The Evolution of Sinn Fein

by Robert Mitchell Henry

This was noble and chivalrous language and it loses none of its force when one recollects that many of the platforms in Ulster were ringing at the time with denunciations of “our hereditary enemies” and with references to Irish Catholics as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” “the men whom we hate and despise.”

But in spite of the fact that the leaders of the Irish Volunteers wished to preserve, and largely succeeded in preserving, a non-provocative attitude towards the Ulstermen, the governing facts of the situation could hardly be ignored completely. Phrases used at meetings for the enrolment of Irish Volunteers appreciative of the spirit of Ulster were strongly resented by many Nationalists who saw in the Ulster Volunteers a menace not to the English exploitation of Ireland but to the national hopes. And even the leading spirits in the movement could not conceal the fact that the Ulster Volunteers, whatever they might prove to be in the future, were certainly a present obstacle to the attainment of Home Rule, which, little regarded by Sinn Fein and the Republicans as a final settlement, was undoubtedly the only approach to a settlement that could be looked for in the near future. The blame of this it was sought to throw on the English Tory Party. “A use has been made,” said Professor MacNeill, “and is daily made, of the Ulster Volunteer movement, that leaves the whole body of Irishmen no choice but to take a firm stand in defence of their liberties. The leaders of the Unionist Party in Great Britain and the journalists, public speakers and election agents of that party are employing the threat of armed force to control the course of political elections and to compel, if they can, a change of Government in England with the declared object of deciding what all parties admit to be vital political issues concerning Ireland. They claim that this line of action has been successful in recent parliamentary elections and that they calculate by it to obtain further successes, and at the most moderate estimate to force upon this country some diminished and mutilated form of National Self-Government. This is not merely to deny our rights as a nation. If we are to have our concerns regulated by a majority of British representatives owing their position and powers to a display of armed force, no matter from what quarter that force is derived, it is plain to every man that even the modicum of civil rights left to us by the Union is taken from us, our franchise becomes a mockery and we ourselves become the most degraded nation in Europe. This insolent menace does not satisfy the hereditary enemies of our National Freedom. Within the past few days a political manifesto has been issued, signed most fittingly by a Castlereagh and a Beresford, calling for British Volunteers and for money to arm and equip them to be sent into Ireland to triumph over the Irish people and to complete their disfranchisement and enslavement.”

All this was true, but it was only half the truth. It was true that the Tory Party was making use of the threat of armed force; but the threat had been made before the Tory Party could make use of it, and it had been made by a body of armed Irishmen. But the followers were, as often happens, less virulent than their leaders; and months after this the sight might have been witnessed in Belfast of Ulster Volunteers and Irish Volunteers using the same drill ground through the good offices of a tolerant Ulsterman: and though the Ulster Volunteers were prepared undoubtedly to fight for their privileges, some of the most vicious appeals to their passions and their prejudices came from men who were not of the Ulster, not even of the Irish, blood. Right through their tragic and tempestuous career the Irish Volunteers in spite of countless difficulties and provocations continued their attitude of punctilious courtesy to the Ulster force. When the Ulstermen succeeded in their great coup of running a cargo of rifles from Hamburg to Larne the Irish Volunteer congratulated them heartily and warmly. Their attitude towards their fellow-countrymen was deeply regretted, but for what they had done to assert the freedom of Irishmen from English dictation they were accorded generous praise. The spirit of the leaders in this matter permeated the force. The head of the Irish Volunteers in Tralee wrote at a time when threats of suppressing the Ulstermen with the help of the army were made: “To my mind the Volunteers should prevent if possible and by force the English soldiers attacking the Ulster rebels. Say to the English soldiers and to the English Government, ‘This is our soil and the Ulster rebels are our countrymen; fire on them and you fire on us.’... Ulster is not our real enemy, though ... Ulster thinks we are her enemy. Time will prove who are Ulster’s friends and ours.”

But the history of the Irish Volunteers, though indispensable for the understanding of the development of Sinn Fein is not the history of Sinn Fein. Individual Sinn Feiners were prominent in the movement and brought into it the spirit of national unity and disregard of the differences of creed which kept Irishmen divided: but the Sinn Fein organization remained distinct, praising, warning and criticizing the new movement and the tactics of its leaders. It pointed out at once that for the Volunteers to combine and to drill was not enough: they must have rifles and rifle ranges, and urged that the provision of them should be seen to without delay. But though it wished the Volunteers to be equipped as effectively and as quickly as possible it still regarded an armed force of Irishmen as inadequate to the task of winning Irish freedom. “To help the Volunteer movement,” said Sinn Fein, “is a national duty: they may not defeat England, but the movement will help to make Ireland self-reliant.” And Sinn Fein was emphatic in urging the dangers of a sectional policy, of any attempt to narrow the basis upon which the new force was to be built up. “It is better,” ran a leader on the subject, “at the beginning of the National Volunteer movement there should be frank speaking and frank understanding. If it were designed to be a movement confined to or controlled by any one Nationalist section we would not write a word in its support. It would fail badly.... It is quite true that we must work through public opinion in the circumstances of Ireland rather than through force of arms, but it is a poor thinker who does not realize that the public opinion which lacks the confidence, the calmness, the steadiness, the judgment, the resolution and the understanding which a training in arms gives a people is a poor weapon to rely upon in times of crisis.” The Volunteers were in the opinion of Sinn Fein a useful auxiliary in the task of developing the one quality from which alone ultimate success was to be expected, the self-reliance and moral resolution of the Irish people. But αὐτὸς ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος—the mere “sheen of arms” has an attraction superior to all arguments and all policies: and there is little doubt that the superior attractions of the Volunteers proved too strong for many young and ardent Sinn Feiners and induced them to put the means first and the end second. The phrase of Irish Freedom in noticing the inauguration of the Volunteers probably gives the view of most of the younger generation: “In this welcome departure from our endless talk we touch reality at last.”

The Irish Volunteers were not the only militant body which the example of Ulster had formed in Ireland. While the Ulster campaign was in full swing the workers of Dublin had been engaged in a bitter industrial struggle with their employers in which after a prolonged battle victory had somewhat doubtfully declared itself against them. The Labour leader, Jim Larkin, decided to found a Citizen Army for Irish workers. “Labour,” he said in addressing the meeting at which the new force was inaugurated, “in its own defence must begin to train itself to act with disciplined courage and with organized and concentrated force. How could they accomplish this? By taking a leaf out of the book of Carson. If Carson had permission to train his braves of the North to fight against the aspirations of the Irish people, then it was legitimate and fair for Labour to organize in the same militant way to preserve their rights and to ensure that if they were attacked they would be able to give a very satisfactory account of themselves.” He went on to say that the object of the Citizen Army was “that Labour might no longer be defenceless but might be able to utilize that great physical power which it possessed to prevent their elemental rights from being taken from them and to evolve such a system of unified action, self-control and ordered discipline that Labour in Ireland might march in the forefront of all movements for the betterment of the whole people of Ireland.” The Citizen Army thus formed, never very numerous, efficient or enthusiastic, was practically destroyed by the formation of the Irish Volunteers. Most of its members joined the Volunteers, partly because they were the more numerous and popular body, but principally because a national policy had more attraction for them than one which was purely sectional. Captain White, who had trained the first Citizen Army, now urged that it should be reorganized upon a broader basis and in March, 1914, the Citizen Army, which afterwards played such a memorable part, was put upon its final footing. The new constitution was as follows: “That the first and last principle of the Irish Citizen Army is the avowal that the ownership of Ireland, moral and material, is vested of right in the people of Ireland: that the Irish Citizen Army shall stand for the absolute unity of Irish nationhood and shall support the rights and liberties of the democracies of all nations: that one of its objects shall be to sink all differences of birth, property and creed under the common name of the Irish People: that the Citizen Army shall be open to all who accept the principle of equal rights and opportunities for the Irish People.”

It might have seemed that the constitution and principles of the Citizen Army were wide enough and national enough to justify a union or at least a close co-operation with the Irish Volunteers. But at first the two bodies held sternly aloof. The Labour Party had not been invited to send representatives to the meeting at which the Volunteers had been inaugurated, and many of the Volunteer Committee were suspected, rightly or wrongly, of being entirely out of sympathy with Labour ideals and Labour policy. When members of the Labour Party began to flock into the Volunteer ranks their action was the occasion of a bitter controversy in the official Labour organ. The Sinn Fein movement, whose spirit was supposed to preside over the Volunteer organization, had never been on cordial terms with organized Labour, and the members of the Irish Citizen Army were publicly warned to keep clear of these “Girondin politicians, who will simply use the workers as the means towards their own security and comfort.” Nor were the members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and of the United Irish League who belonged to the Volunteer Committee any more to the taste of Labour; they regarded these two bodies as bitter and implacable opponents of their rights. Regarding themselves as the true successors of the Nationalism of Wolfe Tone and John Mitchel, they called upon the Volunteers for an explicit declaration of what was meant by “the rights common to all Irishmen” which they were enrolled to maintain. Did they mean the right to Home Rule, or to the constitution of 1782 or to an Irish Republic? The Volunteers could not have said “Yes” to any one of the three alternatives without driving out members who desired to say “Yes” to one or other of the remaining two. The Volunteers had deliberately left in abeyance controversies which the Labour Army wished to fight out in advance. They, undoubtedly, desired a Republic and meant to say so. When it was announced that the Irish Volunteers would be under the control of the Irish Parliament (when there should be such a body to control them) Labour became more suspicious still; was not the only Irish Parliament even in contemplation to be subordinate to the Parliament of England? The Volunteers seemed to treat the Citizen Army with indifference, if not with contempt: and a bitter antagonism was developed which only common misfortune was able to mitigate.

In all this welter of sharp antagonisms and conflicting policies the only party which walked in the old political ways was the Parliamentary Party. They expected confidently that political conventions would finally be observed or that Parliament would deal effectively with those who tried to break them. It was becoming plain, however, as time went on that the conventions were not going to be regarded and that Parliament was as likely as not to acquiesce in the breach of them. And the Party was not aware of the change that was slowly passing over Ireland. A long tenure of their place among the great personages and amid the high doings of Westminster seemed to have made them somewhat oblivious of the fact that Irish politics are made in Ireland. They did not feel the thrill of chastened pride that shivered gently through Ireland when the quiet places of Ulster echoed to the march of the Ulster Volunteers. They did not know how many Irishmen regarded the action of Ulster not as a menace to the dignity of the Parliament in which the Party sat but as the harbinger of national independence. They underrated (as who then did not?) the influence of Sinn Fein; they regarded the foundation of the Irish Volunteers as the work of “irresponsible young men,” though the “young men” were nearer the heart of Young Ireland: like O’Connell, they “stood for Old Ireland and had some notion that Old Ireland would stand by them.” Ireland, though no one guessed it at the time, was the crucible in which were slowly melting and settling down all the elements that were to go to the making of the future Sinn Fein.

Sinn Fein was at the time to all outward seeming an insignificant and discredited party with an impossible programme. It still published a small weekly paper with no great circulation. It did not agree with the parliamentarians: it had a standing feud with the Labour Party: it gave a dignified and pontifical blessing to the Volunteers without committing itself to their whole programme. Its only electioneering venture, outside municipal politics, had been a disastrous failure: it had won a few seats on the Dublin City Council: it had tried and failed to run a daily paper. When all Nationalist Ireland was waiting for Home Rule it declared Home Rule to be a thing of naught. To the buoyant confidence of the Parliamentary Party it opposed a cynical distrust of their aims and methods, a constant incredulity of their ultimate success. When the Party pointed to what it had done and to what it was about to do Sinn Fein reminded the country that the very existence of a Parliamentary Party was an acknowledgment of the Act of Union. When the Liberal Government was engaged in an embittered and apparently final struggle for supremacy with the Tory Party in the interests of Ireland, Sinn Fein professed entire disbelief in its sincerity; it asserted that the Liberals really loved the Tories very much better than they loved the Irish. With a querulous and monotonous insistence it preached distrust of all English parties and even of the English nation, towards whom it displayed a hostility that seemed almost to amount to a monomania. To Irish Labour this indiscriminating attitude seemed insensate bigotry: to the Irish people as a whole it seemed incomprehensible that a Nationalist Party should regard the Liberals as enemies and the Ulster Volunteers as brothers in arms. Sinn Fein never seemed less certain of a future in Ireland than when events were preparing to make Ireland Sinn Fein.

Early in 1914 Sinn Fein saw in the King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament indications that the Cabinet and the Opposition had arranged “a deal” over Home Rule and foretold an attempt at compromise. The next month the Prime Minister proposed the partition of Ireland between the Unionists and the Nationalists and the Irish Party accepted the proposal as a temporary device to ease the parliamentary situation for the Cabinet. No proposal better calculated to offend the deepest instincts of Irish nationalism could have been made: no concession more fatal to the party which agreed to it could have been devised. The mention of it provoked an outburst in Ireland which did more to smash the Parliamentary Party and leave the field open to their rivals than anything which had happened since Home Rule was first mooted. The criticisms passed upon it by the non-Parliamentary Nationalists were important, not so much on account of the quarters they came from, as for the grounds on which they were made, and their words awakened deeper feelings than had come to the surface for years. “To even discuss,” said Sinn Fein, “the exclusion of Ulster or any portion of Ulster from a Home Rule measure is in itself traitorous. When God made this country, He fixed its frontiers beyond the power of man to alter while the sea rises and falls.... So long as England is strong and Ireland is weak, England may continue to oppress this country, but she shall not dismember it.” “If this nation is to go down,” wrote Irish Freedom, “let it go down gallantly as becomes its history, let it go down fighting, but let it not sink into the abjectness of carving a slice out of itself and handing it over to England.... As for Ulster, Ulster is Ireland’s and shall remain Ireland’s. Though the Irish nation in its political and corporate capacity were gall and wormwood to every Unionist in Ulster yet shall they swallow it. We will fight them if they want fighting: but we shall never let them go, never.” Sinn Fein and the Republicans were no more emphatic than the Labour Party. James Connolly in the Irish Worker said of Partition: “To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death if necessary as our fathers fought before us.” It even used the menace of partition as an argument in favour of joining the Citizen Army and urged that Volunteers should transfer their membership to a body which “meant business.” “The Citizen Army,” said an article signed with the initials of one of its principal organizers, “stands for Ireland—Orange and Green—one and indivisible. The men who tread the valleys and places Cuchullain, Conall Cearnach, Russell and McCracken trod are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Because they may have a different creed does not matter to us; it never mattered to the Government: an Irish Protestant corpse dangled as often at the end of a rope as did the corpse of an Irish Catholic.”

But Sinn Fein saw that, though partition was unacceptable, it was no use continually asking the Ulstermen to name the safeguards they wanted. They would not name what they did not want: no safeguards would secure them in a democratic modern community against their chief objection to Home Rule—that in an Irish Parliament Protestants, as such, would be in “a permanent minority.” It was of the very nature of things that they should be, if representative institutions were to be recognized at all. But though in a minority they need not be, as they asserted they would be, subject to disabilities, and Sinn Fein held that every offer to allay their fears compatible with free institutions should be made. A Sinn Fein Convention held in Dublin towards the end of April, 1914, agreed to make the Ulstermen, on behalf of Sinn Fein, the following proposals: (1), increased representation in the Irish Parliament on the basis partly of population, partly of rateable value and partly of bulk of trade, the Ulster representation to be increased by fifteen members including one for the University of Belfast: two members to be given to the Unionist constituency of Rathmines; (2), to fix all Ireland as the unit for the election of the Senate or Upper House and to secure representation to the Southern Unionist minority by Proportional Representation; (3), to guarantee that no tax should be imposed on the linen trade without the consent of a majority of the Ulster representatives; (4), that the Chairman of the Joint Exchequer Board should always be chosen by the Ulster Representatives; (5), that all posts in the Civil Service should be filled by examination; (6), that the Ulster Volunteer Force should be retained under its present leaders as portion of an Irish Volunteer Force and should not, except in case of invasion, be called upon to serve outside Ulster; (7), that the Irish Parliament should sit alternately in Dublin and in Belfast; (8), that the clauses in the Home Rule Bill restricting Irish trade and finance and prohibiting Ireland from collecting and receiving its own taxes, or otherwise conflicting with any of the above proposals, should be amended. These proposals, the most statesmanlike and generous proposals put forward on the Nationalist side, were, though approved of generally by the Belfast Trades Council, contemptuously ignored by the Ulster leaders.