OPINION:ON APRIL 11th, 1912 – 100 years ago – the Third Home Rule Bill was presented, for the first time, to the House of Commons. Under it, a united Ireland of 32 counties would have enjoyed a devolution of legislation and administration, but without control over foreign and military affairs and customs duties. The exclusion of Ulster counties was to be purely temporary.
In an editorial marking the centenary on Wednesday last, The Irish Times said it was a “moment of triumph” for John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. But it went on to condemn his “disastrous miscalculation” in asking, three years later, for Irish men to join the army to combat German aggression against neutral Belgium, and claimed that “a generation of young Irishmen paid a terrible price” for this.
I believe The Irish Times underestimates what Redmond achieved, and overstates his responsibility for the Irish casualties in the Great War.
His achievement was enormous. Relying on wholly constitutional and parliamentary methods, Redmond succeeded where O’Connell, Butt and Parnell had all failed. He actually got Home Rule onto the statute book on September 18th, 1914. He did this in face of vetoes by the House of Lords, threats of mutiny within the military and of physical violence by the Ulster Volunteers.
The Bill became law a month after the war had broken out with imperial Germany. When the war first broke out in August, the Asquith-led Liberal government wanted to postpone the Home Rule Bill, which was still strongly opposed by the Conservative Party, as part of a wartime political truce.
But Redmond insisted. He got his way. The law was passed and assented to by the king, but its operation was suspended for 12 months, or until the end of the war, whichever was to come later. This postponement seemed reasonable in the circumstances. It allowed the energies of all concerned to be concentrated on winning what was expected to be a short war.
It was as a direct response to the success of his tactic in forcing the Liberal government to put Home Rule on the statute book that, just two days later, on September 20th, 1914, Redmond called on members of the Irish Volunteers to freely join the army to fight to defend France and Belgium.
It is hard to argue that Redmond was wrong to take sides in a war to defend the territorial integrity of a small neutral nation, like Belgium. We make so much of our own neutrality today. But one cannot say our own neutrality is important and other people’s neutrality does not matter.
Redmond’s position was more enlightened than that of the republicans of Easter Week 1916, who explicitly invoked, in their proclamation, their “gallant allies” in Europe. These allies were imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Ottoman empire. The morality of this alliance has yet to be seriously questioned, but it should be.
Leaving morality aside, was Redmond tactically foolish to call for Irish men to join the army in September 1914? This question has to be judged by what Redmond was trying to achieve at the time. He was trying to persuade Ulster unionists to voluntarily come in under a Home Rule government in Dublin.
All the concessions he made were to achieve that goal, free acceptance of Home Rule by unionists, or “unity by consent”.
He believed that one way of making Ulster unionists see Irish nationalists in a different light would be if they stood shoulder to shoulder in a common endeavour to defend a cause in which both believed. He knew he was taking a risk. But it was a calculated one, in an attempt to achieve unity by consent.
Given that all subsequent attempts, including terror, international propaganda, boycotting Northern goods, and even demanding British coercion of unionists, failed to achieve voluntary (or any other kind of) unity, one should be slow to criticise what Redmond attempted in September 1914, unless one has, or had, a better plan.
Of course, if a united Ireland by consent was never a serious goal, was just a necessary piety, and if maximum separation of just 26 or 28 counties from Britain was the real goal, one could take a different view. But that was not Redmond’s position.
One might accuse Redmond of making a miscalculation because he did not foresee that the war would go on so long, that there would be so many casualties, and that it would bring down the Liberal government, whose dependence on Irish Party parliamentary support after the 1910 election had made Home Rule possible.
At the time most people, including most military experts, expected that this war, like most of the wars of the 19th century, would be over within a year or so. Unfortunately they were all wrong.
It is excessive to blame Redmond’s speech for the terrible price that was paid in the trenches, because large numbers of Irish men would have joined up anyway, whatever Redmond said. The only way Redmond could have affected the issue would have been if he had campaigned for Irish men not to join up.
But if he had done that, he would have been saying goodbye to Irish unity, and would have run the risk that the Home Rule Act he had worked so hard to pass would have been repealed, on the ground that Home Rule, in those circumstances, would have been a threat to British security.
Redmond was a realist. Unfortunately some of his successors were not.
John Bruton is a former taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael