Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (32 page)

Bonar Law, however, needs the sanction of the Irish Unionist leadership. Here, again, the Liberal offer has had a profoundly divisive impact. Southern Unionists are appalled, as are the Ulster Unionists who live outside the excluded area. The Unionist leaders from the north-eastern heartland of the movement are more cautious, with some hawks - especially the Boer War veterans - unimpressed by Asquith’s apparent generosity.
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Carson, who fought Home Rule in 1886 and 1893, recognises the advance which Asquith has made on the Gladstonian formulation, and - as an acute political intelligence - he recognises the tactical difficulties which the offer creates for the Irish Unionist cause. Though distrustful, he is prepared to work with the Liberals. Carson takes advice from a number of Ulster lieutenants, but principally from James Craig, who throughout his career has reflected the concerns of his east Ulster political base. Since the Liberal offer protects this heartland, and since Craig, as an experienced campaigner in Britain and in the House of Common, recognises the likely difficulties of sustained opposition, he counsels in favour of a cautious acceptance.

A deal is struck on the basis of temporary exclusion, and the Bill passes into law. The new Irish Parliament meets, as specified within the terms of the new Home Rule Act, on the first Tuesday of September 1913.
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Despite pressures and predictions, the unity of the former Irish party holds, and it emerges as the dominant force within both the new House of Commons in Dublin and the new Irish executive: John Redmond is the first Irish Prime Minister. There is a scattering of southern Unionist and Sinn Fein representation in the 164-seat Commons, but southern Unionists fare rather better in the new Senate, where the Lord Lieutenant allocates them a disproportionate number of the forty available seats. Some forms of minority constitutional Nationalism - such as the supporters of the centrist William O’Brien - also find a station in the Commons and the new Senate.

Will the new Irish administration create a Catholic and clericalist ascendancy, as the Unionist pundits of 1911-12 alleged? The Home Rule Act formally prohibits most forms of sectarian legislation, but there are certainly ways of circumventing this ban (some Unionists argued that the taxation regime of the Home Rule state would favour church institutions).
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However, several leading Nationalists have Protestant family connections: Redmond, for example, has a Protestant mother and a Protestant wife.
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Moreover, the new Parliament contains (as did the Irish Parliamentary party at Westminster) a comparatively large number of Protestants, who although widely recognised as political lightweights are likely to protest against any outrageous clericalism. But perhaps the strongest brake upon any sectarian ascendancy will come from the pressure created by the temporary partition arrangement; the new Irish administration will have every reason to demonstrate to the still hostile north the liberality of its intentions. There are undoubtedly strong sectarian forces in the new Parliament: Devlin’s party organisation, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, is heavily represented.
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But, equally, such forces are counterbalanced by a still influential centrist constitutional tradition, and by southern Unionists, as yet unscathed by the Great War. There is every reason to assume that, though Home Rule has been launched in the context of heightened sectarianism, the new Irish administration will be (at least initially) more sensitive to religious difference than the polities, the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, actually created in 1920-1.

Relations between the new regime and the North remain highly volatile and highly intricate. Though a settlement has been reached on Home Rule, its temporary nature means that Ulster Unionists remain wary, and retain some of their defensive organisation (such as the nominal Ulster provisional government). Their attitude, and the fate of the temporary exclusion arrangement, are extremely difficult to predict. It is possible, however, that temporary partition will - as many Liberals prophesy - defuse the growing militancy within Ulster Unionism. It is, after all, difficult to sustain a credible defiance over six years, and with the possibility that the partition arrangement may be extended. Much depends upon the attitude of the new Home Rule executive. Redmond’s sense of obligation to the Liberal government for the concession of Home Rule will lead him to support the British war effort in August 1914, and to encourage the recruitment of Irish volunteers to the British army.
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In the context of a relatively settled constitution, Ulster Unionists will be impressed by this evidence of Redmond’s ‘loyalism’; and the broadly united Unionist-Nationalist attitude to the war may help to consolidate domestic political ties.
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Temporary exclusion, combined with the war, will certainly bring the evaporation of British Unionist enthusiasm for Ulster, and especially if - as is probable - the new Home Rule administration proves its competence during the period of exclusion. Ulster Unionists will therefore be left with the alternatives of continuing the arrangement in the context of waning British sympathy, or of joining the new Home Rule polity. This last is not beyond the bounds of possibility: many Ulster Unionists in the much less propitious circumstances after 1920 (including, evidently, James Craig) believe that partition is a transient phenomenon - and the unity forged by the war may well act as a constitutional cement. However, whether these consensual attitudes and the political unity which they support will survive for long is quite another matter.
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But will the new Dublin administration prove to be competent, in the teeth of Ulster Unionist suspicion and British prejudice? The sharp political intelligence exercised by leading Nationalists such as Redmond, Devlin or John Dillon, allied to the discipline of office and the constraints imposed by the Home Rule Act, provide grounds for optimism. In addition, to look ahead, the politically less gifted and less experienced Free State ministers of the 1920s provide a highly competent, if unimaginative, administration to the newly independent Ireland. The constitutional Nationalists of the Home Rule administration have been long trained in the discipline of opposition, and they are unlikely to wield executive power in anything other than a highly circumspect manner.

The threat to constitutional stability lies less with the new rulers of Ireland than with the instrument of their authority, the Home Rule Act. Although the Act contains a number of checks and balances which may avert conflict with the North, it also contains the material for conflict with the British Parliament. Disputes may well arise from the distribution of powers outlined in the Act, or from the superior authority of the Westminster Parliament: the veto power of the lord lieutenant over Irish legislation will be a difficulty, as will ill-advised legislative interference from the British Parliament. Irish MPs at Westminster, though reduced in number, remain highly influential, and especially with (as in 1910) the two main British parties so evenly matched in parliamentary strength. This Irish leverage in London may well be used for further constitutional gain, and particularly if conflicts between the Home Rule and imperial administrations grow in frequency and severity.

Such conflict will also lend credence to the separatist or republican cause.
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With every minor clash between Dublin and London constitutional nationalists will be angered, but they will also come under pressure from the vocal Sinn Fein minority to pursue an ever more independent line. In addition, as the unpopularity of the war grows, and as hostility towards the administration’s pro-British stand deepens, support is delivered to the advanced nationalist cause. The Home Rule government may well be able to hold this at bay, but probably only by capturing at least some of the separatists’ ground: after the armistice there will be demands for further constitutional concessions. These are likely to be granted, given the 50,000 Irish casualties which are sustained in the war.

The pursuit of this counterfactual speculation produces a vision of Ireland in the 1920s which in certain respects does not differ from the historical denouement: in both the historical and virtual-historical cases Ireland emerges as a dominion, loosely bound to the British empire. The inclusion or exclusion of Ulster has little bearing on this counterfactual fantasy. Few Ulster Unionists would have keenly supported the restoration of the Union after the ‘betrayal’ of Home Rule, and there are some grounds for supposing that, had the North joined a Dublin administration, Unionists would have been both influential members of the regime and interested in consolidating its powers. The presence of Ulster Unionists in Dublin would possibly, though by no means probably, have ensured a residual connection between Ireland and the British crown; but, even as it was, Ireland became a republic only in 1949.
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However, it should again be emphasised that an independent Ireland with a strong Unionist representation need not have been - in the long term - a politically and culturally settled polity. There is, in fact, some justification for supposing the reverse.

It seems unlikely that, had Home Rule been enacted in 1912, there would have been an Anglo-Irish war; on the other hand, it is not improbable that advanced separatists would have staged a revolt against a Home Rule administration which seemed to be (in MacSwiney’s metaphor) joining the Carnival of Empire. It is therefore unlikely that the revolutionary Nationalist tradition would have died in a Home Rule Ireland; but it is possible that, having a much less clear focus, it would have had less popular acceptance. Revolutionary Nationalists might well, however, have forced the Home Rule Parliament into a more defiantly nationalistic stance than would otherwise have been the case. Some ongoing form of civil unrest may have been unavoidable, but this would probably have arisen out of the Ulster issue rather than, as in 1922-3, between different forms of advanced nationalism.

This leads into another series of counterfactual speculations. The idea of a settlement in 1912 presumes that Ulster Unionist militancy would have been checked in its infancy, undermined by a combination of Liberal tractability and Conservative apathy. But for the moment these presumptions will be set aside. Returning to the historical record, there were no serious proposals for a settlement between the Liberal government and the Ulster Unionists until 1914, by which time northern militancy was fully formed. Sustained diplomacy from late 1913 until July 1914 demonstrated only the rigidity of the deadlock between the negotiating parties; and this tension was released only by the outbreak of the Great War. But what if there had been no war? Or, as is argued elsewhere in this volume, what if, while the rest of Europe marched to Armageddon, the United Kingdom had remained neutral? Would the Asquith government have bought the lives of British soldiers with the currency of an Irish civil war?

The prospect of a European war was certainly the mechanism by which the Unionist leaders and the Liberal ministers escaped from the Ulster crisis; and indeed it was thought at the time, and subsequently, that the larger war had averted a smaller and perhaps - at least from the narrow perspective of British constitutional stability - more damaging conflict. But these contemporary counterfactual assumptions deserve a fuller examination: would a civil war have been fought in Ulster in 1914 had there been no European conflagration? How would an Ulster civil war have altered the subsequent constitutional history of modern Ireland?

With the failure of the Buckingham Palace Conference in July 1914, Home Rule would have been enacted for the whole of Ireland. Asquith’s Amending Bill, introduced in June 1914 and proposing temporary exclusion for Ulster, was by this stage widely seen as unsatisfactory, and was effectively lost. Assuming that there had been no party truce as a result of the European war, and assuming that British neutrality had been sustained, the machinery of the Home Rule Act would have ground into action, with elections for the new Irish House of Commons, and the gradual segregation of administrative functions between the new administration and London.

In the North of Ireland the enactment of Home Rule would have served as a signal for the Ulster provisional government, formed originally in 1911, to emerge from the shadows and operate as a rival executive. There had been plans (albeit sketchy) for an occasion such as this, and these would now have been put into operation: railway and communication lines would have been severed, arsenals and supply depots would have been seized, and the main roads into the North closed and guarded.
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The UVF and its political masters had long recognised that the police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, would present the most immediate opposition to the loyalist coup, and there were plans for the arrest and disarming of constables.
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The machinery of Home Rulefor example, the elections to the new House of Commons - would either have been ignored, or have been exploited for the benefit of the revolt. The elections in the North might have been used simply to provide an electoral mandate for the rebellion (Sinn Fein exploited British elections in 1918 and in 1921 for similar reasons). Almost certainly there would have been no immediate attempt by the government to suppress the coup. Asquith would have been fearful of converting (what was for the moment) peaceful defiance into a bloody rebellion, but he would also have been anxious to wait for a more propitious opportunity to intervene.
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The Ulster provisional government planned to seize and exercise control with the minimum of force (Carson was emphatic - for tactical as much as humanitarian reasons - that the Ulster Volunteers were not to fire the first shots); equally the British government was anxious to avoid, as far as possible, any bloody confrontation with the Unionist rebels.
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But each had begun to plan for a civil war in Ireland at least as early as March 1914. It is probable that, while the Ulster Unionists were outlining the initial plans for their coup, hardliners within the government (such as Churchill and the War Minister, Seely) were debating the possibility of coercion.
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The Ulster Unionists were now armed, having successfully (and illegally) imported 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition into the North in April 1914. In addition to these weapons, the Unionists had perhaps 12,000-15,000 rifles of different types and age: the total armament was calculated in July 1914 to be around 37,000 rifles, but this may well have been a slight underestimation.
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Loyalists had been drilling since late 1910, and there were mass camps of instruction in 1913 and 1914 such as that at Baronscourt, County Tyrone, in October 1913.
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