Attitude of the North, 1911.
tion was definitely advertised as a rebel organization. 1 Demon- strations were also organized against the celebrations connected with the coronation of King George V. On Coronation Day (June 22) a meeting at the Custom House in Dublin was ad- dressed by John Devoy, Countess Markievicz and others, in terms of violent denunciation, and the preparations made for the reception of the King and Queen in Dublin were met by a formal protest on the part of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which declined " to identify itself with the wretched compromise sought to be effected by the misguided section of our fellow- countrymen who seek to sacrifice the great national principle of Ireland as a nation by the slavish adulation of a foreign monarch." 2 This protest was reechoed in a resolution passed by a meeting of Sinn Fein; 3 but the royal visit to Dublin (July 7-11) was none the less a great success. Mr. Redmond, speaking at Woodford in Essex, had indeed emphasized the loyalty of the Nationalists to the Crown and Empire, and had been duly denounced by Irish Freedom, a Sinn Fein monthly, for betraying Irish Nationalism in " an orgy of Imperialism."
In view of this confusion of voices in the South it is perhaps not surprising that the mood of the Protestant North tended to harden; and this mood was at the moment still further embittered by attempts on the part of certain of the Catholic clergy to enforce the logical consequences of the Nctemere decree 4 in the case of " mixed marriages " already contracted. The annual July celebrations 6 in Ulster passed off quietly, and a great meeting on Aug. 12 at Lon- donderry did no more than emphasize the moral of the successful defence of the city as applied to the present perils. On the 2ist, however, a meeting of Presbyterians was held in the same city, in w.hich a stronger note of defiance was sounded, one clergy- man declaring that a Home Rule bill forced through the House of Lords would be resisted by force. 6 This defiant temper was illustrated more especially by the great Unionist demonstration at Craigavon, Belfast, on Sept. 23, at which a hundred thousand people were present. In an impassioned speech Sir Edward Carson protested against the " base betrayal " of the Irish loyalists contemplated by the Liberal Government. " Never," he said, " under any circumstances, would they submit to Home Rule." 7 At the same meeting an address was presented, signed by a thousand Ulster business men, pointing out the disastrous effects to Ulster industry of any separation from Great Britain; and on the following Monday, as a result of the man- date given by the great mass meeting, a conference at Bel- fast of delegates from Orange Lodges, Unionist Clubs and the Ulster Unionist Council, resolved to frame a constitution for Ulster and to set up a provisional Government, should the Home Rule bill become law.
The imminence of the introduction of the new Government of Ireland bill increased the agitation at the opening of 1912, and especially in the north of Ireland. On Jan. 5 a meet- Ulsteraad j n g o f Southern Unionists at Omagh, in Tyrone, was addressed by Sir Edward Carson, who defended his attitude as leader of the Ulster resistance. He was, he said, a rebel in the sense that he desired to remain under the king and the Imperial Parliament and was pre- pared to face a charge on that issue. On the i6th the Ulster Unionist Council decided not to allow Mr. Winston Churchill to address a meeting in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, in favour of Home Rule. The meeting, however, took place on Feb. 8 on ground belonging to a Nationalist football club, and passed off
1 Mr. Daniel McCarthy said : " It is an organization to keep the bone and muscle of our country from donning the red coat or the black coat of England (i.e. from enlisting in the army or the Royal Irish Constabulary) . . . We want our men to be physically strong, and when the time comes the hurlers will cast away the caman for the sharp, bright steel that will drive the Saxon from our land." Wicklow People, Jan. 21 1911.
1 Dublin papers, June 12.
- The resolution was seconded by Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington.
- See 17.755.
' In commemoration of William III. '3 victory at the Boyne.
Notes from Ireland (1911), p. 78. 'Text in Notes from Ireland (1911), p. 84.
the Home Rule Bill.
Parliament and the Irish Question.
without disaster, Mr. Churchill explaining " that any plan for Home Rule put forward would be an integral part of parlia- mentary devolution, and would not be inconsistent with the design of the ultimate federation of the Empire." The realities of the situation were, however, more clearly revealed by the great demonstration of Unionists held on Easter Tuesday at Balmoral, Belfast, and presided over by Dr. Crozier, the Protes- tant Primate of All Ireland. From the temper of this assembly it was clear that, as Mr. Bonar Law put it, " Ireland is not a nation, but two peoples separated by a deeper gulf than that dividing Ireland from Great Britain."
The same moral was drawn by Sir Edward Carson in his speech during the debate on the introduction of the Home Rule bill on April 1 1 . The dividing line in Ireland, he said, was between Catholic and Protestant, and any argument for Home Rule for Ireland applied with equal force to Home Rule for the Protestant North. Mr. Asquith, on the other hand, declared it to be "im- possible to concede the demand of a small minority to veto the verdict of the Irish nation"; but in the adjourned debate on the 1 5th Mr. Balfour exposed this fallacy. The United King- dom, he said, should be treated as a whole: " If Ireland is a nation, what right has Great Britain to supremacy?"
The debates on the bill in the House and in the country showed, indeed, an extraordinary confusion of mind in British legislators as to the Irish demand. There was talk of devolution as a step towards federalization, of " local autonomy " and of the necessity of delegating the work of the over-burdened Imperial Parliament. But the Irish Nationalists, whatever concessions they were pre- pared to yield to expediency, never budged from their prin- ciple of " Ireland a nation," with all that this implied. This ideal the bill did little enough to realize. It proposed to estab- lish in Dublin a subordinate Parliament, consisting of two Chambers, and having control over all concerns in Ireland not specifically reserved to the Imperial Parliament; but the number of matters thus reserved, either temporarily or permanently, was very great, 8 while the difficulty, so long as any union existed, of disentangling the finance of the two countries opened the financial clauses of the bill to a destructive fire of criticism; for, as Sir Edward Carson had said at Liverpool (Jan. 23), without fiscal autonomy Home Rule was an impossibility.
In Ireland, the bill was endorsed by the Nationalist Con- vention which met in Dublin on April 23, but Mr. O'Brien pointed out in the House of Commons in the course of the second reading debate on April 30, that, save Cation-
... . ., , . , alists and
for the reconciliation it would bring, there was no the gm finality about it. This, indeed, was the opinion of most people in Ireland, in spite of demonstrations to the contrary; and Prof. T. M. Kettle, of the National University, expressed the general view of Nationalists when he welcomed it as " not the end, but the beginning," and said that it had " the seed of freedom lodged in Irish soil." 9 Sinn Fein was less compli- mentary. According to Patrick H. Pearse, who was afterwards to head the Easter rebellion in 1916, Mr. Redmond by accepting the bill had " sold Ireland's birthright for a mess of pottage, and a dubious mess of pottage at that." He himself defined the object of true Nationalism as the completion of the work left unfinished by Wolfe Tone:
" To break the connexion with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assist the independence of my country these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Prot- estant, Catholic and Dissenter these were my means."
In these words of Tone he found " implicit all the philosophy of Irish Nationalism, all the teaching of the Gaelic League and the later prophets." 10 It was the Sinn Fein confession of faith.
8 At Preston, on' June 13, Mr. Balfour said that the bill gave Ire- land a National Constitution without national powers.
> Notes from Ireland (1913), p. 40. Mr. Kettle joined the army and was killed at the front in France in 1915.
10 Address at the grave of Wolfe Tone, June 22 1913, Bodenstown Series, No. I.
