Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (33 page)

There would have been two distinct, but interrelated, forms of response to the loyalist coup. The Nationalists had a rival paramilitary force, the Irish Volunteers, which - inspired by advanced separatist feeling - was spreading rapidly in the spring of 1914, and especially in western Ulster, where there was a majority in favour of Home Rule. By May 1914, 129,000 Irish Volunteers had been recruited throughout Ireland, with 41,000 in Ulster. Badly armed, but enthusiastic, their commander - a former officer of the Connaught Rangers - declared in June that ‘any government that attempts gerrymandering the nationalist counties out of Ireland must render an account to us’.
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The government which had been seeking, in a half-hearted fashion, a ‘gerrymander’ had at its disposal the Royal Irish Constabulary as well as the troops of the Irish garrison. These, too, were potential, though by no means enthusiastic, opponents of the Ulster Unionists.
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It is highly probable that the enactment of Home Rule in 1914 would have stimulated a conflict between the UVF and the Irish Volunteers. In southern and western Ulster, and to a certain extent in Belfast, Unionists and Nationalists were marching for their respective causes, and displaying their armaments. Any attempt by the Ulster Volunteers to enact their plan of campaign - seizing strategically vital locations in the largely Nationalist South Down area, for example - would unquestionably have stimulated conflict.
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It is probable that the Ulster Volunteers, with superior arms and (within the North, at any rate) superior numbers, would have temporarily fought off any Nationalist opposition, but at the politically very high price of causing bloodshed and sectarian unrest. The vague Unionist plans for the peaceful disarming of the local RIC men were, at best, highly ambitious. There is a fair probability that the process of disarmament would have brought conflict between the mainly Catholic policemen and the Protestant Volunteers. In both cases - bloody confrontation between either the police or the Irish Volunteers and the UVF - British support for the Unionist cause would have been jeopardised; and in particular it is difficult to see how Conservative endorsement of the Ulster Unionists could have been sustained after (say) a bloody sectarian affray or the assassination or wounding of members of the RIC.

Such episodes would have been publicly deplored by the Asquith government, and privately welcomed as a political bonanza. In addition they might well have served to simplify the attitude of the British army and navy towards the Ulster Unionist cause. This attitude had been temporarily (but only temporarily) defined by the ‘incident’ or ‘mutiny’ at the Curragh military camp, County Kildare, in March 1914 when a brigadier-general and sixty other officers had resigned rather than march north to impose Home Rule on Ulster.
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But this military crisis had arisen, not from any coherent official attempt to coerce the Ulster Unionists, but rather as a result of bungling by the army commander, Sir Arthur Paget, and his garbled communication of relatively uncontroversial War Office orders. Precautionary troop deployments in Ulster were presented by Paget as a likely prelude to Armageddon, and he unilaterally offered his junior officers the option of resigning. From this episode it has often, understandably, been inferred that the army was irrevocably Unionist, and that it could not have been used against the Ulster Volunteer Force. Certainly as late as 4 July 1914 the Army Council acknowledged that there could be no military coercion of Ulster.
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Equally, some stress has been laid upon similar attitudes within the ranks of the Royal Navy.
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But it is all too easy to misinterpret this highly charged episode. It reveals, not a mutinous spirit among the army (no orders were disobeyed), but rather a broad Unionist sentiment, and a determination, if the option were available, of avoiding any bloody involvement in Ulster. But all the available evidence suggests that, had there been no option, army officers would have obeyed direct orders to march north in order to implement Home Rule: Brigadier-General Gough, the leading ‘mutineer’, stated unequivocally that ‘if the GOC-in-C had ordered my brigade north to Belfast I should have gone without question’.
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The Curragh incident undoubtedly made the military imposition of Home Rule much more difficult than it would otherwise have been, but even so it is possible to exaggerate these difficulties. The passage of time clearly alleviated the burden of the Curragh; in particular the death in November 1914 of one of the most influential anti-coercionists, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, was a loss to Ulster Unionism. But, even more crucially, the Unionist sympathies of the officer cadre would have been tested to breaking point if, as has been argued, the Ulster Volunteers had become embroiled in the shooting of Catholic Irish Volunteers or policemen. In these circumstances, and given unambiguous orders from a less befuddled commander than Paget, it is highly unlikely that another ‘mutiny’ would have occurred.

Could the Ulster Volunteers have won a military victory?
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The UVF would undoubtedly have scored isolated successes against both the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Irish Volunteers. But, as has been argued, such successes would have been self-defeating, for they would have provided an opportunity for the government and the army to intervene; and in such a situation it is hard to see the possibility of either political or military gain. The UVF had large numbers (around 100,000), was heavily armed and had local knowledge. But it is probable that some of this number would have melted away as the prospect of a war came closer, and in addition the numbers of weapons, though impressive, obscured severe logistical difficulties. Some of the Unionist armoury was antique, and, while there were too many types of rifle, there were too few revolvers and - at the other end of the scale - too few machine-guns or field pieces for effective action. It appears that the amount of ammunition available to the UVF would scarcely have trained the force, let alone equipped it for a prolonged battle. It is therefore hard to doubt the judgement that ‘in a full-scale military clash the UVF’s weaponry would have created a logistical nightmare’.
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These difficulties might have been overcome, and the local knowledge of the Volunteers might have been put to good use in a guerrilla conflict, but this was precisely the form of warfare which they had eschewed. The official preference was for ‘a stand-up fight’, and the training and organisation of the UVF indicate that they were in fact preparing for a conventional war.
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There is little doubt that the UVF would have fought the British army as bravely as they fought the Germans on the Somme and at Messines; and, equally, there is little doubt that they would have been slaughtered in similar numbers. Neither the Unionist political leadership nor British public opinion would have permitted an extended bloodletting; and in all probability - as was suggested in the romance
The North Afire
- a settlement would have been brokered after a few weeks of conflict.
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Almost certainly this would have been along the lines of the mixture of temporary exclusion and county option which had been offered by Asquith and Lloyd George in the spring of 1914.

All the available evidence suggests that, had the army been embroiled in Ulster, the UVF would have suffered defeat. The terms of the settlement between the Liberal government and the Ulster Unionists can also be envisaged with some degree of certainty. It is much harder, however, to assess the long-term fall-out from such an episode. It is unlikely, on the basis of contemporary arguments, that the ferocious Unionism of the northern loyalists would have survived a humiliation at the hands of the United Kingdom government (even a Liberal government) and its army: Conservative sympathy in the light of British military casualties in Ulster would have been highly doubtful. It is possible that leaders such as Carson and Craig would have been repudiated in the wake of military failure, just as Redmond was rejected by Nationalist voters in the aftermath of a series of perceived political defeats. Some passive resistance of Home Rule would have been likely, again judging by the predictions of contemporary commentators.
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Defeated on home territory, cut off from British sympathy, it is possible that northern Unionists might have trickled into a Home Rule parliament in Dublin in much the same grudging manner that northern Nationalists entered the Belfast Parliament and Fianna Fail entered Dáil Éireann in 1927. Whether the presence of such Unionists would have made for a successful multi-cultural democracy such as Switzerland, a workable, if unstable confederation such as Canada, or failure and schism, as with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, is a moot point. Either way, it is unlikely that the relationship between Britain and Ireland would have been much better than was in reality the case. Unionists and Nationalists may well have been united only by their hostility towards British oppression.

Home Rule failed, and the Irish wrested a form of independence from Britain through the war of 1919-21 and the Treaty of December 1921. The problem of Ulster was addressed through a partition scheme, launched in 1920 through the Government of Ireland Act. Anglo-Irish relations seemed permanently soured as a result of the circumstances in which the new Irish state was launched. Sectarian relations within Northern Ireland seemed permanently embittered as a result of the nature and extent of the partition settlement. Viewed with the luxury of hindsight Home Rule looked like a fleeting opportunity to create a settled Ireland and a fruitful diplomatic relationship between Dublin and London.

Yet there is a paradox inherent in the view that Home Rule might have averted the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ - for much of the awkwardness of the Ulster problem arose, not out of the failure of Home Rule, but precisely because a Home Rule measure had been successfully imposed. The constitutional basis for the existence of Northern Ireland - the Government of Ireland Act - was a legislative mixture of partition and devolution, and, though it failed to satisfy southern Nationalist opinion, it was ruefully accepted by Ulster Unionists. The Act of 1920 created a Home Rule parliament and executive in Belfast, both of which lasted until the introduction of direct rule from London in 1972. Home Rule in Northern Ireland brought endemic financial difficulties (the economic relationship between Belfast and London was a recurrent source of acrimony, and had to be revised as early as 1924-5); it brought the domination of one political tradition, Unionism, and the marginalisation of another, the northern Nationalists. The irony of Unionists exercising power in a northern Home Rule administration has often been emphasised. But perhaps the true irony of the 1920 settlement was that through it Unionists brought to life many of their own most pessimistic predictions concerning Home Rule. The reality of Ulster under Stormont illustrates the virtual reality of Ireland under Home Rule.

And yet there was certainly nothing inevitable about the failure of the third Home Rule Bill as a piece of legislation. It has been shown how, in the spring of 1912, an opportunity for a settlement between the Liberal government and the Ulster Unionists was missed. Nor was partition inevitable, at least in the form of a permanent exclusion of the six northern counties from the Home Rule scheme. It has been suggested that there was a chance that Ulster Unionists might have at least temporarily reconciled themselves to a Dublin administration, particularly in the context of a united Irish commitment to the Allied war effort in 1914.

But arguing that Home Rule might have succeeded in parliamentary terms is very far from saying that it would have succeeded as a policy. And suggesting that the permanent partition of Ireland might have been avoided is far from proclaiming that a stable unitary Irish state might have emerged instead. Probably the only conditions upon which the Home Rule crisis might have been peaceably settled would have meant the temporary exclusion of four or six Ulster counties from Home Rule in 1912. At the most optimistic prognosis, these counties might have grudgingly accepted Home Rule after the expiry of the statutory term. But, even assuming that the reunification of Ireland could have been achieved without massive bloodshed, the state which would have emerged would have contained over one million reluctant and culturally distinctive citizens. And, given that the driving forces behind the emergence of Ireland as a mature and stable democracy included a shared Catholicism and a widely shared respect for Gaelic culture, the presence of a large, highly defensive northern Protestant community might have proved disastrous. The price paid by all the Irish for a unitary state might well have been higher than the price paid for partition: an unstable thirty-two-county Ireland, as opposed to an unstable six-county Northern Ireland.

In any event the failure of Home Rule did not mean the loss of British Ireland, because British Ireland had been lost long before the 1912-14 era. The consolidation of Irish national identity in the nineteenth century had been achieved partly on the basis of a conscious rejection of Britishness (as opposed to the complementary relationship between, for example, Scots national identity and Britishness). It is probable that Home Rule would have been swiftly redefined by an Irish parliament after 1914, just as dominion status was redefined in the 1920s; indeed it is probable that Home Rule would have served as a precursor to dominion status. It is likely that pressure from advanced separatists would have promoted a defensively nationalistic Home Rule administration in Dublin; and it is also likely that the terms of the Home Rule measure would have promoted rancour between the new administration and Westminster. This, added to the possibility that Ulster Unionists might have been subjected to military coercion, suggests that Home Rule, far from inaugurating a new and peaceful era in Anglo-Irish relations, might well have introduced a period of bloodshed and nagging international bitterness. If the victims of the 1916 rising and the Anglo-Irish war might have been spared, other lives would have been lost in the North, and with no mitigating political benefits. The vision of Home Rule as a pathway to arcadia is rooted more deeply in Gladstonian optimism and myopia than in the politics of 1914.