The Evolution of Sinn Fein

by Robert Mitchell Henry

But whatever the wisdom or the folly of such expectations, there is no doubt that the Separatists looked to Germany not to annex but to free Ireland. They did not desire that Germany should take Ireland from England; but that Germany should declare Ireland to be an independent sovereign State. Nothing less than this could have satisfied their aspirations. For Germany to have offered less would not have secured their assistance; if Germany had annexed Ireland they would have welcomed a deliverer from Germany as eagerly as a deliverer was looked for them from the domination of England.

But in the actual circumstances that accompanied the outbreak of war in 1914 there was no disposition to take sides with Germany on the merits, or to stake everything upon the success of an understanding with Germany. It is true that the official statement of the English case for the declaration of war was received with a certain degree of quiet scepticism. The commercial rivalry of the two empires, the prophecies of a coming war that had been openly made for years, the Entente Cordiale with the French Republic, of the real meaning of which France at least made no secret, had been too well known and had been too openly and too long canvassed for the violation of Belgian neutrality by Germany to receive the importance which was attributed to it or to be regarded as much more than a blunder adroitly utilized. There was not so much sympathy with Germany as a want of sympathy with England: there was not so much a lack of sympathy with Belgium as a distrust of the appeals which were insistently made to that feeling.

When war was declared the Home Rule Bill had not passed into law. A great effort had been made to come to terms with the Ulster and the English Tory Parties and had failed. It seemed as if the Government must either go forward with its policy and take the risks or own defeat. It was assumed as a matter of course that a foreign war ended ipso facto all disputes between the great English parties and that till the war should be over internal opposition to the Government should cease. But what about Ireland? Would the two Irish parties sink their differences in the same way in the interest of the Empire? Would the Irish people give their whole-hearted support and sympathy in the struggle to an England which had so far failed to satisfy what they regarded as their elementary rights? The choice fell to Mr. Redmond. On the one hand prudence counselled the use of a unique opportunity: he might offer Irish support in return for the immediate enactment of Home Rule and throw upon the Ulster Party the onus of refusing to support the Empire in its deadly struggle. He might on the other hand offer Irish support without conditions and leave the satisfaction of the national claims of Ireland as a debt of honour to the conscience of English statesmen. Had he bargained (and got his terms) Nationalist Ireland would have been with him almost to a man: with that simplicity of character, which, as the Greek historian says, “makes up a great part of good breeding,” he promised without conditions: England might withdraw her soldiers from Ireland; the shores of Ireland, North and South, would be guarded by her armed sons. The House of Commons, England and the Empire were greatly impressed: the beau geste of the Irish leader was universally applauded. The Home Rule Bill was presented for the Royal Signature and signed; a Suspensory Bill was hurried through providing that its operation should be postponed; the Prime Minister promised the enemies of Home Rule that before it was allowed to be put into operation the Government would introduce and pass a Bill amending the measure in such a way as to make it acceptable to its opponents; and Mr. Redmond hurried home to rally Ireland to the cause of the Empire. The situation was summed up later with brutal frankness by a Belfast Unionist paper: “If the Nationalists will not enlist because the war is just, they should not do so because they have got Home Rule; because they have not got it. The Unionist Party has declared that when it comes into power it will not allow the Act to stand.” Even so between 40,000 and 50,000 Irish Nationalists joined the Forces during the first year of the war.

By the time Mr. Redmond had returned to Ireland the attitude of all Irish parties to the war had become pretty clearly defined. The Ulster Volunteers, after about a month’s hesitation on the part of their leaders, had received official intimation that they were free to enlist. Any delay there may have been was due, not to the feelings of the rank and file, but to the tactics of the politicians, eager to extract the last possible advantage from the situation. The bulk of the Nationalists, like the bulk of the Ulstermen, were in sympathy with the cause of England and her Allies as against Germany and the two parties sent recruits in almost equal numbers. The attitude of Sinn Fein is put so clearly in a leader in its official organ that it deserves quotation: “Ireland is not at war with Germany: it has no quarrel with any Continental Power.... There is no European Power waging war against the people of Ireland: there are two European Powers at war with the people who dominate Ireland from Dublin Castle.... To-day the Irish are flattered and caressed by their libellers. England wants our aid and Mr. Redmond, true to his nature, rushes to offer it—for nothing.... If England wins this war she will be more powerful than she has been at any time since 1864 and she will treat the Ireland which kissed the hand that smote her as such an Ireland ought to be treated. If she loses the war, and Ireland is foolish enough to identify itself with her, Ireland will deservedly share in her punishment.... We are Irish Nationalists and the only duty we have is to stand for Ireland’s interests, irrespective of the interests of England or Germany or any foreign country.... Let it (i.e. the Government) withdraw the present abortive Home Rule Bill and pass ... a full measure of Home Rule and Irishmen will have some reason to mobilize for the defence of their institutions. At present they have none. In the alternative let a Provisional Government be set up in Dublin by Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson and we shall give it allegiance. But the confidence trick has been too often played upon us to deceive us again. If the Irish Volunteers are to defend Ireland they must defend it for Ireland under Ireland’s flag and under Irish officers. Otherwise they will only help to perpetuate the enslavement of their country.... Germany is nothing to us in herself, but she is not our enemy. Our blood and our miseries are not upon her head. But who can forbear admiration at the spectacle of the Germanic people whom England has ringed round with enemies standing alone, undaunted and defiant against a world in arms?” This was a clear declaration of neutrality coupled with an offer of terms of friendship. But as the negotiations in Parliament proceeded, as it became clear that, while Home Rule was nominally to be passed, no effect was to be given to it for the present, and no permanent validity to attach to the passing of it, the tone of the Sinn Fein and Republican Press grew harder. “If the Home Rule Bill,” said Sinn Fein, “be signed, but not brought into immediate operation, by the appointment of a Home Rule Executive Government, Ireland is sold and betrayed. Let every Irishman get that into his head and keep it there.” “We regard no enemy of England as an enemy of ours.... It was Grattan, the greatest of our constitutional leaders, who declared that if the interests of the Empire clashed with the liberties of Ireland, then he and every Irishman would say ‘Live Ireland—perish the Empire.’” Irish Freedom which printed in capitals across its pages mottoes such as “Germany is not Ireland’s enemy,” “Ireland First, Last and All the Time,” said, “If England withdraws her troops utterly from Ireland the Irish Volunteers will take and hold the country, hold it not alone against Germany but against anybody else who attempts to interfere with it. And on no other conditions will the Volunteers consent to move a step.... We are not prepared to buy even freedom—were it offered—at the price of our honour.” It declared that “the psychological moment” had arrived for the union of Irishmen, for the attainment of Irish liberty, and proposed for the last time a working arrangement between the Irish Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteers to further the real liberties of Ireland. The Labour paper was even more outspoken. It ridiculed the parliamentary leaders for their lack of ability in driving a bargain as compared with the more astute Ulstermen; it ridiculed the advanced Nationalists who still talked nonsense about a junction of the two forces of Volunteers: it declared stoutly, “If England wants an Empire, let her hold the Empire.... Let no Irishman leave his own land.... Keep your guns for your real enemies.” While it deplored the success of the recruiting campaign it allowed (with, considering its own strongly expressed views, a commendable toleration) articles to appear from Labour men giving their reasons for supporting the war. But it had no illusions as to what was in store in the end for Irishmen who put its ideas into practice. “For some of us,” James Connolly wrote, “the finish may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell, for others more fortunate upon the battlefield of an Ireland in arms for a real republican liberty.” But as a last resort even Connolly proposed terms of accommodation: he thought that the Volunteers by the bold policy of refusing to move until their terms were conceded might force the Government to repeal all clauses in the Home Rule Bill denying to Ireland the self-government enjoyed by Canada and Australia. The last number of his paper bore the legend “We serve neither King nor Kaiser.” It had been decided by all the political parties that then seemed to count in Ireland that Irishmen must serve, if they served at all, not because they had been given Home Rule but because they had not been given it—because Ireland was still an integral part of the United Kingdom, bound to its fortunes till the issue of the war should be determined. Three months after war was declared the Sinn Fein, Republican and Labour papers were suppressed by the police.

The public discussion of the terms upon which it might have been possible to range even Separatists against Germany, the granting to Ireland of something of her own to defend, being thus declared not to be in the public interest, it seemed as if no obstacle remained in the way of raising recruits all over the country. Irishmen were credited with a love of mingling in a fight without any nice discrimination as to the grounds of the quarrel or the merits of the dispute. “Is there not wars?” seemed to some of the authorities to be a sufficiently potent appeal. But it was found that there existed a confused and vague feeling that England as a whole had at last, in spite of much English opposition, come to take a friendly view of the Irish claim to self-government; that, if the war had not occurred when it did, some way out of the difficulty would have been found; that the Government was honest in its intentions and could hardly be blamed for the tactics of its opponents. Even a slight and doubtful indication of real friendliness on the part of England raises in Ireland a response which must often seem to be out of proportion to the cause which excited it; and at the beginning of the war Nationalist Ireland was ready to respond to the call for men in a way which roused the cynical criticism of the advanced wing of the Nationalist Party. “No English city,” wrote the Irish Worker in September, 1914, “is displaying more enthusiasm than Dublin in sending its bravest and best to murder men with whom they have no quarrel.” The Scottish Borderers, leaving for the Front, received an enthusiastic send-off from the city in which a short while before they had had to be confined to barracks; all over the country men were flocking to recruit in the first few weeks of the war. Anti-English feeling was practically smothered in a wave of enthusiasm. The Irish Volunteers, now apparently under the assured control of the Parliamentary Party, became the subjects of an almost embarrassing interest. Unionist peers and gentry, retired militia officers and other people, not (to say the least) distinguished for Irish patriotism, hastened to enrol in their ranks and to proffer their services. The name of Major the Earl of Fingall appearing as Chief Inspecting Officer of the Irish Volunteers in Meath in an order signed by Colonel Maurice Moore, “Inspector-General, Irish Volunteers,” would have seemed strange six months before and stranger still a year afterwards. But it provoked little comment in August, 1914. It seemed as if a miracle were about to happen and it became the apparent business of the authorities to take steps to secure that it should not happen.

Enlistment had not been growing in popularity in Ireland for some years before the war. In 1908, Sinn Fein had pointed out with satisfaction that the army returns showed that the number of Irishmen in the regular army had then fallen to the lowest point upon record. The Boer War and the anti-recruiting propaganda in Ireland had not been without their effect upon Irish feeling and the real position and work of the army in Ireland had been closely scrutinized. “The Curragh Mutiny” had provoked some very pointed comments upon the spirit which really animated the army in Ireland: it came to be looked upon as the citadel and symbol of all the forces that opposed the claims of Ireland. “We all know in our hearts,” said Roger Casement and Eoin MacNeill in a manifesto published in April, 1914, in the Irish Volunteer, “that the ‘Union’ means the military occupation of Ireland as a conquered country: that the real headquarters of Irish government on the Unionist principle is the Curragh Camp to which the offices of Dublin Castle are only a sort of vermiform appendix.” And the functions performed by the army in Ireland would certainly have seemed strange to anyone who felt any attachment to the views generally accepted in England as to the relation of the army to the civil power. In the General Orders for the guidance of the troops affording aid to the Civil Power in Ireland, issued in 1891, the following paragraph is to be found: “All officers in command of corps or detachments are to transmit to the Deputy Adjutant General an immediate report of any outrages, large meetings held or expected to be held for political or other purposes, or occurrences that may take place in the neighbourhood of their posts connected with the state of the country, whether they have or have not been called upon to afford assistance to the civil power.” The functions of an army acting upon instructions like these are hardly to be distinguished from those of an army of occupation, and Nationalist Ireland was well aware of the efficiency with which these functions were performed. To make enlistment popular in Ireland, even in a moment of enthusiasm, was thus a work requiring a certain amount of tact and discretion.

The first real difficulty arose with the Volunteers, whose services as an army of defence had been pledged by Mr. Redmond to the Government. The pledge had been given without the consent, or even the knowledge, of the Volunteer Committee and they resented the implication that they could be disposed of as if they were the private property of other people. They had been enrolled with a definite object and any duty for which their services were to be given must be shown to be at least not inconsistent with that object. The committee, however, so far endorsed Mr. Redmond’s offer as to pass a resolution declaring “the complete readiness of the Irish Volunteers to take joint action with the Ulster Volunteer Force for the defence of Ireland.” The Prime Minister promised in Parliament that the Secretary for War would “do everything in his power, after consultation with gentlemen in Ireland, to arrange for the full equipment and organization of the Irish Volunteers.” Whether the powers of the Secretary for War were less extensive than the Prime Minister believed, or whether the “gentlemen in Ireland” had other views, the scheme drawn up by General Sir Arthur Paget and his staff “by which the War Office may be supplied from the Irish Volunteers with a force for the defence of Ireland” was rejected by the War Office. This, it is true, made little difference in the end, for the Volunteer Committee, when the scheme was submitted to them, demanded the inclusion of certain “primary conditions” which it was not at all likely that the War Office would have accepted: but the immediate rejection of it by the military authorities in England is significant of the spirit in which the question of Irish recruiting was approached. It was hostile not only to Irish ideals but to Irish sentiment, to everything except the use to which Irish soldiers might be put. The contrast between the treatment accorded to Irish Nationalist recruits and the privileges granted to the Ulster Division can only be explained on the assumption that the War Office desired to show appreciation of the latter and suspicion of the former. The Ulster men were allowed to retain their own officers and their own tests of admission: the “regiments” formed under the Provisional Government of Ulster were taken over, without alteration, by the English authorities: they were allowed to refuse Catholics or Nationalists who offered to enlist in their ranks: their recruiting marches were accompanied by bands who played Orange party tunes through Catholic and Nationalist hamlets while they went through the farce of lecturing the inhabitants on their “duty to the Empire in this crisis.” In November, 1914, an advertisement appeared in the Dublin Evening Mail announcing that a new Dublin Company of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was to be formed to which none but Unionists were admissible, intending recruits being directed to apply at the Orange Hall. The Ulster Force was trained as a body in camps of its own, while Ulster Nationalists had to take train for the South or were shipped to England. Similar privileges were bluntly and persistently refused to the Nationalists. The Ulstermen had their own banners: the Nationalists might not fight under any emblem but the Union Jack, the symbol of the defeat of their nationality, of the very Act of Union against which they were known to be in protest. Treatment such as this could have only one result: the people who decided upon it must have known what the result would be, and by persisting in it showed that the result was desired. By cooling down the enthusiasm of Nationalist Ireland they made it possible to declare that Nationalist Ireland was “disappointing expectations” and to hint that they had suspected all along that it was less eager to fight than had appeared. Incidentally the result was held to justify the suspicions which had brought it about. Irish soldiers were divided into two categories: those whom the authorities delighted to honour and those whom they decided to employ. It must be added that these manufactured animosities faded away in the stress of battle. Ulstermen and Nationalists fighting side by side covered themselves with glory and did equal credit to the old land; and no more stringent criticisms of the treacherous and malignant policy that divided them can be heard than from the lips of some of the men who survived the glorious ordeal of the Somme.

But an influential body had from the first decided that the duty of Irishmen, and especially of Irish Volunteers, was to remain in Ireland; these were the members of the original Volunteer Committee and their adherents: outside the Volunteer ranks they were supported by Sinn Fein, the Republican Party and the Citizen Army. To them the supreme and immediate duty of Irishmen, and in a special degree of the Volunteers, was to safeguard the liberties of Ireland—a duty to which the fact of a European war was irrelevant, except in so far as it might afford an opportunity to strengthen and secure Irish liberty. There is little doubt that some members of this party hoped that Germany would be victorious, not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of Ireland, which had little prospect of winning concessions from an England rendered invincible by the overthrow of her most formidable rival: some of them regarded the war as a mere struggle for commercial supremacy in which Ireland had no interest at stake: but they would all alike have defended the shores of Ireland against a German army which invaded them for the purposes of annexation and conquest. To all alike the proposition that Irishmen had any duty to enlist for foreign service in the English army was a denial of the very fundamental article of their creed. When Mr. Redmond, then, in his address to the Volunteers at Woodenbridge in September, 1914, urged them to enlist for service overseas the inevitable crisis was provoked. But the original provisional committee were now in a minority in the counsels of the organization they had founded, and they were hampered by a fundamental (and, indeed, intentional) ambiguity in the Volunteer pledge. “The rights and liberties common to all Irishmen” was not a phrase which carried its interpretation on its face. It was open to the Volunteer followers of Mr. Redmond to say that the democracy of Great Britain had conferred upon Ireland a “charter of liberty” and that it was the duty of Irishmen to fight for Great Britain, keeping faith with those who had kept faith with them. It was open to others to say that “the Thing on the Statute Book” fell far short of conferring upon Irishmen the rights and liberties to which they were entitled, and that the duty to secure first that to which they were entitled precluded them from the prior performance of any other task. The members of the original committee who took the latter view could also urge that Mr. Redmond’s original pledge that the Volunteers would “defend the shores of Ireland” was not capable of the gloss that “the shores of Ireland” under the circumstances was a legitimate figure of speech for the trenches in the front line in France. The difference of interpretation developed into a split. The members of the original committee met in September and called a Volunteer Convention for November 25, 1914, at which it was decided “to declare that Ireland cannot with honour or safety take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than through the free action of a National Government of her own; and to repudiate the claim of any man to offer up the blood and lives of the sons of Irishmen and Irishwomen to the services of the British Empire while no National Government which could act and speak for the people of Ireland is allowed to exist.”

Before the split the Volunteers had numbered about 150,000; and it would appear that the great majority of these at first sided with Mr. Redmond. Many of them enlisted: many of them, under the title of the National Volunteers, continued to exist as a separate body in Ireland: some at least of them afterwards found their way back into the ranks of the Irish Volunteers.

From the time of the Volunteer split the air was cleared politically in Ireland: for the first time people began to know precisely where they stood. The National Volunteers and the Parliamentary Party under Mr. Redmond’s leadership were committed, as were the Unionists, to the unreserved and energetic prosecution of the war: all the other parties, Sinn Fein, the Republicans, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army adopted an attitude of watchful neutrality. Their view was bounded by the shores of Ireland or when they cast a glance abroad it was as the husbandman observes the clouds. They continued to differ (sometimes sharply and vehemently) from one another: but the public, with a prophetic disregard of the mere obvious present, began to label them indiscriminately as Sinn Feiners. In truth common adversity was drawing them closer together, and the apparently heterogeneous elements which went to make up the Sinn Fein of present-day Ireland were being welded into a unity of aim and resolution.