The 20th-century crisis

Disillusioned by the defeats of the 1886 and 1893 Home Rule bills, the Liberals ignored the demand for Home Rule when they won an overall majority in the 1906 election. But Ireland came to the top of the political agenda when two elections in 1910, caused by a constitutional crisis regarding the powers of the House of Lords, made the Liberal government of H.H. Asquith dependent on the Home Rule Party for its parliamentary majority. The reduction of the power of the Lords by the Parliament Act of 1911 seemed to promise that the third Home Rule bill, introduced in 1912, would come into force by the summer of 1914. But, in the meantime, the Irish unionists, under their charismatic leader, Edward Carson, had mounted an effective extraparliamentary campaign backed by Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party. Thousands of Ulstermen signed the Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule (1912), and in January 1913 the Ulster unionists established a paramilitary army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), to coordinate armed resistance. In September 1913 Carson announced that a provisional government of Ulster would be established in the event of Home Rule’s coming into effect. After at first seeking to reject Home Rule for all of Ireland, the unionists gradually fell back on a demand for Ulster (where unionists were predominant) to be excluded from its scope. Redmond’s claim that there was “no Ulster question” and Asquith’s public, albeit disingenuous, refusal to contemplate Ulster’s exclusion from the terms of the bill hardened the Protestant and unionist resistance in the areas around Belfast. Of the nine Ulster counties, Down, Antrim, Armagh, and Derry (Londonderry) had unionist majorities; Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan had strong Home Rule majorities; and Tyrone and Fermanagh had small Home Rule majorities. The boasts of the 90,000-strong UVF that it enjoyed active sympathy in the British army became plausible when the officers in the cavalry brigade at The Curragh suddenly announced in March 1914 that they would resign if ordered to move against the UVF. Meanwhile, a nationalist force, the Irish Volunteers, had been launched in Dublin in November 1913 to counter the UVF. Both forces gathered arms, and Ireland seemed close to civil war when World War I broke out. Assured of Redmond’s support in recruiting for the army, Asquith enacted the third Home Rule Bill but accompanied it with a Suspensory Act, postponing its implementation until the return of peace.

World War I restored bipartisanship on Irish policy, as all differences between the Liberals and Conservatives were subordinated to the goal of defeating Germany. Coalition governments—first under Asquith in 1915–16 and from 1916–22 under David Lloyd George—destroyed the leverage exerted by the Home Rule party’s control of the balance of power in the Commons since 1910. Initial enthusiasm for the war and Redmond’s popularity in the wake of Home Rule’s enactment prompted a large majority—some 150,000 “National Volunteers,” as opposed to fewer than 10,000 antiwar “Irish Volunteers” (who were secretly manipulated by the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood)—to endorse Redmond’s support for the war. But the longer the war dragged on, the more the revolutionary element gained support from those alienated by Redmond’s pro-British attitude. Before the end of 1914 the Irish Republican Brotherhood made full plans for a revolutionary outbreak. When the rising took place, on Easter Monday 1916, only about 1,000 men and women were actually engaged. A provisional Irish government was proclaimed. The General Post Office and other parts of Dublin were seized; street fighting continued for about a week until Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, and other republican leaders were forced to surrender. Their subsequent execution inflamed nationalist opinion and, compounded by the threat that conscription would be introduced in Ireland, led to the defeat and virtual extinction of Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party in the general election of December 1918. Their successful opponents, calling themselves Sinn Féin and supporting the republican program announced in 1916, were led by Eamon de Valera, a surviving leader of the Easter Rising, who campaigned for Irish independence in the United States as “president of the Irish Republic.” The republicans refused to take their seats in the Westminster Parliament but instead set up their provisional government, elected by the Irish members of Parliament at a meeting in Dublin called Dáil Éireann (“Irish Assembly),” which sought to provide an alternative to British administration and which first met on January 21, 1919. Simultaneously, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was organized to resist British administration and to secure recognition for the government of the Irish republic. There followed a guerrilla war: the Anglo-Irish War, also known as the Irish War of Independence. The IRA launched widespread ambushes and attacks on police barracks, while British forces retaliated with ruthless reprisals. A large proportion of the Irish police resigned and were replaced by British recruits, who became known as Black and Tans for their temporary uniforms of dark tunics and khaki trousers.

The 1918 election had made Lloyd George’s government dependent on the Conservatives for its majority in the Commons and, when the Home Rule legislation of 1914 was disinterred, this ensured separate treatment for Ulster. The Government of Ireland Act (1920) split Ireland into two self-governing areas, both with devolved powers approximating to Home Rule. Northern Ireland consisted of six counties (Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, Fermanagh, and Tyrone), the largest number in which the Ulster Unionists were assured of a permanent majority. Southern Ireland consisted of the remaining 26 counties, including the three Ulster counties with clear nationalist-Catholic majorities (Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan). Sinn Féin rejected the act as incompatible with its republican aspirations, and it never came into force in “Southern Ireland.” But Sinn Féin could do nothing to resist partition, which became a reality with the first meetings of the government and parliament of Northern Ireland in Belfast in June 1921.

A truce in July 1921 ended the Irish War of Independence and initiated exchanges between Lloyd George and de Valera, which were protracted because neither side would admit the other’s legality. But negotiations in London, which began in October, culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed on December 6, 1921, on behalf of the United Kingdom by Lloyd George and leading members of his cabinet and on behalf of Ireland by Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and other members of the republican cabinet.