Search Results

A study of the local press, both nationalist and unionist, indicates that there was no ‘Ulster crisis’ in the five counties studied from the 1910 elections up to the autumn of 1913. Only the outbreak of mob violence — in Belfast in the summer of 1912 and to a lesser extent Londonderry in August 1913 — generated real nationalist unease. For the rest of the time, the publication and passage of the Home Rule Bill generated a considerable volume of press coverage but few great passions either for or against. ‘Ulster's’ campaign against the bill, and the newly-formed Ulster Volunteer Force, were seen not as a looming and ever-growing physical threat, but as a political and propaganda ‘bluff’ to undermine British support for the bill before it could pass. Confidence, complacency, quietude, and even apathy were more typical characteristics of local debate than wild enthusiasm, chagrin, disappointment, or alarm.

This chapter tracks the impact on the theatre of the radicalisation of Irish politics following the General Election of 1910. The momentary success of the Home Rule Bill (1912) is set against the 1913 Dublin lockout and the Irish Volunteer movements. Left politics, voiced by Larkin and Connolly, are considered resonant with the theatre of Robinson, O'Kelly, St John Ervine, Thomas Murray, Fitzmaurice, and Gerald MacNamara. Left-literati alliances were re-forged against the conservative nationalism of William Martin Murphy and Griffith. The First World War drove republican logics to the fore; indicated both by the pessimism of Wilson's The Slough and the excited radicalism of MacDonagh, Eimar O'Duffy, and Patrick Pearse himself. Republicanism, indicated by Pearse's references to Ibsen and Synge, is shown as having absorbed theatrical forces of display, to be reiterated in the Easter Rising of 1916.

This chapter examines the years of dashed hope for the Irish Home Rule movement. 1910 saw the party regain the balance of power at Westminster lost in 1895. Thereafter, the formerly apathetic Liberal government was dependent on the support of IPP MPs to secure a parliamentary majority. By 1912, a Home Rule Bill was introduced. The members of the leadership are examined in the course of their most intense work and their most difficult trials. Ireland became the central focus in imperial politics in the years 1912-14.The chapter argues that, by the outbreak of the First World War, the leadership, especially Redmond and Dillon, had been elevated from the status of provincial politicians to that of imperial statesmen. This chapter also charts the origins of the partition of Ireland, Ulster unionism’s resistance to Home Rule and the drift from constitutionalism towards paramilitarism in these years.

Dissenters in the long nineteenth century believed that they were on the right side of history. This chapter argues that the involvement of evangelical Nonconformists in politics was primarily driven by a coherent worldview derived from a Congregationalist understanding of salvation and the gathered nature of the church. That favoured a preference for voluntarism and a commitment to religious equality for all. Although Whig governments responded to the rising electoral clout of Dissenters after 1832 by meeting Dissenting grievances, both they and the Conservatives retained an Erastian approach to church–state relations. This led to tension with both those Dissenters who favoured full separation between church and state, and with Evangelical Churchmen in Scotland, who affirmed the principle of an Established Church, but refused government interference in ministerial appointments. In 1843 this issue resulted in the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of a large Dissenting body north of the border, the Free Church. Dissenting militancy after mid-century was fostered by the numerical rise of Dissent, especially in cities, the foundation of influential liberal papers often edited by Dissenters such as Edward Miall, and the rise of municipal reforming movements in the Midlands headed by figures such as Joseph Chamberlain. Industrialization also boosted Dissenting political capacity by encouraging both employer paternalism and trades unionism, whose leaders and rank and file were Nonconformists. Ireland constituted an exception to this pattern. The rise of sectarianism owed less to Irish peculiarities than to the presence and concentration of a large Catholic population, such as also fostered anti-Catholicism in Britain, in for instance Lancashire. The politics of the Ultramontane Catholic Church combined with the experience of agrarian violence and sectarian strife to dispose Irish Protestant Dissenters against Home Rule. The 1906 election was the apogee of Dissent’s political power, installing a Presbyterian Prime Minister in Campbell-Bannerman who would give way in due course to the Congregationalist H.H. Asquith, but also ushering in conflicts over Ireland. Under Gladstone, the Liberal party and its Nonconformist supporters had been identified with the championship of oppressed nationalities. Even though Chamberlain and other leading Dissenting liberals such as Isabella Tod resisted the extension of that approach to Ireland after 1886, preferring local government reform to Home Rule, most Dissenting voters had remained loyal to Gladstone. Thanks to succeeding Unionist governments’ aggressive foreign policy, embrace of tariff reform, and 1902 Education Act, Dissenting voters had been keen to return to a Liberal government in 1906. That government’s collision with the House of Lords and loss of seats in the two elections of 1910 made it reliant on the Irish National Party and provoked the introduction in 1912 of a third Home Rule Bill. The paramilitary resistance of Ulster Dissenters to the Bill was far from unanimous but nonetheless drove a wedge between British Nonconformists who had concluded that religion was a private matter and would do business with Irish Constitutional Nationalists and Ulster Nonconformists, who had adopted what looked like a bigoted insistence that religion was a public affair and that the Union was their only preservative against ‘Rome Rule’. The declaration of war in 1914 and the consequent suspension of the election due in 1915 means it is impossible to know how Nonconformists might have dealt with this crisis. It was the end of an era.

This chapter examines how the First World War transformed the leadership of the IPP. John Redmond’s unilateral declarations regarding the Irish Volunteer force – a nationalist alternative to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force – caused tensions, specifically with John Dillon. Redmond’s pledge of the force to Home Defence and subsequently to full participation in the war effort signalled a radical realignment of policy. It builds upon a historiographical tradition that sees the First World War as the defining moment in modern Irish history. It examines the ways in which the Irish party were called upon to assist in wartime recruitment and how the war began a stagnation of the Home Rule movement which had appeared to achieve its goals in September of 1914 with the signing of the Home Rule Bill into law. By mid-1915, correspondence shows that Redmond and Dillon had patched up their differences, at least to the extent that they could find a modus vivendi.