Home Rule Crisis
The Home Rule Crisis was a political and military crisis in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland that followed the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in 1912.
Background
The separate kingdoms of
Struggle for Home Rule
In the 1870s, the
As early as 1893, plans were floated to raise 2,000–4,000 men, to drill as soldiers in Ulster. Many Ulster Unionists interpreted the southern and western violence directed against land grievances as pro-Home Rule (and thus believed Home Rule was appeasement of this violence), and resolved to defy the government militarily.[2]
The Parliament Act
In 1909, a crisis erupted between the House of Lords and the Commons, each of which accused the other of breaking historic conventions. Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, hoping to clear the way for an onslaught on the Lords' veto on legislation, framed his budget so the Lords were likely to reject it. After the Lords, hoping to force a general election, rejected the Finance Bill in November 1909, the Commons accused the Lords of breaking the convention of not rejecting a budget, and the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith appealed to the country.[3]
The January 1910 General Election left the Liberals and Conservatives equally matched, with John Redmond's Irish Nationalists holding the balance of power in the House of Commons. The price of their support to pass the budget through the Commons (the Lords allowed it to pass, as it now had an electoral mandate) was a measure to curb the power of the House of Lords, the last obstacle to Home Rule. After the Lords rejected that measure, a second general election in December 1910 left the House of Commons arithmetic barely changed. If the Liberals were to defeat the House of Lords, they would need to keep the support of the Irish Party with a Home Rule Bill.
With the promise of co-operation from both the late king,
Although hints about Home Rule had appeared in ministers' speeches throughout 1910, Asquith only admitted that he intended to present a Home Rule Bill late in the December 1910 campaign, when over 500 seats had already finished voting, leading to complaints that the British public had not given that issue a mandate.[3]
Third Home Rule Bill
On 11 April 1912, the Prime Minister introduced the Third Home Rule Bill which would grant Ireland self-government.[5]
Unionist opposition
In
By 1912 Protestant influence remained strong in Ulster, based not on farmland but on new industries that had been developed after 1800. Many Protestants in Ulster were Presbyterians, who had also been excluded from power before 1801, but now wanted to maintain the link with Britain. Further, Belfast had grown from 7,000 people in 1800 to 400,000 by 1900, and was then the largest city in Ireland. This growth had depended largely on trade within the British Empire, and it seemed that the proposed Dublin-based parliament elected by a largely rural country would have different economic priorities to those of Belfast and its industrial hinterland. The argument developed that 'Ulster' deserved separate treatment from the rest of Ireland, and that its majority was socially and economically closer to the rest of Britain. Unionists declared that the Irish economy had prospered during the Union, but with Ulster doing better than the rest of Ireland. The Protestants of Ulster had done well with their industries, particularly linen and shipbuilding. They feared a Dublin parliament run by farmers would hamper their prosperity by imposing barriers on trade with Britain.[6] At the time Cork city was also a centre of textiles, heavy industry and shipbuilding on the Island of Ireland at that time.[7] but was largely inhabited by Irish Nationalists who were willing to risk relative economic decline in exchange for the fulfilment of their political aspirations. In addition to economic factors Irish Unionists feared that they would suffer discrimination as a religious minority in a Catholic dominated Home Rule Ireland, taking up radical Quaker MP John Bright's slogan "Home Rule is Rome Rule". They were also concerned that Home Rule would be the first step in an eventual total separation of Ireland and Britain and that this was implicit threat to their cultural identity as being both British and Irish, Irish Nationalism drawing inherent distinction between the two.[8][9][10]
Ulster crisis unfolds
All the arguments for and against
Unionists continued to demand that Ulster be excluded, the solution of
Represented mainly by the
The Nationalists in turn raised the
The economic arguments for and against Home Rule were hotly debated. The case in favour was put by Erskine Childers' The Framework of Home Rule (1911)
The shaping of Partition
Even before the Bill became law, questions arose about proposals to exclude Ulster from the Act.
It now appears that in late May Asquith sought any solution that would avoid, or at least postpone, an Irish civil war. He had not been frank about the new temporary-partition possibility, leaving everyone wondering what, exactly, they were voting for in the main Bill, when it might be seriously altered by the as-yet-unseen Amending Bill that was to be launched in the House of Lords.
Sir Edward Carson and the
recommendation, supported the government's Amending Bill in the Lords on 8 July 1914 for the "temporary exclusion of Ulster" from the workings of the future Act, but the number of counties (four, six or nine) and whether exclusion was to be temporary or permanent, all still to be negotiated.The compromise proposed by Asquith was straightforward. Six counties of the northeast of Ireland (roughly two-thirds of Ulster), where there was arguably or definitely a Protestant majority, were to be excluded "temporarily" from the territory of the new Irish parliament and government, and to continue to be governed as before from Westminster and Whitehall. How temporary the exclusion would be, and whether northeastern Ireland would eventually be governed by the Irish parliament and government, remained an issue of some controversy.
Redmond fought tenaciously against the idea of partition, but conceded only after Carson had forced through an Amending Bill which would have granted limited local autonomy to Ulster within an all-Ireland settlement. The British government in effect accepted no immediate responsibility for the political and religious antagonisms which in the end led to the partition of Ireland, regarding it as clearly an otherwise unresolvable internal Irish problem. To them, the Nationalists had led the way towards Home Rule from the 1880s without trying hard enough to understand Unionist apprehensions, and were instead relying on their mathematical majority of electors. In the background, the more advanced nationalist views of ideologues such as D. P. Moran had nothing to offer the Unionists.
The passing of the Bill
With the outbreak of
Unionists were in disarray, wounded by the enactment of Home Rule. and by the absence of any definite arrangement for the exclusion of Ulster.[31] The Unionist opposition in Parliament claimed that this manoeuvre by Asquith was a breach of the political truce agreed on at the start of the war.[citation needed] However, with the Home Rule Bill effectively put into limbo, and the arguments surrounding it still capable of being resurrected before home rule was actually to come into operation, Unionist politicians soon left the issue aside in the face of more pressing war concerns.[citation needed]
Nationalists, in the belief that independent self-government had finally been granted, celebrated the news with bonfires alighting the hill-tops across the south of Ireland. But as the Act had been suspended for the duration of what was expected to be a short war, this decision was to prove crucial to the subsequent course of events.
Aftermath
The outbreak of the war, and
On the outbreak of war, however, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) began planning an insurrection.[34] The Easter Rising took place in April 1916.[35] As a result of the Rising, and the executions and mass imprisonment that followed it, the Irish people became disillusioned with the nationalist Home Rulers. This became apparent in the North Roscommon by-election of February 1917, when Count Plunkett, father of the executed 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett, defeated the Irish Party candidate in what had hitherto been a safe seat.[36] The Conscription Crisis of 1918 further galvanised support for political separatism. A month after the end of the war, the Irish party was routed by Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, leading to the establishment of the First Dáil and the Declaration of Independence.[37]
The Government of Ireland Act 1920 partitioned Ireland, setting up separate Home Rule Parliaments in Dublin and in Northern Ireland.[38] The Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the Irish War of Independence, led to the creation of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922.[39] In reference to the achievement of a separate status of Ulster, Winston Churchill commented: "...if Ulster had confined herself simply to constitutional agitation, it is extremely improbable that she would have escaped inclusion in a Dublin Parliament."[40]
Notes
- ISBN 0-571-08066-9
- ^ Jeffery 2006, p111-13
- ^ a b Stewart, A. T. Q.: p.24
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q.: p.25
- ^ Hansard online, start of the debate 11 April 1912; accessed 20 January 2009
- ISBN 1-84536-040-0
- ^ https://archive.org/details/corkitstradecomm00corkrich |pg168
- ^ The Ulster Crisis: Resistance to Home Rule by A. T. Q. Stewart
- ^ Carson; a biography by Geoffrey Lewis
- ^ Not an inch: a study of Northern Ireland and Lord Craigavon by Hugh Shearman
- ^ Hansard speeches "Settlement of an old controversy"; accessed 20 January 2009
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q., pp.58–68
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q., Ch.18 "The Kaiser's Ulster Friends" p.226
- ISBN 1-84536-040-0
- ^ Collins, M. E., p.28
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q.: Ch.6 "An Army with Banners" pp.69–78
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q., p.44
- ISBN 0-7538-1767-5
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q., p. 82
- ISBN 978-0-14-101216-2
- ^ Collins, M. E., pp. 32–33
- ^ Erskine, Childers (1911). The Framework of Home Rule. Edward Arnold. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
- ^ Home Rule Finance text online
- ^ Hansard; Question put on 21 May 1914; accessed 20 January 2009
- ISBN 978-1-78117-245-2
- ^ Jackson, Alvin, p. 159
- ^ Jackson, Alvin, pp.161–163
- ^ a b Jackson, Alvin: p.164
- ISBN 0-415-17420-1
- ^ Eventually Home Rule was considered by the Irish Convention in 1917–18, and by the cabinet from September 1919; the Welsh Church Act was delayed until March 1920.
- ^ Jackson, Alvin, p. 166
- ^ Tim Pat Coogan, Ireland in the 20th Century, Random House, 2009, p. 40
- ^ Coogan (2009), pp. 44–45
- ^ Coogan (2009), p. 45
- ^ Coogan (2009), pp. 53–59
- ^ James F. Lydon, The Making of Ireland: From Ancient Times to the Present, Routledge, 1998, p. 343
- ^ Lydon (1998), pp. 344–45
- ^ John Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 257.
- ^ Lydon (1998), p. 355
- ^ Bromage, Mary (1964), Churchill and Ireland, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IL, pg 63., Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-20844
Further reading
- Doherty, Gabriel (Ed.): The Home Rule Crisis 1912-14 , [Seventeen] Cork Studies in the Irish Revolution, Mercier Press Cork, (2014), ISBN 978-1-78117-245-2
- Hennessey, Thomas: Dividing Ireland, World War 1 and Partition, (1998), ISBN 0-415-17420-1.
- Jackson, Alvin: HOME RULE, an Irish History 1800–2000, (2003), ISBN 0-7538-1767-5.
- Jeffery, Keith: Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier, Oxford University Press, (2006), ISBN 978-0-19-820358-2
- Lewis, Geoffrey: Carson, the Man who divided Ireland, (2005), ISBN 1-85285-454-5
- Lee, JJ: Ireland 1912–1985, Cambridge University Press (1989), ISBN 0-521-37741-2
- Rodner, W. S.: Leaguers, Covenanters, Moderates: British Support for Ulster, 1913–14 pages 68–85 from Éire—Ireland, Volume 17, Issue #3, (1982)
- Stewart, A.T.Q.: The Ulster Crisis, Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–14, Faber and Faber, London, (1967, 1979), ISBN 0-571-08066-9
- "Home Rule Finance" Arthur Samuels KC (1912) Text online at Archive.org
- Erskine Childers; The Framework of Home Rule. Text online at Gutenberg.org