Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  He was sure that the proposal would hinder, and not help, prosecution of the war: ‘It would take him three Army Corps in Ireland to get one Army Corps out of it.’170 Sheehan argued, from experience, that recruiting had been killed in Ireland because of the insistence that Irish regiments should have mostly English officers, who lacked sympathy with the soldiers. ‘Why, I remember myself, when we were training with the 9th Munster Battalion, which was raised by myself almost to a man, that the adjutant, an English officer, who was a mere insurance clerk in London before the War, declared, because four cadets were sent to our battalion from the 7th Leinsters, “Four more bloody Irishmen coming to your regiment!”’171 He concluded:

  All the sacrifices which we have made in the past will, by your blundering methods, by your incapacity to understand the country, be rendered nugatory and vain, and you are going to render them more futile than ever. Those of us who have lost our boys believed in the War, and we believed that Ireland deserved better treatment than you are meting out to us in this matter, that we deserved consideration for our national demands … I will stoutly resist any attempt to impose Conscription upon my fellow countrymen. Give us national self-government. Give us equal treatment with the treatment you give to your Dominions. We demand that at the very least. Give us these things and we will do the rest, for the Irish instinct never failed to respond to generous treatment.

  Sinn Féin did not want equal treatment: they wanted Irish sovereignty. They would not accept conscription because they denied the authority of Britain over Ireland. It would be apparent by the end of the year that Irish Nationalism, in its constitutional form, was dead.

  When Asquith spoke in the 9 April debate he demanded unity, to present to the public, the Allies and the world ‘an unbroken front’.172 This could be accomplished, he said, only by avoiding the ‘terrible shortsightedness’ of ‘imposing upon Ireland a measure which, as we know, rightly or wrongly, is obnoxious to a very large number of the Irish people.’173 This pushed Lloyd George further into a corner. Law asserted that men likely to be called up from Ireland would ‘make a difference of military strength’. He suggested over 120,000, when asked to quantify it.174 However, a sign that the government was having second thoughts came with the admission that Irish conscription would not be automatic, but would wait to be enforced by Order in Council, an idea Duke had put to Lloyd George on 5 April. Law, heckled too, proclaimed: ‘we are not going to alter on this matter’. ‘Neither are we,’ cried an Irishman.175 Repington thought Lloyd George had ‘misled’ Parliament and the public, and added: ‘I expect that history will find the detachment of over a million men on these futile Eastern campaigns inexcusable.’176

  On 17 April Plunkett noted: ‘For 8 months I struggled to unite my countrymen so that they could inaugurate self-government by a big Irish part in the war. The Government in as many days have successfully united them in a determination not to fight England’s battles.’177 The Bill was enacted the next day; there was no sign of Home Rule. Lloyd George had asked Long to draft a Bill acceptable to all sides, a tall order given that the convention was divided forty-four to twenty-nine over its report, and that the feelings of Britain’s new American allies had to be satisfied too. To complicate matters, Long had become a federalist – believing that Irish Home Rule should begin the federalising of the United Kingdom.178 A large minority of MPs agreed, as did Austen Chamberlain, but most of the cabinet profoundly disagreed, not least because of England’s disproportionate size in any federation. Lloyd George thought the notion too radical and insufficiently considered, and it was dropped.

  French remained trigger-happy in his desire to enforce the Act, though admitted it ‘would not be easy’. General Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant General, suggested court-martialling any Irishmen who refused to serve: a grip on reality seems to have been lost. The War Cabinet trod with more caution. The RIC were less sure of success, and Duke maintained that a call-up was simply impossible to organise, and would lead to martial law throughout the whole of Ireland.179 The Catholic Church became increasingly vocal in opposition to conscription, telling men not to cooperate. It was feared they would ask Catholic RIC officers not to help enforce the Act; they already appeared to have the support of much of the legal profession outside Ulster. There were rumours of a general strike being about to paralyse Ireland; and fears that food supplies from Ireland, on which Britain depended, could be cut off. ‘Hatred of England,’ Plunkett noted on 1 May, was now ‘the all-pervading passion’ among the Irish.

  This sentiment presented a massive problem even without an attempt to force Irishmen to fight for the King. In February Sir Horace Plunkett, chairman of the convention, had been to London and asked Riddell, as a conduit to Lloyd George, to tell him that ‘an early settlement of the Irish question is absolutely essential’ because under the ‘superficial appearance of being quiet and contented’ Ireland concealed ‘a seething mass of rebellion which may break out at any moment.’180 The Ulstermen were ‘intractable and unyielding’, and Plunkett felt that while the convention rather than the government should settle the question, so that those who designed the settlement had the responsibility of executing it, some coercion would be necessary. Plunkett had noted in his diary on 11 January that ‘Carson is supreme in cabinet’, which Duke had hinted to him was the main obstacle to progress.181 On his February visit Plunkett told Law that Ulster’s attitude was ‘indefensible’ and that ‘the Gov’t must intervene. A democratic settlement must be forced.’182

  Having consigned the fate of Ireland to the convention, Lloyd George had been free to occupy himself shaping the Versailles system and disposing of Robertson, which had diverted his attention from the question. The relentless advance of Sinn Féin brought widespread disturbances, with men in prison on hunger strike and, as they were not being force-fed, in appalling health. Lloyd George wrote to Plunkett suggesting fiscal incentives that could be given to a Home Rule state, and picked up on suggestions by the convention for ruling Ulster by a committee within an Irish parliament that could opt Ulster out of measures it disliked. However, Ulster’s representatives would not end their opposition to one Irish parliament.

  During February 1918 there had been incidents of Sinn Féiners seizing farms and livestock and declaring them the property of the Irish republic, cutting telegraph wires and ambushing the police. The Times reported on 25 February that ‘it is the bare truth to say that the King’s writ has ceased to run in the counties of Clare, Sligo, Roscommon and Mayo, something of which the War Cabinet had been made aware in the preceding days.’183 The War Cabinet considered interning Sinn Féin activists, but Cave, the home secretary, and Smith, the Attorney General, said that as the likely internees were British subjects it would be hard to prove they had committed ‘hostile association’; therefore internment would be legally questionable.184 Lawlessness in the west of Ireland made it impossible for the convention to appear credible and its decisions workable.

  The Lords debated Ireland on 12 March. Salisbury mocked the assertions Curzon had made four months earlier, and which had shown a grotesque unrealism about where Ireland was moving: ‘The noble Earl said, speaking of Mr de Valera’s speeches, “They are not dangerous to public order, and the extreme Sinn Fein Party is in a minority that becomes smaller instead of larger from day to day”. He added: “There is no general prevalence of crime in Ireland. There is no policy of violence in the proceedings of the Sinn Fein party.” I wonder whether my noble friend reflects with satisfaction upon those assurances which he gave your Lordships in November of last year.’185

  Salisbury described an Ireland out of control: masses of young men in uniform brandishing revolvers and tricolour flags on the streets; a rebel army openly drilling; the police at bay; cattle rustling; rebels raiding houses in the search for arms; even an instance of an American flag being torn down and destroyed because of America’s alliance with Britain. The worst trouble was in the south and west, in counties such as Kerry, Galway, Tipperary,
Limerick and Clare. He was furious that Duke had operated a policy of such weakness, which included hunger strikers being released rather than allowed to die in jail to avoid the manufacture of more martyrs. He argued that no confrontation had been allowed because the government did not wish to sour the atmosphere in which the convention was held. Salisbury felt the government was betraying the law-abiding people of Ireland by its weakness; but in truth they were betrayed, and left to their fate, in April and May 1916. His conclusion applied to a world that no longer existed: ‘I urge the Government to exercise that strength which is entrusted to them—that strength to see that law and order are maintained. It has been said that force is no remedy, and, no doubt, force is no remedy against injustice and against maladministration; but force is a remedy against disorder. Indeed, the essential foundation of all government is strength.’186 The Earl of Meath, who agreed with Salisbury, put a different dimension on the problem: ‘My Lords, is it not a terribly sad thing to think that we have practically made no progress during the last fifty years in acquiring the love and affection of the Irish people?’187 The government could only have changed the course of events in Ireland by blood-soaked coercion, and even that would probably have failed. Most Irish people had, after the mismanagement of the Rising, simply abandoned any faith in constitutional Nationalism.

  This loss of faith was particularly the case because any imposition of law and order in Ireland had to be undertaken by the Army. Sinn Féin had instituted a boycott of the RIC that was supposed to leave its officers as social outcasts, but which often veered into violence and intimidation, as in the Land War of the 1880s when the tactic was developed.188 It had neutered the police. In North Tipperary it was reported, for example, that the RIC ‘are practically always confined to their barracks fearing an attack.’189 In West Cork the attacks were so bad that outposts of the RIC were closed and the force concentrated in more substantial buildings where they could better defend themselves: thus tracts of the country began to be unpoliced. This was a great help to Sinn Féin, as it raided private houses looking for arms.

  The prime minister summoned Scott to Walton Heath on 21 April for Sunday lunch and told him ‘he was determined to put conscription through in Ireland. He knew there would be trouble – rioting, bloodshed, but it was better to face all that and get it over.’190 He said there would be no repeat of the drawn-out executions after the Easter Rising: if anyone had to be shot, he would be put up against a wall and shot on the spot, a lesson learned, he said, from the Paris Commune. He dismissed Scott’s objection that an army larger than the one that would be recruited would be needed to hold Ireland down while conscription was undertaken. Scott described this attitude as ‘entirely reckless’.191 To Riddell, with whom he was used to a complete and undiplomatic frankness that he did not exert with Scott, Lloyd George admitted over dinner that evening that ‘we are in for a big fight with the Irish’, and stated his certainty that Sinn Féin was in league with the Germans.192 ‘If Home Rule is granted and the Irish are not prepared to play their part in the defence of the Empire, we must show them that we mean to govern.’ Duke had told him the Irish trades unions were mobilising; a one-day general strike on 23 April was widely observed, a portent of the chaos that would ensue if conscription were enforced. De Valera had succeeded in persuading the Catholic Church to have priests read out a statement in every parish on 21 April asserting that conscription was an ‘oppressive and inhuman law’ to impose upon the Irish, who had ‘the right to resist by every means that are consonant with the law of God’. Cardinal Logue, the Archbishop of Armagh, told de Valera: ‘When I talk about passive resistance, I don’t mean we are to lie down and let people walk over us.’193

  Duke was exasperated and, imploring Lloyd George not to enforce the policy, offered his resignation, which was accepted on 5 May. Edward Shortt, a Liberal barrister, whose solution – not adopted – was to encourage the Irish to join the French army, replaced him.194 Wimborne, the Lord Lieutenant, also resigned, as in 1916; but this time for good. The job was offered to Midleton, who turned it down when Lloyd George declined his terms – that conscription had to happen separately from Home Rule, to avoid annoying Nationalists and Ulster Unionists at the same time and making Ireland ungovernable. Lloyd George told Midleton, with some hyperbole, that these were terms ‘which no previous viceroy had ever been accorded’.195 The job was then offered to French, who agreed with Midleton but felt it his duty as a soldier to accept. He had the great advantages of his passionate belief in conscription and of being an Irishman from an old Roscommon family, albeit born in Kent: but Plunkett dismissed him as ‘very unintellectual & not very intelligent.’196 To provide Ireland, at that time, with what was effectively a military governor was yet another public relations disaster by the supposedly sure-footed Lloyd George. Haldane, a close friend of French, wrote to him to assert the impossibility of imposing conscription, and warned him: ‘Remember that coercion has never succeeded and never will succeed in Ireland.’197 Midleton, visiting French shortly after he took up his post and after the new Lord Lieutenant – or Viceroy, as he preferred to be known – had survived an assassination attempt, noted that ‘the conditions under which he had taken office made his task quite impossible.’198

  Having discussed the issue with the prime minister, Scott thought he knew what drove the policy. He told Dillon:

  You have to bear in mind (i) his love of and exaggerated belief in the value of force; (ii) his eagerness for more men – conscription would at least give him four or five Divisions from Ulster; (iii) his conviction that only by imposing conscription can he carry his Government for Home Rule; (iv) his belief that the Home Rule movement in Ireland has developed, or is developing, into a definitely Separatist movement, and that the question of the control of the Imperial Parliament of the armed forces of the Crown (which includes the raising as well as the use of them) is the touchstone of this.199

  None of this prevented Scott writing in a leader on 11 May that Lloyd George was on the verge of doing ‘some very evil work’ and would destroy every advance made in Ireland since Gladstone’s day.200

  French, acting as a quasi-military viceroy, aggravated matters by arresting around 150 prominent Sinn Féin activists on the night of 16–17 May, on the grounds of collaboration with the Germans. The ringleaders, including de Valera, were deported to England. Days passed, with the promised ‘evidence’ of collusion failing to appear; eventually an account of the enemy’s role in the Easter Rising was published, which hardly justified arrests in May 1918. There was, however, a statement by de Valera, in January 1918, that ‘so long as Germany is the enemy of England, and England the enemy of Ireland, so long will Ireland be the friend of Germany.’201 The statement asserted that it had been planned for the Germans to land arms in Ireland, and that documents had been found on de Valera describing ‘in great detail’ the constitution of his rebel army: and it was claimed there had been activity by U-boats off the west of Ireland that were not seeking to sink merchant shipping.

  With the government under increasing pressure to explain its heavy-handed approach, Curzon was eventually brought in to stoke up the rhetoric. In June he told the Lords that Sinn Féin had planned to commit ‘treason’.202 There had been well-documented cases of Sinn Féiners stealing weapons – breaking into houses where guns were kept, attacking policemen for their rifles or sidearms, and stealing explosives from quarries – but this pointed to a further attempt at an uprising, not to a German plot. Yet when asked whether the government intended to put the deportees on trial, Curzon said that that would reveal to the enemy the means by which they and their conspiracy had been discovered. They were interned: evidence beyond assertion remained largely non-existent. As with conscription – the imposition of which would have been even more explosive – the government knew that to start trying Sinn Féiners for treason would be lethally provocative. The aim of the arrests seems to have been to discredit Sinn Féin; it only achieved further strife, but by then i
t was too late to dampen the rise of republicanism.

  French had managed to arrest some of the more moderate members of the movement. This allowed Michael Collins (a member of Sinn Féin’s executive, a veteran of the Rising and the Frongoch internment camp, and a London-trained lawyer) and Cathal Brugha (second-in-command of the South Dublin Union during the Rising) to use their freedom to expand their influence in the organisation; they both escaped the authorities’ clutches. Lloyd George charged Chamberlain to manage the Irish question. With Sinn Féin still winning by-elections, it was not easy.

  The prime minister, as so often, was longer on words than on action, and had to back down from his threats once he saw not just the size of the opposition, but realised he would be opening up another front in the war. Rather than conscription, a version of the Derby scheme was introduced in Ireland on 15 May, enabling men to attest their willingness to serve. Dillon led his party out of the Commons for three months in disgust at the passage of the Act. The Order in Council required to trigger Irish conscription was never issued. Esher admitted: ‘I am worried about this Home Rule business. It is a difficult moment in which to set about re-casting a Constitution. The worst of LG is that he does not prepare alternatives – a Torres Vedras. His agility has served him too well.’203 A committee chaired by Long on Home Rule reported on 19 June to the War Cabinet, but was unable to improve on the compromises suggested in the summer of 1914. The War Cabinet agreed to drop the matter; no conscription, and no Home Rule. French was given little direction on what to do, except to hold the line: which, until the general election six months later, he did. Meanwhile, as the Marquess of Londonderry said in the Lords on 20 June, ‘it is the British Government who have permitted Sinn Féin.’204