Irish Home Rule

independence - Ireland (or most of it) becoming a sovereign member of the family of nations, and not some region of the UK governed by a glorified town council.

Should Ireland and its nationalist vanguards have waited for a peaceful settlement, or should we regard mere devolution as insufficient?

there's an interesting discussion of this in the Neil Ferguson edited "Virtual History". The author of the relevant article reckons that the advanced nationalists would never have settled for Home Rule, and had it been granted it would just been a step on the way to full independence.

Would Home Rule in c.1918 have actually left the possibility of eventual territorial unification more alive than it was after 1921?

times had changed by 1918... Home Rule was an irrelevance by then. If the country had been succcessfully partitioned into two Home Rule entities then, unification would only have come about if both entities had been happy to merge, which I don't think would have been that likely.

2. 'A step on the way' - possibly a peaceful way? After all, it took no bloodshed to get from Free State to Eire to Republic. Are you saying that Home Rule could have initiated a similar process? - in which case the armed struggle would not have been worthwhile.

3. 'Things were different by 1918 - Home Rule was an irrelevance by then': of course - because of the change in nationalist strategy. I am saying, what if that change in strategy had not taken place? Presumably Home Rule would not have been an irrelevance.

A broad question might be: what is Home Rule anyway, really? The Free State was in the Commonwealth, had official associations with Britain, etc - couldn't Home Rule have offered a similar scenario?

I know what you mean, because I am not a nationalist. but for Irish people the big advantage of being independent is that we've not been sucked into Britain's tawdry wars since the first world war (although of course loads of Irish people did enlist in the British army at various points for economic reasons). It has also meant that we haven't had cockfarmers like Thather or Blair running us. We've had our own cockfarmers.

2. 'A step on the way' - possibly a peaceful way? After all, it took no bloodshed to get from Free State to Eire to Republic. Are you saying that Home Rule could have initiated a similar process? - in which case the armed struggle would not have been worthwhile.

I think more that the advanced nationalists would have kept agitating for full independence, and the Home Rule leaders would have found themselves in the unenviable position of being Britain's policeman in Ireland. I think the Home Rulers would probably have seen their support slide to Sinn Féin and the hardliners, but I couldn't really say whether this would have inevitably led to independence, peacefully achieved or otherwise.

3. 'Things were different by 1918 - Home Rule was an irrelevance by then': of course - because of the change in nationalist strategy. I am saying, what if that change in strategy had not taken place? Presumably Home Rule would not have been an irrelevance.

but it wasn't a change of strategy... the politicians who in 1914 had advocated Home Rule were still advocating it. it's just that no one supported them anymore. that's why Home Rule was irrelevant - the convulsion of the first world war and Britain's hamfisted attempt to bring in conscription in Ireland had galvanised opinion in favour of independence.

A broad question might be: what is Home Rule anyway, really? The Free State was in the Commonwealth, had official associations with Britain, etc - couldn't Home Rule have offered a similar scenario?

nyeh.. I think the Home Rule thing was still assuming that Ireland would remain part of the UK, and that Defence and Foreign Policy would remain in Britain's remit.

I suppose problems arise when people think that while they are trying to just get along other people are not, or worse are taking advantage of their easy-goingness. When you look at politics in divided societies in Northern Ireland, it seems like people spend all their time talking about the concessions they've made and the paltry response the others have made to it.

That point is well taken. Yet 'opinion' was not just autonomous, it was moulded by political leadership and vanguards. I still think that if the Rising and subsequent events had not happened, 'opinion' would not have taken the turns it did. In fact, that statement is virtually inarguable. So I still think that strategy - or, who was in control of strategy, or which strategy became hegemonic - is central.

In any case, I think the subsequent shift of opinion away from Home Rule was caused more by British government acts rather than by decisions of Irish vanguardists. Firstly the executions that followed the 1916 Rising made people more sympathetic to the rebels than they had been. Secondly, the hamfisted attempts to introduce conscription in the latter part of the war turned people bigtime against a British state keen to send them off to be killed, and this paved the way for the formation of a mass movement to oppose conscription and then by extension British rule.

I think that the first para fairly thoroughly misinterprets me. I think the opposite, ie: what you say in the first para. Part of my point was that the Rising was an eccentric, minority event, NOT rendered 'necessary' or 'historically inevitable' by any prior mass movement - so if a vanguard had not made such an event happen, then mass politics could have taken a different direction.

Your second para makes some good points re. why mass politics might nonetheless have taken the direction they did. But then, some of those factors (eg. executions) are themselves contingent on the Rising having taken place. Conscription is a different one - but even this might have had a different effect if Redmond had still hegemonized the 'national' movement at that time?

Among the questions which this thread sought to ask was: couldn't Ireland have achieved roughly what it did without going through armed struggle in the 1910s? So the fact that the Rising was vanguardist and non-inevitable was, I thought, one of my main premises, not something I was overlooking.

As you say upthread, though, another argument vs my hypothesis is that Home Rule was NOT equivalent to what Ireland did gain, and that the latter could ONLY have been gained through violence. That may well be true. Whether it justifies violence may possibly be a thorny question.

It is funny that only two of us are interested enough to debate this. And at the hour of the anniversary of Emmet's rebellion an' all.

There are naturally tons of other books on this to me fascinating area. I would quite like to see the Vicar's own recommendations rather than re-spilling my usual can of beans.

eg: - the Ulster police were formed from the UVF (is this right? perhaps I am misremembering; at any rate the B-Specials of the late 1960s were Loyalist paramilitaries who became state employees, no?)

- Redmond (Irish Parliamentary Party) decided that he needed a paramilitary force of his own, to match Ulster's, possibly equipped with guns brought back from WWI - and he was a loing-standing MP at Westminster etc!

Among the strangest anecdotes of the period is Patrick Pearse's approval of the UVF, on the grounds that it was a good sign that Irishmen were carrying guns around.

Anyway, the general point is: Volunteering on both sides was perhaps so widespread that armed rebellion was not such a sore thumb?

I've not really read that much on the subject so my opinions are suspect. Michael Tierney history book we did in school was a lot more nuanced than might be expected. Green Against Green (about the Civil War) by Michael Hopkinson (I think) is also interesting.

I think the A and B Specials might have been formed from people who were in the Ulster Volunteers, but the cops up North (ie the Royal Ulster Constabulary) were essentially just a continuation of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

I think once the whole volunteering thing got off the ground it becomes much more likely that extremists will get enough people and arms together to stage a rising.

It's worth remembering, though, that the volunteer groups pre 1916 are not really analagous to contemporary paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.

One odd verb that keeps coming up in histories of the period is 'drilling'. 'Connly was drilling his Citizen Army... Meanwhile, Carson was drilling Ulster Volunteers', etc. I cannot imagine so much drilling going on today, outside of the armed forces.

As far as buiks go, I would like to read some biography now... maybe (Tim Pat Coogan's?) Collins. It does seem extraordinary how much Collins had achieved by the age of (?) 32.

When Britain had imprisoned hundreds (?) of rebels who had battled without quarter against their own troops, and when republican feeling was plainly simmering again (what does WBY say: those dead men to stir the boiling pot) all over the south -- why on earth did the Brits just *release all the prisoners* and send them back to Dublin??

Truly, I still don't get it.

(I still don't, 15 minutes later; and I never have yet.)

I understand what you're saying, I think, but I can't finally see the strategic sense in it.

But I STILL can't see the strategic sense in releasing Collins and de Valera to go and start running guns all over again.

'Minor player': but I think he did a lot of damage to the enemy. And he did a lot more once they let him out again.

In 1913 he also joined the Irish Volunteers and actively participated in the preparations for the Easter Rising of 1916. After a week of fighting against the British troops he was captured. De Valera was court-martialled, convicted, and sentenced to death, but the sentence was immediately commuted to penal servitude for life. He served 14 months in jail and was released in June 1917. Shortly after, he won a by-election in East Clare to the House of Commons. At a convention in October 1917 he was elected president of the Sinn Féin party. In May 1918 he was arrested again and put in a jail for agitation against extending conscription to Ireland. In the General Election of December 1918 de Valera was returned for East Mayo. De Valera escaped from Lincoln Jail on 3 Feb 1919 and returned to Ireland to be elected President of the Ministry ("Príomh-aire") by Dáil Éireann on 1 Apr 1919.

The only logic I can find is that there was a belief in repressive measures, and that the republican sentiment was a much over-exaggerated minority tendency. Releasing them to Dublin would put them in front of the people who's lives the british had been inconvenienced and brutalised in the cause of pursuing the rebels. It's the same strategy that seeks to humiliate a group of schoolkids as a group, in the hope that they move away from support for the one who's been the naughty kid, and that the naughty kids receives a justice from the people in who's name they purport to act.

Finally, traditional colonial superiority would tend to suggest that the danger areas were the country; the city was British territory and remain so; there was little damage to be done, as 1916 had proved the british could defeat the rebels in urban guerilla situations, and ultimately, yer Irishman was a bit of a thicky really.

Collins was a minor figure before and during the Rising - he only took part in it because he had promised to protect his nephew. his time in Frongoch Prison was when he came to prominence - the British could not have predicted how dangerous to them he would prove to be.

(x-post: Dave B said it better than i could)

just read R.F. Foster's VIVID FACES and my views are the same as 11 years ago! namely
1. not sure that Home Rule (with partition) should have been so devalued; it was good enough for Parnell!
2. still puzzled by the same old question about why the British released all those people who came back and fought them again! (but at least I see that D Boyle and others tried to answer it.)