count on his status as a Tory MP to aid him as other, more successful British MPs including F.E. Smith and Lord Hugh Cecil offered a larger presence. His lack of success in the Edwardian party was in part due to his inability and unwillingness to adhere to the changing party line; now immersed in Unionist mobilisation that demanded uniformity Castlereagh grew even more restive at having responsibility over a policy he could not influence. At a moment when he should have been ideally placed to take advantage of the convergence of Tory and Ulster Unionist interests he complained to his wife: It is damnable here and I am bored to tears . . . I am simply loafing about; as yet I have done nothing; tomorrow evening a meeting and the same on Thursday and I sign on Saturday. I wish I had just come over for the signing; for all the good I have done or will do I might have been at Timbuctoo. I hate swelling the train of Carson and F.E.; there are so many anxious to do it. I have no news, I am bored here. I played golf this morning and I do the same this afternoon.37 The week was taken up with rallies to drum up excitement for the impending covenant signing. Castlereagh addressed a Unionist meeting in Crumlin, accompanied by a B-list of figures including Colonel Pakenham, Charles Craig and Lord Templetown. Like Templetown, Castlereagh made reference to his local ancestry and added a warning to the government that violence could result if their demonstrations were ignored.38 Even when his involvement increased, Castlereagh began to resent his concentrated dose of Ulster politics: ‘[t]his blasted week has put me all wrong. Never again do I undertake a week like this unless I am the central figure, and I fear that it interests me less and less. The cast and the humbug of the whole thing is really sickening’.39 230
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Following the exultation of Ulster Day Castlereagh exhibited a willingness to work with the bill albeit via amendments couched in party rhetoric; like the Liberals he too may have doubted the resolve of Unionist resistance. The amendments were not merely wrecking measures, they tacitly assumed an antiUnionist Dublin Parliament would come into existence, and included safeguards for landlords and northern Unionists.40 Castlereagh attacked the idea that only one part of the United Kingdom should be treated so very differently. And he extended this critique to how Ireland was being administered by calling for a Secretary of State for Ireland, responsible to Westminster, to replace the Viceroy, an office which he called ‘a complete anachronism’.41 Although Castlereagh’s parliamentary opposition to home rule is well documented, there is almost nothing to determine what place he may have had in the more militant aspects of Unionist resistance, particularly the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). However, any part he may have played was in all probability purely symbolic and of little political or logistical importance; Carson at least was very insistent that he avoid the stigma of association.42
War and the Irish Convention Many things changed for Castlereagh and Ireland during the First World War. The seemingly unstoppable slide of Ireland into civil war was averted by events on the European mainland. Castlereagh, like many others, enthusiastically greeted the outbreak of hostilities and joined up in August 1914; but his temporary return to the army was not as significant as the death of his father on 8 February 1915. Castlereagh, now the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, was no longer in his father’s shadow and inherited not only the title and coal-mining fortune, but a determination to live up to the ambitious political expectations of his family. As the war progressed Londonderry, in contrast to his previous experiences, was drawn ever closer to the Ulster cause, a move that reflected his sense of family duty and wider hopes of conscription in Ireland. Ironically, his growing interest occurred during a period when many of his Conservative colleagues began to drift away from the increasingly trenchant Ulster Unionists. Not for the first or last time in his political career, Londonderry championed a cause with little regard for the views of his Conservative colleagues. Londonderry’s involvement in Irish affairs came through his interest in the war effort. First he joined the Central Council for the Organisation of Recruiting in Ireland and later campaigned for the inclusion of Ireland in the 1916 conscription legislation that applied only to the rest of the United Kingdom.43 He was indifferent to the damage Sinn Féin’s opposition to conscription was inflicting on John Redmond’s constitutional Nationalists. This not only reflected his lack of distinction between the two groups, but also military concerns and a sense of Irish patriotism that felt humiliated by the organised refusal of many Irishmen to serve in the war.44 Speaking at a fair in County Londonderry he demanded Irish conscription on the basis of equality with Britain and warned of 231
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the dishonour Ireland would face among countries that fully participated in the war effort.45 This role developed his enthusiasm for, and participation in, Irish affairs. It was eventually acknowledged, along with his continued association with Ulster unionism, in 1917 when he was made an Ulster Unionist delegate to the Irish Convention. The Irish Convention was a response to the dramatically altered Irish political climate of 1916. Following the Easter Rising, Redmond and Carson were successful at getting their parties to ratify a settlement based on the introduction of home rule with the exclusion of six Ulster counties. In June 1916, after an acrimonious debate, the Ulster Unionist Council approved the scheme that meant the abandonment of three counties to a Dublin Parliament. Londonderry publicly supported Carson’s contention that it would be the most practical solution: It was a very sad day for us all but there was nothing else to be done and I think our action was tactically right. The offer we got is a better offer than we have ever had before or are ever likely to get again and if there is a bill to establish a clean cut, that places us in an impregnable position. It remains now to see what the Nationalists are going to do. I cannot believe that they will accept the situation and in that case we get all the credit for having taken the patriotic line and of having made a real sacrifice.46 He later claimed he had only agreed to support the measure on the basis of the assurance that the wartime Coalition Cabinet had approved of the scheme.47 Not only was this not the case – they had not reckoned on Lloyd George’s alacrity in reaching an agreement – but Walter Long and Lansdowne, encouraged by southern Irish Unionists, led a revolt on the issue. The row dragged on into July when the plan was finally jettisoned, but the episode exposed the divisions between southern and northern, British and Irish Unionists that would increasingly pry them apart by the end of the war.48 Londonderry was annoyed with the confusion but, unlike his wife, refused to take part in any intra-party division or foster disquiet about the leadership. Like Carson he adhered to a policy of war first, Ulster second, and had made a public declaration of his support for six-county exclusion. His posting was also a factor; in France he was far from the political maelstrom in the Cabinet and not in a position of much influence.49 In December, with the aid of Carson and Bonar Law, Lloyd George ousted Asquith and formed a new coalition government with a larger Unionist representation. By the spring of 1917 Lloyd George had reverted to finding a solution to the Irish question, for ‘appearances as well as for ends’, and all sides eventually agreed to a Convention.50 The decisions of this assembly of Irishmen would be non-binding; but Lloyd George assured Redmond that Parliament would enact any substantial agreement reached, although even the Cabinet Conservatives remained vague about what that meant.51 232
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Londonderry was chosen for the Convention and joined the Ulster Unionist delegation as their honorary secretary; they were led by Hugh Thom Barrie, a Scottish businessman and MP for North Londonderry. It was agreed early on that Ulster Unionist representatives should meet regularly with an external advisory committee; this would check the activities of a negotiating team that, in contrast to the Nationalists, included no leading member of the party. The hundred or so members of the Convention met from the summer of 1917 to the spring of 1918; in that time many schemes were put forward and debated, committees and sub-committees formed and divisions taken. The details of the Convention are not treated exhaustively here, but attention is given to the performance of the Ulster Unionists and to Londonderry in particular.52 Amid much tension, the Convention opened on 25 July in Trinity College, Dublin; Sir Horace Plunkett was eventually elected chairman.53 In the opening meeting the parties stated their positions; Londonderry presented the Ulster Unionist view and was ‘listened to with the closest attention, there being, naturally, much anxiety as to the line the Ulster Unionist groups would take’.54 According to Plunkett’s minutes, Londonderry said the Unionists came to the Convention in ‘friendliness’ and with an ‘open mind’ to reach ‘some general kind of agreement of what is the best for the government of this country’. He recited Ulster Unionist beliefs, from the link between the Union and empire to northern prosperity, the unity of British peoples and a denial that Ireland was a colony.55 Plunkett’s notes give an interesting account of Londonderry’s presentation: The speech produced the best possible impression . . . It was delivered with an obvious lack of platform practice, which he explained by three years spent in discharging the duties of a soldier in France, but its tone and temper were perfect. As I listened to him I felt that he had all the charm of his father and a good measure of his mother’s brains. He seemed to belong a little more to the later nineteenth and early twentieth century than either of his parents.56 Indeed, Plunkett was so impressed by Londonderry and confident they were similar in attitude that he allowed Londonderry to look at the Confidential Report he was preparing for the government.57 But the Ulster Unionists refrained from putting forward any firm proposal, a position they maintained amid much criticism for most of the Convention. In response to warnings from George Russell of a Sinn Féin revolt, Londonderry replied ‘that the Unionists can be won if they can be persuaded that selfgovernment is better than the Union’, a rhetorically generous but atypical interpretation of his party’s position.58 The exchange of views carried on through the summer months with pressure increasingly focused on the Ulster Unionists. Social occasions were organised in the hope that their relations with other delegates might improve.59 Still wary of the motives and possible uses of 233
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the Convention, the Ulster Unionists remained unwilling to engage fully in the debate, and aside from their economic concerns they were circumspect about their position. This reluctance reflected not only a strategy to avoid an agreement, but also the party’s lack of a definitive objective. Views within the Ulster Unionist movement were varied both in the delegation and in the party at large. Some, like Londonderry, were amenable to an all-Ireland solution if the safeguards were satisfactory; others like Hugh de Fellenberg Montgomery were passionate advocates of six-county exclusion.60 The Convention continued its work throughout the summer of 1917, with meetings held in Belfast and Cork as well as in Dublin; Londonderry played the aristocratic host and used the trips north to invite delegates to his home at Mount Stewart. Londonderry’s attitude towards Irish politics had shifted from distaste to personal satisfaction, and he increasingly despaired at the lack of common ground; failure, he felt, was inevitable:61 my ambitions in another sphere having failed this does satisfy a desire to be someone and to be really filling a place somewhere which carries responsibility with it . . . Last night I had a private confabulation with Labour, which was very interesting. The working man here does not look with suspicion on a Lord as his confrere in England does. I am enjoying being in Ireland very much. I really like it infinitely better than England, and I get on better with the people.62 Londonderry was privately frustrated by the unco-operative attitude of his Ulster colleagues: ‘We could govern Ireland from Belfast but I am not sure the stalwarts want to do that; they would much prefer to remain behind a six county [border] and make faces at the rest of Ireland.’63 Londonderry was increasingly embracing the Convention with hopes of realising a new Irish settlement just as his great-great-grand uncle, Viscount Castlereagh, had done over a century earlier. By October, Plunkett felt that the Ulster Unionists were beginning to engage, coaxed along with assurances about continued representation at Westminster and fiscal union with Britain.64 A new sub-committee, including Barrie and Londonderry, was formed to concentrate the debate on the two stumbling blocks, fiscal policy and Ulster.65 At meetings of this ‘sub-committee of nine’, Ulster Unionists opposed any moves towards an all-Ireland Parliament. It was not until they agreed to discuss a hypothetical suggestion for an Irish Parliament made by the Catholic Bishop of Raphoe, Patrick O’Donnell, that there was movement. Progress thereafter was good and it was eventually agreed that an Irish Senate would consist of appointees and be given extra Unionist representation to counterbalance the Nationalist dominance of the lower house.66 When they discussed the Unionist allocation of seats in the lower house, positions were more reluctantly abandoned. In spite of this, the Ulster Unionists appeared willing to countenance some form of all-Ireland Parliament. London234
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derry had even indicated to Lord Midleton, the leader of southern Unionists, that the more ‘satisfactory’ representation was for Unionists, the more liberal they could be about the powers of the Parliament.67 Barrie settled at 40 per cent of lower house seats, and Nationalists conceded continued representation at Westminster.68 Once these issues were settled, the sub-committee turned its attention to the fiscal question. Due to a combination of economic fears and political intransigence, this was the sticking point that doomed the Convention. O’Donnell’s hypothesis gave Dublin control over customs and excise, a crucial benchmark for an aspiring devolved legislature that Unionists refused to allow. The deadlock created a mood of gloom, and the sub-committee met on 15 November 1917 to prepare a negative report for the grand committee scheduled to meet a week later. With all seeming lost, Londonderry suddenly and without warning offered a glimmer of hope. He agreed to table a motion for a federal scheme at the last meeting of the sub-committee to be held on 21 November.69 The idea of a federal United Kingdom was not new to the Convention or Londonderry, but that he aired it at a critical moment when the Ulster Unionists had hitherto offered no real scheme was very significant. It revealed that although Londonderry had come to a prominent position within Ulster unionism, his concerns remained broader than those of his colleagues. The idea of home rule for the entire United Kingdom was shared by some leading Conservatives, including Carson.70 It also suited Conservatives who feared Ulster Unionist intransigence was alienating American support.71 Plunkett’s report of the Convention, generally scathing of Ulster Unionists, praised Londonderry’s initiative: ‘Now an Ulster leader suddenly announces his intention of not only making, on behalf of his party, a constructive proposal, but of offering at any rate a certain measure of self-government, presumably for the whole of Ireland’.72 Predictably Londonderry’s move caused consternation among some Ulster Unionists who feared his offer would be enough of a concession to push through home rule. And Londonderry had no authority to make such a gesture. Unsurprisingly Adam Duffin, a member of the modestly named advisory committee, warned Londonderry to be vague on federalism and make major reservations for Ulster; the war, he felt, was not the appropriate time for new constitutions. Like other Ulster Unionists Duffin wanted the Convention to fail; he informed Londonderry that the delegation should break agreement on the fiscal issue and allow the Nationalists to be the ones to walk away.73 Remarkably there is no minute of any meeting between the Ulster delegates or their advisors in the week following Londonderry’s offer.74 Despite this the result is known. On 21 November, at the last meeting of the sub-committee, Barrie informed the others that Londonderry would not be putting forward the federal scheme ‘as they did not think that such a course would ease the situation’. Plunkett was clear that it was not Londonderry who changed his mind: ‘There was nothing for it but to take Lord Londonderry’s will for somebody 235
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else’s deed’.75 When the grand committee met the next day, Barrie ignored the federal debacle and blamed the failure of O’Donnell’s scheme on the distance between unionism and nationalism on the fiscal question.76 The episode exposed internal Ulster Unionist divisions. Barrie felt the leadership’s policy to be the wrong one; that it would have been better to allow O’Donnell to be the main and only objector.77 The rejection of the slightest possibility of an all-Ireland solution at this point was a defining moment for Ulster unionism, no matter how prescribed. The last hope of an accommodation with Nationalists, offered by Londonderry, was rejected. As though to confirm this, the last meeting of delegates on 18 December recorded, unusually for the terse minutes of Richard Dawson Bates, that a ‘discussion took place to the various schemes for safeguarding the interests of Ulster’.78 Another important consequence was the parting of ways between southern and Ulster unionism. Midleton had supported Londonderry’s scheme, calling it the ‘last hope’; once it had evaporated he moved towards a doomed alliance between southern Unionists and Redmond’s Nationalist supporters.79 Londonderry’s reasons for choosing the federal scheme were more than a wish to rescue the Convention. He had previously spoken in the House of Commons of his desire for a federal solution to the Irish question; to him it was the best way to secure Ireland’s link with British affairs. In an argumentative letter to the Nationalist Lady Fingall he revealed his thinking: There is no limit to local self-government which the evolution of modern government may not reach and to this movement I am a willing subscriber, but I repeat that this must limit Irish aspirations so long as the British Empire exists . . . the suggestion of Ireland as a separate national political and fiscal unit has never received support in the Colonies and must present a strategic danger which Great Britain could under no circumstances admit.80 There was a perception that despite his defeat Londonderry could join and give further legitimacy to an alliance of southern Unionists and moderate Nationalists; this was not to be – his loyalty to Ulster unionism, however frustrating, came first.81 Londonderry certainly despaired at the unwillingness of his colleagues to grasp what he regarded as a ‘great opportunity’ and admitted to feeling uncomfortable as an Ulster Unionist.82 Yet he would not openly dissent from the Ulster leadership, a consequence of years in a divided opposition. Although Londonderry’s serious proposal for a federal solution had been dismissed, the Ulster Unionist leadership toyed with using it as a negotiating device when the Convention resumed its deliberations in 1918.83 The uncommitted and mercurial attitude to the issue by the leadership irritated Londonderry: ‘I think Carson is quite impossible and he thinks that he can come and go as he likes; back one day, disappear the next’.84 He was so upset with the attitude of his colleagues that he warned his mother that he might not return to Ulster pol236
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itics should the rebelliousness of Ulster Unionists not wane; it was an empty and subsequently contradicted threat. The differing attitudes of Londonderry and others can be seen in their speeches from the beginning of February 1918. While Londonderry promised the Ulster representatives would bring about a settlement if it were ‘honourable’, Barrie toed the party line in a series of defensive and unco-operative speeches.85 On 25 February Lloyd George – based on hearings with Convention delegations and under the influence of Cabinet Conservatives – wrote to Plunkett and Barrie putting forward a compromise position. The plan included home rule, a delay in the fiscal question until the end of the war, greater representation for Ulster in the Irish Parliament and an Ulster committee with a vetoing power. He also agreed to implement any agreements on land purchase reached by the Convention. To Barrie he emphasised the need to agree for the sake of the war effort and to appease critics in the United States.86 The Ulster delegates prepared for their meeting in Belfast with the advisory committee; Londonderry was chosen to read out Lloyd George’s letter.87 The result of this meeting was catastrophic for those who sought consensus.88 De Fellenberg Montgomery wrote to Londonderry deriding Lloyd George’s war plea as ‘bunkum’.89 But Londonderry was not in agreement with the policy adopted by the party and thought the time for compromise was upon them. He had expressed his view to Carson a few days prior to the meeting: I cannot pretend to be in agreement with this policy. I never was in your confidence before my Father died and I certainly am not in it now. I believe your view is more or less the same as mine, namely that the war must take precedence . . . and that even a temporary arrangement of our prejudices and difficulties ought to be come to if it can possibly be done. I believe also that you are satisfied that the offers suggested to be made to Ulster now eliminate those dangers which induced us in 1914 to take up arms in our own defence. But even holding these views . . . you feel that because Ulster opinion appears to be so strong, we should not even make an effort to induce our constituents not only to consider the desperate position of the Empire, but also to realise that from the tactical point of view we can brand the R.C. Church as really opponents to a settlement of the question. If this is so I feel very unhappy about it. You are the only man who has any real over-riding influence in Ulster – we do not count and I especially do not count, for reasons which I need not go into and as your determination seems to throw your weight into the scale of the strongest opposition to any settlement; then all I can say is that I wish that instead of procrastinating because we have done nothing else, we had left the Convention some months ago.90
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Londonderry’s disappointment with Carson should not be understated; he had asserted before the Convention that Carson was the ‘sole intelligence’ and stabiliser of Ulster unionism.91 The Convention adjourned on 6 March owing to the death of Redmond; Londonderry was the only Ulster Unionist representative to attend the funeral. When it met again the Convention struggled on until April but failed to reach any consensus. This had been the tactic behind the Ulster leadership’s attitude to the Convention. From its inception they had been suspicious, seeing it as a step in the direction of self-government; those, like Londonderry, who were still willing to consider other options were not fashionable or in tune with party thinking. And while Londonderry’s representation of the Ulster Unionist position showed both his willingness to play a part in Irish affairs and the reduced inclusion of aristocratic leaders, it also revealed that the increasingly absolute demand for exclusion rode roughshod over those with broader agendas within and outside the party, that the all-Ireland and broader British sensibilities of those such as Carson and Londonderry would come second to the exclusion of a certain number of Unionist people in the north-east of Ireland. The Convention’s failure coincided with an increasing demand for manpower in the army. At the end of March 1918 the Cabinet began discussing the implementation of conscription. Londonderry supported the measure but criticised the government for not having done it sooner, adding that he ‘urged the conscription of Ireland as an Irishman who was jealous of the good name and honour of Ireland’.92 When the Convention finished in April, Londonderry again had cause to meditate on his own course. In spite of his independence at the Irish Convention he continued to be courted by Ulster unionism, even to the extent that others reinterpreted his views to make him more acceptable; he was lauded at an Orange Order demonstration as the man who had brought the threat of home rule to an end.93 More importantly, Londonderry’s performance had given him government approval. He was invited to participate in Lord French’s distinctly senatorial and patrician Viceroy’s Advisory Council. The Council was intended to be a representative body of Irishmen ‘of position and standing in different parts of the country’, but as Eunan O’Halpin has argued, ‘a less representative collection of Irishmen it would have been hard to find: they were simply rich men who were afraid of Sinn Féin. Apart from Londonderry . . . none of them carried any political weight’.94 Government patronage meant that Londonderry became a useful ambassador for the Ulster Unionists; for example, helping the UVF to retain its weapons against the wishes of elements in Dublin Castle.95 At the first meeting of the Council on 10 October, Londonderry expressed his hope that it would ‘develop into something more substantial and responsible’.96 However, despite hopes of turning it into an Irish Cabinet, it only met on a few occasions and was soon disbanded amid internal political wrangling in Dublin Castle. Just as Ireland had rescued Londonderry from obscurity, Westminster rescued him from the chaos of Irish politics that followed the 238
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December 1918 general election, an election that produced both a Conservative victory in the United Kingdom and a Sinn Féin majority in Ireland. Within the year Londonderry was promoted to Under Secretary of State for Air and given the elite Order of the Garter for his services to Ireland. Londonderry never lost his interest in Ulster affairs, returning in 1921 as the first Minister of Education in the new Belfast Parliament. Even during and after his tenure in the British Cabinet as Secretary of State for Air in the 1930s he continued a personal lobby for what he regarded as his neglected province. Unlike most of his family he chose to be buried in his Ulster estate.
Conclusion As Jackson argues, this was the period when unionism simplified, retreated and retrenched.97 By the end of the war the Conservatives had moved significantly away from a territorial definition of British unity to one of nation. Ulster Unionists became more regional, populist and dominated by the middle class. Southern unionism, shorn of the numerical strength of Ulster and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of one-nation Conservatism, fell victim not only to the indifference of its former allies but also to the civil turmoil that preceded and followed the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. At first glance Londonderry’s involvement in Irish affairs appears to be marked by repeated failures; but this view would ignore the social and political contexts of the period. Londonderry’s political thought and practice were fundamentally patrician. At a time when the northern middle-class leadership of Ulster unionism was stripping itself of southern unionism and its own supporters within nine-county Ulster, and alienating the previously supportive Conservatives, they invited an independent-minded Anglo-Irish Conservative to inherit his father’s role as the leading aristocrat within the movement. However, this should not overstate his effectiveness or the reason for his appointment. They never intended him to be a leader, merely a potentially useful servant and ally with good connections to the Conservative party and royal court; when he did act on his patrician instincts the leadership moved to silence him. At the same time, Londonderry’s role in the Convention earned him plaudits from previously indifferent Conservatives who rewarded him with junior office in 1919. This made him a valuable asset to Ulster Unionists, one they invited in 1921 to join their six-county home rule government. Indeed, as a well-known liberal Ulster Unionist, Londonderry was given the controversial task of reforming education, a policy that required the consent of both Catholics and Protestants. It is ironic that Londonderry’s career started to progress at a time when the various species of unionism with which he was associated, directly or by temperament, began to unravel and part company. But this is at the heart of why he did progress both in Ulster and in the Conservative party. They viewed him as a conduit between Belfast and London. For the Conservatives Londonderry represented a reliable and safe pair of hands in the distrusted Belfast 239
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administration; for the Ulster Unionists he provided a highly placed political and social link with Westminster. At a time when the British and, to a much greater extent, the Irish landed classes were on the decline, Lord Londonderry maintained a prominent political role in both countries, becoming a lifelong advocate for Northern Ireland, and, through his early role in the Irish Convention, ending years of backbench anonymity to begin a political and government career that lasted until the mid-1930s.
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A TIME OF TRANSITIONS 1 Quoted in Richard Murphy, ‘Walter Long and the Making of the Government of Ireland Act, 1919–20’, Irish Historical Studies [IHS], 25 (May 1986), p. 95. 2 Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 77, 125. 3 Alan O’Day, ‘Parnell: Orator and Speaker’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991), pp. 201–20; Alan O’Day, ‘Information, Media and Power: Charles Stewart Parnell’s Mission to North America, 1880’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Information, Media and Power through the Ages: Historical Studies 24 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 202–21. 4 James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria (Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 198–289. 5 Daily Mail, 15 June 1888. 6 See Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994). 7 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London, 1995), p. 3. 8 ‘The Rights of Man as Proclaimed in the French Constitution of the Year III’ (1795), in J.M. Roberts (ed.), French Revolution Documents (Oxford, 1966), I, p. 178. 9 J.H. Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York, 1951), p. 574. 10 Quoted in H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 147. 11 R.D. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production (Cork, 1966), p. 83. 12 R.B. McDowell, Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs (Dublin, 1993), p. 30. 13 Virginia Crossman, Local Government in Nineteenth-century Ireland (Belfast, 1994). 14 McDowell, Land and Learning, p. 30. 15 See Janet Nolan, ‘The Great Famine and Women’s Emigration from Ireland’, in E. Margaret Crawford (ed.), The Hungry Stream: Essays on Famine and Emigration (Belfast, 1997), pp. 67–75. 16 See ibid.; Janet Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington, KY, 1989). 17 Liam Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast, 1996), pp. 25–34. 18 Ibid., p. 34. 19 Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland: Catholic Elite, 1879–1922 (Cork, 1999), pp. 134–5. 20 Ibid., p. 151. 21 W.E. Vaughan and A.J. Fitzpatrick (eds), Irish Historical Statistics: Population 1821–1971 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), pp. 3, 15–16.
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22 David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Disappearance of the Irish Agricultural Labourer, 1841– 1912’, Irish Economic and Social History, 7 (1980), p. 82. 23 David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration 1801–1921 (Dundalk, 1984), p. 29. 24 See Alan O’Day, ‘Irish Nationalism and Anglo-American Relations in the Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (eds), Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 168–94. 25 Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, p. 38. 26 Ibid., Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration 1850–1900 (Minneapolis, MN, 1958), p. 105. 27 See Alvin Jackson, ‘Irish Unionism and the Russellite Threat, 1894–1906’, IHS, 25 (November 1987), pp. 376–404. 28 See D. George Boyce, ‘Rights of Citizenship: The Conservative Party and the Constitution, 1906–1914’, in Alan O’Day (ed.), Government and Institutions, pp. 215–25. 29 Umut Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London and Basingstoke, 2000), p. 33. 30 Ibid., p. 34. 31 Gerard Delanty and Patrick O’Mahony, Nationalism and Social Theory (London, 2002), p. 131. 32 Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999), p. 45. 1 MAX WEBER AND LEADERSHIP 1 An early version of this chapter was presented at the Methodist College Belfast. Bronagh Leitch suggested the topic. It was prepared while I was Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast. I am indebted to George Boyce and my aunt, Col. Helen E. O’Day. 2 Quoted in Peter Mulvany, ‘Extracts from a Rathoath Diary, 1804–1895’, Records of Meath Archaeological and Historical Society, 6: 1 (1975), p. 29. 3 Tom Garvin, The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (Dublin, 1981), p. 7. 4 M.R. O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, 1824–1828 (Dublin, 1977), III, pp. 372–3. 5 See Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, ‘O’Connell in Irish Folk Tradition’, in Maurice R. O’Connell, Daniel O’Connell: Political Pioneer (Dublin, 1991), pp. 72–85. 6 Kevin B. Nowlan, ‘O’Connell and Irish Nationalism’, in Kevin B. Nowlan and Maurice R. O’Connell (eds), Daniel O’Connell: Portrait of a Radical (Belfast, 1984), p. 9; also, Donal McCartney, ‘The Changing Image of O’Connell’, ibid., pp. 19–31. 7 Patrick O’Brien, ‘Is Political Biography a Good Thing?’, Contemporary British History, 10 (Winter 1996), p. 62. 8 Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), p. 340. 9 K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), pp. vii–viii. 10 Ibid., p. viii. 11 Jim McLaughlin, Reimaging the Nation-state: The Contested Terrains of Nation Building (London, 2001), pp. 6, 8–9, passim. 12 Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Act (Cambridge, 1967), p. 340. 13 A.B. Cooke and J.R. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain 1885–86 (Hassocks, 1974), p. 160. But see G.K. Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Self-government 1865–1925: From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001), pp. 1–11.
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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
O’Brien, ‘Political Biography’, p. 60. Ibid., p. 65. Garvin, Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics, p. 2. Ibid., p. 6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), p. 19. For Lazerfeld and the other authorities discussed in this paragraph, see Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Chris Newbold (eds), Approaches to Media: A Reader (London, 1995). E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 125. Alan O’Day, ‘Isaac Butt and Irish Nationality’, The Historian (Summer 1998), pp. 18–21. Quoted in William L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland, 1872–1886 (Boston, MA, 1984), p. 96. D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (3rd edn; London, 1995), pp. 18–19. Nation, 13 November 1869. Ibid., 20 November 1869. Quoted in Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule 1867–1921 (Manchester 1998), pp. 29–31. Nation, 17 December 1870. Proceedings of the Home Rule Conference held at the Rotunda, Dublin on the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st November 1873 (Dublin, 1874). Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (eds), Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994), p. 336. Antonio Panebianco, Political Parties: Organisation and Power (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 132–3. Nation, 11 April 1874. Joseph Royayne to John O’Leary, Isaac Butt Papers, National Library of Ireland. The Times, 6 May 1879. George-Denis Zimmermann, Songs of Irish Rebellion: Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs 1780–1900 (Dublin, 1967), p. 61. Alan O’Day, ‘Isaac Butt versus Parnell: The Debate on the Role of a Third Party in the House of Commons in the 1870s’, in O’Day (ed.), Government and Institutions in the Post-1932 United Kingdom (Lampeter, Wales; Lewiston, NY; Queenstown, Ontario, 1995), pp. 156–90. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (17th edn, London, 1985), pp. 150–82. Alan O’Day, Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846–1891 (Dublin, 1998). Drogheda Argus, 17 April 1875. Nation, 23 October 1875. Alan O’Day, ‘Parnell: Orator and Speaker’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991), pp. 201–20. See Alan O’Day, ‘Information, Media and Power: Charles Stewart Parnell’s Mission to North America, 1880’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Information, Media and Power through the Ages: Historical Studies 24 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 202–21. Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London, 1906), p. 371. Lassman and Speirs (eds), Weber: Political Writings, pp. 105–7; Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (London, 1960), pp. 297–327. James Loughlin, ‘Constructing the Political Spectacle: Parnell, the Press and National Leadership, 1879–86’, in Boyce and O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective, pp. 221–41. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and his Party 1880–90 (Oxford, 1957), p. 262, n. 2. Zimmermann, Songs of Irish Rebellion, p. 289. The fullest account is F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon: A Biography (London, 1968). T.W. Moody and R.A. Hawkins with Margaret Moody (eds), Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal (Oxford, 1988), p. 494.
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49 50 51 52 53 54 55
Lyons, John Dillon, pp. 26–67. T.W. Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846–82 (Oxford, 1982), p. 539. Quoted in O’Brien, Parnell and his Party, p. 221. Lyons, John Dillon, pp. 152–3. F.S.L. Lyons, The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890–1910 (London, 1951), pp. 62–7. Ibid., p. 67. Quoted in Paul Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 102–3. 56 Francis M. Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question 1910–23 (Dublin, 1978), p. 208. 57 Lyons, John Dillon, pp. 380–3. 58 Zimmermann, Songs of Irish Rebellion, p. 276. 2 N AT I O N A L I T Y A N D L O YA LT Y
1 T.M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of my Day (London, 1928), I, p. 183. 2 A widespread Irish view that she contributed only £5 to famine relief was erroneous. She personally contributed £2,500, while an appeal she made for funds raised, in conjunction with other appeals, £435,000. See Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–9 (London, 1964), pp. 164–5, 303, 380; Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–1850 (Dublin, 1999), p. 259. 3 Anthony Trollope, The Land Leaguers (London, 1883), I, p. 79. The Fenian, John O’Leary, described Victoria as a ‘highly respectable foreign lady, apparently with all the merits and demerits of the English bourgeoisie . . . she could not well help being English and a Queen, or, rather the English Queen of Ireland’. John O’Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (London, 1896), I, p. 131. 4 See Parnell to the editor, New York Herald, 1 February 1880 in P.J. Tynan, The Irish National Invincibles and their Times (London, 1894), pp. 147–8. 5 For the argument that charitable works were a central element of a monarchical campaign to increase its hold, and that of the constitutional status quo, on British popular opinion in the Victorian era, see Frank Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995), p. 67. 6 C.M. O’Keeffe, ‘Queen Victoria and Mr Parnell’, Celtic Monthly (June 1880), p. 512, cited in J.H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism, Monarchy and Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria (Cork, 2001), pp. 200–1. 7 Ponsonby to the Queen, 21 December 1880, Royal Archives [RA], D28/43. 8 Queen to Ponsonby, 22 December 1880, RA, D28/43a. 9 Healy quoted in Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), p. 34. 10 Katherine O’Shea, Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life (London, 1914), II, p. 160. 11 See report in Freeman’s Journal [FJ], 26 September 1881. 12 James Loughlin, ‘Constructing the Political Spectacle: Parnell, the Press and National Leadership 1879–86’, in D.G. Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective (London, 1991). 13 See J.M. McKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), ch. 1. 14 Loyalty assumed a stable social hierarchy, something the Land War was destroying. See Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London, 1904), p. 466; James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question 1882–93 (Dublin, 1986), pp. 105–6. 15 Queen to Lord Hartington, 12 December 1880, RA, D29/200. A Fenian bombing
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16 17 18 19
20
21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32
33 34 35
campaign in London began at this time. See K.R.M. Short, The Dynamite War: Fenian Bombers in Victorian London (Dublin, 1980). See Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Electric Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (London, 1998). See J.A. Godley to Ponsonby, 16 June 1881, RA, D28/74. See Address from the Canadian Parliament on home rule for Ireland, 20 April 1882, Commons; 3 May 1882, Senate in A.B. Keith (ed.), Selected Speeches and Documents on British Colonial Policy 1763–1917 (London, 1933), II, pp. 193–6. Thackeray mercilessly ridiculed the office in the 1840s: ‘Oh that old humbug of a [Dublin] Castle! It is the greatest sham of all the shams in Ireland’. ‘The Irish Sketchbook’ [1843] in W.M. Thackeray, Sketchbooks (London, 1902), pp. 577–8. As the administrative – to Nationalist minds, coercive – as well as ceremonial centre of Ireland, Dublin Castle was reviled by Nationalists and Republicans. See Cowper to Gladstone, 12 December 1880; Forster to Cowper, 15 December 1880, in K. Cowper Earl Cowper by His Wife (London, 1913), pp. 446–9. The Protection of Person and Property Act implemented in early 1881 was only enacted under threat of Cowper’s resignation. Cowper to Lord Spencer, 30 March 1881, in Cowper, Earl Cowper, pp. 486–7; Ponsonby to Cowper, 28 August 1881, p. 517. See Congress report in The Times, 10 October 1881. See Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences, ed. Arnold Haultain (New York, 1910), pp. 314–15; Smith to John Cameron, editor of the Toronto Globe, 18 November 1881, in Arnold Haultain (ed.), The Correspondence of Goldwin Smith (New York, 1913), p. 99. Gladstone’s attempt to establish an Irish royal residence during his first administration was a significant factor in Victoria’s developing detestation of him. See Philip Magnus, Gladstone (2nd edition, London, 1963) pp. 208–15. See Lord Spencer to the Queen, 21 December 1881, reporting on a visit he had made to assess the situation, in Peter Gordon (ed.), The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer, 1835–1910 (Northampton, 1980), I, pp. 178–9. For an account see Joseph Hone, ‘Queen Victoria in Ireland, 1853’, History Today, 3 (July 1953), pp. 500–8. Such thinking, for example, was the basis of the ‘constructive unionism’ pursued in Ireland from 1886. Hamilton to Ponsonby, 12 December 1881, RA, D28/82. See Parnell at Cork, FJ, 3 October 1881. For comprehensive and fairly objective coverage of the controversy, see Belfast NewsLetter, 17, 23 December 1881. See Gary Owens, ‘Nationalist Movements in Ireland, c.1870–1914: Symbolism and Ritual’, in Raymond Gillespie and Brian Kennedy (eds), Ireland: Art into History (Dublin, 1994), p. 106. An attempt made on the life of the Queen at this time was erroneously assumed in Britain to be Irish-inspired. But as Cowper informed Victoria: the attempt was condemned ‘even in this country [Ireland]’. Cowper to the Queen, 3 March 1882, RA, D28/127. Cowper to Gladstone, 2 May 1882, in Cowper, Earl Cowper, pp. 579–80. On this subject, see Hiram Morgan and S.J. Connolly, ‘Lord Deputy’, in S.J. Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford, 1998), pp. 328–9. For a general account of the viceregal system, see Joseph Robins, Champagne and Silver Buckles: The Viceregal Court at Dublin Castle 1700–1922 (Dublin, 2001). Spencer, ‘More Notes on the Functions of Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary’, 22 April 1882, in Gordon (ed.), Red Earl, I, p. 186. See Lyons, Parnell, pp. 207–20, 231–4. Trevelyan was appointed apparently because he was believed to have ‘some genius
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36 37 38 39 40 41 42
43 44 45 46 47 48
49 50 51 52
53 54 55 56 57
58
59
and imagination’, qualities believed to be ‘useful’ in dealing with the Irish. Lord Northcote to Spencer, 7 May 1882, in Gordon (ed.), Red Earl, I, p. 193. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., Spencer to Harcourt, 26 May 1882, p. 202. Queen Victoria’s Journal, 6 May 1882, in Christopher Hibbert (ed.), Queen Victoria in her Letters and Journals (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 273. See Loughlin, Gladstone, ch. 1. James Loughlin, ‘Maamtrasna Murders’, in Connolly (ed.), Oxford Companion, p. 333. See Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall, Seventy Years Young (New York, 1939), p. 127. Justin McCarthy, Parliamentary Debates [PD] 3rd series, 280 (20 June 1883), cc.1076–83; Mrs O’Shea to Gladstone, 16, 18 June 1883, in H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries with Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence (Oxford, 1990), X, p. 461. See E.D. Gray, PD, 280 (20 June 1883), cc. 1089–90; Richard O’Shaughnessy, c. 1091; F.H. O’Donnell, c. 1093; Philip Callan, cc. 1091–2. Daunt to the editor, Nation, 7 July 1883. M’Grath to the editor, Nation, 11 August. 1883. See Daunt to W.E.H. Lecky, 8 June 1882, Trinity College Dublin Ms 1827–36, Lecky Correspondence, 257. Goold to the editor, Nation, 18 August 1883; Goold to Daunt, 21 July, 1 August 1883, National Library of Ireland [NLI], W.J. O’Neill Daunt Papers, Ms 8045. Gladstone to Hartington, 29 December 1883, Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1990), XI, pp. 86–7; Spencer to Hartington, 21 October 1883, in Gordon (ed.), Red Earl, I, pp. 251–4; Spencer to Harcourt, 30 December 1883, p. 260. The reforms (1884–5) enfranchised the male householder, and British concern – in royal as well as political circles – about their effect was widespread. See article in the Contemporary Review [CR] by the Marquis of Lorne advocating ‘Provincial Councils’, and clearly intended to forestall more radical options. ‘Provincial Home Rule in Ireland’, CR, 55 (April 1884), pp. 483–93. Spencer to the Queen, 17 October 1883, British Library [BL], Althorp Papers, K2. See Loughlin, Gladstone, p. 20. Parnell to Daunt, 15 July 1885, NLI, C.S. Parnell Papers, Ms 5934. Spencer ruefully admitted that in a doomsday situation in Ireland they might well have to consider arming the Orangemen. See James Loughlin, ‘Parades and Politics: Liberal Governments and the Orange Order 1880–86’, in T.G. Fraser (ed.), The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum (London and Basingstoke, 2000), p. 38. Gladstone to Spencer, 8 April 1884, Gladstone Diaries, XI, pp. 91–2. Spencer to Ponsonby, 25 January 1885, RA, T.9/4. FJ, 24 January 1885; ‘Mr Parnell at Cork’, newspaper cutting from The Times, RA, D37/4. Spencer to Gladstone, 26 January 1885, BL, Althorp Papers, K8. Spencer to Ponsonby, 28 January 1885, RA, T.9/67. Fenian bombers had attacked London Bridge and the Tower of London in late December and early January 1885. W.V. Harcourt, Home Secretary, to the Queen, 23 December 1884, 4 January 1885, RA, D37/38. A.G. Gardiner, Life of Sir William Harcourt (London, 1923), I, p. 516. Edward was initially reluctant to go to Ireland, not because of the Fenian threats but because the visit was being arranged over his head. Kinley Roby, The King, the Press and the People: A Study of Edward VII (London, 1975), p. 219. See Gladstone to Spencer, 22 December 1884; 4, 7 February 1885, BL, Althorp Papers, K8.
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NOTES
60 See evidence of Timothy Harrington, national organiser of the National League, in Spec. Com. 1888 Proc., IX, pp. 202–3; William O’Brien, VIII, pp. 136, 200. 61 Nation, 28 February 1885. 62 See T.D. Sullivan, Troubled Times in Irish Politics (Dublin, 1905), pp 138–44. 63 Nation, 7 March 1885. 64 Ibid. 65 United Ireland [UI ], 28 February 1885. 66 See Nation, 14 March 1885. 67 For the controversy, see C.J. Woods, ‘Ireland and Anglo-Papal Relations 1880–85’, Irish Historical Studies [IHS], 18 (1972–3), pp. 57–60. 68 Spencer to Ponsonby, 11 February 1885, RA, D37/23. 69 Resolution reproduced in Sullivan, Troubled Times, p. 223. 70 Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp. 228–9. 71 See The Times, 5 March 1885; Daily Express [DE], 5 March 1885; UI, 14 March 1885. 72 FJ, 6–7 March 1885. Gray had personal as well as political reasons for his stance on the visit. He had already personally expressed to the Prince his delight at the news of the visit and wished him well. Spencer to Ponsonby, 24 February 1885, RA, T.9/17. 73 Press cutting, 6 March 1885, NLI, Alfred Webb Papers, Ms 1745 (50). 74 See James Loughlin ‘The Irish Protestant Home Rule Association and Nationalist Politics 1886–93’, IHS, 25 (1985), pp. 341–63. 75 Lyons, Parnell, pp. 357–8, 362. 76 Davitt to Webb, 5 March 1885, Trinity College Dublin, Davitt Papers, Ms 9490/4953–86, DPA67. 77 Spencer to the Chief Secretary, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 6 March 1885, BL, Althorp Papers, K10. 78 UI, 14 March 1885. 79 The declaration invited ridicule and gave the impression that the Parnellite leadership was dictating policy to the corporation, a charge Parnell attempted to refute. See Parnell to the editor, FJ, reproduced in UI, 21 March 1885. 80 The loyalist section of Dublin Corporation responded to their defeat by organising a ‘Citizens’ Committee’ to present an Address. See DE, 23 March 1885. 81 Parnellites could do little to control unelected bodies such as Chambers of Commerce, often loyalist-controlled, except to warn them not to pretend to represent Irish public opinion. See Nation, 21, 28 March 1885; UI, 21 March 1885. 82 UI, 28 March 1885, highlighted his recently assumed presidency of the ‘antiCatholic’ English Freemasons, a body whose Irish colleagues were closely associated with Orangeism for the purpose of keeping papists in servitude. 83 See Spencer–Campbell-Bannerman correspondence, 10, 12, 15 March 1885, BL, Althorp Papers, K10. 84 See Loughlin, ‘Constructing the Political Spectacle’, p. 232. 85 Spencer, ‘Memo. for the Cabinet on Irish Legislation’, 25 March 1885, BL, Gladstone Papers, Ms 44312. 86 See Henry Jephson, ‘Royalty and Viceroyalty in Ireland: I the Irish Viceroyalty’, Fortnightly Review, 37 (April 1885), pp. 500–11; R. O’Hara, ‘Royalty and Viceroyalty in Ireland: II a New Era for Ireland’, pp. 512–18. The appearance of the articles at this time was hardly accidental. Jephson had, it seems, recently been a Dublin Castle employee. 87 See James Loughlin, ‘Central Board Scheme’, in Connolly, Oxford Companion, pp. 81–2; C.H.D. Howard, ‘Joseph Chamberlain, Parnell and the Irish “Central Board” Scheme 1884–5’, IHS, 8 (1953), pp. 329–61. 88 Joseph Chamberlain, A Political Memoir, ed. C.H.D. Howard (London, 1953), pp. 144–5.
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NOTES
89 Copy of ‘“The Prelates” Precedence’, 26 March 1885, Dublin Diocesan Archives, Archbishop William Walsh Papers, WP. 1885, 357/1, II. 90 The Times, 4 March 1885. 91 Walter Walsh, The Religious Life of Queen Victoria (London, 1902), pp. 195–7. 92 Campbell-Bannerman to Spencer, 22 March 1885, BL, Althorp Papers, K10. 93 Ibid., Spencer to the Queen, 26 March 1885. He did, however, warn the Prince of the likelihood of Nationalist protests. Spencer to the Prince of Wales, 6 April 1885, RA, T.9/24. 94 See Times report cited in DE, 7 April 1885; Nation, 4 April 1885; UI, 4 April 1885. 95 See Nation, 11 April 1885. 96 UI, 4 April 1885. 97 The Queen’s first visit to Ireland, taking place in the wake of the famine and the ineffectual Young Irelander rising of 1848, provoked fears – groundless as it turned out – for her safety. See Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp 79–100; James Loughlin, ‘Allegiance and Illusion: Queen Victoria’s Irish Visit of 1849’, History, 87 (October 2002), pp. 491–513. 98 Irish Times [IT], 9 April 1885. See also DE, 9 April 1885. Well might Edward telegraph his mother: ‘just arrived, most enthusiastic reception’. Telegram, 8 April 1885, RA, Z.4601. 99 Daily Telegraph [DT], 10 April 1885; Belfast Morning News [BMN ], 10 April 1885. 100 Spencer to the Queen, 9 April 1885, in Gordon (ed.), Red Earl, I, p. 296; CampbellBannerman to Spencer, 8 April 1885, BL, Althorp Papers, K10. 101 DE, 13 April 1885. 102 Nation, 11 April 1885. 103 ‘A Salute to the Prince’, supplement to UI, 11 April 1885. 104 The triumphant chorus was led by The Times, 11 April 1885, and included, to name only some, The Standard, Morning Post, Edinburgh Courant, Saturday Review, Leeds Mercury, Dundee Advertiser and Liverpool Post. See the survey of British press opinion in BMN, 16 April 1885. Privately the same opinion was being conveyed to the Queen, Sir Arthur Ellis to the Queen, 9 April 1885, RA, Z455/7. 105 See UI, 18 April 1885; Nation, 18 April 1885. 106 Nation, 18 April 1885. 107 Spencer was prepared to allow O’Brien to present a ‘respectful’ airing of his grievances to the Prince, but without the presence of ‘a mob’. Spencer to County Inspector, Captain Plunkett, 12 April 1885, Irish National Archives, Chief Secretary’s Office, Registered Papers [CSORP] 1885/8059. DT, 16 April 1885; UI, 18 April 1885. 108 For a reasonably accurate account of the Mallow fracas, see DT, 14, 16 April 1885; also UI, 18 April 1885. 109 Ibid. 110 Prince of Wales to the Queen, 19 April 1885, RA, Z455/20. For an account of the Cork visit by an army officer on duty during it, see Lord Ernest Hamilton, Forty Years On (London, 1922), pp. 19–20. 111 Resident Magistrate Irwin to Chief Secretary, 13–14 April 1885, INA, CSORP/ 1885/3142/85555; Irwin to Spencer, 20 April 1885, INA, CSORP/1885/8011. 112 IT, 20, 23 April 1885. 113 Only in the north-west, at Derry, did civil disorder occur, but when it did the royal party had left Ireland. Robert McVicker to the Chief Secretary, 22 April 1885, INA, CSORP/1885/8133; UI, 2 May 1885. 114 See James Loughlin, Ulster Unionism and British National Identity since 1885 (London, 1995), pp. 42–3. 115 Dixie, Lady Florence Caroline (1857–1905), authoress and traveller; hunted big game in Africa, Arabia and Rocky Mountains; explored Patagonia, 1878–9; cor-
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116 117 118 119
120 121 122 123
124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133
respondent for Morning Post during Zulu War, 1879; denounced Land League 1880–3; advocated complete sexual equality. Sir Sydney Lee (ed.), DNB, 2nd supp.: Index and Epitome, London, 1920, p. 33. See Dixie to Daunt, 13, 21, 25 April 1885; Dixie to the Prince of Wales, 25 April 1885, NLI, O’Neill Daunt Letters, Ms 8045 (4). Journal entries, 15, 16 April 1885, NLI, O’Neill Daunt Journals, II, 1877–88, Ms 3042. Ibid., 30 April, 5 May 1885. Goldwin Smith, ‘The Administration of Ireland’, CR, 48 (July 1885), pp. 1–9. Although Smith’s article appeared after the visit was over, he supplied the Prince with a copy before his departure for Ireland. Smith to Percy Bunting, 31 March 1885, in Haultain (ed.), Correspondence of Goldwin Smith, p. 169. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, introduction by R.H.S. Crossman (London, 1867/1971). Bagehot famously described the monarch’s rights as: the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn. Steven Lukes, ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’, in Lukes, Essays in Social Theory (London and Basingstoke, 1977), pp. 56–7. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY, 1975), p. 56. See Frederick Engels quoted in Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (London, 1988), p. 204, on the English constitution as an ‘inverted pyramid’: ‘the apex is at the same time the base . . . Nowhere is a non-ruling personage more revered than in England’. See P.S. Baker, ‘The Sociological and Ideological Role of the Monarchy in Late Victorian Britain’ (MA thesis, University of Lancaster, 1978), p. 5. Murphy, Abject Loyalty, p. 291, dates its revival from the late 1890s. Ibid., p. 240. K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), p. 484. This was a finding of a study of the genealogy of political leaders, reported in the Unionist DE, 11 May 1885. See Loughlin, Gladstone, pp. 30–3, ch. 4. Ibid., p. 66. William O’Brien, Evening Memories (Dublin and London, 1920), p. 240. The rumours were undoubtedly facilitated by the Princess of Wales’ declared sympathy for Irish autonomy. See journal entry, 4 September 1892, in Reginald Viscount Esher, Journals and Letters, ed. M.V. Brett (London, 1934), I, p. 161. Harold Nicholson, George V: His Life and Reign (London, 1952), pp. 309–10. 3 ‘ T H E S E Q U I E T D AY S O F P E A C E ’
1 Western Nationalist (Boyle, County Roscommon), 14 December 1912. 2 Warre B. Wells, John Redmond (London, 1919), p. 15. 3 D. George Boyce, ‘One Last Burial – Culture, Counter-Revolution and Revolution in Ireland, 1886–1916’ in D. George Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland, 1879–1923 (London and Basingstoke, 1988), p. 133. 4 For example see A.T.Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis: Resistance to Home Rule 1912–1914 (London, 1967); Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912–1916 (Oxford, 1994); and Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998: Politics and War (Oxford, 1999), pp. 215–44. 5 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism in Ireland, 1900–22’ in Tomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 383. 6 Stephen Gwynn, The Irish Situation (London 1921), p. 28.
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7 For example, see three narrative histories: Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998, pp. 164–9; J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), p. 15; Charles Townshend, Ireland in the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), pp. 59–60. See also Patrick Maume’s perceptive analysis in The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 129–32. 8 Redmond speaking at Cahirciveen, County Kerry, on 21 September 1913, Western Nationalist, 4 October 1913. 9 Sydney Brooks, Aspects of the Irish Situation (Dublin, 1912), pp. 205–6. 10 Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London, 1932), p. 361; Pearse made this observation to Gwynn ‘fully a year’ before the First World War. 11 Gwynn, Irish Situation, p. 18. 12 The Nationalist newspapers were the Leitrim Observer, Longford Leader, Midland Reporter, Roscommon Herald, Roscommon Journal, Roscommon Messenger, Sligo Champion, Western Nationalist, Westmeath Examiner and Westmeath Independent. The independent papers were the Leitrim Advertiser and Longford Independent; the Unionist papers the Longford Journal, Sligo Independent, Sligo Times and Westmeath Guardian. 13 Roscommon Journal, 16 August 1913. 14 Sligo Champion, 4 December 1909. 15 Ibid., 9 October 1909. 16 Report of the RIC Inspector General, November 1909, National Archives Kew [NA], CO 904/79. 17 Ibid., December 1909, CO 904/79. 18 Westmeath Independent, 19 March 1910. 19 T.P. O’Connor to the Master of Elibank, 22 March 1910, Elibank Papers, National Library of Scotland, Ms 8802 f 18. 20 Sligo Champion, 23 April 1910. 21 Midland Reporter, 9 June 1910. 22 Report of the Sligo county inspector, July 1910, CO 904/81. 23 Longford Leader, 3 September 1910. 24 Roscommon Journal, 23 October 1910. 25 Reports of the Leitrim, Roscommon, Sligo and Westmeath county inspectors, December 1910, NA, CO 904/82. 26 Westmeath Independent, 26 November 1910. 27 Sligo Independent, 24 December 1910. 28 Roscommon Herald, 17 December 1910. 29 Ibid., 5 February 1910. 30 Sligo Champion, 22 January 1910. 31 Ibid., 3, 10, 17, 31 December; Western Nationalist, 31 December 1910. Craig spoke at Lisburn on 24 December. 32 Longford Journal, 31 December 1910. 33 Roscommon Messenger, Westmeath Independent, 31 December 1910. Gwynn originally wrote to the London Morning Leader. 34 Sligo Times, 21 January 1911. 35 Westmeath Independent, 14 January 1911. 36 Roscommon Herald, 21 January 1911. 37 Sligo Champion, 28 January 1911. 38 Leitrim Observer, 14 January 1911. 39 Roscommon Messenger, 21 January 1911. 40 Wells, John Redmond, p. 95; F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon (London, 1968), p. 322. Both men were also injured in car crashes during the year. 41 Patricia Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (Brighton, 1980), pp. 56–8.
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42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83
Westmeath Independent, 22 April 1911. Roscommon Messenger, 12 August 1911. Leitrim Advertiser, 25 May 1911. Westmeath Independent, 7 October 1911. Report of the Inspector General, September 1911, NA, CO 904/85. Sligo Champion, 4 February 1911; Longford Journal, 11 February 1911; Westmeath Examiner, Sligo Times, 4 March 1911. Western Nationalist, 7 January; Sligo Champion, 14 January 1911. Roscommon Messenger, 1 June 1911. Sligo Champion, 17 June 1911. Westmeath Examiner, 22 July 1911. Fitzgibbon speaking at Williamstown, County Galway, Roscommon Journal, 18 November 1911. Scanlan speaking at Glasgow, Sligo Champion, 14 October 1911. Sligo Times, 2 September 1911. Sligo Champion, 9 September 1911. Westmeath Independent, 9 December 1911. Sligo Champion, 30 December 1911. Roscommon Journal, 30 December 1911. Roscommon Herald, Westmeath Independent, 15 April; Sligo Champion, 29 April and 6 May 1911. Westmeath Independent, Roscommon Journal, 7 October; Longford Leader, 28 October; Sligo Champion, 30 December 1911. Roscommon Herald, 23 September 1911. Westmeath Independent, 14 October, 4 November 1911. Roscommon Messenger, 28 October 1911. Westmeath Independent, 9 December 1911. Dillon to Redmond, 14 January 1912, Redmond Papers, National Library of Ireland, Ms 15182. Longford Leader, 17 February 1912. Westmeath Independent, 13 January 1912. Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond, p. 197. Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), p. 237. Westmeath Independent, 6, 13, 20 January; 24 February 1911. Sligo Champion, 17 February 1912. Report of the Roscommon county inspector, March 1912, NA, CO 904/86. Irish Independent, 1 April; Midland Reporter, 4 April; Roscommon Messenger, Roscommon Journal, Roscommon Herald, 6 April 1912. A total of 28,000 travelled from Ireland to all the Dublin termini. Westmeath Independent, 6 April 1912. Midland Reporter, 4 April 1912. John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London, 1987), p. 185. Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, vol. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1997), p. 457. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985, p. 7. Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998, p. 163. Cited in Lyons, John Dillon, p. 328. Westmeath Examiner, 13 April 1912. Western Nationalist, 13 April 1912. Roscommon Herald, 13 April 1912.
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NOTES
84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135
Midland Reporter, 11, 18 April 1912. Roscommon Herald, 20 April 1912. Roscommon Messenger, 13 April 1912. Longford Leader, 13, 27 April 1912. Roscommon Journal, 13, 20 April 1912. Westmeath Independent, 13 April 1912. Sligo Champion, 27 April 1912. Ibid., 13 April 1912. Longford Independent, 20 April; Westmeath Examiner, 27 April 1912. Midland Reporter, 25 April 1912. Report of the Roscommon county inspector, April 1912, NA, CO 904/86. Report of the Inspector General, May 1912, CO 904/87. Roscommon Messenger, 27 January 1912. Western Nationalist, 10 February 1912. Longford Independent, Sligo Times, 27 January 1912. Roscommon Herald, 27 January; Midland Reporter, 25 January, 1 February 1912. Westmeath Independent, 10 February 1912. Sligo Independent, 13 April; Sligo Champion, 20 April 1912. Report of the Inspector General, February 1913, NA, CO 904/89. Roscommon Messenger, 17 August 1912. Sligo Champion, 13 July 1912. Longford Leader, 10 August 1912. Roscommon Journal, 24 August 1912. Western Nationalist, 6 July 1912. Westmeath Independent, 24 August 1912. Midland Reporter, 8 August 1912. Longford Leader, 3 August 1912. Westmeath Examiner, 24 August 1912. Western Nationalist, 17 August 1912. Sligo Champion, 24 August 1912. Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question, p. 70. Westmeath Independent, 28 September 1912. Roscommon Messenger, 31 August 1912. Leitrim Observer, 19 October 1912. Sligo Champion, 28 September 1912. Midland Reporter, 10 October 1912. Longford Leader, 19 October 1912. Longford Journal, 2 November 1912. Sligo Champion, 24 May 1913. Midland Reporter, 3 October 1912. Sligo Champion, 12 October 1912. Longford Leader, 23 November 1912. Leitrim Observer, 16 November 1912. Midland Reporter, 21 November 1912. Roscommon Herald, 23 November 1912. Ibid. Roscommon Messenger, 14 December 1912. Westmeath Independent, 30 November 1912. Ibid., 14 December 1912. Sligo Champion, 4 January 1913. Leitrim Observer, 9 November 1912. Western Nationalist, 14 December 1912.
252
NOTES
136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160
Report of the Inspector General, November 1912, NA, CO 904/88. Ibid., December 1912, CO 904/88. Roscommon Messenger, 15 February 1913. Westmeath Independent, 29 March 1913. Longford Journal, 10 May 1913. Westmeath Independent, 11 January 1913. Leitrim Observer, 7, 28 June 1913. Westmeath Independent, 23 August 1913. Roscommon Herald, 14 June 1913. Sligo Champion, 14 June 1913. Roscommon Herald, 2 August 1913. Westmeath Independent, 5 July 1913. Ibid., 23 August 1913. Ibid., 19 July 1913. Ibid., 3 May; Longford Leader, 10 May 1913. Roscommon Journal, 3 May 1913. Ibid., 31 May 1913. Western Nationalist, 26 July 1913. Leitrim Advertiser, 14 August 1913. Hayden speaking at Strokestown. Roscommon Messenger, 20 September 1913. Hayden speaking at Cloonfad, ibid., 15 November 1913. Westmeath Independent, 16, 30 August 1913. Longford Leader, 14, 28 June 1913. Roscommon Messenger, 28 June 1913. This chapter is based upon chapter 8 of Nationalism and the Irish Party in Provincial Ireland, 1910–1916 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 4 T. P. O ’ C O N N O R A N D T H E S TA R , 1 8 8 6 – 9 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11
W.P. Ryan, The Plough and the Cross (Dublin, 1910), pp. 28–32, 213, 250. Ibid., p. 214. United Ireland, 10 September 1887. D.P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin, 1905), p. 69; The Leader, 13 October 1900. The Leader, 1 September, 13 October, 24 November 1900, 3 August 1901; Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, pp. 5–6, 102; Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation (Dublin, 1999), pp. 10, 46. L.W. Brady, T.P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (London, 1983), pp. 157–8; Hamilton Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor (London, 1934), pp. 239–65, 300–1. Maume, The Long Gestation, p. 10. O’Connor to the Master of Elibank, 14 April 1909, Elibank Papers, National Library of Scotland [NLS], Ms 8,802, ff. 213–14. T.W. Moody, ‘Michael Davitt and the British Labour Movement, 1882–1906’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 3 (London, 1953), pp. 53–76; Maume, The Long Gestation, pp. 9, 50–9. T.W. Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism (Urbana, IL, 1974), pp. 144–55; Michael Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism (Brighton, 1975), pp. 87–97; T.A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party (Oxford, 1988), pp. 220–90. Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998), for example, focuses on the Unionist response to home rule, while James Loughlin’s stimulating Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin, 1986) ranges beyond Westminster, but does not take in Fleet Street.
253
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12 Alan O’Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism (London, 1977). 13 Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, The Struggle for London, 1885–1914 (London, 1967); Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. I: The Nineteenth Century (London, 1981). Works by Heyck and Barker (see note 10 above) ignore The Star, as does D.A. Hamer’s earlier study, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972). 14 John Goodbody, ‘The Star: Its Role in the Rise of Popular Newspapers, 1885–1914’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 1 (Spring 1885); Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, pp. 97–8, 141–3. 15 For a recent discussion of this change, see Gary Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Selfgovernment, 1865–1925: From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001). 16 Koss, Political Press, I, pp. 286–92; H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98 (Oxford, 1999), p. 554. 17 Labouchere to Herbert Gladstone, 10 February 1886, Viscount Gladstone Papers, British Library [BL], Ms 46,016, f. 4. 18 Labouchere to Herbert Gladstone, 10 February 1886, ibid.; Koss, Political Press, I, pp. 269–81. 19 Matthew, Gladstone, p. 554; D.A. Hamer, John Morley (London, 1968), p. 250; O’Connor to Gladstone, 27 June 1886, Gladstone Papers, BL, Ms 44,498, f. 68; Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, pp. 90, 301. 20 Morley to Bryce, 28 July 1886, Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library, Ms Bryce 107, f. 106; Koss, Political Press, I, p. 288. 21 Morley to Gladstone, 10 April 1887, Gladstone Papers, Ms 44,255, f. 191. 22 Gladstone had directed Bryce to take control of the official Liberal home rule literary campaign in mid-1886 (Gladstone to Bryce, 8 July 1886, Ms Bryce 10, f. 64). 23 Morley to Gladstone, 10 April 1887; H.W. Lucy, Sixty Years in the Wilderness (London, 1909), pp. 129–36. 24 Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor, p. 143; Brady, T.P. O’Connor, p. 104. 25 Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor, p. 142; Elizabeth O’Connor, I, Myself (London, 1910), p. 211. 26 Stephen Koss, John Brunner (Cambridge, 1970), p. 157; Koss, Political Press, I, pp. 308–9; A.F. Havighurst, H.W. Massingham, Radical Journalist (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 20–1. 27 Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor, p. 143; Brady, T.P. O’Connor, p. 104. 28 Algar Thorold, The Life of Henry Labouchere (London, 1913), pp. 152–71, 264–5; Wilfrid Blunt, The Land War in Ireland (London, 1912), p. 39. Firm evidence of their pre-1886 links comes in Labouchere’s correspondence with Herbert Gladstone and Lord Rosebery (NLS). 29 Labouchere to Herbert Gladstone, 7 August 1886, Viscount Gladstone Papers, Ms 46,016, f. 115. 30 This focus on ‘personality’ had been central to his 1885 collection of parliamentary sketches, Gladstone’s House of Commons. 31 Elizabeth O’Connor, I, Myself, p. 210. Labouchere virtually said as much when T.P’s press venture began in January 1888, predicting success in Truth (19 January). 32 Wilson Pope etc., The Story of The Star (London, 1938), p. 15; Koss, Political Press, I, pp. 308–9; Brady, T.P. O’Connor, pp. 104–5. 33 The Star, 17, 18 January, 18 June 1888. 34 The Star, 17 January 1888, 17 January 1889; Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor, pp. 140–1; Havighurst, H.W. Massingham, p. 18. 35 For The Star’s place in the story of the popular press, see the Goodbody article (note 14) and Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press, 1855–1914 (London, 1976). 36 Wilson Pope etc., The Story of The Star, p. 12. 37 Notable Catholic–Nationalist war correspondents of the 1870s and 1880s included John Augustus O’Shea of the Standard and Edmund O’Donovan of the Daily News.
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38 The two vital contacts were T. Wemyss Reid, the editor of the Speaker, and James Bryce, who played a key role in establishing the paper. O’Brien had worked closely with Bryce in the home rule literary campaign of 1886–8 (see note 22). 39 O’Connor’s position between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ journalisms in the late 1880s was captured in his article, ‘The New Journalism’, in New Review (October 1889). Later, as M.A.P. shows, politics gave way to commerce. 40 Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, pp. 107–17, 154–5; Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism, pp. 181–4. 41 W.E. Gladstone, Special Aspects of the Irish Question (London, 1892), p. 21; Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 558–78; Hamer, John Morley, pp. 195–207; Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, pp. 58, 180–1. 42 Daily News, 23 September 1887. 43 The Star, 17 January 1888. 44 Ibid., 17, 18, 19 January 1888. 45 Ibid., 3 November 1888. 46 Ibid., 17 January 1889; Koss, Political Press, I, p. 387; Brady, T.P. O’Connor, pp. 111–17. 47 John Davis, Reforming London (Oxford, 1988), p. 88; Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism, p. 198; Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London, 1998), pp. 534–6. 48 Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, pp. 90–111; The Star, 12 December 1888. 49 The Radical Programme (London, 1885); Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, pp. 199–210; Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, pp. 1–87. 50 Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor, p. 144; Sidney Webb to Clement Shorter, 3 March 1888, Clement Shorter Papers, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University. 51 See The Star, 17 January 1889. 52 Morley to Gladstone, 15 November 1886, Gladstone Papers, Ms 44,255, f. 128. 53 Davis, Reforming London, pp. 71–121. 54 Michael MacDonagh, The Home Rule Movement (London, 1920), pp. 138–9; F.W. Soutter, Recollections of a Labour Pioneer (London, 1923), p. 7; C.C. O’Brien, Parnell and his Party (Oxford, 1957), pp. 50, 62; Walter L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case (Oxford, 1965), pp. 205–9; T.P. O’Connor, ‘The Rule of the Purse’, Contemporary Review, vol. 37 (June 1880). 55 The Radical, 4 December 1880; Soutter, Recollections of a Labour Pioneer, pp. 99–101. Davitt was also advocating an alliance with the English working classes at this time. 56 Soutter, Recollections of a Labour Pioneer, pp. 99–101; Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party (Oxford, 1965), p. 15; The Radical, 4, 11, 25 December 1880. Brady entirely overlooks T.P.’s ‘outdoors’ attempts to build an Irish–Radical alliance in 1880–1. 57 Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 50–60; Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism, pp. 15–19. 58 O’Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism, pp. 82–3; The Radical, 27 August 1881. 59 This familiar anti-aristocratic rhetoric shows that, although The Star was challenging the Liberal front bench in its support for state intervention in social issues, its campaign still owed much to traditional radical ideas and themes. 60 The Star, 3 November, 5 July 1888. 61 Ibid., 2, 11 February 1888. For his use of this phrase in 1881, see The Radical, 12, 19, 26 February 1881. 62 The Star, 9 February 1888. See too 17 February 1888 and 9 February 1889. 63 Henry Labouchere, ‘Radicals and Whigs’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 41 (February 1884); Thorold, The Life of Henry Labouchere, pp. 154–71. 64 Truth, 15, 29 July 1886, 15 March 1888; Labouchere to Herbert Gladstone, 9 July 1886, 31 March 1888, Herbert Gladstone Papers, Ms 46,016, ff. 93, 129; Labouchere
255
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65 66 67 68 69
70 71 72 73 74 75
to Harcourt, 11 July 1886, Harcourt Papers, Bodleian Library, MSS Harcourt dep. 87, ff. 7–8. Truth, 15 July, 2 December 1886, 26 July 1888. The Star, 3, 9 November 1888; Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism, p. 174. Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism, p. 176; The Star, 9 November 1888; Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, p. 198. The Star, 12 December 1888; Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, p. 198. The Star, 17 January 1889; Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, p. 180; Richard Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999), pp. 349, 487–8; Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 509, 560. ‘New Liberals’ like Haldane, for example, had helped push Morley towards domestic issues, and backbench MPs like F.A. Channing had put similar pressure on Gladstone. See Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, pp. 27–8, for the contention that for a newspaper to maintain its circulation, its politics had to enjoy substantial support from the readership. The Star, 3 November 1888; Matthew, Gladstone, p. 560; Heyck, The Dimensions of British Radicalism, pp. 174, 201–3. Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, p. 106. Fyfe, T.P. O’Connor, pp. 152–6; Koss, John Brunner, pp. 114–58; Brady, T.P. O’Connor, pp. 114–17. T.P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (2 vols, London, 1929), II, pp. 267–71; Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, pp. 99–100; Davis, Reforming London, p. 119. Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour, pp. 96–106. 5 A F I R S T W O R L D WA R T R A N S I T I O N
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
W.S. Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, 1929), p. 319. Clive Ponting, Thirteen Days: The Road to the First World War (London, 2002), p. 239. Parliamentary Debates [PD], 5th series, 65 (3 August 1914), c. 1824. Ponting, Thirteen Days, p. 307. Senia Pašeta, ‘Thomas Kettle: “An Irish Soldier in the Army of Europe”’, in Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us All?’ (Manchester, 2002), pp. 8–27, at pp. 9–10. Paul Bew, John Redmond (Dundalk, 1996), p. 37. Ponting, Thirteen Days, p. 307. Ibid., p. 315. P.J. Musgrove (ed.), A Socialist and War, 1914–1916, by James Connolly (London, 1941), pp. 25–6. PD, 64 (18 September 1914), cc. 1019–20. Ibid., cc. 888–92. Ibid., cc. 906–8. Ibid., cc. 910–11. For a discussion of the home rulers’ response to the Boer War see Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1988), p. 192. PD, 64 (26 July 1914), cc. 1029–30. Ibid., c. 911. Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years (London, 1919), pp. 154–5. David Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 379–406, at p. 393. Ben Novick, ‘The Arming of Ireland: Gun-Running and the Great War, 1914–1916’, in Gregory and Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War, pp. 94–112, at p. 98.
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20 John Kendle, Walter Long, Ireland and the Union, 1905–1920 (Montreal and Kingston, 1992), pp. 90–1. 21 Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), p. 280. 22 Irish Times, The Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook (Dublin, 1916), p. 197. 23 A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (London, 1981), pp. 1–2. 24 W.H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. 1: The Rise of Collectivism (London, 1983), pp. 47, 53. 25 Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in Wartime Britain’, in Ariel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 330–48, at p. 348. 26 Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Face of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 2. 27 Adrian Kelly, ‘From State Welfare to Welfare State: Social Security in Independent Ireland, 1922–1952’, PhD thesis, National University of Ireland (NUI) (Maynooth), 1995, p. 32. 28 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 29 Vanessa Rutherford, ‘Aspects of Childhood: Ireland 1800–1925’, PhD thesis, NUI (Maynooth), 2002, pp. 148–9. 30 Ibid., p. 255. 31 Theresa Moriarty, ‘Work, Warfare and Wages: Industrial Controls and Irish Trade Unionism in the First World War’, in Gregory and Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War, pp. 73–93, at pp. 73–5. 32 Ibid., pp. 77–8, 79, 83–8; Andrew E. Malone, ‘Irish Labour in War Time’, Studies, 7 (June 1918), pp. 319–27. 33 Bew, Redmond, p. 47. 34 Wilson, Myriad Face of War, p. 538. One authority estimated that nearly a million acres were added to the area under tillage in the first half of 1918 alone (Edward E. Lysaght, ‘Irish Agriculture’, Studies, 7 (June 1918), pp. 314–19, at p. 317). 35 PD, 90 (20 February 1917), c. 1211. 36 Selborne to F.S. Oliver, 14 March 1917, in D.G. Boyce (ed.), The Crisis of British Unionism: The Domestic Political Papers of the Second Earl of Selborne, 1885–1922 (London, 1987), p. 204. 37 PD, 92 (24 April 1917), cc. 2295–6. 38 Ibid., c. 2298. 39 Ibid. (25 April 1917), cc. 2440. 40 Ibid., cc. 2540–1, 2543. 41 Louis M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1600 (London, 1971), p. 171; Lysaght, ‘Irish Agriculture’, p. 318. 42 Cullen, Economic History, p. 172. 43 Michael MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front (London, 1916), pp. 4–5. 44 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 45 Ibid., p. 13. 46 Sir Henry Robinson, Further Memories of Irish Life (London, 1924), p. 149. 47 For a discussion of these issues see Bew, Redmond, pp. 38–9. 48 Sinead M. Joy, ‘County Kerry, 1916–1921: A Provincial View of the IRA and the War of Independence’, MPhil. dissertation, NUI (Cork), 2000, p. 24. 49 Irish Times, Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, pp. 174–5. 50 Ibid., p. 177. 51 Ibid., p. 180. 52 Ibid., pp. 180–1. 53 Ibid., p. 182.
257
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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61
62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92
Ibid. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 202. Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), pp. 510–11. Breandan Mac Giolla Choille, Intelligence Notes, 1913–1916 (Dublin, 1966), p. 85. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., pp. 146–7. See e.g. reports from Cavan (p. 137), Londonderry (p. 139), Monaghan (p. 139), Carlow (p. 141), County Dublin (p. 141), Kilkenny (p. 142), King’s County (p. 143), Longford (p. 143), Meath (p. 144), Queen’s County (p. 145), Westmeath (p. 145), Wexford (p. 146), Clare (p. 146), West Riding of Cork (p. 147), Kerry (p. 148), Tipperary (p. 150), Waterford (p. 150), Galway (p. 152), Leitrim (p. 153), Mayo (p. 153), Roscommon (p. 154), Sligo (p. 154). Marie Coleman, ‘County Longford, 1910–1923: A Regional Study of the Irish Revolution’, PhD thesis, NUI (University College Dublin), 1984, p. 57. P. Callan, ‘Voluntary Recruiting for the British Army in Ireland during the First World War’, PhD thesis, NUI (University College Dublin), 1984, pp. 53–4. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Callanan, T.M. Healy, p. 510. Ibid., pp. 70–1. Ibid., pp. 122–4. Gwynn, Redmond’s Last Years, p. 140. Coleman, ‘County Longford’, p. 60. Tracey R. Connolly, ‘Irish Public Opinion and the Republican Movement, 1916–1918’, MA thesis, NUI (Cork), 1995, p. 20. The full version of this street ballad, of which the above is a part, was kindly given to me by John A. Murphy, Emeritus Professor, University College Cork. Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), p. 6; see pp. 7–8 for close analysis of these figures. MacDonagh, Irish at the Front, p. 8. H.J. Tennant to Sir Laurence Parsons, 5 February 1915, National Archives Dublin, Ms 21,278, p. 17. Ibid., 11 February 1915, Ms 21,278, p. 18. Ian Colvin, The Life of Lord Carson (London, 1934), II, p. 313. Myles Dungan, They Shall Not Grow Old: Irish Soldiers and the Great War (Dublin, 1997), pp. 138–40. Thomas Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Dublin, 1992), p. 213. Ibid. Connolly, ‘Irish Public Opinion’, p. 42. Ibid., pp. 44–5. Ibid., p. 49. Major W. Redmond, Trench Pictures from France (London, 1917?), p. 23. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 82–3; article written on 11 September 1916. For which see O’Day, Irish Home Rule, pp. 269–75. Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism in Ireland’, pp. 395–6. Joy, ‘County Kerry’, p. 37. D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (3rd edn; London, 1995), p. 316. Joy, ‘County Kerry’, p. 37. Bew, Redmond, p. 43. Adrian Gregory, ‘“You Might as Well Recruit Germans”: British Public Opinion
258
NOTES
93 94 95 96 97 98
99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109
110 111 112 113 114 115
and the Decision to Conscript the Irish in 1918’, in Gregory and Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War, pp. 113–32, at p. 113. Stephen Gwynn to F.S. Oliver, 24 March 1917 (incorrectly dated 1918), in Boyce (ed.), Crisis of British Unionism, pp. 206–7. PD, 90 (20 February 1917), cc. 1200–14. Freeman’s Journal, 31 August 1916. Joy, ‘County Kerry’, p. 40. Callanan, T.M. Healy, p. 537. Connolly, ‘Irish Public Opinion’, p. 142. The farmers’ patriotism was real enough: George Russell estimated that a ‘a pig killed and cured in Ireland was less value by the shilling per cwt. than the same pig brought over to Great Britain, killed and cured there’. (‘The Self-Supporting Community’, Studies, 7 (June 1918), pp. 301–6, at p. 302.) Gregory, ‘“You Might as Well Recruit Germans”’, p. 118. F.E. Guest to Lloyd George, 25 April 1918, Lloyd George Papers, House of Lords Record Office, F21/2/9. PD, 78 (21 December 1915), c. 223. Ibid., 78 (23 January 1916), c. 1627. Ibid., 104 (9 April 1918), cc. 1357–8. Ibid., 106 (3 June 1918), c. 1229. Freeman’s Journal, 4 April 1918. Ibid., 20 April 1918. R.B. McDowell, Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (Dublin 1997), p. 53. See also Peter Martin, ‘Dulce et Decorum: Irish Nobles and the Great War, 1914–1919’, in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, pp. 28–48. PD, 78 (11 January 1916), cc. 1473–4, 1480–1. D.G. Boyce, ‘“That Party Politics Should Divide Our Tents”: Nationalism, Unionism and the First World War’, in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, pp. 190–216, at p. 199. For an excellent summary of Ulster Unionist attitudes to the war see Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, pp. 55–9. McDowell, Crisis and Decline, p. 69. Brigadier A.E.C. Bredin, A History of the Irish Soldier (Belfast, 1987), p. 472. ‘The Rights of Man as Proclaimed in the French Constitution of the Year III’ (1795), in J.M. Roberts (ed.), French Revolution Documents (Oxford, 1966), I, p. 178. J.H. Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York, 1951), p. 574. PD, 110 (5 November 1918), c. 1962. Eunan O’Halpin, The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland, 1892–1920 (Dublin, 1977), p. 171. 6 B R O K E N G L A S S A N D B AT O N E D C R O W D S
1 R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats, A Life: I The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p. 580, n. 95. 2 Terence Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats (Dublin, 1999). 3 Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA, 1994), pp. 283, 287, 291. 4 Damien Murray, Romanticism, Nationalism and Irish Antiquarian Societies, 1840–80 (Maynooth, 2000). 5 J.Th. Leersen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), p. 170. 6 Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 18, 32, 35, 42, 44. 7 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism (Oxford, 2001).
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8 James H. Murphy, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria (Cork, 2001). 9 Brown, Yeats, p. 136. 10 Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp. 269–73. 11 Bruce Stewart, ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Possessed by the Spirit of the Nation’, Irish University Review, 29:2 (Autumn/Winter 1999), pp. 238–55. 12 W.B. Yeats to William Sharp, 30 June 1987, in Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre Toomy (eds), The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 2 (1896–1900) (Oxford, 1997), p. 117. 13 Quoted in Foster, Apprentice Mage, p. 181. 14 Quoted in Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 76. 15 Quoted in Brown, Yeats, p. 141. 16 Howes, Yeats’s Nations, pp. 66–7, 78, 83. 17 Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp. 276-89. 18 Within just over three years, however, he was writing that he was ‘a Nationalist who considers what is called “the link of the Crown” inevitable’. See Foster, Apprentice Mage, p. 265. 19 Freeman’s Journal, 20 March, 4 April 1900. 20 John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (eds), Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats, 2. Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose, 1897–1939 (New York, 1976), pp. 211–13. 21 Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp. 291–2. 22 Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renaissance (London, 1965), pp. 45–6. 23 C.L. Innes, Women and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1955 (London, 1993), pp. 131, 143. 24 Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), p. 51. 25 O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 296. 26 Frazier, Behind the Scenes, p. xv. 27 Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp. xxiii–xxiv. 28 Frazier, Behind the Scenes, pp. 67–8. 29 Quoted in Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 91. 30 Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (New York, 1914), pp. 8–9. 31 Robert Welch, The Abbey Theatre 1899–1999: Form and Pressure (Oxford, 1999), p. 7. 32 Ibid., pp. 7, 26. 33 G.J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival (London, 1979), p. 66. 34 Howes, Yeats’s Nations, pp. 57, 65. 35 Foster, Apprentice Mage, pp. 227–8. 36 Frazier, Behind the Scenes, p. 54. 37 Foster, Apprentice Mage, p. 249. 38 W.B. Yeats, Collected Plays (New York, 1953), p. 55. 39 Ibid., p. 57. 40 Ibid. 41 Patrick J. Keane, Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (Columbia, MO, 1988), p. 12. 42 John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (eds), The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 3 (1901–4) (Oxford, 1994), pp. 166–8. Yeats remained unclear about the spelling of the play’s name and wrote to Lady Gregory on 23 May 1902, ‘Kathleen Ni Hoolahan is in the press, I wish you would let me know as soon as you can exactly how to spell the name, is it Houlan or Hoolan, is it Ni or Ny, should it be small n or capital N? Capital I suppose in a title’. Ibid., p. 185. 43 Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 92.
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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
Quoted in Foster, Apprentice Mage, p. 262. Edward Larrissy (ed.), W.B. Yeats (Oxford, 1997), p. 179. Yeats, Collected Plays, p. 55. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, pp. 74–6, 83. Yeats, Collected Plays, p. 50. See, for example, Charles Lever, Lord Kilgobbin (Belfast, 1992), p. 61, ‘It’s the “boys”, Miss . . . They don’t mean any harm at all . . . Just a spare gun or two’. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 76; Keane, Devouring Female, pp. 11–16. Keane, Devouring Female, p. 17. Yeats, Collected Plays, pp. 54–6. Brown, Yeats, p. 136. Freeman’s Journal, 19 March 1900. Murphy, Abject Loyalty, pp. 42, 289; Freeman’s Journal, 19 January 1901. Yeats, Collected Plays, p. 54. Larrissy, Yeats, p. 52. Foster, Apprentice Mage, p. 249. Yeats, Collected Plays, p. 55. Ibid., p. 52. 7 N AT I O N A L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N
1 The standard account of the assembly is R.B. McDowell, The Irish Convention 1917–18 (London, 1970). 2 For Russell’s life see N. Allen, George Russell ‘Æ’ and the New Ireland, 1905–30 (Dublin, 2003). 3 Æ, ‘In Memoriam’, Bean na h-Eireann, 2:24 (February 1911). 4 For astute analysis of the evolution of Plunkett’s political convictions to 1914, Carla King, ‘Defenders of the Union: Sir Horace Plunkett’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism (London, 2001), pp. 137–58. 5 West, Plunkett, p. 41. 6 A. Denson (ed.), Letters from Æ (New York, 1961), p. 112. 7 Ibid., p. 114. 8 Letters from Green to Moore survive in Moore’s correspondence in the National Library of Ireland [NLI], Ms 10,561. See also R.B. McDowell, Alice Stopford Green: A Passionate Historian (Dublin, 1967). 9 McDowell records Smuts’ meeting with Douglas: ‘During lunch Smuts bluntly said dominion status meant independence and no British government risk setting up an independent government in Ireland. Mrs Green and Douglas urged that nothing less would satisfy Irish opinion. “That may be so”, replied Smuts, “but you can only achieve independence by gradual means”’. McDowell, Green, p. 106. 10 Irish Times [IT], 26 May 1917. 11 John Healy edited the IT from 1907. The British Government released 120 republican prisoners involved in the 1916 Rising from jail on 16 June 1917 as a sign of its good faith to the Convention. The IT was dissuaded from too critical an editorial response to this development by Plunkett’s personal plea to Healy. See McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 102. 12 Russell, ‘Thoughts for a Convention’, IT, 26 May 1917. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.
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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33
34
35
36
37 38 39 40
See G. Russell, ‘Priest or Hero?’, Irish Theosophist, 5:7 (15 April 1897) pp. 127–31. Russell, ‘Thoughts for a Convention’, IT, 28 May 1917. Ibid., 29 May 1917. Ibid. ‘The National Convention’, IT, 26 May 1917. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 28 May 1917. ‘Mr Murphy’s Letters’, Irish Independent, 1 June 1917. ‘Convention and Partition’, Nationality, 1:16 (2 June 1917). ‘Problems of Settlement’, IT, 30 May 1917. Ibid. ‘Thoughts on Irish Settlement’, The Times, 31 May 1917. Ibid. Letters to Maurice Moore from Alice Green in April and May 1917 show that the signatories Moore hoped to attract to his initial memorandum form the main body of supporters for Russell’s ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ in the IT. See NLI, Ms 10,561, 10,573. IT, 31 May 1917. Ibid., 1 June 1917. In a speech delivered to a banquet of the Houses of Parliament in his honour on 15 May 1917, Smuts suggested the formation of an Imperial Council to co-ordinate the post-war Empire. To Smuts, ‘the British Empire, or this British Commonwealth of Nations, does not stand for unity, standardisation, or assimilation, or denationalisation; but it stands for a fuller, a richer, and more various life among all the nations that compose it. And even nations who have fought against you, like my own, must feel that they and their interests, their language, their religions, and all their cultural interests are as safe and as secure under the British flag as those of the children of your household and your own blood’. Quoted in W. Hancock and J. Van Der Poel (eds), Selections from the Smuts Papers: Volume Three June 1910–November 1918 (London, 1966). This speech was widely reported in the contemporary press and no doubt influenced Russell’s redefinition of imperial relations at the end of his ‘Thoughts for a Convention’. Before replying to Duke’s invitation, Lysaght ‘made sure that the Sinn Féin leaders approved of my accepting. It was agreed that it would be advisable to have someone in the Convention who was in sympathy and in close touch with Sinn Féin and so could act as a sort of liaison member but still could not be regarded in any sense an official representative of the party’. From E. Lysaght, ‘Master of None’, viii, 4. Unpublished autobiography, NLI, Ms 4,750. McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 100. Mahaffy was Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1914 to 1919. He kept a diary of the Convention’s proceedings and made notes of other delegates’ speeches. He ‘profoundly disagreed’ with Russell, especially on matters of national education. See Trinity College Dublin [TCD], Ms 2,986–7, items 178–204. Since no formal records were kept, details of Convention business in the pages following derive mostly from TCD, Ms 2,986–7, especially Item 177, Horace Plunkett’s secret dispatch, ‘The Irish Convention, Confidential Report by the Chairman to His Majesty the King’ (1918). Lysaght, ‘Master of None’, viii, 6–7. NLI, Ms 4,750. McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 104. TCD, Ms 2,986–7, Item 55. Plunkett, ‘The Irish Convention, Confidential Report by the Chairman to His Majesty the King’, p. 3.
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41 Hugh Barrie was Unionist MP for North Londonderry; Joseph Devlin was Nationalist MP for West Belfast; Lord Londonderry was a Conservative MP; Lord Midleton was leader of the southern Unionists; William Martin Murphy was an industrialist and owner of the Nationalist Irish Independent; Patrick O’Donnell had been closely connected to the Irish Parliamentary Party but was critical of the 1916 executions and sympathetic to Sinn Féin; Hugh Pollock was a businessman nominated to the Convention to represent the Belfast Chamber of Commerce; John Redmond was MP for Waterford and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party until his death during the Convention on 6 March 1918. 42 TCD, Ms 2,986–7, Item 70. 43 Lysaght recalled that ‘In November Æ considered resignation and writing to Lloyd George a letter (to be published) in which he would state how the Ulster Unionists with the former’s pledge in their pockets sat and jeered at all efforts to compromise knowing their safety to block everything’. Lysaght, ‘Master of None’, viii, 7, NLI, Ms 4,750. 44 TCD Ms 2,986, Item 73. 45 Russell, ‘The New Nation’, IT, 19 December 1917. 46 Ibid. 47 Plunkett, ‘The Irish Convention, Confidential Report by the Chairman to His Majesty the King’, p. 6. 48 Denson (ed.), Letters from Æ, p. 134. 49 Plunkett, ‘The Irish Convention, Confidential Report by the Chairman to His Majesty the King’, pp. 5–6. 50 Plunkett declared himself ‘distressed’ at Russell’s ‘proposed withdrawal’ from the Convention. He hoped that Russell would accompany the Convention to meet the British Cabinet in London in early February 1918. Russell responded, ‘The Sinn Féiners were right in their intuitions from the first. If I had followed my intuition from the first I would have remained away also. A man must be either an Irishman or an Englishman in this matter. I am Irish’. Quoted in Denson (ed.), Letters from Æ, pp. 136–8. Russell’s memory was as faulty as his faith in intuition if he obscured his early enthusiasm for the Convention. 51 Russell, ‘Notes of the Week’, Irish Homestead, 25:2 (12 January 1918). 52 Plunkett, ‘The Irish Convention, Confidential Report by the Chairman to His Majesty the King’, p. 4. 53 The IT criticised what it perceived to be the Duke administration’s inability to suppress Sinn Féin sedition during a South Armagh by-election. IT, 2 February 1918. 54 Russell, ‘Notes of the Week’, Irish Homestead, 25:14 (6 April 1918). 55 Ibid. 56 This point is developed in N. Allen, George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland, 1905–30 (Dublin, 2003). 57 McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 216. 8 THE END OF PARNELLISM AND THE IDEOLOGICAL DILEMMAS OF SINN FÉIN 1 Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858–1928 (Oxford, 1987), p. 33. 2 Writing in a different context, Alan O’Day says the reunified party ‘was not the same as Parnell’s in spirit, confidence or effectiveness’ (my italics). See his Irish Home Rule 1867–1921 (Manchester 1998), p. 190. 3 See my ‘“Parnell’s Old Brigade”: The Redmondite–Fenian Nexus in the 1890s’, Irish Historical Studies [IHS], 33 (November, 2002), vol. 130, 209–32. 4 F.S.L. Lyons, The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890–1910 (London 1951), pp. 67–89.
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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
United Irishman [UI], 6 January 1900. Ibid., 11 March 1899. Ibid., 26 May 1900. For example, see Crime Branch Special [CBS] Précis, box 3, 22 November 1901, 9, 17 October 1902, 5 November 1902. UI, 10, 17 February 1900. See biographical essay ‘A Sketch of His Career’ by Patrick Bradley in Rooney’s posthumous Poems and Ballads (Dublin, 1902?). UI, 7 April 1900. Also, 29 June 1901, 20 June 1903. Frank Callanan, The Parnell Split 1890–1 (Cork, 1994). See my ‘Dublin Fenianism in the 1880s: “The Irish Culture of the Future?”’, Historical Journal, 43:2 (2000), pp. 729–50. UI, 17 February 1900. Emphasis added. Oddly, the by-elections are not mentioned in F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon (London 1968), or Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork 1996). Philip Bull, ‘A Fatal Disjunction, 1898–1905: Sinn Féin and the United Irish League’, in Rebecca Pelan (ed.) Irish-Australian Studies: Papers of the Seventh Irish-Australian Conference (Sydney, 1994); Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation (Dublin, 1999), pp. 34–5. Maume’s position is essentially that of Richard Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-violent Sinn Féin (Dublin, 1974), p. 39. Lyons, John Dillon, pp. 204–6. CBS, box 17, 21353, 6 March 1900. Tom Kettle, ‘Would the Hungarian Policy Work?’, New Ireland Review, 22:6 (February 1905), p. 322. CBS précis, box 1, 15 June 1900. Ibid., box 17, 21343, 6 March 1900. Davis, Arthur Griffith, p. 40; UI, 3 March 1900, claimed the figure was less than a third. Unless stated otherwise the detail on Lynch’s career and the Galway election campaign comes from the large file (CBS, box 20, 27053) partly comprised of reports on Lynch’s movements in the 1890s. United Ireland, 27 January 1894. Galway Vindicator, 9 December 1893. See Terence Denman, ‘“The Red Livery of Shame”: The Campaign against Army Recruitment in Ireland 1899–1914’, IHS, 29 (November 1994), pp. 214–16, 228–9. Seamus MacManus to Terence MacSwiney, 12 October 1901, University College Dublin [UCD], P48b/316. UI, 6 October 1900. CBS précis, box 3, 16 October 1900. Irish Daily Independent [IDI], 14 October 1901. Ibid., 8 November 1901. Paul Bew, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland 1890–1910: Parnellites and Radical Agrarians (Oxford, 1987), pp. 26–9. IDI, 19 October 1901. Freeman’s Journal, 20 November 1901. UI, 30 November 1901. CBS, box 20, 27,053. Yeats reported the possibility that the IRB might vote for Plunkett to Lady Gregory, cited in R.F. Foster, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p. 578, n. 58. Foster, Apprentice Mage, p. 223. CBS, box 17, 21,065, c. 31 January 1900. Ibid., précis, box 2, 6 September 1902. Davitt spoke openly of a ‘fusion’ (police
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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77
word) between the separatists and the UIL at a public meeting in Belfast, 4 March 1902. Ibid., précis, box 3, 21 April 1902. P. T. Daly told Glasgow Fenians excited by the UIL that the Supreme Council was ‘opposed to giving it any countenance whatsoever’. Ibid., précis, box 3, 1 May 1903. Ibid., précis, box 3, 9 October 1902. Ibid., précis, box 3, 5 November 1902. Bew, Conflict and Conciliation, pp. 151–8. CBS précis, box 3, 9 October 1902. Senia Pašeta, ‘Nationalist responses to two royal visits, 1900 and 1903’, IHS, 31 (November 1999), pp. 488–504. UI, 26 November 1904, 17 December 1904; Tom Kettle, ‘Hungarian Policy’, p. 322. Reproduced in UI, 3 December 1904; R. Dudley-Edwards, Patrick Pearse: Triumph of a Failure (2nd edn, Dublin, 1990), p. 72. Davis, Non-Violent Sinn Féin, pp. 10–11. D.G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (2nd edn, London 1992), p. 297. UI, 22 November 1902; MacSwiney Papers, UCD, P48b/335. UI, 26 September 1903. Ibid., 30 September 1905. For example, see ‘Practical Effort’ (UI, 30 October 1900) which criticised the antinational practices of small shopkeepers. UI, 12 April 1902. UI printed a rave review by Griffith of Yeats’s Poems in April 1901, his essay ‘Ireland and the Arts’ in August, and the full text of his play Where There is Nothing in a special supplement, ibid., 27 April, 31 August 1901, 1 November 1902. Ibid., 24 October 1903, was dominated by the controversy provoked by Synge’s 1903 play The Shadow of the Glen. See Foster, Apprentice Mage, pp. 294–300. UI, 10 January 1903. Ibid., 26 April, 3, 10, 17, 31 May, 7, 14, 21, 28 June 1902. Ibid., 28 June 1902. Ibid., 14 February 1903. Ibid., 10 September 1904. Senia Pašeta, ‘Ireland’s Last Home Rule Generation: The Decline of Constitutional Nationalism in Ireland, 1916–30’, in Mike Cronin and John M. Regan (eds), Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922–49 (London, 2000), pp. 13–31. UI, 17 September 1904. MacSwiney diary, 18 September 1905, UCD, P48c/99. UI, 1 October 1904. Ibid., 11 March 1905. Ibid., 16 July 1904. Ibid., 23 July 1904. Ibid., 13 August 1904. Kettle, ‘Hungarian Policy’, p. 322. Ibid., p. 323. Quoted in Davis, Non-Violent Sinn Féin, p. 17; UI, 3 March 1900, 9 December 1905. See Davis, Non-Violent Sinn Féin. McCarten to McGarrity, 2 February 1907, McGarrity Papers, UCD, Ms 17,457 (4). Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland (Cambridge, 1999), p. 25. McCartan to McGarrity, 21 January 1906, McGarrity Ms 17,457 (2). McCartan to McGarrity, 29 December 1906, ibid., 17,617 (1). MacSwiney diary, 3 December 1906, UCD, P48c/103.
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78 McCartan to McGarrity, 2 October 1906, McGarrity Ms 17,457 (1). 79 MacSwiney diary, 3 July 1907, 22 July 1907, P48c/103. 80 This chimes with the summary of Griffith’s strategy in John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Irish Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London, 1987), p. 172. 81 Irish Weekly Independent, 29 February 1908. 82 In early 1910 Griffith considered co-operating with William O’Brien’s All-ForIreland-League but was forced to desist by the IRB. 9 ‘WITH THE EYES OF ANOTHER RACE, OF A PEOPLE O N C E H U N T E D T H E M S E LV E S ’ 1 Roger Casement, Ireland, Germany and the Freedom of the Seas: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 (New York and Philadelphia, 1914), p. 8. A copy of the text of this work, over 50,000 copies of which were printed, heavily annotated in prison in Casement’s hand, is on file at the Public Record Office Kew [PRO], HO 144/1636 /311643/44/32A. Minuted instructions on one Casement file, HO 144/1637/ 311643/176, state that all material he produces in prison is to be destroyed. 2 Ibid., pp. 8, 9. 3 Augustine Birrell in Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (Belfast, 1993), p. 415. 4 National Library of Ireland [NLI], Mss 12,114 and 12,115. The additional material is pasted in Ms 12,114. 5 The most notable of the biographies are as follows: Denis Gwynn, The Life and Death of Roger Casement (London, 1930, 1936); Geoffrey de Clifton Parmiter, Roger Casement (London, 1936); W.J. Maloney, The Forged Casement Diaries (Dublin, 1936); Herbert O. Mackey, The Life and Times of Roger Casement (Dublin, 1954); Rene MacColl, Roger Casement, A New Judgement (London and New York, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1965); Peter Singleton Gates and Maurice Girodias, The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings (Paris and London, 1959, 1960); Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London, 1973, 1974, 2002); B.L. Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement (New Haven, CT and London, 1976); Roger Sawyer, Casement, the Flawed Hero (London, 1984). 6 See R.F. Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’, in Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993), pp. 212–32; Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996); and Terry Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Oxford, 1999). Biographies by Angus Mitchell and Seamus Ó Siochain are in press. 7 On his enquiries into his mother’s connections with the Jephsons of Mallow see NLI, Ms 8999, Casement to Miss Jephson Norreys, Ballycastle, 1 June 1895. He mentions that he is writing an account of his recent African travels for the British Association meeting in the autumn of 1895. For a fuller account of Casement’s family background, particularly in Antrim, see Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement and the Black Diaries with A Study of his Background, Sexuality, and Irish Political Life (Belfast, 2002). 8 Background information supplied to the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1914, PRO CO904/195. 9 Angus Mitchell (ed.), The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (Dublin, 1997). 10 Angus Mitchell, ‘New Light on the “Heart of Darkness”’, History Today, vol. 49 (December 1999), 20–7, and Colm Toibin, ‘A Whale of a Time’, London Review of Books, 2 October 1997, p. 24. 11 Roger Casement to Robert Morton, July 1899, quoted in Parmiter, Casement, pp. 5–6. 12 See Norman Vance, ‘Celts, Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo-Irish Literary
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13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34
Relations, 1780–1820’, Irish Historical Studies, 22 (March 1981), pp. 216–38, and Leerssen, Remembrance. Roger Casement to Alice Stopford Green, 20 April 1907, cited in MacColl, Casement, pp. 57–8. Also, NLI, Ms 10,464. MacColl wrongly calls the Lulongo the Sulanga. Correspondence and Report From His Majesty’s Consul at Boma Respecting the Administration of the Independent State of the Congo, PP 1904, [Cd 1933], HMSO 1904. Involved with the first Feis of the Glens, on the committee representing Glenshesk. Ada MacNeill, then a member of the Gaelic League, was the secretary. PRO, CO 904/195. See too Richard Kirkland, ‘“The Shanachie of Belfast and its Red-brick Gaeltacht”: Cathal O’ Byrne’, Bullan: An Irish Studies Journal, 4 (Winter 1999/Spring 2000), pp. 67–82; Mitchell, Amazon Journal, p. 41; Mary Burgess, ‘Inventing “Northern Ireland”: Partition and the Limits of Ulster Regionalism’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002), and the work of Catherine Morris on Alice Milligan. For a theoretical approach to the notion of shared cultural capital among such overlapping interest groups see Randal Johnson’s introduction to Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge, 1993), pp 1–25. Paper entitled ‘Roger Casement’s Vision of Freedom’ given at the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Roger Casement, 5 and 6 May 2000. NLI, Ms 12,144 and 12,145. Gertrude Parry (ed.), Some Poems of Roger Casement (Dublin, 1918). Draft introduction on file NLI, Ms 13,079. ‘Part 4; Poems by Roger Casement’, in Herbert O. Mackey (ed.), The Crime Against Europe, The Writings and Poetry of Roger Casement (Dublin, 1958), pp. 159–214. Mackey must have had access to these notebooks, as his poems include material from them unavailable in earlier publications. He often edits or slightly changes the texts. He includes some poems and not others and most of them are undated. NLI, Ms 12,115. The handwriting is sometimes unclear: e.g. in the following passage ‘de Leva’ could read ‘de Lera’. Mackey, Crime against Europe, p. 202. Ibid., p. 187. For a recent insight into the MacDonnells see Jane Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randall MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge, 1993). For Mangan see David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1987) and for a wider reading of that nineteenth-century mode see Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (London, 1985). Alice Stopford Green’s cutting book, NLI, Ms 9,932 contains cuttings of a newspaper-published account of Casement’s life by his sister Mrs Newman. Ada MacNeill, ‘Recollections of Sir Roger Casement, 1929’. Typescript shown to me by Anne Casement of Magherintemple. Ada’s father’s cousin, Charlotte Miller, had married a Mr Casement of Churchfield, an uncle of Roger’s. Mackey, Crime against Europe, p. 203. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 175. NLI, Ms 26,978, 24/28 June 1895. See Tadhg Ó hAnnrachain, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002).
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35 Andrew Porter, ‘Sir Roger Casement and the International Humanitarian Movement’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29 (May 2001), pp. 59–74. 36 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 37 Ibid., p. 64. 38 Ibid., p. 71. 39 Casement to Alice Stopford Green, NLI, Ms 10,464; emphasis in the original. 40 Leerssen, Remembrance. 41 For Alice Stopford Green see R.B. McDowell, Alice Stopford Green: A Passionate Historian (Dublin, 1967). For her relationship with Taylor see Sandra Holton, ‘Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History: The Case of Alice Stopford Green’, History Workshop Journal, 53 (Spring 2002), pp. 118–27. 42 Taylor was first brought to my attention by Frank Callanan through the Aeolus episode of Ulysses and Taylor’s role there. James Joyce, Ulysses (London, 1986), pp. 116–18. Yeats writes scathingly about him. Commemorated in the Aeolus episode is the speech that Taylor made against Gerald FitzGibbon in the early 1900s. Casement adopted its central image for his essay ‘The Language of the Outlaw’ in which he promulgates Taylor’s views on the Irish language. 43 Published account by Mrs Newman, NLI, Ms 9,932. 44 See Margaret Callagan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and Law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 1994). 45 Inglis, Casement, p. 117. 46 NLI, Ms 13,077(3), Father’s journal of American tour. 47 Quoted in Inglis, Casement, p. 159. 48 See Foster, ‘Protestant Magic’, and Leerssen, Remembrance. 49 Deane, Short History. 50 For Green’s liberal genealogy see John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the Liberal Past (Cambridge, 1981). 51 See Alvin Jackson, ‘Irish Unionism’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996), on the bonds between Unionist historical scholarship and unionism in this period. See too Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘Franchise Reform, First Past the Post and the Strange Case of Unionist Ireland’, Parliamentary History, 16:1 (1997), pp. 85–106. 52 J.L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938). 53 Adam Hoschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York and London, 1998, 1999, 2000). 54 Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978). 55 Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1979). 56 For an overview of the Congo campaign in Britain see Kevin Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29 (May 2001), pp. 27–58. 57 A.J.P. Taylor, ‘A Patriot for One Ireland’, Essays in English History (London, 1976, 1984), pp. 210–17. 58 F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890–1939 (Oxford, 1979); Tom Garvin, Irish Nationalist Revolutionaries, 1858–1928 (Oxford, 1987). For a recent exploration of the formation of certain Nationalists in the period see Patrick Maume’s important work The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999). This too, however, underestimates the highly significant Irish Protestant contribution to the construction of the new nationalism in this period.
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10 UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES 1 I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Irish American Cultural Institute, and Loyola University Chicago for supporting the research for this chapter. 2 See Aghaloora School, County Cavan, Margaret Smyth and Mathew Comisky Case, ED9/4516/7732/33/1886-87, National Archives Ireland [NAI]. 3 See Janet Nolan, ‘The Great Famine and Women’s Emigration from Ireland’, in E. Margaret Crawford (ed.), The Hungry Stream: Essays on Famine and Emigration (Belfast, 1997), pp. 67–75. 4 See Janet Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington, KY, 1989). 5 J.M. Goldstrom, The Social Context of Education, 1808–1870: A Study of the Working Class School Reader in England and Ireland (Shannon, 1972), p. 72; and ‘Richard Whately and Political Economy in School Books, 1833–1880’, Irish Historical Studies, 15 (September 1966), pp. 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139. 6 Grainne O’Flynn, ‘Our Age of Innocence’, in Mary Cullen (ed.), Girls Don’t Do Honours: Irish Women in Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin, 1987), pp. 79, 81; Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995), p. 216. 7 David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Futility of History: A Failed Experiment in Irish Education’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians: Historical Studies (Dublin, 1991), p. 171; Seamus Ó Buachalla, ‘The Language in the Classroom’, Crane Bag, 2 (1981), p. 21. 8 A.S. MacShambrain, ‘Ideological Conflict and Historical Interpretation: The Problem of History in Irish Primary Education c. 1900–1930’, Irish Educational Studies 10:1 (1991), p. 231; Fitzpatrick, ‘The Futility of History’, pp. 173, 174, 175. 9 Wright, ‘Brigidine Convent, Abbeyleix, Queen’s [Laois]’, in Reports of Inspectors, 1909–1910, pp. 6, 7, 8. 10 Ó Buachalla, ‘The Language in the Classroom’, pp. 18, 21, 22, 25, 27, 30. 11 Table 142, ‘Percentage of Irish-speaking Population, 1891, 1901, 1911’, Census of Ireland for the Year 1911: General Report, with Tables and Appendix (Athlone, 1913), p. 291. 12 J.J. O’Neill, ‘Loreto Convent, Balbrigan [County Dublin], 11–12 October 1909’, Reports of Inspectors, 1909–1910, p. 5. 13 Ibid., R.C.B. Kerin and T. Rea, ‘Convent of St Louis, Carrickmacross [County Monaghan], 13, 18 April 1910’, p. 7. 14 Ibid., Wright and Ensor, ‘Convent of Mercy High School, Carrick-on-Suir [County Tipperary], 4 February 1910’, pp. 3, 5. 15 Ibid., Kerin and Rea, ‘Ladies School, Dundalk [County Louth], 7, 11 April 1910’, p. 5. 16 Ibid., Wright and Ensor, ‘Presentation Convent, Bagenalstown [County Carlow], 8 March 1910’, p. 5. 17 Ibid., O’Neill and Rea, ‘Ladies Collegiate School, Carrickfergus [County Antrim], 9–10–31 May 1910’, p. 5. 18 Ibid., Wright and Ensor, ‘Carrick-on-Suir, 4 February 1910’, p. 5. 19 Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, Rules and Regulations of the National Commissioners of Education in Ireland, 1914–1915 (Dublin, 1914), pp. xx, 60. 20 Ibid., p. 15. 21 Louis S. Daly, 12 February 1907, 13 January 1908 (entry dated 28 July 1908), 26 May 1910, in ‘District Inspector’s Observation Book, Caherciveen Number 2 National School, Kerry, 1874–1917’, ED9/1186/7/11, NAI. 22 Ibid., J.V. Doody, jr, 10 November 1908. 23 Ibid., D. Lehane, 12 September 1910.
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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34
35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
47 48 49 50 51 52 53
Ibid., Kane, 21 December 1911. Ibid., Doody. Ibid., emphasis in the original. E.T. Darman, 17 May 1917. W. Erskine, A Review of the National School System of Education: Its Evils Exposed, and Improvements Suggested [pamphlet] (Belfast, 1895?), pp. 12, 14, 15, 18, 25. Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, Rules and Regulations of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland (Dublin, 1869), pp. 12, 13. Emphasis in the original. Rules and Regulations, 1914–1915, pp. vi, 6, 22, 23. Ibid., pp. 15, 72. Josephine Kamm, Hope Deferred: Girls’ Education in English History (London, 1965), p. 153; John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London, 1973), pp. 241, 242. A training school for male teachers was located across Dublin, in Glasnevin. Thomas Wyse, ‘Elementary Education in Ireland’, American Journal of Education, 2 (1862), pp. 140, 141, 142. Kamm, Hope Deferred, pp. 157, 158; T.J. O’Connell, History of the Irish National Teachers Organisation, 1868–1968 (Dublin, 1968), p. 393. Formal teacher training in England also affected only a minority of teachers. Although the number of certified teachers in England rose from 12,000 in 1870 to 53,000 in 1895, the great majority of English teachers were uncertified in those years. Lawson and Silver, Social History of Education, p. 332. Kamm, Hope Deferred, pp. 161, 162; O’Connell, Irish Teachers Organisation, p. 333. Rules and Regulations, 1914–1915, p. 35. Ibid., pp. 96, 103, 104. Ibid., pp. 35, 36, 103, 104, 106, 107. Ibid., pp. 23, 27. Ibid., pp. 14, 16, 28, 29. Ibid., pp. 29, 95. Rules and Regulations, 1869, p. 20. Ibid., pp. 19, 20, emphasis added. W.H. Welply, 12 August 1907, District Inspectors’ Observation Book, Caherciveen Number 2 National School, Kerry, 1874–1917, Teachers, ED9/1186/7/11, NAI. O’Connell, Irish Teachers Organisation, pp. 409–10. Women hired as teachers after 1 October 1933 were required to resign their teaching jobs when they married (Eoin O’Leary, ‘The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation and the Marriage Bar for Women National Teachers, 1933–1958’, Saothar 12 (1987), p. 47). While women hired before 1 October 1933 could keep their teaching jobs after marriage, teachers appointed for the first time after 30 June 1911 were required to be absent from school for two continuous months before and after childbirth and provide a qualified substitute at their own expense (emphasis added) if the two-month period of forced absence was not within the normal eight-week school vacation period. In this way, national school teachers were forced to either pinpoint the timing of their conceptions and due dates or lose either their jobs or a substantial portion of their salaries. See Rules and Regulations, 1914–1915, p. 24. Ibid., pp. 30, 32, 37. O’Connell, Irish Teachers Organisation, pp. 7, 274. Ibid., pp. 42, 43. Ibid., pp. 56, 58. Ibid., pp. 403, 404. Ibid., p. 405. Ibid., p. 407.
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54 District Inspectors C.E. Wright and E. Ensor, ‘Brigidine Convent, Abbeyleix, County Laois (Queen’s) – 3 May 1910’; ‘Presentation Convent, Bagenalstown, Kilkenny – 8 March 1910’, and Maguire, ‘Mount Pleasant School, Ballinasloe, Mayo – 25 February 1910’, in Great Britain. Intermediate Education Board for Ireland. Reports of Inspectors, 1909–1910, Volume III: Girls’ Schools, 5, 3, 1, National Library of Ireland. 55 O’Connell, Irish Teachers Organisation, pp. 45, 48. 56 Ibid., pp. 62, 63. 57 See Janet Nolan, ‘The National Schools and Irish Women’s Mobility in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Irish Studies Review, 18 (Spring 1997), pp. 23–8. 58 Joan Crean O’Leary, telephone interview by author, 30 January 1998. 59 See the following works by Janet Nolan: ‘Education: Irish-American Teachers in Public Schools, 1880–1920’, in Michael Glazier (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America (Notre Dame, IN, 1999), pp. 236–9; ‘St Patrick’s Daughter: Amelia Dunne Hookway and Chicago’s Public Schools’, in Ellen Sherrett (ed.), At the Crossroads: Old St Patrick’s and the Chicago Irish (Chicago, 1997), pp. 103–17; ‘Patrick Henry in the Classroom: Margaret Haley and the Chicago Teachers’ Federation’, Eire-Ireland, 30 (Summer 1995), pp. 104–17; and ‘Pioneers in the Classroom: The Irish in San Francisco’s Schools’, in Donald Jordan (ed.), The Bay Area Irish (Notre Dame, IN, forthcoming). 11 ‘THE CHARM OF ALLOWING PEOPLE TO MANAGE THEIR OWN AFFAIRS’ 1 Poor Relief (Ireland Inquiry Commission) Report and Evidence, H.C., 1887, xxxviii [C. 5043], pp. 7, 10. 2 Dublin Mail, 15 June 1888, reprinted in Notes from Ireland, 23 June 1888. 3 This section draws on arguments about regionalism advanced by the contributors to Glenn Hooper and Leon Litvack (eds), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity (Dublin, 2000). See especially, Seán Ryder, ‘The Politics of Landscape and Region in Nineteenth-century Poetry’, pp. 169–84. 4 Copy of a Report from the Local Government Board of Ireland, dated the 13th Day of March 1883, with Regard to the Distress Existing or Apprehended in Certain Parts of Ireland . . . , H.C., 1883, lix (92), p. 17. 5 ‘Failure of the Potato Crop in the Western Unions’, memorandum prepared by H.A. Robinson, 7 November 1894, uncatalogued papers of John Morley, Bodleian Library, Oxford. See also Annual Report of the Local Government Board for Ireland, H.C., 1884, xxxviii [C. 4051], p. 13. 6 Sir Henry A. Robinson, Memories: Wise and Otherwise (London, 1923), p. 50. 7 Ibid., p. 78. 8 See evidence of Revd Patrick Grealy and Revd Patrick O’Connor, Poor Relief (Ireland) Inquiry Commission, pp. 73–4. 9 J.H. Tuke, ‘Achill and the West of Ireland’, Nation, 10 April 1886. 10 Nation, 20 March 1886. 11 J.H. Tuke, Achill and the West of Ireland. Report of the Distribution of the Seed Potato Fund in the Spring of 1886 (London, 1886), p. 5. 12 Proof of letter by Tuke, 12 May 1890 (British Library [BL], Balfour Papers, Add Ms 49,817, f. 230). 13 Swinford was added to the list of scheduled unions during the passage of the bill. 14 Parliamentary Debates [PD], 3, 304, 1 April 1886, c. 566. A sum of £50,000 had been voted in 1883 to assist Poor Law boards to relieve distress, of which just over £10,000 had been used, leaving a surplus of £40,000.
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15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
Ibid., 5 April 1886, c. 887. Ibid., 1 April 1886, c. 573. This power was never used. 49 Vict., c. 17. The Irish Poor Law, like the English, was administered by boards of guardians composed partly of guardians elected by ratepayers and partly of local magistrates sitting ex officio. For the ‘nationalisation’ of Irish Poor Law boards, see William L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland 1872–1886 (Boston, MA, 1984). Mayo Examiner, 10 April 1886. Quoted in Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), p. 96. Report from Capt. Sampson, 7 May 1886, National Archives [NA], Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers, 1886/10224. See also the remarks of Local Government Inspector, A.N. Comyn, Poor Relief (Ireland) Inquiry Commission, p. 175. PD, 304, 1 April 1886, c. 574; 5 April 1886, c. 890. Westport Union Minutes, 29 April 1886, National Library of Ireland [NLI], Ms 12,664, p. 288. Précis of Correspondence with the Westport Board of Guardians, NA, CSORP, 1886/10224. Poor Relief (Ireland) Inquiry Commission, p. 138. Ibid., p. 133. See also the evidence of John Geoghegan, Oughterard, p. 206. Ibid., pp. 44, 58, 210. Ibid., p. 173. See also the evidence of Peter King, Oughterard, p. 201. Louden referred to such reports appearing in the Irish Times and Freeman’s Journal at a board meeting on 6 May, Mayo Examiner, 8 May 1886. Westport Minutes, 10 May 1886, NLI, Ms 12,664, insert after p. 301. Mayo Examiner, 22 May 1886. Daily Express, 1 September 1886. Irish Times, 1 September 1886. Freeman’s Journal, 1 September 1886. Henry Robinson to Hicks Beach, 13 September 1886, NA, CSORP, 1887/10224. See Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 233, 305. ‘Letters from Ireland’, ix, The Times, 19 October 1886. Ibid., xiv, 18 November 1886. Nation, 27 November 1886. Henry Robinson to Sir Robert Hamilton, 12 October 1886, NA, CSORP, 1887/10224. Redington had chaired the commission appointed earlier in the year to oversee the establishment of public works under the Relief Act. He was a known supporter of home rule. Poor Relief (Ireland) Inquiry Commission, pp. 73–4. See also the evidence of Revd T. Flannery, and Revd Mark Eagleton, pp. 167–8, 202. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Thomas Mooney to Sir William Kaye, 14 April 1887, NA, CSORP, 1887/10224. Buller to Balfour, 27 April 1887, BL, Balfour Papers, Ms 49,807, f. 74. Freeman’s Journal, 4 June 1886. Mayo Examiner, 4 June 1886. Balfour to Buller, 12 May 1887, BL, Balfour Papers, Add. Ms 49,826, f. 68. Balfour to Tuke, 2 July 1886, ibid., f. 117. Balfour to Buller, 12 May 1887, ibid., f. 68. Buller to Balfour, 14 May 1887, ibid., Ms 49,807, f. 100. See also Balfour to Buller, 26 April 1887, Public Record Office [PRO], War Office Papers, General Sir Redvers Buller Papers, WO 132/4A.
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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
61 62
Balfour to Buller, 12 May 1887, BL, Balfour Papers, Ms 49,826, f. 68. H.C., 1887, Public Bills, ii, p. 175. Westport Union Minutes, 7 July 1887, NLI, Ms 12,665, pp. 705–6. Memorandum for the Information of John Dillon, Esq., MP, 15 June 1887, Trinity College Dublin, Dillon Papers, Ms 6,803, f. 2. Swinford Union Minutes, 12 July 1887, NLI, Ms 12,592, f. 119. PD, 317, 7 July 1887, cc. 153–6. Ibid., c. 166. Ibid., 21 July 1887, cc. 1736–7. Balfour to Buller, 5 July 1887, BL, Balfour Papers, Add. Ms 49,826, f. 119. Memorandum on the Distressed Unions Bill 1887, 29 February 1892, PRO, Balfour Papers, 30/60/4/G. This was particularly hard on the Belmullet guardians who, as the inquiry commission acknowledged, had tried to supervise the distribution of relief, but were unable to pay their debt owing to the low rateable value of the union and its distressed condition. Swinford’s position was different as the union was already carrying a debt of over £10,000 in respect of a loan obtained under the Seed Potatoes Act of 1880. Daily Mail, 15 June 1888. Mitchell Henry, ‘Mr Morley’s Views on Ireland’, The Times, 28 November 1887. 12 TRUE BOLSHEVIKS?
1 Vincent Morely, ‘Sóisialithe Átha Cliath agus teagasc Daniel de Leon, 1900–1909’, Saothar, 12 (1987), pp. 22–33. 2 Emmet O Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824–1960 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 81–3. 3 C. Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly (London, 1961), pp. 224–5. 4 William O’Brien Papers, National Library of Ireland [NLI] Ms 15,674(1). 5 Thomas J. Morrissey, SJ, A Man Called Hughes: The Life and Times of Seamus Hughes, 1881–1943 (Dublin, 1991), p. 87. 6 C. Desmond Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union: The Formative Years, 1909–23 (Dublin, 1982), p. 178. 7 William O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go: Reminiscences of William O’Brien as told to Edward MacLysaght, D.Litt (Dublin, 1969), p. 4. 8 Uinseann Mac Eoin (ed.), Survivors (Dublin, 1980), pp. 22–3. O’Donnell worked as an ITGWU official from 1918 to 1920. 9 For the wider context see O Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 94–116. 10 The Irish Trade Union Congress added ‘and Labour Party’ to its title in 1914, and was known from 1918 to 1930 as the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress. To minimise the alphabet soup, it will be referred to here as the ILPTUC, ‘Congress’ or ‘the Labour Party’. The party was not in any way distinct from Congress. 11 Emmet O Connor, ‘Labour Lives: Cathal O’Shannon’, Saothar, 24 (1999), pp. 89–90. 12 See for example Irish Opinion, 8 December 1917, 28 February 1918; Watchword of Labour, 29 November 1919, 24 January 1920. 13 New Ireland, 8 March 1919. 14 Irish Opinion, 9 February 1918. 15 Mike Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers’ Republic since 1916 (Dublin, 1984), p. 40. 16 See for example the Watchword of Labour, 31 January, 9–16 October 1920; Communist, 5 August, 7 October 1920. 17 NLI, SPI Papers, Ms LO p. 107; Fr. Thomas J. Morrissey, SJ, ‘William O’Brien, the Socialist Party, and the Church, 1917–21’ (unpublished paper).
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18 O’Brien Papers, NLI, Ms 15,705(10). 19 Irish Opinion, 9 February 1918. The attendance figure is claimed in Report of the SPI to the Third International, 11 June 1920, Rossiiskii Gosudartsvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, hereafter cited as RGASPI), 495/89/3–10. 20 O’Brien Papers, NLI, Ms 15,705(11). 21 Edited by SPI member Semyon Aronson (alias Sidney Arnold), the pamphlet contained the constitution of the Soviet Republic together with various articles. Voice of Labour, 16 November 1918. 22 O’Brien Papers, NLI, Ms 15,705(11). 23 Irish Labour and its International Relations in the Era of the Second International and the Bolshevik Revolution (Cork Workers’ Club, nd), p. 26. 24 O’Brien Papers, NLI, Ms 15,705. 25 Dónal Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O’Donnell (Cork, 2001), p. 11. 26 Watchword of Labour, 4 December 1918. 27 Voice of Labour, 2 November 1918. 28 Watchword of Labour, 6 December 1919. 29 Ibid., 25 October 1919. I am obliged to Tom Crean for this reference. 30 Ibid., 15 November 1919. I am obliged to Tom Crean for this information. 31 Peter Hegarty, Peadar O’Donnell (Cork, 1999), p. 59. 32 Watchword of Labour, 20 December 1919, 7, 21 February 1920; Report of the SPI to the Third International, 11 June 1920, RGASPI, 495/89/3–12. 33 Arthur Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, 1890–1930: The Irish Labour Movement in an Age of Revolution (Dublin, 1974), pp. 82–3. 34 Brian Farrell, The Founding of Dáil Éireann: Parliament and Nation Building (Dublin, 1971), pp. 29–44. 35 Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, pp. 99–100. 36 Ibid., p. 90. 37 J. Anthony Gaughan, Thomas Johnson, 1872–1963: First Leader of the Labour Party in Dáil Éireann (Dublin, 1980), p. 81. 38 O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, p. 116. 39 Irish Opinion, 9 February 1918. 40 Irish Labour and its International Relations, pp. 21–2. 41 Ibid., pp. 22–5. 42 Ibid., p. 27. 43 Report of the SPI to the Third International, 11 June 1920, RGASPI, 495/89/ 3–10. 44 Farrell, The Founding of Dáil Éireann, pp. 57–61. 45 Gaughan, Thomas Johnson, p. 160. 46 Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, pp. 110–12. 47 Ibid., p. 112. 48 New Ireland, 22 February 1919. 49 Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, p. 111. 50 Gaughan, Thomas Johnson, pp. 160–3. 51 O’Brien Papers, NLI, Ms 15,705(12). 52 Report of the SPI to the Third International, 11 June 1920, RGASPI, 495/ 89/3–7/14. 53 Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, pp. 234–5. 54 Emmet O Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland (Cork, 1988), pp. 51–2. 55 Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland, p. 39; Thomas Darragh [Roddy Connolly], ‘Revolutionary Ireland and Communism’, Communist International, 11–12 (June–July 1920).
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56 Irish Independent, 3 October 1919. 57 Michael Laffan, ‘“Labour Must Wait”: Ireland’s Conservative Revolution’, in Patrick J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, Rebels, and Establishments (Belfast, 1985), p. 211. Roddy Connolly made similar claims in Darragh, ‘Revolutionary Ireland and Communism’. 58 Gaughan, Thomas Johnson, p. 171. 59 Watchword of Labour, 15 November 1919. 60 Ibid., 10 January 1920. 61 Ibid., 3–31 January 1920; O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, p. 170. 62 Watchword of Labour, 31 January to 21 February, 13 March 1920. 63 O Connor, ‘Labour Lives: O’Shannon’; O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, pp. 190–4; Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, pp. 263–4; Michael Herbert, The Wearing of the Green: A Political History of the Irish in Manchester (London, 2001), p. 99; Manchester Guardian, 12 April 1920. 64 Watchword of Labour, 24 April 1920; Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, pp. 264–5, 268. 65 George Spain to Sylvia Pankhurst, 2 March 1920, RGASPI, 495/89/3–3/4; George Spain to Albert Inkpin, 17 May 1920, RGASPI, 495/89/3–2; Watchword of Labour, 6 March 1920. 66 Communication of the Amsterdam sub-bureau of the IIIrd International: the political and working class organisation in Ireland, undated, RGASPI, 495/89/ 104–150/152. 67 W.K. Anderson, James Connolly and the Irish Left (Dublin, 1994), pp. 126, 142; Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland, p. 40. 68 Report of the SPI to the Third International, 11 June 1920, RGASPI, 495/89/ 3–7/14. 69 Darragh, ‘Revolutionary Ireland and Communism’. 70 Report of the Irish Communist Labour Party to the Third International, 20 May 1920, RGASPI, 495/89/2–3/5. 71 Report to Kobietsky for the ECCI, 10 February 1921, RGASPI, 495/89/10–2/4a; Report on the work of the Irish Communist Groups, undated [1921], RGASPI, 495/89/2–30/33; Report of the CPI to the ECCI, October 1921–October 1922, RGASPI, 495/89/16–44. 72 Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland, p. 41; Watchword of Labour, 3 July 1920. 73 Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland, pp. 41–2. 74 Communist International, 24 June 1920, RGASPI, 489/1/30. 75 Watchword of Labour, 7 August 1920; Communist, 5 August 1920. 76 ILPTUC, Annual Report (1920), pp. 96–109, Irish Labour History Archive. On Rooney see Report on the work of the Irish Communist Groups, undated [1921], RGASPI, 495/89/2–30. 77 The Profintern, or Red International of Labour Unions, was to be the trade union equivalent to the Comintern. 78 Watchword of Labour, 21 February, 6 March, 3, 24 April, 16 October 1920. 79 Ibid., 27 November, 4 December 1920; Voice of Labour, 22 October 1921; ITGWU, Fifty Years of Liberty Hall: The Golden Jubilee of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1909–59 (Dublin, nd), p. 77. 80 Report on the situation in Ireland, E. MacAlpine, Roderic J. Connolly, 7 July 1920, RGASPI, 5/3/581–1/8. 81 Bulletin for the delegates to the second congress of the Communist International, 5 July, 16 July 1920, RGASPI, 489/1/54–33/34, and The Communist International in Lenin’s Time: Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress (New York, 1991), pp. 248–9. 82 Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland, pp. 45–6.
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83 Workers’ Republic, 29 October, 17 December 1921; Report of the SPI to the Comintern, October 1921 to October 1922, RGASPI, 495/89/16–43. 84 CPI to the ECCI, 8 October 1921, RGASPI, 495/89/10–6/7. 85 CPI to the ECCI, 9 November 1921, RGASPI, 495/89/8–6/12. 13 OLD AND NEW UNIONISM 1 For family history see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Londonderrys: A Family Portrait (London, 1979). 2 Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism: One: The Anglo-Irish and the New Ireland: 1885–1922 (Dublin, 1972), pp. xvi–xvii. 3 Ibid., p. xiv. 4 Brian Walker, ‘Landowners and Parliamentary Elections in County Down, 1801–1921’, in L.J. Proudfoot (ed.), Down, History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays in the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1997), p. 315. 5 Alvin Jackson, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911 (Oxford, 1994), p. 5; ‘Irish Unionism, 1870–1922’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801 (London, 2001), p. 121; Peter Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism: the Formation of Popular Protestant Politics and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester, 1975), pp. 143–6. 6 Alvin Jackson, Sir Edward Carson (Dundalk, 1993), pp. 29–31. 7 Jackson, The Ulster Party, pp. 67, 299. 8 Viscount Chilston, Chief Whip: The Political Life and Times of Aretas Akers-Douglas, 1st Viscount Chilston (London, 1961), p. 4. 9 Marquess of Londonderry, ‘In the Days of My Youth’, in TP’s & Cassell’s Weekly, 21 March 1925, p. 810; Morning Post, 22 February 1906. 10 Morning Post, ibid. 11 Parliamentary Debates [PD], 172 (9 April 1907), cc. 147–52. For Castlereagh’s attempted amendments see ibid., 174 (29 May), cc. 1727, 1730–1; 176 (17 June), cc. 227–30, 240; (18 June) cc. 391, 397, 417. 12 See, PD, 19 (25 July 1910), cc. 1793–6. 13 Ibid., 172 (13 April 1907), cc. 528–31. 14 The Times, 10 December 1908; Sunday Chronicle, 13 December 1908; PD, 198 (9 December 1908), c. 520. See PD, 2 (26 March 1909), c. 2075. 15 Marwick, The Deluge, p. 62; See The Times, 27 April 1907; PD, 195 (4 November 1908), c. 1322; R.C.K. Ensor, England (Oxford, 1936), pp. 408–9; The Traffic (Local Option) (Scotland) bill (1908); The Times, 23 May 1908. 16 Prohibitionists also felt that alcohol consumption had an impact on voting. Near the end of 1908 Castlereagh opposed their attempt to close public houses on polling days; he felt that people were capable of choosing a candidate regardless of their sobriety. The Times, 21, 30 October, 3 November 1908 and 11 June 1909. 17 The Times, 20 July 1909. 18 Ibid., 8 January 1910. 19 Anthony Seldon, ‘Conservative Century’, in Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), p. 28. 20 The Times, 16 April 1910. 21 Ibid., 19 April 1910; he later attacked the Irish party for supporting the Liberal delay of women’s suffrage, PD, 43 (5 November 1912), cc. 1083–4; Diane Urquhart, Women in Ulster Politics 1890–1940 (Dublin, 2000), p. 24. 22 The Times, 2 March 1911. 23 PD, 23 (4 April 1911), c. 2075.
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24 Ibid., 25 (2 May 1911), c. 238. 25 The Times, 28 July 1911. 26 J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (reprinted edition; Cambridge, 1998), p. 12. 27 The Times, 8 January 1913; Castlereagh to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 29 January 1912, Londonderry Papers, Durham County Record Office [DCRO], D/Lo/C/ 682 (86). 28 PD, 36 (11 April 1912), cc. 1459–66. 29 Ibid. 30 PD, 39 (18 June 1912), cc. 1536–7. 31 See Jennifer Todd, ‘Unionist Political Thought, 1920–72’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London, 1993), p. 192. 32 Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism: Two: Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland 1886–1922 (Dublin, 1973), p. 51. 33 Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912–1916 (Oxford, 1998), p. 92. 34 PD, 39 (19 June 1912), 1760–3. 35 A.T.Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis: Resistance to Home Rule 1912–1914 (rep. edn., Belfast, 1999), pp. 54–7. 36 Buckland, Irish Unionism: Two, pp. 55–6. 37 Castlereagh to Edith, Lady Castlereagh, 23 September 1912, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland [PRONI], D/3099/13. 38 The Times, 26 September 1912. 39 Castlereagh to Edith, Lady Castlereagh, 25 September 1912, PRONI, D/3099/13. 40 PD, 52 (16 October 1912), cc. 1347–51; The Times, 24 October 1912. 41 PD, 52 (24 October 1912), cc. 2483–6. 42 See Stewart, Ulster Crisis, pp. 76–7. 43 E.A. Aston to Londonderry, 23 June 1915, PRONI, D/3099/8/1; 1 July 1916, D/ 3099/2/7/1. 44 Londonderry to Lady Fingall, 26 November 1917, D/3099/2/7/15. 45 The Times, 14 December 1917. 46 Londonderry to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 13 June 1916, DCRO, D/Lo/C/682. 47 Londonderry, notes for a letter to Edith, Lady Londonderry, undated, PRONI, D/3099/8/3. 48 Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798 –1998: Politics and War (Oxford, 1998), p. 241. 49 For example see Castlereagh to Ralph Blumenfeld, 14 January 1915, House of Lords Record Office, Blu/Lon/1; Londonderry to Colonel Hankey, 16 July 1916, PRONI, D/3099/2/4/7. 50 Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: the Anglo-Irish Settlement and Its Undoing 1912–72 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1991), p. 103; R.B. McDowell, The Irish Convention, 1917–18 (London, 1970), p. 77. 51 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 52 For a thorough account see McDowell, Irish Convention. 53 Horace Plunkett, Report of the Proceedings of the Irish Convention (Dublin, 1918), pp. 9–10. 54 H.C. Plunkett, The Irish Convention: Confidential Report to His Majesty the King by the Chairman (Dublin, 1918), pp. 11–12. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Londonderry to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 29 August 1917, DCRO, D/Lo/ C/682 (241).
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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68
69 70
71
72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80
81
Confidential Report, pp. 15–16, 18. McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 106. See Buckland, Irish Unionism: Two, pp. 111–12. Derby to Londonderry, 8 September 1917, PRONI, D/3099/2/8/2. Londonderry to Desborough, 1 September 1917, PRONI, T/3201/29. Londonderry to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 3 September 1917, DCRO, D/Lo/ C/682 (241). McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 117. Confidential Report, pp. 37–8; Report of the Proceedings, pp. 11, 55. The sub-committee ensured that the Senate would be for ‘the Church, the Peerage, the Privy Council and organised commerce’ with four representatives of labour. Confidential Report, p. 42. Midleton to Londonderry, 25 October 1917, PRONI, D/3099/2/7/14. This was thought by some to be a temporary arrangement. Midleton believed this and feared that socialists and not Sinn Féin in future would come to dominate Irish politics. He tempered Londonderry’s enthusiasm to be ‘liberal about powers’ with this caveat. Midleton to Londonderry, 25 October 1917, D/3099/2/7/14; McDowell, Irish Convention, pp. 121–2. Confidential Report, p. 51. In September Carson pressed Lord Selbourne to advocate federalism to the Convention. See John Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution, 1870–1921 (Kingston and Montreal, 1989), p. 188; Selbourne and Moreton Frewen – an advocate of federalism – kept in contact and Frewen put pressure on Londonderry as late as June 1918 to be the leading advocate for federalism. Moreton Frewen to Londonderry, 26 June 1918, PRONI, D/3099/8/3. Stephen Evans, ‘The Conservatives and the Redefinition of Unionism, 1912–21’, Twentieth Century British History, 9 (1998), p. 20; D.G. Boyce, ‘Conservative Opinion, the Ulster Question, and the Partition of Ireland, 1912–21’, Irish Historical Studies, 17 (March 1970), p. 96. Confidential Report, p. 51. Adam Duffin to Londonderry, 16 November 1917, in McDowell, Irish Convention, pp. 126–7; Londonderry later stated he did not intend that federation be immediate. Londonderry to Lady Fingall, 26 November 1917, PRONI, D/3099/2/7/15. The Ulster Delegation Minutes jump from 12 November to 17 December 1917, PRONI, D/1327/3/17. Confidential Report, p. 52. Ibid., p. 55. Hugh Barrie to Londonderry, 16 February 1918, PRONI, D/3099/8/3. Ulster Delegation Minutes, 18 December 1917, D/1327/3/17. Confidential Report, pp. 51–2. Copy of Londonderry to Lady Fingall, 26 November 1917, PRONI, D/3099/2/ 7/15; Fingall replied and suggested that George Bernard Shaw assist Londonderry in pressing for federalism. Lady Fingall to Londonderry, 28 November 1917, D/3099/2/7/16. Londonderry’s fiery encounter with Lady Fingall is detailed along with the circumstances in Anne de Courcy, Circe: The Life of Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry (London, 1993), pp. 127–8. B. Mahon to Londonderry, 3 December 1917, PRONI, D/3099/2/7/17; Lord Southborough revealed to Professor W.G.S Adams of the Cabinet Secretariat that Londonderry might advocate ‘a good scheme’ under the auspices of the southern Unionists to his own party. Southborough to Adams, 17 December 1917, Plunkett to Londonderry, 21 December 1917, in McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 136.
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NOTES
82 Londonderry to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 21 January 1918, DCRO, D/Lo/C/ 682 (258). 83 McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 162. 84 Londonderry to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 27 February 1918, DCRO, D/Lo/ C/682 (99). 85 The Times, 4 February 1918. 86 Lloyd George to Barrie, 21 February 1918, in McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 163. 87 Ulster Delegation Minutes, 25 February 1918, PRONI, D/1327/3/17. 88 McDowell, Irish Convention, pp. 163–4. 89 Montgomery to Londonderry, 26 February 1918, in McDowell, Irish Convention, p. 163. 90 Londonderry to Carson, 21 February 1918, PRONI, D/3099/8/3. 91 Londonderry to Theresa, Lady Londonderry, 5 April 1917, DCRO, D/Lo/C/682. 92 PD [Lords] (17 April 1918), c. 740. 93 See speech by the Grand Master, The Belfast News Letter, 13 July 1918. 94 Eunan O’Halpin, The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland 1892–1920 (Dublin, 1987), p. 171. 95 Viceroy’s Advisory Council minutes, 10 October 1918, PRONI, D/3099/8/3; The Times, 24 October, 29 November 1918. 96 Council Minutes, 10 October 1918, D/3099/8/3. 97 Jackson, ‘Irish Unionism’, p. 115.
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Abbey Theatre 121–3 agriculture: Irish rural identity 5; loss of labourers 10; Protestant labourers 9–10; rural reform 133; state intervention 98–9; see also land and landowners Akers-Douglas, Aretas 225 Albany, Duke of (Prince Leopold) 37, 38, 39 Alexander II, Tsar 37 Alexandra, Princess of Wales 5 Allen, Nicholas 3, 6; ‘National reconstruction: George Russell (Æ) and the Irish Convention’ 128–41 Amazon Journal (Casement) 160, 161 Amnesty Association 143, 147 An Claidheamh Soluis (newspaper) 114, 150 Ancient Order of Hibernians 12 Anglo-Irish literary revival 6, 113–16 Anglo-Irish Treaty 153 Anti-coercion Association 87 Antrim Road Ard Righ circle 3 Arnold, Matthew: On the Study of Celtic Literature 115 Ashbourne Act (1885) 8 Ashe, James 134 Asquith, Herbert H. 59; defeated 232; on home rule bill 71; reforming House of Lords 227–8 Bachelor’s Walk shooting 95 Bagehot, Walter: English Constitution 54 Balfour, Arthur 9, 130, 226; distress inquiry 203, 204–5, 206; strong government 194 Balfour, Gerald 9, 130 Barrie, Hugh Thom 138, 233, 234, 235 Bartlett, Tom 18
Bates, Richard Dawson 236 Beach, Sir Michael Hicks 202 Bean na h-Eireann (journal) 129 Belfast: demography of 12; riot of 1912 58; riots of 68–9; Russell and 140; urbanisation 11 Bell, Andrew 186 Benburb, Battle of 167–8 Berne International Conference 216–17 Bew, Paul 70 Bigger, Francis 163 Bigger, Joseph 163 Birrell, Augustine 32 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (Mearns) 86 Blythe, Ernest 105 Boer War 31, 118; Casement on 161, 162; expectation of 144; not a party issue 150–1; opposition to 143; Parnellites and 147 Bolshevism 212, 217, 222 Bonaparte-Wyse, A.M. 104 Bonar Law see Law, Andrew Bonar Boyce, D. George 1, 22; dual identity 3; ‘A First World War transition: state and citizen in Ireland, 1914–19’ 92–109; home rule in jeopardy 57; rights and duties of man 7–8 Bradlaugh, Charles 87 Brady, L.W.: T.P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish 78 Brady (school manager) 180, 181 Bright clause 8 Britain: belief in Union with 224; campaigning in England 73–4; effect of conscription crisis 105–9; end of allBritish Isles united state 12–13; heading into World War I 92–6; health and welfare 97; identity includes
280
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Ireland 8; imperialism 133; industry and agriculture 97–9; Parliament and Unionism 227–30; result of royal visit 51–6; Russell’s cultural criticism of 141; socialist parties 210 ‘Broken glass and batoned crowds: Cathleen Ni Houlihan and the tensions of transition’ (Murphy) 113–27 Brooks, Sydney 58 Browne, Lord John 198 Brunner, John 82–3 Bryce, James 32, 81 Buckingham Palace Conference 32 Bull, Philip 146 Buller, General Sir Redvers 203, 205 Burke, Patrick 199 Burke, T.H. 40 Butt, Isaac 2; leadership of 21–6, 33–4; obstruction and 25; on selfgovernment 23; Viceroyalty and 42 Canavan, Fr. J.E.: How Far May a Catholic Agree with Socialists? 217 Carlyle, Thomas 115 Carpenter, Walter 213, 217–18 Carson, Sir Edward 231; British speaking tour 74; conscription and 107–8; Convention and 140, 237–8; Craigavon rally 63; home rule 71, 72; outbreak of war 93, 94; and Parliamentary Unionists 228; six counties agreement 232 Casadh an tSúgáin (Hyde) 120–1 Casement family 160, 171–2 Casement, Nina 170 Casement, Roger 3; Amazon Journal 160, 161; Crime against Europe 170; critique of imperialism 168–70; formation of politics 159–63, 171–3; humanitarianism and revolution 173–4; Land League meetings 163–4; notebook poetry 164–8, 173; recruiting for Germany 103 Castlereagh, Viscounts see Londonderry, Marquesses of Cathleen Ni Houlihan (Yeats and Gregory) 113; performed at Abbey Theatre 123–4; political resonances 124–7; the Queen’s Jubilee and 116–20 Catholics and Catholic Church: Dillon and 31; home rule and 50; marriage 62; political demography 11;
promotion of Dr Walsh 48; rising middle class 10; sharing precedence 50; shipyard workers 69; teachers and 9 Cavendish, Lord Frederick 40 Cecil, Lord Hugh 230 Celtic Literary Society 149, 152 Celticism see Gaelicism Central Board scheme 50 Chamberlain, Joseph 78, 224; Central Board scheme 50; threat to Irish–Liberal alliance 86 Chaplin, Edith (later Lady Londonderry) 223 ‘“The charm of allowing people to manage their own affairs”: political perspectives on emergency relief in late nineteenth-century Ireland’ (Crossman) 193–208 Childers, Erskine 64 Church of Ireland: disestablishment 8; sharing precedence 50; at time of change 1 Churchill, Winston 68; calls for devolution 70; dreary steeples at war’s end 92 Clancy, J.J. 199 Clarke, Peter: Liberals and Social Democrats 173 class: middle-class Catholics 10; radical antipathy to aristocracy 87 Coercion Bill 81, 87 Coffey, Diarmuid 135 Collins, Michael 142, 153 Colman, J.J. 83 colonialism/imperialism: brotherhood of Dominions 133; Casement and 3, 160–3, 168–70, 174–5; Comintern’s priority against 221; of World War I 94 Colthurst, Reverend 1 Comisky, Matthew 179–81 Communist International (Comintern) 218–19; birth of CPI and 221–2; test of revolutionaries 216–17 Communist Party of Britain 220 Communist Party of Ireland 221 Congested Districts Board 12 Connaught Rangers 108 Connolly, James 30, 217; on outbreak of war 94; Socialist Republican Party 116; SPI and 209–10
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INDEX
Connolly, Roddy 217, 219 Connolly (James) Labour College 220 Conservative Party (Britain): and Castlereagh before World War I 224–7; and Ulster Unionists 223–4 constitutionalism: versus separatism 143–50 Cooke, Alistair 18 Corn Production Act 98, 99 Council of the Three Hundred scheme 151 The Countess Cathleen (Yeats) 116, 122, 123 Covenant 70 Cowen, C.P. 97 Cowling, Maurice 18 Cowper, Lord 37, 39 Craig, James 61 Crawford Technical Institute 137 Crime against Europe (Casement) 170 Crimes Act (1882) 49 Croke, Archbishop Thomas 51–2 Crossman, Virginia 5–6; ‘“The charm of allowing people to manage their own affairs”: political perspectives on emergency relief in late nineteenthcentury Ireland’ 193–208 Crowe, John 147 Cumann na nGaedheal 150, 155 Cumannacht na hÉireann 211 Curragh Mutiny 32 Dáil Éireann 216, 222; welcomes soldiers 108 Daily News (newspaper) 79–81 Daly, Louis S. 184 Daly, P.T. 218 Darmon, E.T. 184 Daunt, W.J. O’Neill 43, 49, 54 Davis, John 87 Davitt, Michael 77, 148, 149, 164; alienated from Parnellites 49 de Fellenberg Montgomery, Hugh 234, 237 de Leon, Daniel 209–10 de Valera, Eamon 105, 216; Irish Home Rule Convention 128 Deak, Francis 150, 153 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) 95–6, 98, 104 Deirdre (Russell) 123 demography: of Belfast 12; declining
population 10; political representation and 11–12; religious proportions 10 Devlin, Joseph 138 devolution 131; rejection by Sinn Féin 7; rejection of 158 Dilke, Sir Charles 80–1 Dillon, John 2; on conscription 107; home rule finance 64; leadership of 29, 30–4; opposes Distressed Unions Bill 205–7; ‘our troops’ 106; political activity 62; public opinion and 21; Russell and 131 Dillon, John Blake (elder) 30 Disraeli, Benjamin 87 Distressed Unions Bill 205–7 Dixie, Lady Florence 54 Dolan, C.J. 155 Dolan, James 59 Doody, J.V. 184 Dougherty, J.B. 62 Douglas, James 130–1, 135 Dracula (Stoker) 117 drama and theatre: Anglo-Irish literary revival and 120–1; Gaelic 120–1 Dublin Society 19 Duffin, Adam 235 Duke, H.E. 98 Dungannon Club 155, 163 Durkheim, Émile 12 Duties of Man 7–8 Eardley, F. 180–1 Easter Rising 32, 56; soldiers of 104; splits nationalism 158 Echo (newspaper) 79 economics: financing home rule 64; the Hungarian policy 150–7; money from emigrants 11; rhetoric on 5; uncertain investors 131–2 education: Education Bill 32; of girls 181–3, 192; inspection and management 183–9; localism and 9; resistance and INTO 189–92; Smyth’s row with Comisky 179–81; statistics of 3–4; teachers as leaders 18; teachers’ jobs 185–9; training for teachers 185–7; women teachers 6 Edward (Albert), King/Prince of Wales: claims about conversion 56; death of 59, 60; preparation for visit to Ireland 46–51; royal visit 5, 51–6, 150; Yeats on 119
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INDEX
emigration: money sent home 11; population decline and 10; of women 9, 192 ‘The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin’ (Kelly) 142–58 English Constitution (Bagehot) 54 The English Face of Nationalism (O’Day) 78 English History, 1914–1945 (Taylor) 96 Errington, George 49–50 Erskine, W. 185 Evicted Tenants Act 32 exhibitions 39–40 Fabian Society 86 famine: Parnell and 28; Queen Victoria and 36, 52 Farrell, J.P. 66, 149 Farren, Tom 214 Fay, Frank 123 Fay, Willie 123 Fenians: Butt and 21–3, 24; Parnell and 26 Ferguson, Samuel 171 Finlay, Fr. Peter 217 Finn, Margaret Doris 218 ‘A First World War transition: state and citizen in Ireland, 1914–19’ (Boyce) 92–109 Fitzgibbon, John 63, 68; snap home rule vote 71 Fitzpatrick, David 10–11, 57 Fleming, N.C. 3, 6; ‘Old and new unionism: the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, 1906–21’ 223–40 Foran, Tom 210 Forde, John J. 148 Forster, W.E. 40 Franchise and Redistribution Acts 11 Freeman’s Journal (newspaper) 106, 134, 201; poor relief 204 Fyfe, Hamilton 81 Gaelic Athletic Association 121 Gaelic language 4; teaching of 182–3 Gaelic League 6; An Claidheamh Soluis 114, 150; drama 120 Gaelicism: Anglo-Irish literary revival and 114–15; barbarians or ancient civilization? 115; literary renaissance 6 Garvin, Tom 17, 19; three phases of separatism 142 Gerbner, George 20
Ginnell, Laurence: election 59; on home rule bill 66–7 Gladstone, Herbert 89 Gladstone, William E. 11; commitment to home rule 22, 28, 84; disestablishment 8; Kilmainham Treaty 40; Land Bill 30; O’Connor and 78; replaced by Salisbury 201; retirement 31; workability of home rule 56 Gonne, Maud: in Cathleen Ni Houlihan 124–5; ‘Famine Queen’ 119–20; the Queen’s Jubilee and Cathleen Ni Houlihan 116–20; A Servant of the Queen 120; Yeats and 117 Goodbody, John 79 Goold, Augusta 43 Government of Ireland Bill 63–7 Great Exhibition (1851) 39 Green, Alice Stopford 131, 170, 171; The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 173; nationalism of 174 Green, J.R. 173 Gregory, Lady Augusta 121; authorship of Cathleen Ni Houlihan 113; establishment of Abbey Theatre 121–3 Grey, Sir Edward 93 Griffith, Arthur 7, 77; apostasy of 143; Gonne and Famine Queen 119; The Resurrection of Hungary 150–7; on Sinn Féin and home rule 130; The United Irishman 114 Guest, F.E. 106 gun running 174 Gurevitch, Michael 21 Gwynn, Denis 64 Gwynn, Stephen 57, 58, 61; on Cathleen Ni Houlihan 124; expecting justice 105; on military recruitment 102, 103 Hamilton, Edward 39 Harcourt, Sir William 89 Harrington, Timothy 49, 143, 146 Hayden, John 62, 73; on campaigning in England 73 health and safety 97 Healy, Timothy M. 31, 35, 197; on conscription 106; election 59, 61; on local interests 198; on military service 101, 102 Hill, Frank 79–80 history, teaching of 182 Hobsbawm, E.J. 21
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INDEX
Hobson, Bulmer 155 Hobson, J.A. 169; Imperialism 173 Holden, Isaac 83 Home Government Association 23 home rule: Agar Robartes exclusion 68; bill defeated 70–2, 201; Butt’s programme 23, 24–6; Catholic Church and 50; Dublin demonstration 65; elections 24; exclusion of Ulster 174; financing 64; first episode 3; Liberal committment to 84–8; and military service 101; nationalist complacency 57–63, 73–5; Parnell and 25; Ulster resistance to 67–72 Home Rule League 26 Home Rule Party 8, 149; Butt and 22; conscription crisis 107; dissolves 146; failure of democracy 109; Parnell and 28 Hoppen, K.T. 18 Hoppen, Theodore 55 Horgan, J.J. 64 Horniman, Annie 123 housing: Liberal policies 89–90; state intervention 97 How Far May a Catholic Agree with Socialists? (Canavan) 217 Hroch, Miroslav 22, 27, 34; Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe 19–20 Hughes, Séamus 215 Hutchinson, John 65 Hyde, Douglas 123; Casadh an tSúgáin 120–1; ‘On the Necessity for DeAnglicising Ireland’ 113 Hyndman, H.M. 86 identity: Anglo-Irish literary revival 113–16; antiquarianism 173; ‘imagined community’ 11; Irish ethnicity 141; nationalist 2–3; political 2–3; and poverty 207–8; print media and 4; religion and 12 imperialism see colonialism/imperialism Imperialism (Hobson) 173 In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge) 114, 123 industry: assessing possibilities for 151; British state intervention 97–8 Inglis, Brian 174 Inkpin, Albert 218 Ireland: self-government 12–13; transition in mentalité 1
Irish Academy: establishment 19 The Irish at the Front (MacDonagh) 99 Irish Catholic (newspaper) 31 Irish Convention 3, 6, 128, 136–41; federal proposal 235–7; Lord Londonderry and 233–40; opening positions 233–4; partition 32; Russell’s ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ 131–5 Irish Freedom (journal) 157 Irish Homestead (journal) 128–9, 141 Irish Independent (newspaper) 64 Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress 211, 220; SPI policy and 214–16 Irish language see Gaelic language Irish Literary Theatre 121–3 Irish National Association 147 Irish National Federation 143 Irish National Land League 27, 30 Irish National League 143; collapse of 145 Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) 189–90 Irish National Theatre 151 Irish Parliamentary Party 109, 143, 146, 158 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 108, 219 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) 121, 143, 148; Casement and 163; separatism 145; split nationalisms 158 Irish Statesman (newspaper) 6, 128; Russell and 141 Irish Tenant League 22 Irish Times (newspaper): relief fund 196; Russell’s ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ 131–5 Irish Trade Union Congress 97 Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union 7, 210–11; the SPI and 213–16, 220, 221–2 Irish University Act 32 Irish Volunteer Force (IVF) 174; formation of 93; outbreak of war 93–6; war recruits 100; and wartime conscription 106; see also Irish Republican Army Jackson, Alvin 65, 239 Jalland, Patricia 62 Jeffrey, Keith 103 Jinks, John 69 Johnson, Tom 211, 214, 216, 217 Johnston, Anna 145
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INDEX
Johnston, Joseph 135 Johnston, Robert 147 Joyce family murders 42 Joyce, P.W. 182 Kane, Inspector 184 Kelly, Matthew 6; ‘The end of Parnellism and the ideological dilemmas of Sinn Féin’ 142–58 Kelly, P.J. 199 Kennedy, Thomas 218 Kerin, R.C.B. 183 Kettle, Tom 64, 93, 146, 150; the Hungarian policy 154 Kiberd, Declan 5 Kiernan, Daniel 179–80, 184 Kilmainham Treaty 40 King, Cornelius 200 Koss, Stephen: The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain 79 Kossuth, Lajos 150, 153, 155, 172 Labouchere, Henry 79; supports O’Connor 81–2, 89, 90 labour: Belfast shipyards 68–9; international radicalism 7; urbanisation 10; wages for 85 Labour Party (Britain) 215, 216, 219 Laffan, Michael 155 Lalor, J.J. 37 Lancaster, Joseph 186 Land Act 12, 30, 32; Parnell and 39 land and landowners: changing powers of 8–9; the Land War 27; Lloyd George’s ‘the people’s budget’ 226–7; Plan of Campaign 28, 29, 30–1; political authority 9; The Star and 88; Stoker’s Dracula 117; Wyndham Act 31–2 Land League: Casement and 163–4; conflict with viceregal system 36; Davitt and 149; suppression of 39 Land War 1, 28, 146; Casement and 171–2; Parnell and 27 Landsdowne, Lord 226 Larkin, James 30, 32 law: Russell’s constitutional theory 131–5 Law, Andrew Bonar 69; and Castlereagh 228; outbreak of war 93; support for Carson 228 Lazerfeld, Paul 20 leadership: ‘organic intelligentsia’ 18; public communication and 20–1;
social forces versus great men 18; Weber’s three types of 20 Lee, J.J. 65 Leerssen, Joep 170, 172 Leitrim, Lord 116–17 Leitrim Advertiser (newspaper) 62 Leitrim Observer (newspaper) 62, 71 Liberal Party: ‘Newcastle Programme’ 90; O’Connor’s radicalism and 84–8; and the press 83–4; relation to Irish nationalism 78–82; see also Gladstone, William E., commitment to home rule Liberals and Social Democrats (Clarke) 173 Limerick, Bishop of 31 literacy statistics 3 literature: antiquarianism 173; Casement’s notebook poetry 164–8; Celtic folk and fairy tales 115–16; Gaelicism and 6; teaching of 183; see also drama and theatre Litvinov, Maxim 215 Lloyd George, David 33; agrees to Convention 232; Irish Home Rule Convention 131; post-Rising settlement 104; proposal for home rule 237; ‘the people’s budget’ 226–7 local government: administration of 9, 198; relieving poverty and 193–5 Local Government Act (1898) 9 Local Government Board: health and welfare 97; poor relief 199, 201, 204–5; resist emergency relief 196 localism: education and 9; political attitudes and 55–6 Logue, Cardinal 102 London County Council (LCC) 87, 90 Londonderry, 2nd Marquess of 224, 229 Londonderry, 6th Marquess of 224, 231, 234 Londonderry, 7th Marquess of (Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart) 3, 138; Asquith’s reforms and 227–9; assessment of role 239–40; increased mobilisation 230–1; the Irish Convention and 233–40; Plunkett’s praise for 235–6; six counties agreement 232; supports unionism 223–4; World War I and 231–2 Long, Walter 95 Longford Independent (newspaper) 68 Longford Leader (newspaper) 59, 60, 73;
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home rule finance 64; on snap vote 71; on Ulster resistance to home rule 69, 70 Louden, J.J. 198–9, 201 Loughlin, James 4 Lucy, H.W. 79–80 Lynch, Arthur 146, 147–8 Lysaght, Edward 135, 136 MacAlpine, Eadhmonn 219 MacBride, Major John 117–18; on the Hungarian policy 152–3, 154; IRB candidacy 143, 146–7, 149 McCabe, Cardinal 48 McCartan, Patrick 155, 156 McCarthy, Florence 166 McCarthy, Justin 31, 42–3 MacDonagh, Michael: The Irish at the Front 99 MacDonald, Ramsay 216 MacDonnell, Sir Antony 30, 32 MacDonnell, Sir Randall 165 MacDonnell, Sorley Boy 165 McDowell, R.B. 107 McGarrity, Joseph 155 MacGuinness, Frank 69 Mackey, H.O. 164 McLaughlin, James 18; Reimagining the Nation-State 4 McLoughlin, Séan 219 MacManus, Seamus 147–8 McManus, Terence Bellew 121 MacNeill, Ada 166 MacNeill, Eoin 95 MacNeill, J.G. Swift 73 MacNeill, John 136 MacSwiney, Terence 148, 156; the Hungarian policy 150, 152–3 Mahaffy, John Pentland 136 The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (Green) 173 Manchester Martyrs 121 Mangan, James Clarence 166 Manning, Cardinal 50 Mansfield, Mr and Mrs 189–90 Marconi scandal 74 Marlborough, Lady 36 marriage: Ne Temere papal decree 62 Martyn, Edward 121, 122–3 Massingham, H.W. 90 Mathew, Fr. Theobald 121 Maume, Patrick 77, 146
Maynooth seminary 50 Mayo Examiner (newspaper) 204 Mearns, Andrew: The Bitter Cry of Outcast London 86 Mechanics Institute 121 media see newspapers and periodicals M’Grath, John 43 Midland Reporter (newspaper) 58, 66, 69, 70 Midleton, Lord 138 military: conscription 106–9, 231; paramilitary organizations 57; recruitment for World War I 99–103 Military Service Act 107 Milligan, Alice 145; on the Hungarian policy 152 Mitchell, Angus 160, 161 Molloy, Patrick 200 monarchy: adoption of ‘Windsor’ name 56; a King of Ireland 153; Parnell and 4–5, 9, 35–7; royal visit issue 150 Moore, George 121, 123 Moore, Maurice 130, 135 Moran, D.P. 76; The Philosophy of Irish Ireland 114 Morley, John 5, 196; and the Daily News 80–1; Distress Relief Act 197; O’Connor and 78; Relief of Distress Act 193, 201–2, 207; The Star and 89–90 Morris, Mary 189, 190 Mosca, Gaetano 12 Mr Britling Sees It Through (Wells) 96 Mulcahy, Richard 215 Murphy, James H. 6, 55; ‘Broken glass and batoned crowds: Cathleen Ni Houlihan and the tensions of transition’’ 113–27 Murphy, William Martin 134–5, 136, 138, 139 Murray, T.C. 114 Nathan, Sir Matthew 101 Nation (newspaper) 198 National Insurance Act 97 ‘National reconstruction: George Russell (Æ) and the Irish Convention’ (Allen) 128–41 National Volunteers 7, 101–2 Nationalism: apathy in home rule debate 57–63; attempts to unite with Unionists 31; and Boer War 118; citizenship-based 26; conscription and
286
INDEX
106–9, 231; Government of Ireland bill 63–7; identity and monarchy 35–7, 39; ‘imagined community’ 11; Irish Home Rule Convention 134–41; leadership and 17–18; Liberal Party and 78–82; Prince’s visit protest 51–4; and popular opinion 20–1; process of 19–20; separatism versus constitutionalism 143–50; see also Sinn Féin, Parnellism and Nationalist Party 11 Ne Temere (papal decree) 62 newspapers and periodicals: construction of identities 4; home rule debate 58–9; London’s political press 83–4; nationalists and home rule 62–7; political leadership and 20–1; provincial 4; on Ulster resistance to home rule 67–72 Nicholas, Patrick M. 199 Nolan, Col. John P. 200, 206 Nolan, Janet 6, 9; ‘Unintended consequences: the national schools and Irish women’s mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ 179–92 Northern Patriot (journals) 145 Nowlan, Kevin B. 18 Nugent, John Dillon 60 Nugent, Sir Walter 61, 71 O Ceallaigh, Séan T. 216 O Conaire, Pádraic 211 O Siochian, Seamus 163–4, 172 O’Brien, Patrick 18, 19, 33 O’Brien, R. Barry 29, 84 O’Brien, William 134, 147; anti-visit agitation 46; attempts at accord 31–2; Berne International Conference 216, 217; claims Prince converted 56; the CPI and 221–2; Dillon and 32; elected chairman of SPI 210–11; imprisoned 218; Irish People 149; land struggle 30; Prince of Wales’s visit 51–2; SPI programme 212; splits in SPI 217–21 obstruction policy 25 O’Callaghan, Margaret 3; ‘“With the eyes of another race, of people once hunted themselves”: Casement, colonialism and a remembered past’ 159–75 O’Connell, Daniel 21; leadership qualities
of 17–18; monument to 40; Parnell and 27; public meetings 121; and Queen Victoria 126; Viceroyalty and 42 O’Connell, Sir Morgan 101 O’Connor, Elizabeth 82 O’Connor, Emmet 6; ‘True Bolsheviks? The rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Ireland, 1917–21’ 209–22 O’Connor, John 48 O’Connor, Revd Patrick 203 O’Connor, T.P. 2, 73; achievements of The Star 89–90; as ‘culturally corrupted’ 76–7; establishes The Star 81–4; fictional portrayal 76; Labouchere’s support 89; Liberal Party and 78–82, 84–8; radicalism of 77–8, 87–9; on Redmond 60; Ryan’s portrayal of 88; Wilson’s selfdetermination 109 O’Day, Alan 2; The English Face of Nationalism 78 O’Donnell, Bishop Patrick 138, 234–6 O’Donnell, Frank Hugh 123 O’Donnell, John 59, 146 O’Donnell, Peadar 211, 213 O’Donnell, Red Hugh 164–5 O’Dowd, John 64 O’Flanagan, Fr. Michael 69 O’Gorman, Thomas 147 O’Halpin, Eunan 238 ‘Old and new unionism: the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, 1906–21’ (Fleming) 223–40 O’Leary, John 118, 146–7 O’Leary, Nora 192 O’Looney, Thomas 152 O’Mahoney, Gerald 36 O’Malley, Ernie 104 O’Malley, Peter 200 ‘On the Necessity for De-Anglicisng Ireland’ (Hyde) 113 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold) 115 O’Neill, J.J. 183 O’Neill, Owen Roe 167–8 Orange Order 121 O’Shannon, Cathal 211, 214, 216, 217, 218, 220 O’Shea, Katharine 28, 29 O’Shea, Michael 191–2 O’Sullivan, Joseph 149 O’Sullivan, Mrs (teacher) 191
287
INDEX
Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper) 79 Panebianco, Antonio 24, 34 Pankhurst, Sylvia 218, 219 Papal Rescript (1883) 49–50 Parnell, Charles Stewart 2, 30; abolition of viceroyalty 43; appeal to hillside men 143; charismatic leadership of 17–18, 27–9, 33–4, 35–7, 39; death of 172; Dillon and 31; early career 26–7; imprisonment 39; Kilmainham Treaty 40; monarchy and 4–5, 35–7, 39; Mrs O’Shea and 28, 29, 90; North American tour 55; obstruction and 25; Phoenix Park murders and 81; public opinion of 4, 21; Russell admires 132; as sacrificial 144; working class and 88 Parnellites: anti-visit agitation 46–51; character of debate 142–3; influence on Casement 159; protest (Prince of Wales) 51; royal visit 54–6; Sinn Féin and 157–8; Spencer and 42–4 Parry, Gertrude 164 partition see Irish Convention Pašeta, Senia 10, 149 Pat (journal) 37, 44, 45 Pearse, Patrick: on Irish complacency 58; sacrificial Parnell 144 Peel, Sir Robert 126 Percy, J.C. 101 Perrott, Sir John 165 The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Moran) 114 Phoenix Park: Gonne’s picnic 119; murders 40, 42, 81; as protest point 46, 48 The Playboy of the Western World (Synge) 123–4 The Plough and the Cross (Ryan) 76–7 Plunkett, Sir Horace 30, 31, 131; chairs Convention 135, 136–40, 233–8; O’Brien and 214; opposes Lynch 148; Russell and 128, 129, 130 La Poésie des races celtiques (Renan) 115 political theory: Rights and Duties of Man 7–8, 108–9 politics: demography and representation 11–12; international radicalism 7; see also leadership; local government; political theory; state Pollock, Hugh 138 Ponsonby, Sir Henry 36 Poor Laws 193; abuse of 203; boards of 9; boycott Prince of Wales 51; effect of 5
Poor Relief Act 205 Porter, Andrew 168, 169 poverty: Distressed Unions Bill 205–7; health and housing 97; Irish identity and 5, 207–8; relief of 5–6; Relief of Distress Act 193–5; The Star’s social crusade 85–6 Power, Lily 140 Protestant Ascendancy 8; and literary revival 114; Parnell and 26; unionism and 3 Protestants: agricultural labourers 9–10; see also Church of Ireland Punch (magazine) 46, 47 Queen’s Theatre 122 railways: Dublin to Belfast 55; state intervention in 98 Rea, T. 183 Redmond, Captain John Archer (son) 97, 103 Redmond, John 32, 33, 34, 146; breach with Fenians and 144–6; conscription issue 231; death of 238; election of 1910 60; Government of Ireland Bill 63; Home Rule Convention 138; home rule finance 64; matches Carson’s tour 74; on ‘Orange bellowings’ 68; outbreak of war 93–6; political activity 62; on quiet Nationalists 58; recruits for war 100–3 Redmond, Major Willie 104, 105 Redmond, William 145 Reimagining the Nation-State (McLaughlin) 4 Relief of Distress Act 193–5; administration and abuse of 198–202; genesis of the bill 196–8; inquiry into 202–5 religion 12; see also Catholics and Catholic Church; Protestants Renan, Ernest: La Poésie des races celtiques 115 Renunciation Act 154 The Resurrection of Hungary (Griffiths) 150–7 rights: Rights and Duties of Man 7–8, 108–9 The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (Koss) 79 Robinson, Lennox 123 Robinson, Sir Henry A. 97, 99–100, 195–6; Relief of Distress inquiry 202–3
288
INDEX
Rooney, Eamonn 220 Rooney, William 145 Roscommon Herald (newspaper) 58, 59, 62, 63, 66 Roscommon Journal (newspaper) 59, 60, 63, 64, 74 Roscommon Messenger (newspaper) 61, 62, 66, 70, 71, 72 Royal Dublin Society 17 Royal Irish Academy 19 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) 152; election of 1910 59, 60–1; file on Casement 163 Royal Irish Regiment 108 Russell, George (Æ) 3, 4, 233; background 128–9; Deirdre 123; the Home Rule Convention 137–41; Irish identity 6; outlook of 129–31; Plunkett and 128, 129, 130; ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ 131–5 Ryan, Mark 147 Ryan, W.P. 88, 211; The Plough and the Cross 76–7 St Michan’s Church 117 Salisbury, Lord 201 Scanland, John 63 self-government see home rule separatism: rejection of devolution 158 A Servant of the Queen (Gonne) 120 Sexton, Thomas 64, 197 Shan Van Vocht (journal) 145 Shaw, George Bernard 173; Dinshawi incident 168; home rule and 86; letter to Russell 135; The Star and 79 Sheehy, Ian 2; ‘T.P. O’Connor and The Star, 1886–90’ 76–91 Sinn Féin: changing perception of 105; Dillon and 33; elections 59, 215; Griffith’s Resurrection of Hungary and 150–7; and Home Rule Bills 130; Home Rule Convention 135–6; Irish party and 2; Nationalist paradigm 7; O’Brien and 214; Parnellism and 157–8; reconfiguring nationalism 143; secret talks with SPI 214; in wartime 100–1, 106, 231 Sligo Champion (newspaper) 61, 62, 63, 66; on ‘Carson’s project’ 72; home rule finance 64; on political apathy 65; on Ulster resistance to home rule 69, 70 Sligo Independent (newspaper) 61
Sligo Times (newspaper) 61–2, 63, 68 Smith, F.E. 230 Smith, Goldwin 39, 54 Smuts, Jan Christian 131 Smyth, Margaret 179–81, 186, 188 Smyth, T.F. 71 Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Hroch) 19–20 Social Science Congress (1881) 39 social security: British state intervention 97; see also poverty socialism: in Europe 212–13; rise of in Ireland 211 Socialist Party (Britain): and SPI 218–20 Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI) 7; formation 209–12; gives birth to CPI 221–2; political significance 209; programme and policies 212–16; publications and library 213; splits into factions 217–21 Socialist Republican Party 116 Socialists, Liberals and Labour (Thompson) 79 Spencer, Earl (John) 41; royal visit and 44–51, 54; viceroyalty and 40, 42–4 The Star (newspaper): establishment of 81–4; Liberal Party and 84–8; O’Connor and 2, 78–9; political achievment of 91 Starkie, Dr 190–1 state: debating government 194–5; relation to people 96; see also local government; political theory; politics Stead, W.T. 79 Stoker, Bram: Dracula 117 Sweetman, John 151, 153 syndicalism 211, 222 Synge, J.M. 121; The Playboy of the Western World 123–4; In the Shadow of the Glen 114, 123 Taylor, A.J.P. 174; English History, 1914–1945 96 Taylor, J.F. 171, 173 technology: Russell and technocracy 4; telegraphy 37 tenants: Butt’s support for 22; hatred of landlords 9 Tennant, H.J. 103 ‘“These quiet days of peace”: Nationalist opinion before the home rule crises, 1909–13’ (Wheatley) 57–75
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Thompson, Paul 90; Socialists, Liberals and Labour 79 ‘Thoughts for a Convention’ (Russell) 131–5 The Times (London newspaper) 135, 201–2 Tithe War 151 Townshend, Charles 64 T.P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (Brady) 78 ‘T.P. O’Connor and The Star, 1886–90’ (Sheehy) 76–91 trade unions: British state and 97–8; see also labour Trevelyan, George Otto 40 Trollope, Anthony 36 ‘True Bolsheviks? The rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Ireland, 1917–21’ (O’Connor) 209–22 Truth (journal) 79 Tuke, James Hack 196–7 Tully, George W. 58 Tully, Jasper 58, 63; on Churchill 68; on home rule 64, 66, 71; little coverage of Ulster 72, 73 Ulster: Belfast riots 68–9; crisis 1, 3, 58–9; resistance to home rule bill 67–72; violence 73 Ulster Covenant 57 Ulster Day 70 Ulster Hall 68 Ulster Unionists: Irish Convention and 233–8; political demography 11–12; six counties agreement 232 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 57, 231; formation of 72, 73, 92–3; World War I and 94–6, 108 Ulster Women’s Unionist Council 228 ‘Unintended consequences: the national schools and Irish women’s mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (Nolan) 179–92 Unionism: ascendancy 3; attempts to unite with Nationalists 31; belief in 224; in British Parliament 227–30; the Covenant 70; increased mobilisation 230–1; Irish Home Rule Convention 134, 136–41; southern and northern 131–2 United Ireland (newspaper) 46, 47, 49 United Irish League (UIL) 31, 143; Lynch and 146, 148; quiet times 61
The United Irishman (newspaper) 114, 145, 148; the Hungarian policy 150–1, 154–5 United States: emigration to 9; socialist movements 209–10 urbanisation 10 Veltheim, Erkki 219 viceroyalty 42–3 Victoria, Queen: and Cathleen Ni Houlihan 116–20, 124–6; donates £500 for famine 36, 38; famine and 55, 119–20; fears Irish disorder 37; Gladstone and 42; responsibility 126; royal presence in Ireland 44, 46; visits Ireland 118–20 Vincent, John 18 violence: linked with separatism 145; royal presence and 44, 46 Walsh, Dr William 48 Watchword of Labour (SPI) 213, 219, 220 Webb, Alfred 48–9 Webb, Sidney 86 Weber, Max: institutional power 30; on leadership 17–18, 20, 24, 28, 34 Wells, H.G.: Mr Britling Sees It Through 96 Wells, Warre B. 57 Welply, W.H. 189, 190–1 Western Nationalist (newspaper) 61; on apathy 71; on Belfast riots 69; Belfast shipyard labour 69; on home rule 66 Westmeath Examiner (newspaper): on home rule 66; on Ulster resistance to home rule 69, 70 Westmeath Independent (newspaper) 61, 62, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73 Whately, Archbishop Richard 181–2 Wheatley, Michael 4, 10; ‘“These quiet days of peace”: Nationalist opinion before the home rule crises, 1909–13’ 57–75 Whitbread, J.W. 122 Williamson, James 82, 83 Wilson, Suzanne 179, 181, 186 Wilson, Trevor 96 Wilson, Woodrow: self-determination of nations 109 Winter, Jay 96 ‘“With the eyes of another race, of people once hunted themselves”: Casement, colonialism and a remembered past’ (O’Callaghan) 159–75
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women: education of 186–9, 192; emigration of 9; teachers 6; young emigrants 11 Wood-Martin, Colonel 68 World War I: changed political world 92; effect of conscription crisis 105–9; Irish conflicts at outbreak 92–6; Irish participation 103–5; Irish pigs and 106; Irish recruitment for 99–103; Lord Londonderry and 231–2; loyalty and 102–3 Wright, C.E. 182 Wyndham Land Act 1, 31–2
Yeats, William Butler: Cathleen Ni Houlihan (with Gregory) 113, 124–7; Celticism of 115–16; The Countess Cathleen 116, 122, 123; and crowds 117, 118; establishment of Abbey Theatre 121–3; ‘Man and the Echo’ 124; and Maud Gonne 117; ‘Noble and Ignoble Loyalties’: 119; opposition to queen’s visit 123; the Queen’s Jubilee and Cathleen Ni Houlihan 116–20; Russell and 128; theatre movement 121; unease about crowds 125
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