Tanja Säily
Seminar Paper
Awkward Neighbours
University of Helsinki
15 March 2000
The Irish Land League generation was seen by their successors as traitors and cowards. Young people had been brought up to almost worship Parnell, so when they were suddenly told to condemn him, they could not do so, but rather they saw that the old generation had betrayed him. Priests, too, were accused of betraying Parnell, which reduced the authority of the Church and emphasised the tendency to leave religion out of politics.
Catholicism was too conservative for the new generation, who saw themselves as nationalists rather than Catholics and turned to Fenianism and the Irish Republican Brotherhood instead. However, this was scarcely noticed in British politics at the time, when conservatism was still mainstream and Tories were attempting to "kill Home Rule by kindness". They did notice some "harmless" forms of nationalism among the Irish, for example the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League and the National Literary Society.
In 1906, the Liberals came to power in England, but the 1910 elections reduced their power so that the Conservatives were almost as powerful as them, which made the Liberals dependent on the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party. And what better way to gain that support than by accepting Home Rule? The third Home Rule Bill was brought up by the Irish party leader John Redmond in 1912. It was rejected by the Lords, but as the Commons accepted it, the only thing the Lords could do was delay it - their veto right had been removed by the 1911 Parliamentary Act.
Home Rule was furiously resisted outside the Parliament as well. To the Irish unionists, who were mainly Protestants, Home Rule meant Rome Rule, and they were very concerned about what that would do to their position in the Irish society. Protestants were a minority with no real political power in the three southern provinces, but they had a 55-percent majority in Ulster; besides, they had powerful allies in the House of Lords and the Tories, who wished to regain their power. The Ulster unionists in the Parliament were lead by Sir Edward Carson, who was supported by Captain James Craig. Together they revived the unionist club movement in 1911.
In a monster meeting, the "Ulstermen" declared that if the Home Rule Bill became reality, they would be prepared to govern Ulster by themselves. Eight months before the Home Rule Bill was introduced, the Ulster Unionist Club appointed a committee to draft a constitution for a provisional government of Ireland. After the Bill had been introduced, they pledged themselves in the Solemn League and Covenant to repudiate any Home Rule parliament forced upon them. The Covenant claimed that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland. It was true that Ulster, or rather Belfast, had flourished relative to the rest of Ireland in the 19th century, and the unionists attributed this to the Act of Union.
In January 1913, Ulster Protestants founded the Ulster Volunteer Force to be ready for civil war in case of Home Rule. Many British officers supported the UVF, which scared King George V enough that he wanted Ulster to be excluded from the Home Rule Bill. In April 1914, for example, the UVF received a shipment of illegal arms, but the police did not do anything about it. Eventually, Redmond agreed to amend the Home Rule Bill with the government to exclude Ulster, which made him increasingly unpopular in Ireland.
The nationalist response to the UVF was one of approval and wishful thinking at first - they wanted to unite and get rid of the English - and then founding the Irish Volunteers, their own military organisation, in November 1913. In addition, the Dublin strike in 1913 produced the smaller Citizen Army lead by James Connolly. Although Redmond supported the IV, the real force behind it was the IRB with its new leaders, among them Padraic Pearse, a rising young intellect and poet. The British government, not wanting to seem unfair, could not suppress the IV, because they had not suppressed the UVF. However, when the IV received a shipment of arms in July, the forces of the Crown did try to interfere, with the outcome that four civilians were killed.
The outbreak of World War I caused the civil war and Home Rule issues to be postponed. Redmond and the Irish in general supported the war effort and many even volunteered. Although the initial enthusiasm to volunteer had ceased by 1915, many Irishmen were still fighting for Britain in the war. The IRB, nonetheless, concluded that "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity" and wanted to go ahead and fight for Irish independence from Britain at the first moment possible.
They were hoping for help from Germany (as the Ulster rebels had done before them), and many actually thought it a necessity if they wanted to win. Germany was, of course, interested in this opportunity of causing embarrassment for England, but not interested enough to take the risk of sending troops to such a remote and well-guarded island. In 21 April 1916, Sir Roger Casement returned from Germany to inform the IRB that no help was coming and to call off the Rising.
The IRB leaders were determined to strike - even if they could not win, they could at least keep nationalism alive. So they set a date for the Rising: Easter Sunday, April 1916. Easter Sunday was picked because the musters could then be disguised as normal Church parades; perhaps there was also a symbolic reason. The Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, only found out about the Rising very late; he immediately cancelled the parades with a countermanding order, to which the IRB responded with a counter-countermanding order.
All this caused confusion among the Volunteers, and nobody did anything on Easter Sunday. On Easter Monday, about 1/5 of the thousands of IV members, plus 200 of the 1,000 Citizen Army men, took part in the Rising. The "nation-wide" Rising only happened in Dublin and a few hard-core IRB areas, chiefly Galway, Wexford, Meath and Tyrone. The fighting was mainly restricted to Dublin city, where the rebels took over the General Post Office, which became Pearse and Connolly's command post. From there, they proclaimed the Irish Republic.
The British forces were taken by surprise, so they suffered heavy casualties on the first day of the Rising. However, on the Friday after Easter the rebels surrendered. The casualties of both sides totalled a few hundred, and the General Post Office had been destroyed. Fifteen of the rebel leaders, including Pearse, Connolly, everyone else who had signed the proclamation and some Volunteer commandants, were executed after court martials. Casement was tried and hanged later. Many Volunteers and some other known nationalists were imprisoned.
The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Church leaders deplored and denounced the Rising, and even many of the IRB and IV leaders disapproved of it privately. The Irish in general had at first condemned the revolt with mixed feelings of bewilderment and anger. After the executions, all these negative feelings were transformed into veneration of the fallen leaders and support to the survivors.
Shortly afterwards, the Liberal leader Asquith travelled to Dublin and saw that "the blood of martyrs now stood in his way", but he believed that all was not lost if the Home Rule issue could be solved at once. The negotiations, however, did not go any better than previously. Disappointed in Redmond's politics, popular support turned away from the Irish Parliamentary Party to the newly organised Sinn Féin, which was shaped into the open political movement of the Republican revolutionaries.
The British government rather underestimated Sinn Féin, partly because it was on its toes due to the Irish-American reactions to their handling of the Easter Rising. The government now started to practise a policy of leniency and released most of the rebel prisoners before Christmas 1916. However, this leniency did not last long after the government had failed in its attempt to solve the Home Rule issue and the USA had begun to focus more on the war and less on Ireland. In April 1918, the government threatened to bring conscription legislation to Ireland. Sinn Féin protested fiercely against this, but nobody listened.
After World War I, Sinn Féin set up its own Republican Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and started planning a war with England... It might be argued that if the British, especially General Maxwell, who ordered the executions, had been less harsh on the rebels, Ireland would have continued to evolve peacefully in Redmond's lead into a Commonwealth loyalty similar to that of Canada or Australia. Yet it ought to be taken into account that the sympathies towards the rebels must have been there even before the executions, just hidden for the initial moment of confusion.
The Easter Rising failed in the sense that the Irish Republic did not come true then and many got killed. Regardless of its military failure, the Rising succeeded in that its symbolic and psychological effects were great, and the nationalist spirit went on in the form of Sinn Féin. While imprisoned, the Volunteers and some other nationalists got to know each other better and started rebuilding their organisation, and after they got out, they were greeted as heroes.
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