Sinn Fein: An Illumination

by P. S. O'Hegarty

SINN FEIN

The promoters of the Volunteer movement had not contemplated insurrection, nor had they identified themselves with any extreme or physical force policy. They were not committed to Separation, to Sinn Fein, or to Parliamentarianism, but to the defence of Irish rights, and to the obtaining of arms and ammunition for that purpose. Each of them had his own idea of what exactly the movement stood for, as had the rank and file, but all were content to sink differences and subscribe to the simple formula of defending Irish rights, which embraced them all and embraced all their policies. Upon that basis they carried Ireland with them, united, despite political machines and jealousies, for the first time for generations.

The outbreak of war however changed that, and made it imperative on every section to reconsider the position, and to revise policy. The Parliamentarians and the Fenians were the first to make up their minds, the one to work for an insurrection and the other not alone to suspend Ireland’s claims but actively to support England. The resultant split left Mr. Redmond with an imposing organisation, on paper, but left only one genuine body of Nationalist Volunteers in Ireland—the original Irish Volunteers. But its membership was now reduced to the extreme men—using the term to denote every school of Nationalist thought which went beyond Parliamentarianism. And that inevitably ensured the controlling influence to the Fenians, the only men who were out with a definite policy. The campaign which, immediately after the expulsion of Mr. Redmond and his followers, was carried on against the Volunteers by the united forces of the Government and of the Parliamentary Party hardened them and inclined the whole body towards the policy on which the Fenians were building, and although there were to the end two sections in the Volunteers, one which wanted an insurrection and one which only contemplated it in the event of Partition or Conscription and desired to keep the organisation intact with a view to its weight being used in any post-bellum attempt at settlement, yet the temper of the whole body was such that the Fenian element dominated it for all practical purposes. The self-denying ordinance under which they had at the beginning refrained from being prominently identified with the movement had no further justification, and they controlled the Executive, as representing the majority opinion of the organisation. The result we know.

When the Volunteers expelled Mr. Redmond’s nominees it was considered good tactics by the Parliamentarian press to dub the original Irish Volunteers the “Sinn Fein” Volunteers, the Party having judged that Sinn Fein as a policy was beyond the possibility of resurrection: and in course of time the name “Sinn Feiner” came to be used where up to that time “Factionist” had been the favourite term. When the insurrection occurred it was promptly labelled a “Sinn Fein” insurrection, and the papers were full of stories about the “Sinn Fein” colours, stamps, commandoes, and desperadoes. All this with the object of discrediting the insurrection, the name “Sinn Fein” not being in good odour in the country. Thus Sinn Fein, from being politics, and discredited politics, suddenly became history. And at the same time the Unionists made their contribution to its rehabilitation.

The “Irish Times” is the organ of the governing classes in Ireland and the organ in Ireland of the Unionist Party of England. On the 1st May, 1916, its first appearance after the insurrection, it wrote: “All the elements of disaffection have shown their hand. The State has struck, but its work is not yet finished. The surgeon’s knife has been put to the corruption in the body of Ireland, and its course must not be stayed until the whole malignant growth has been removed. In the verdict of history weakness to-day would be even more criminal than the indifference of the last few months. Sedition must be rooted out of Ireland once for all. The rapine and bloodshed of the past week must be finished with a severity which will make any repetition of them impossible for many generations to come.” How strangely fatuous that reads now! And on May 2 the Dublin correspondent of “The Times,” who is the editor of the “Irish Times,” wrote: “There are a few persons, not now prisoners of the law, about whose fate the public is beginning to be curious. They are men who until the moment of the insurrection were closely identified with the extreme propaganda of Sinn Fein, who encouraged the movement, made violent speeches, wrote violently in newspapers, but at the last moment did not come out with uniforms and guns. At least half a dozen such men are notorious.” The men referred to were Mr. Arthur Griffith and other leaders of the old Sinn Fein Movement. These counsels of the “Irish Times” and of the London “Times” were adopted by the Government, the first executions taking place on May 3rd, and being followed by the arrest and deportation of everybody who had ever been connected either with the Volunteers or the old Sinn Fein Movement, so that many moribund branches of Sinn Fein found themselves together again—in Richmond Barracks, or in a deportation prison.

Now as a matter of actual fact Sinn Fein had nothing to do with the insurrection, which was, as even the Hardinge Commission evidence shows, a Fenian insurrection. Of the seven men who signed the republican proclamation only one was in any sense a Sinn Feiner—Sean Mac Diarmada—and most of the others would have objected very strongly to being identified with Sinn Fein. Of the Sinn Fein leaders proper, most were not out in the insurrection at all, nor were they, apparently, in the counsels of the men who directed it. Facts, however, stand no chance in modern times against journalism, and the Volunteers and the Insurrection were duly labelled “Sinn Fein”; and when public opinion swung over and that opinion coalesced in a new and formidable movement, the name which had been known as a reproach was taken up as a battle-cry, while the policy of deporting the old Sinn Fein leaders merely rehabilitated them in the public eye for their failure to be “out,” and gave them the moulding of the policy of the new movement. It, in fact, provided what was an emotional impulse with a policy ready-made and adaptable to the new conditions, a policy moreover which had already brains behind it.

The policy of Sinn Fein to-day is the old Sinn Fein policy, outlined in Chapter IV, with two alterations. In the first place it is based frankly on separation, with no mention of the Constitution of 1782; and in the second place its immediate objective is the Peace Conference. Mr. Griffith believes intensely, and he has carried the movement with him, that it is possible to get the case of Ireland taken out of England’s hands altogether as an international question. But whether that view be correct or not is immaterial, for Sinn Fein, in working for the Peace Conference, does not drop any portion of its constructive policy, and its main reliance is upon the Sinn Fein policy proper. The Peace Conference is, as it were, a temporary weapon forged by circumstances, which will be available, if at all, during a limited period, and which it would be folly to neglect; but the Sinn Fein policy is the permanent weapon and the main reliance of the movement.

Sinn Fein represents at present a combination of forces. It represents the old Sinn Fein Movement, Fenianism, and the whole public opinion which has swung round from the Parliamentarian policy to the policy of no compromise. There are many sections in it, separated on minor points but agreed on the main point, that Ireland must work out her own salvation, and that so long as she concentrates within herself she is impregnable. It represents the culmination of the cumulative efforts of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League, the Sinn Fein Movement of 1905, and the Irish Volunteers. These were all manifestations of the national perception of loss of the essentials of nationality, and cumulatively they represent the evolution of a national philosophy rather than a political portent.

More than a year ago Mr. Lloyd George, speaking at Westminster and referring to Sinn Fein, said: “The point is that there is a demand for sovereign independence for Ireland. It has never been claimed by my honourable friends bellow the gangway. They have always sincerely accepted the complete supremacy of the Imperial Parliament and membership of the British Empire.” It is precisely because the Irish people as a whole have come to realise that that they have swung over to Sinn Fein. The whole strength of the Parliamentarian Movement lay in the Separatist spirit, and its continued hold on the country depended upon its success in retaining the confidence of the country that it stood, ultimately, for independence. There has never been in Ireland a constitutional, or quasi-constitutional, movement which was not founded in Fenianism, impregnated with Fenianism, and propagated with Fenianism, save the movement under Mr. Butt and Mr. Shaw, which never held the Irish people. If the Parliamentarian speeches are examined, they will be found until quite recently to be full of Tone, and Emmet, and Fitzgerald, appeals not to any material or “reasonable” or “practical” spirit, but to national tradition. If their speeches in Westminster were on the whole more moderate than their speeches at home, allowance was always made for the fact that they were only playing a game of tactics. And so long as their home voice drowned their Westminster voice they retained the trust of the people. But when events convinced the people that their Westminster voice had finally and definitely conquered the home voice, when they realised that what they had taken for a Nationalist in disguise was really an Imperialist, then they dropped the Parliamentarians as they will always drop any Party which compromises the fundamental right of the Irish Nation to independence.

What really happened when the mass of the Irish people swung over to Sinn Fein was not that from being constitutional they suddenly became revolutionary, but that the historic Irish Nation shook itself clear of the after effects of the eighteenth century and ousted the conception of an Ireland deriving its constitutional authority from English decrees. There have been in Ireland two traditions: one, that of the ancient historic Irish Nation, with its separate language, culture, history, and mentality, and the other, dating from the creation in the eighteenth century of an artificial State based upon the subjection of the historic Irish Nation, having its origin in the English invasion of Ireland, deriving its authority from the decrees of English kings, and accepting the status of an English colony, with no rights not subject to withdrawal by the English Parliament. Events forced the resurgent Irish Nation unconsciously to base itself after 1829 on the artificial garrison tradition, which weakened its own separate tradition and would eventually have eliminated it altogether. But when in 1893 it rediscovered its separate language it set up a mental revolution which grew until it had involved every national activity in Ireland and which finally re-awakened the historic Irish Nation and overthrew the garrison tradition.

Whatever, therefore, may happen to Sinn Fein as a movement, the future is with the spirit of it, with the historic Irish Nation of which it is the expression. For the first time since Hugh O’Neill signed the Treaty of Mellifont that Nation has become passionately and definitely articulate. And not all the world can put the garrison tradition into the saddle again.