Читать книгу Birth of the Border - Cormac Moore - Страница 10

CHAPTER ONE

Towards Partition

The Irish question dominated British party politics for over three decades, beginning when William Ewart Gladstone converted to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland in the 1880s. His decision tied the Liberal Party to the Irish Parliamentary Party while the Conservative Party became aligned to the Ulster unionists. The Irish question did not become the Ulster question during the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893. Both bills were defeated by normal parliamentary procedures, with the 1886 bill defeated by the House of Commons and the 1893 bill defeated by the House of Lords. Joseph Chamberlain, a liberal who became a liberal unionist in opposition to Irish Home Rule, was the first major figure to suggest the partition of Ulster during the first Home Rule Crisis in 1886.1 He said that ‘Ireland is not a homogenous community […] it is a nation that comprises two nations and two religions’.2 He floated the concept of ‘a federal Britain with a parliament in Belfast,’ similar to Quebec’s relationship with Canada.3 There was little support for Chamberlain’s proposal at the time, and although Ulster featured more prominently during debates on the second Home Rule Bill in 1893, the Irish question did not become Ulster-centric until the twentieth century. The British electoral rejection of Home Rule in 1886 heralded almost twenty years of conservative and unionist rule, where the policy on Ireland comprised ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’.4 This included the introduction of tax reforms; local government, which established democratically-elected county and urban councils throughout Ireland; and significant land-purchase legislation.5 Many of the Tory initiatives for Ireland were supported by both nationalists and unionists.

With most unionists based in Ulster, the ‘Ulsterisation’ of Irish unionism came to the forefront with the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1905.6 The exclusion of Ulster from any Home Rule settlement became the overriding issue of the third Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912. In the House of Commons, the two general elections of 1910 saw the Irish Parliamentary Party hold the balance of power once again, for the first time since the 1890s. John Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, promised to support a Liberal government and its Parliament Act, which greatly curbed the powers of the House of Lords on the condition that a Home Rule Bill would be introduced.7 The real prospect of Home Rule saw a violent reaction from unionists, most vociferously so in Ulster. Edward Carson, the new leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance since 21 February 1910, ‘hoped to use Ulster Unionist resistance to prevent Home Rule coming into effect in any part of Ireland’.8 From an early juncture, Ulster unionists realised that a huge effort was necessary to secure public sympathy in Britain. The effort involved the production and distribution of literary propaganda, demonstrations, canvassing and tours of Ireland and Britain. The most symbolic gesture of opposition to Home Rule was the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant by just under 500,000 men and women on ‘Ulster Day’ (i.e. 28 September 1912).9 Ulster unionists also armed themselves and threatened to establish a provisional government in Ulster if Home Rule was brought into Ireland.10 Their open flouting of the law was supported by ‘the British Conservative Party, now re-named the Unionist Party and led from 1912 to 1923 by Andrew Bonar Law’.11 In July 1913 at Blenheim Palace, Bonar Law warned that there were ‘things stronger than parliamentary majorities’ and that if Home Rule was imposed on Ulster, he could ‘imagine no length of resistance’ that Ulster would go to, ‘in which I should not be prepared to support them’.12

Compounding the strong and blatantly dangerous opposition from the Ulster unionists and the Conservative Party was the lukewarm support for Home Rule within the Liberal Party. The Liberal leader and Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, brought none of the moral crusade that informed Gladstone’s campaign for Home Rule. In the words of Ronan Fanning, ‘Asquith was always an unwilling ally, a resentful partner in a loveless marriage’ with Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party.13 Senior Liberal Party figures such as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill were early advocates of some form of Ulster exclusion from Home Rule. At a cabinet meeting in February 1912, they both proposed that each county in Ulster have the right to vote themselves in or out of Home Rule.14

Asquith introduced the third Home Rule Bill to the House of Commons on 11 April 1912. No special provision was made for Ulster, as Asquith believed Ireland was ‘a nation, not two nations, but one nation’.15 Although it appeared that Home Rule for the whole island was close at hand, the House of Lords still had the power to delay the bill by two years, meaning that Home Rule could not be enacted until 1914 at the earliest. This gave unionists ample time to spoil the bill, and knowing the Liberal Party’s dilemma over Ulster, it soon became apparent that special treatment was needed for Ulster. In June 1912, a Liberal backbencher named T.G. Agar-Robartes tabled an amendment to exclude the four north-eastern counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down from Home Rule.16 Although his amendment was greeted with outrage by all political parties and was defeated, he ‘was merely expressing a growing frustration at the seemingly intractable impasse between Irish nationalism and Irish (specifically Ulster) unionists as to what should be the future constitutional status of Ireland’.17 However, it was soon supported by unionists as a tactic to stop the implementation of Home Rule for all of Ireland. Carson introduced his own amendment to exclude the nine counties of Ulster, still as a ‘strategic thrust’.18 The amendment nevertheless alarmed southern unionists, who realised that a drift towards partition was occurring within Ulster unionist and Conservative ranks. Carson, himself a southern unionist from Dublin, was moving away from ‘partition as tactic’ to ‘partition as compromise’ and confided in Bonar Law in September 1913 that ‘matters were now moving towards a settlement on the basis of six-county exclusion’.19

Senior leaders within the Liberal Party were convinced that Home Rule could not be enacted without addressing the Ulster question. They just had to convince their allies, the Irish Parliamentary Party. Redmond had stated around this time that:

This idea of two nations in Ireland is to us revolting and hateful. The idea of our agreeing to the partition of our nation is unthinkable. We want the union in Ireland of all creeds, of all classes, of all races, and we would resist most violently as far as it is within our power to do so … the setting up or [sic] permanent dividing lines between one creed and another and one race and another.20

Asquith knew the Irish Parliamentary Party was as reliant on the Liberal Party as the Liberal Party was reliant on the Irish Party. By late 1913, as civil war in Ireland was threatened with unionists and nationalists forming military groups, great pressure was put on Redmond and his deputy leader, John Dillon, to compromise on Ulster. The Irish Parliamentary Party declared itself open to the concept of the Home Rule of Ulster within the Home Rule of Ireland. This was considered totally unacceptable by Carson. Asquith then pressured Redmond to agree to a temporary exclusion, but ‘the permanent exclusion of Ulster he [Redmond] would not however consider for a moment’.21 ‘In early March [1914] the proposals were formulated: individual Ulster counties might opt for exclusion for a period of three years, after which they would automatically come under the jurisdiction of the Irish Parliament.’22 Within days, Redmond was informed by Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary of Ireland, that the exclusion period needed to be doubled from three to six years.23 Birrell, realising from 1912 that the Ulster Unionists’ ‘yells are genuine’, delayed dealing with the Ulster conundrum until 1914.24 Cardinal Michael Logue, the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, had little optimism for the future and perceptively wrote:

I fear the concessions on the Home Rule Bill will be a bad business for us in this part of the North. It will leave us more than ever under the heel of the Orangemen. Worst of all it will leave them free to tamper with our education. I don’t think we have seen the last of the concessions.25

With the concessions agreed by the Irish Parliamentary Party, partition in some form was almost a certainty, and ‘What was now alone at issue was how much of Ulster and for how long’.26 Birrell and members of the British administration in Dublin Castle looked at a number of different options for partition based on divisions of counties, rural districts or poor law unions. These options could have seen the exclusion of roughly five counties of Ulster.27 Redmond was adamant that exclusion would be temporary; Carson threatened forceful resistance unless exclusion was permanent and insisted that unionists did not want ‘a stay of execution for six years’.28 The unionist reaction angered the British government, who were further perturbed by the Curragh Mutiny in March 1914. Aware of the anti-Home Rule sentiments of Arthur Paget, Commander-in-Chief of the British army in Ireland, around sixty officers in the Curragh military camp, under the leadership of Brigadier General Hubert Gough, threatened to resign if they were asked to use force on Ulster to enforce Home Rule. Gough claimed that ‘if it came to civil war … I would fight for Ulster rather than against her’.29 Soon after this, the gunrunner Fred Crawford, under orders from the Ulster Unionist Council, landed 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition in Larne, Donaghdee and Bangor on the night of 24–25 April. Fanning contends that ‘the Larne gun running made it almost impossible for the Unionist leaders to agree to any settlement short of the permanent exclusion of at least the six north-eastern counties of Ulster’.30 Both incidents also made the British government more nervous and eager to reach a solution. As the country spiralled towards civil war, King George V, a keen supporter of Ulster’s exclusion from Home Rule, intervened and called a conference of the main parties in Buckingham Palace in July 1914. The conference saw no solution, with Redmond seeking temporary exclusion for counties looking to opt out of Home Rule and Carson seeking permanent exclusion of all of Ulster.31 Carson originally wanted a ‘clean cut’ for all of Ulster, arguing ‘that the exclusion of the whole province, with its large Catholic minority, was the best guarantee of eventual Irish unity’.32 According to Eamon Phoenix, at the Buckingham Palace conference:

Carson revealed his ‘irreducible minimum’: the proposition that a six-county bloc, the area which was later to comprise Northern Ireland, should be precluded permanently from the operation of the Home Rule Act. Though firmly repudiated by the Nationalist leaders, this was a portentous development in the evolution of the partition debate. Among Ulster Unionists, it marked the beginning of a rethink which, in subordinating principle to pragmatism, sought to salvage the maximum possible area from the operation of Home Rule, whilst projecting an image of ‘reasonableness’ in the eyes of the British public.33

Civil war in Ireland was averted by another war – namely, the First World War, which was, according to Asquith, a case of ‘cutting off one’s head to get rid of a headache’.34 Once the war started, the Irish question no longer retained the dominance it once held in British politics. Most politicians in Britain wanted to be rid of the issue. Home Rule was put on the statute book with two important provisos: ‘On the one hand, a Suspensory Bill stipulated that the Home Rule Act would not come into operation until the end of the war; secondly, parliament had the Prime Minister’s assurance that special provision must be made for Protestant Ulster.’35 The Irish question was ignored but not completely forgotten about during the war. Fanning states:

Forty years after its foundation as a separate party [the Irish Parliamentary Party], its members appeared to have achieved their goal and yet they had nothing to show for it: no parliament to set up in Dublin, no offices to fill, no patronage to dispense, no trappings of power to cover their importance in the vortex of a war that sucked up all political energy for four long years.36

Redmond and the Irish Party supported the war effort, but when an opportunity presented itself for Redmond to serve in a national government cabinet created in 1915, he declined. ‘Bonar Law and Carson accepted … Unionists, as a result, found themselves at the centre of government; Irish party influence, meanwhile, soon began to dip’.37 From then until 1921–22, British government policy on Ireland was decided by a coalition government, with strong unionist representation.

The crisis caused by the Easter Rising in 1916 saw Irish Home Rule become an issue once again. Just months after the rising was quashed, Asquith tasked Lloyd George with initiating negotiations to implement the Home Rule Act ‘at the earliest practicable moment’.38 Lloyd George negotiated separately with Redmond and Carson, telling the former the exclusion of six counties of Ulster would be temporary, telling the latter their exclusion would be permanent. Carson secured the support of the Ulster Unionist Council for the proposals.39 Despite fierce opposition from nationalists, particularly from clergy members of the Catholic Church and nationalists from what would become the border counties in west and south Ulster, Redmond and the leading Irish Parliamentary Party member from Belfast, Joseph Devlin, secured the backing of Ulster nationalists for the proposals at a conference on 23 June 1916 by 475 to 265 votes.40 The vote revealed ‘a broad dichotomy in the body politic, between a pragmatic east Ulster wing, strongly identified with Joe Devlin, and a stridently anti-partitionist west Ulster alignment’.41 Once Lloyd George’s duplicity was revealed and Redmond was informed that the exclusion of six counties of Ulster would be permanent, he, outmanoeuvred once again, rejected the proposals.42 Lloyd George’s proposals were also vehemently opposed by southern unionists, championed by a member of the war cabinet, Walter Long, on the grounds that ‘it would divert the attention of the government and Parliament from the war to complicated and extremely controversial proposals relating to Ireland’.43 The attempts in 1916 were telling in demonstrating the British government’s firm commitment to the permanent exclusion of much of Ulster from Home Rule, particularly with Lloyd George steering government policy on Ireland, as he would continue to do, once he became prime minister in December 1916. The attempts of 1916 comprised yet another blow for Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose popularity was in terminal decline due to its continued support of the war and its perceived humiliating concession after concession in accepting some form of partition. John Dillon conceded in December 1918 that the 1916 negotiations ‘struck a deadly blow at the Irish Party and, since then, [it] has been going downhill at an ever-accelerated pace’.44

The next time an attempt was made to solve the Irish question was in 1917, with the formation of the Irish Convention in July 1917, an effort by Lloyd George to allow Irishmen to ‘work out their own salvation’.45 The Irish Convention was an assembly that met from July 1917 until April 1918 with the aim of finding a resolution to the Irish question. Diarmaid Ferriter states that Carson had in March 1917

prepared a plan to tempt Ulster into devolved Irish government, whereby Ulster would be left out of home rule but an all-Ireland council with representatives of a home rule Parliament and Ulster MPs at Westminster would consider legislative proposals for the whole of Ireland and ‘frame a procedure by which if agreement was reached they could be enacted simultaneously in Dublin and the excluded counties’. The British government was open to this and Carson was willing to try to sell it to his party, but it was shelved in favour of the Irish Convention.46

With the ever-growing Sinn Féin boycotting the conference and Ulster unionists present in body but not in spirit, the convention was doomed from the start, ‘a gigantic irrelevancy’ in the words of F.S.L. Lyons.47 The conference saw the cooperation of the Irish Parliamentary Party with southern unionists, who felt they were abandoned by their northern counterparts. According to Lyons, the Irish Convention ‘finally disposed the myth that any settlement was possible … on the basis of an Ireland which would be at once united and self-governing’.48 R.B. McDowell, in his study of the convention, considered it ‘one of the most striking failures in Irish history … the gaps were too wide, or, to put it another way, the main groups clung too tightly to their prepared positions. Moreover, the majority of the convention’s members were constitutional nationalists who were rapidly losing the confidence of the sections they were supposed to represent.’49 The convention limped on until April 1918. By this time, Redmond was dead, and the Irish Parliamentary Party was months away from a humiliating defeat in the 1918 general election. By the time the First World War ended in November 1918, the Irish question had been fundamentally transformed. The psychological partition between unionists and nationalists had widened significantly, with entrenched Ulster unionists pitted against a brand of nationalism that espoused a severance from all British ties.50

The December 1918 general election, the first since December 1910, was one of the most decisive in Irish history. Sinn Féin obliterated the Irish Parliamentary Party by winning seventy-three of the 105 seats available in Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party won just six seats. However, Sinn Féin decided to abstain from taking seats in Westminster, meaning that there would be just a handful of Irish nationalist voices heard in the House of Commons as the future of Ireland was decided.51 Sinn Féin had campaigned on an abstentionist policy, claiming that the British could not be trusted to deliver a solution to the Irish question. It repudiated Westminster and Home Rule, seeking a complete severance of ties with Britain instead, through an Irish republic. The election was also a spectacular success for Ulster unionists. Of the thirty-seven seats available in the province of Ulster, unionists won twenty-two. In the six counties that would form Northern Ireland, the unionists won twenty-two of the twenty-nine seats available, with Sinn Féin winning just three seats.52 ‘In the whole of Ulster the Unionists won 265,111 votes to a combined Nationalist total of 177,557; while in the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone they had a majority of slightly over two to one: 255,819 votes to 116,888.’53 Whilst three Irish provinces had shown their support for full separation from Britain, it was clear that Ulster was the polar opposite. Remarkably, the nationalists had held more seats in Ulster than the unionists as recently as 1913, with seventeen seats in comparison to the unionists’ sixteen.54 By 1918, the electorate of Ulster had moved decisively in favour of remaining within the union. Unionists were also bolstered by the success of their allies in Britain, the Conservative Party. Lloyd George’s national coalition was easily re-elected. Most of the seats in the coalition were won by the Conservatives, winning 339 seats, with Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals winning 136 seats.55 Afterwards, Lloyd George ‘was sensitive to his own vulnerability in the House and felt himself on occasion to be a prisoner of the Coalition’.56 This greatly influenced his subsequent decisions regarding Ireland. The Irish question barely featured in the election in Britain. The Conservative Party manifesto ruled out two options in relation to Ireland: ‘the one leading to a complete severance of Ireland from the British Empire, and the other the forcible submission of the six counties of Ulster to a Home Rule parliament against their will’.57 With the Conservatives and the unionists winning the vast majority of seats and with no strong nationalist voice remaining in Westminster, the ‘Tory stranglehold on Irish policy tightened immeasurably’.58 According to Michael Laffan, the 1918 general election saw ‘a shift in the Irish balance of power from southern nationalists to northern unionists’.59 This shift became even more apparent when the decisive Government of Ireland Act was introduced in 1920.