The Evolution of Sinn Fein

by Robert Mitchell Henry

The results were soon apparent. During the month or so when the Volunteers enjoyed the fleeting sunlight of aristocratic favour, the Foreign Office had written (18th August, 1914) to H.B.M. Consul-General at Antwerp to assist Mr. John O’Connor, M.P., and Mr. H. J. Harris in arranging for the shipment to Ireland of certain rifles belonging to the Volunteers, permission to export them having been obtained from the Belgian Government by the Foreign Office. It was, no doubt, an oversight that no ammunition for them was obtained, or could be obtained afterwards; but the rifles came. Three months later an officer of the Volunteers who was employed in the Ordnance Survey was dismissed without charge or notice and ordered to leave Dublin within twenty-four hours. He was only the first of a series of Volunteer organizers who suffered deportation under similar circumstances. The Birmingham factory which was engaged in making guns for the Volunteers was raided, its books and correspondence seized, and it was ordered not to remove any goods from its premises. To be an Irish Volunteer was to be “disaffected,” and to be “disaffected” was to be liable to summary measures of repression.

The autumn of 1914 saw the appearance of a new Separatist paper, Eire-Ireland, which appeared as a weekly on October 26th and was changed to a daily after the second number. It is significant of the change in Irish feeling that it was now possible to run a Separatist daily paper in Dublin, and of the gradual rapprochement between Irish parties that this paper, intended as the organ of the Irish Volunteers, was edited by Mr. Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein movement. Its attitude towards the war was defined in an article by Roger Casement in the first number: “Ireland has no quarrel with the German people or just cause of offence against them.... Ireland has suffered at the hands of British administrators a more prolonged series of evils deliberately inflicted than any other community of civilized men.” It emphasized the view of the Volunteers that Mr. Redmond’s advice to take their place in the firing line was out of harmony with their principles. “The Irish Volunteers had from the beginning and still have but a single duty—to secure and safeguard the rights and liberties of Ireland.” The new daily contained a column “The War Day by Day” in which a critical analysis of the military situation was attempted. While most of the other Irish papers merely reproduced the amateur war criticisms of Fleet Street, the editor of Eire, assuming that English newspapers were giving only one side of the case, attempted an independent study of the situation, which was made to appear much less favourable to the Allies than was asserted by other Irish papers. Stories of German atrocities were analyzed and ridiculed. The fortunes of the Irish regiments were followed with a jealous eye: it was asserted that they were being sacrificed unnecessarily while English regiments were spared, and the Government was challenged to prepare and publish complete casualty lists for the Irish regiments of the line. The protest of the German professors against the alleged Allied calumnies was printed in full and annotated with sympathy. The assurance given to Roger Casement by the German Acting-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as to the contemplated action of German troops if they should land in Ireland was printed as a document of first-rate international importance. It was assumed that the Ballot Act would be enforced in Ireland and passive resistance to its enforcement was urged from the first number of the paper. Eire did not run for much more than six weeks. Its last number (December 4) was a broad sheet announcing that the printer, whose premises had been entered by a military force which had confiscated his property, felt unable to continue the printing of the paper.

Eire did not so much make, as voice, the opinions of a considerable section of Irish Nationalist opinion. The newspapers were scanned eagerly every morning all over Ireland for tidings of the Irish regiments. It was known that they were engaged, that they were outnumbered, that they would fight like lions (“the Gaels went out to battle but they always fell”): a disquieting and ominous silence reigned as to their fate. It was assumed that the news was bad and that it was being kept back: it began to be asserted that they were being put upon forlorn hopes to spare the more valued English regiments: and even those who did not credit the suspicion felt uneasy when it was expressed. It may have been necessary to refrain from telling the whole truth in official reports, but every course has its disadvantages and, so far as Ireland was concerned, this had the result of arousing suspicion and distrust. And to the question “Why, if these men can fight and die for the freedom of others, are they not considered worthy of the freedom they desire for themselves?” the answers did not carry conviction.

The official “War News” printed in the Irish papers was read with detachment and reserve; stories of German atrocities were received with unimpressionable scepticism. This was not due to any pro-German bias, or to any Sinn Fein propaganda. Peasants in remote villages who never saw any paper but an odd copy of the Freeman’s Journal or the Irish Daily Independent, and who were Redmondites to a man, discussed these matters with a completely open mind, and with (to those who did not know them) surprising acumen. People accustomed for years to read that their county or their province, in which some unpopular grazier had been boycotted, was “seething with outrage and disorder,” to be told that a district in which there was known not to be as much crime in a year as there was in an English district of the same size every month was “in a state bordering on almost complete lawlessness,” were not moved when the Germans were charged on the same authority with crimes against civilization. The word of “our English correspondent” was simply “not evidence” against anybody. This invincible scepticism, born of experience, was quite wrongly interpreted as being the result of “pro-German” sympathies when it proved an unexpected obstacle to the recruiting campaign.

The gradual growth of Sinn Fein and anti-English (which was only accidentally and not on principle pro-German) sentiment during the war, and the increasing difficulties found in the way of the recruiting campaign, were due mainly to a growing disbelief in the sincerity of English statesmen in their dealings with Ireland. The Government had gone too far in the direction of Home Rule to make Unionists sure that the promised Amending Bill would secure that they should not be “coerced”: it had not gone far enough to make Nationalists sure that it really meant to do what it had promised. The result was the conviction upon all hands that their rights must be secured by their own efforts not by reliance upon the lukewarm sympathy of others. This conviction was not a matter of a sudden growth nor did it always find expression in the same way: it acted at once in favour of, and to the detriment of, recruiting: it was professed both by Nationalists and by Unionists. At first recruits joined because the war was just, because the Empire was in danger, because England had granted Ireland a “charter of liberty,” because the civilization of Europe was threatened, because there was fighting afoot. Probably the majority enlisted for one or other of these reasons. But the theory of “a free gift of a free people” expounded by Mr. Asquith in Dublin fell more and more into the background. It began to be represented on both sides that the more recruits either party sent to the war the stronger would be the lien of that party upon the sympathy of the English Government. Unionists whose blood had flowed for England in Flanders could not be abandoned after such a sacrifice: Nationalists who had given their best and bravest to the cause of freedom could not be denied the freedom for which such a price had been paid. The official recruiting campaign wavered in its appeal between the two points. Its minor ineptitudes need hardly be taken into account. It was hardly politic to cover the walls of police barracks in Protestant villages in Ulster with green placards drawing attention to a few weighty words of Cardinal Logue: these follies did neither harm nor good. But it was different when appeals to the chivalry and bravery of Irishmen alternated with deductions from the famous phrase about “the rights of small nations.” When Irish Nationalists were implored to rally to the defence of the Friend of Little Nations the size of Ireland was not likely to be forgotten. The inference that in fighting for the liberties of small nations Irishmen would be helping their own nation to secure the same liberty was the inference intended: but it was not always the inference actually drawn. The person who first conceived the idea of making use of that phrase for recruiting purposes in Ireland did the cause of recruiting an unforeseen but serious disservice. Was it, after all, really true (it was asked) that England could not recognize the freedom of Ireland until Ireland had first helped England to force Germany to recognize the freedom of Belgium? Was the freedom of Ireland then not a matter of right but the result of a bargain—the equivalent of how many fighting men? Had England been the friend of small nations before the war, was she to be their friend during the war, or was Ireland only to help her to be their friend after the war was over? The right of Ireland to more freedom than she had enjoyed had seemed to be recognized before the war had been spoken of; what had become of the recognition of it? And even bargaining, however distasteful, has its usages: it was no bargain when one side was called upon to pay up and the other carefully refrained from promising anything definite in return.

The bulk of the recruits enlisted during the first year of the war, and enlisted for worthy and honourable motives: when recruiting became, as it did become later, a question of party tactics the results were less favourable. But quite early in the war it became plain that there was going to be a contest between the two Irish parties as to which should have most to show for itself at the end, and there was no burning desire to assist political opponents to obtain recruits. Sir Edward Carson refused absolutely to stand on the same recruiting platform as Mr. Redmond; the Belfast Unionist papers found it a grave lapse from principle in the present Lord Chancellor of England that he addressed a recruiting meeting in Liverpool in the company of Home Rulers. The Ulster Volunteer Force was informed practically that it had a two-fold duty, to fight for the Empire abroad, and to keep up the organization at home. It was plain from the first that in Ireland there was to be no “party truce,” and it was recognized on all hands before long that when the war was over the old fight was to be renewed. The position of the Home Rule Act, penned in the Statute Book, with an Amending Bill waiting to tear it to pieces when the time came for it to be allowed out, made this inevitable. And the Government did not find it in its heart to hold an even balance between the parties: and when the balance began to dip the end was in sight for those who had eyes to see.

The only party really able to turn to account the situation thus created was the Sinn Fein party. It had preached for years that the English governing classes, indeed the English nation, were not, in spite of their apparent readiness to listen to the Parliamentary Party, the friends of Irish Nationalism in any real sense: that they had no intention (and never had) of satisfying the just claims of Ireland: that the Parliamentarians were mere pawns in a party game, to be sacrificed when it suited both or either of the English parties: that the word of English statesmen could not be trusted, and that Ireland had nothing to gain from them: that self-reliance, vigilance and distrust of England were “the sinews of good sense” in Irish politics. It had hinted, not obscurely, that the opportunity of Ireland would come when England should be involved in a European war, and that Ireland must be prepared when the day came to use the opportunity. It now pointed a triumphant finger to what was going on in Ireland and asked which had been the truer prophet, itself or the Parliamentary Party. It quoted the returns of recruiting in Ulster in support of its thesis: “The fact that out of 200,000 Unionists of military age in Ireland—men who talked Empire, sang Empire and protested they would die for the British Empire—four out of every five are still at home, declaring they will not have Home Rule, is proof that the Irish Unionist knows his present business.” That Irish soldiers were to be used to further English interests, and not the cause of Ireland, was (it held) proved by extracts from English newspapers, where in unguarded moments the naked truth peeped out: it gave prominence to a quotation from the Liverpool Post of September 12, 1914: “His Majesty could make a triumphal tour of Ireland, North, South, East and West, and in reply to his personal appeal, there would be 300,000 Irishmen of all creeds and classes for the Front in less than a week. In England the question becomes more and more important in the interests of the efficiency of our trade, whether we can spare any more skilled mechanics for the ranks of battle. The capture of the German trade is almost as vital to the existence of the Empire as the destruction of Prussian militarism.”

By the end of 1914 all avowedly Sinn Fein papers had been suppressed, and the two American papers, the Gaelic American and the Irish World, had been prohibited in Ireland. The latter had been a supporter of Mr. Redmond’s policy but had parted company with him on the question of recruiting in Ireland. The editor of Sinn Fein countered the suppression of his paper by an ingenious device. He began to publish a bi-weekly called Scissors and Paste, which contained nothing but extracts from other English, Irish, Colonial and American papers. It was introduced to the reader in the only editorial it contained, entitled “Ourselves”: “It is high treason,” it ran, “for an Irishman to argue with the sword the right of his small nationality to equal political freedom with Belgium or Servia or Hungary. It is destruction to the property of his printer now when he argues it with the pen. Hence while England is fighting the battle of the Small Nationalities, Ireland is reduced to Scissors and Paste. Up to the present the sale and use of these instruments have not been prohibited by the British Government in Ireland.” The columns of the Times, the Daily Mail, and the Morning Post supplied the German Wireless messages: the New York Times was drawn upon for James O’Donnell Bennett’s articles protesting against the reports of German atrocities. In addition it printed suitable extracts from The Reliques of Father Prout, from Barry’s Songs of Ireland, Thomas Davis’s Essays and Sir Samuel Ferguson: it reprinted Curran’s speech in defence of the printer of The Press in 1797. It ransacked the Daily Mail for that journal’s vigorous denunciations of the French in 1899: “If they cannot cease their insults their colonies will be taken from them and given to Germany and Italy—we ourselves want nothing more.... France will be rolled in the blood and mud in which her Press daily wallows.” The paper ran for a little over a month. Its undoing was an extract from the Irish Times, a copy of a notice posted on a Sunday morning in January, 1915, in places near a number of Roman Catholic churches in Wexford: “People of Wexford, take no notice of the police order to destroy your own property and leave your own homes if a German army lands in Ireland. When the Germans come they will come as friends and to put an end to English rule in Ireland. Therefore stay in your homes and assist as far as possible the German troops. Any stores, hay, corn or forage taken by the Germans will be paid for by them.”

Just before the disappearance of Scissors and Paste, the Irish Worker, three weeks after its suppression, appeared again in Glasgow, where it was printed by the Socialist Labour Party, and began to circulate once more in Ireland.

After five months Mr. Arthur Griffith was again able to start a paper. The Dublin printers could not be induced to take the risk of printing for him again: but Belfast supplied one with the necessary enterprise. On June 19, 1915, Nationality appeared as a penny weekly paper and continued to appear until the Easter Rising in 1916. In tone Nationality was a reproduction of its predecessors and as the main characteristic of Sinn Fein propaganda was its directness and simplicity two extracts from its columns will suffice. An editorial (signed C.) on “The Fenian Faith” written towards the end of 1915 contains the following: “The Fenians and the Fenian faith incarnated in Allen, Larkin and O’Brien were of a fighting and revolutionary epoch. They can only be commemorated by men of another fighting and revolutionary generation. That generation we have with us to-day. For we have the material, the men and stuff of war, the faith and purpose and cause for revolution.... We shall have Ireland illumined with a light before which even the Martyrs’ will pale: the light of Freedom, of a deed done and action taken and a blow struck for the Old Land”; and a month or so later: “The things that count in Ireland against English Conscription are national determination, serviceable weapons and the knowledge of how to use them.” Under the stress of circumstances Sinn Fein seemed to have abandoned the policy of the days of peace and to have come round in time of war to the policy which, even two years before the war, had been enunciated in Irish Freedom: “Ireland can be freed by force of arms; that is the fact which ever must be borne in mind. The responsibility rests with the men of this generation. They can strike with infinitely greater hopes of success than could their fathers and their grandsires: but if they let this chance slip ... if they strike no blow for their country, whilst England herself is in handgrips with the most powerful nation in Europe, then the opportunity will have passed and Ireland will be more utterly under the heel of England than ever she was since the Union.” This was written in September, 1912. But the task of putting the policy into practice, of welding the (at times) discordant elements of anti-Parliamentarian Nationalism together and making possible a united effort was reserved for other hands and another mind than those of the founder of Sinn Fein.