Authors: Gabriel Doherty
MacNeill’s claim that Carson was unwittingly the originator of the Easter Rising and the revolution that followed must be explored. The passing of the Parliament Act of 1911 meant that the British House of Commons could override the House of Lords by passing identical legislation in three successive sessions, provided that two years elapsed between the second and third readings; thus, in the ordinary run of things and parliamentary opposition notwithstanding, the 1912 home rule bill would have become law in any event by 1914. This constitutional change meant
that the controversy – and possibly crisis – over the bill would be a prolonged one.
Moreover, the Parliament Act specified that bills must be introduced in the last two circuits in precisely the same form as they left the Commons the first time. Committee and report stages were dispensed with, since Commons’ amendments were not allowed. The Parliament Act authorised the Commons to ‘suggest’ amendments to the House of Lords, but the Liberal Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, insisted that any such ‘suggestions’ must not destroy the identity of the bill. As the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, pointed out, the opposition could debate the bill, but were not allowed to alter a single line.
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Two further complications were embedded in the bill’s passage through parliament. The general election of November 1910 resulted in the Liberal government being returned to power, but with 272 seats, exactly the same number as the unionists. Labour won forty two seats and the Irish party eighty four. Thus the Liberals depended heavily on the Irish nationalist vote in the House of Commons, though they knew that the nationalists likewise depended on them, since the Irish party was unlikely to want to vote out a Liberal government and replace it with a unionist one. The second dilemma was a peculiarly Liberal one. The government was not unaware of the Ulster unionist difficulty, and as early as February 1912, two months before the bill was introduced in the Commons, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill formally proposed in cabinet that Ulster, or those counties in which Protestants were in a clear majority, should be given an option to contract out of the home rule bill as introduced. The question for the government was: if such a concession were offered, at what stage should the offer be made? Would it be tactically most opportune to make it at the outset; withheld as a concession to be made later; inserted as an amendment to the bill; or indeed made at all? The Gladstonian tradition was that Ireland should be treated as a unit for the purpose of self-government – as Asquith re-affirmed in the first reading, ‘Mr Gladstone’s position is strongly fortified by our later experience.’
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Ulster unionists, however, were adamant that this would place them under the heels of their traditional enemies and that they ought not be coerced into living under a system of government that they feared and detested.
Victorian Liberal thinking was primarily concerned with protecting the rights of individuals rather than distinct communities, and the 1912 bill specifically denied the right of the proposed devolved legislature to ‘establish or endow any religion or prohibit the free exercise, or to give a
preference, privilege, or advantage, or impose any disability or disadvantage, on account of religious belief ’.
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But this was of no comfort to Ulster unionists, who saw themselves as a distinct people, loyal men and women, holding their province for Britain and the empire. The unionist opposition accused the government of turning the House of Commons into a ‘market-place where everything is bought and sold’. This very unparliamentary language – what Asquith called the ‘new style’ – branded the unionist opposition as both irresponsible and dangerous.
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It also seemed to confirm that the whole Ulster crisis was one manufactured by the unionists for their own selfish political ends: thus, once again, nationalists could claim that the divisions in Ireland between unionist and nationalist were the fault of obdurate British politicians, and need not be addressed within Ireland itself.
Later generations of nationalists – and some contemporary nationalist thinkers such as Sinn Féin’s founder, Arthur Griffith – professed astonishment that a modest measure of devolution should occasion such a fervent protest from unionists in Britain and Ireland. But apart from the belief (propagated by nationalists themselves since 1886) that home rule offered ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’, the 1912 bill was a serious measure of self-rule. It was true that the Westminster parliament was to remain sovereign, and that it retained unimpaired authority over questions of peace and war, treaties, the levying of customs duties, coinage, postal services and, for six years, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Irish parliament could not endow religion or impose religious disabilities. It had limited taxation powers, and could not add more than 10 per cent to the rate of income tax or death duties. Irish membership of the House of Commons was to be reduced from 103 to 42, though the 42 could speak on all subjects, and were not confined to contributing to debates on subjects affecting Ireland alone.
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But the key point in the bill was not its definition of the powers of the Irish parliament, but its lack of definition: for the new parliament could make laws for the ‘peace, order and good government of Ireland’. This left a large and unlimited scope for the parliament to enhance its powers, in an age when states across Europe were embarking on social policies that would significantly increase their legislative output and executive control.
There can be no doubt that the crisis over the 1912 home rule bill did mark a significant change in the Irish political climate. This was the third such bill to be placed before the British parliament. Those of 1886 and 1893 occasioned heated opposition from British and Irish unionists alike, but the grave threats to Irish Protestants, and especially to Ulster Protestants, were not met by any serious armed opposition. There was plenty of fighting talk, but that was all. In June 1892 at a great unionist convention in Belfast, one speaker proclaimed ‘firm and unchangeable determination of the people of Ulster to resist by constitutional means and, if need be, by force the passing of the home rule bill into law’. Another, neatly adopting Gladstone’s phrase when he declared his determination to resist agrarian violence in Ireland in the early 1880s, warned that the resources of civilisation were not yet exhausted; but when they were, ‘it remained for them, as loyal sons of sires agone, to find out how they might resist the resolution of the imperial parliament to hand them neck and heel to a tyranny that was beyond the conception of the English elsewhere’.
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But the
Irish Times
noted that the speeches at the convention contained ‘no threat, no boast, no bluster. The purpose was that more than a million of the people of Ireland should say simply no.’
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Alvin Jackson has explained that, because unionism had only a generally narrow and inadequate constituency base, with few pressure groups beyond the Orange Order able to claim a mass membership (and virtually none long surviving the defeat of the second home rule bill), unionism was for all practical purposes a parliamentary movement, and it was to MPs in the House of Commons that northern Protestants looked for political redress or personal advancement.
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Yet twenty years later words were replaced, or perhaps reinforced, by deeds; and the proceedings of the British parliament became increasingly irrelevant to the clash of ideologies in Ireland itself. What was described as potentially a matter of life and death in 1892 was now indeed a matter of life and death in 1912, since the home rule bill must pass into law. Moreover, the Ulster unionists had, by 1912, provided themselves with their own organisation, the Ulster Unionist Council, which held its first meeting in March 1905, and which offered a more representative and permanent body for Ulster Protestants, as well as a more narrowly focused political perspective.
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The Irish unionist parliamentary party was now looking more like a first – or, in due course, a second – amongst equals, rather than the representative of general unionist opinion. The increasingly particularist outlook of Ulster unionists was reflected in their decision in September 1911 to set up a provisional government for Ulster should the home rule bill become law. Ulster unionists were glad to have British unionist support for their stand against home rule, but it was not their only, nor indeed their main, pillar of resistance.
This resistance took a more ominous shape when, as early as 1910 and on local initiative on the part of Orange Order lodges, volunteers offered
themselves as defenders of the Union. Although Sir Edward Carson and Sir James Craig welcomed the UVF, they played no part in the organisation’s day-to-day running; this was indeed a new departure in unionism.
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Institutions, however, expressed but did not create the Ulster unionist mood of 1912. A new generation of political leaders had emerged, new men, Edwardians like James Craig and Fred Crawford, who found a militant stand more congenial than had their forebears. The importance of the South African war of 1899–1902, which introduced a spirit of militant patriotism in Great Britain and worked the same spell in Ireland, should not be underestimated. It occasioned the formation of Volunteer forces, comprising civilian soldiers who had not engaged in warfare before 1899. One such force was the City of London Imperial Volunteers, in which the later Irish republican Erskine Childers enlisted ‘to do something for one’s country’.
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And the early debacles in the campaign against the Boers gave new impetus to the idea of military conscription in the United Kingdom, which was almost unheard of before then. Tunes of glory were being played all over the British Isles. Irish nationalists, for their part, insisted that they held common cause with the Afrikaaners, and would indeed themselves resort to arms if such an option were likely to succeed, which they conceded it was not, at least for the foreseeable future.
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The crisis over the third home rule bill raised political, constitutional and even moral issues which, the Ulster unionists claimed, justified a resort to force of arms. These were stated in ‘Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant’ which thousands of Protestants signed in September 1912. ‘Being convinced in our consciences’, the signatories pledged themselves to use all means necessary to defeat a conspiracy which, they believed, would be disastrous to Ulster’s and Ireland’s material well-being, destructive of Protestants’ civil and religious liberty, and perilous to the unity of the empire. Bonar Law declared in the House of Commons in June 1912 that the Liberal government ‘are putting themselves in a position from which they cannot recede … That means that they know that if Ulster is in earnest, if Ulster does resist, there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities. They know that in that case no government would dare to use British troops to drive them out.
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It
was equally true, however, that if Ulster unionists were in earnest, they too might put themselves in a position from which they could not recede; and the use of troops, and their willingness to be employed as an instrument of force, was not – as yet – in any doubt.
Ulster and southern Irish unionist fears about the real character of Irish nationalism were perhaps reinforced by new forces that were stirring
at the turn of the century. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893 with the aim of ‘de-anglicising Ireland’, and bringing to a point earlier nationalist ideas that there was a distinct gaelic nation, or even race, suggested that those who did not belong to that race or nation might be treated as foreigners, uncomfortable interlopers in a country to which they did not ‘really’ belong. This, it must be stressed, was not the purpose of the league’s founder, Douglas Hyde, himself a Protestant, who sought to use language to overcome Irish religious divisions. But this noble idea was diluted by those who saw the league as a means of furthering the separatist cause, or as a way of excluding those who did not ‘belong’. The determined efforts by the Catholic church to infiltrate and guide the league, as it did other kinds of pressure groups and organisations, was likewise an uncomfortable sight. Paul Bew has demonstrated that unionists had fears about the Irish language under home rule; for example, at the committee stage of the home rule bill in October 1912 unionists moved an amendment with the aim of preventing an Irish parliament making Irish a qualification for holding public appointments,
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though the first occupant of the chair of Irish in Queen’s University Belfast in 1909 was an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend F.W. O’Connell.
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Religious divisions remained the bedrock of Irish politics. For Ulster Protestants the enemy was, as it had been since 1886 (and indeed since the 1830s and 1840s, when ‘the Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell, roamed the Ulster border area), the Catholic majority in Ireland, which carried its own potent ideological mixture of religion, grievance, and desire to reverse history’s verdict that Protestants would be up, and they, the Catholics, would be down. This ideology accommodated the home rule movement as comfortably as more radical nationalism: the men of ’98 were as much the property of Redmond and his followers (especially his followers) as they had been of Parnell and his, and the new Sinn Féin party and its. The Irish party did not, in principle, rule out the use of force to achieve freedom.
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Ulster unionists did not need new foes, gaelic or otherwise, in the period 1912–14; they felt they had enemies enough. On Ulster Covenant day Dr William McKeon, former moderator of the Presbyterian church, claimed that:
We are plain, blunt men who love peace and industry. The Irish Question is at bottom a war against Protestantism; it is an attempt to establish a Roman Catholic ascendancy in Ireland to begin the disintegration of the empire by securing a second [sic] parliament in Dublin.
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