The Evolution of Sinn Fein

by Robert Mitchell Henry

When the Rising was crushed and the leaders and their followers had surrendered it is questionable whether the fortunes of Republicanism in Ireland had ever been at so low an ebb. All their plans had miscarried; their very counsels had been contradictory and confused. German assistance had disappointed them; the country had not supported them; and the army had made an end of their resistance and had brought their strongholds about their heads: their leaders were in custody, not even as prisoners of war: all of their followers who had shown that they could be counted on were either dead or in gaol. There was no district in Ireland that had not sent men to the war: many of them had died at the hands of the Germans to whom the Republican leaders had looked for aid, many of them were risking their lives every hour; it was not from the friends and neighbours of these men that sympathy for the Rising could have been expected. Sinn Fein was involved in the general feeling; if it had not fomented the Rising, what had it done to discourage it? Was it not the stimulus which had spurred more daring spirits into action?

A bruised reed never seemed less difficult to break or less worth the breaking. It was decided to break it ad majorem cautelam.

Four days after the surrender Pearse and two others after a secret trial were shot in the morning: the next day and the next others were shot. There was a pause of three days, and the shooting was resumed till thirteen had paid the penalty. After the thirteenth execution, a proclamation was issued that the General Officer Commanding in Chief had “found it imperative” to inflict these punishments, which it was hoped would act as a deterrent and show that such proceedings as those of the Rising could not be tolerated. Two more executions followed, that of James Connolly and another. At the same time arrests took place all over the country. Three thousand prisoners who had taken no part in the Rising were collected, many of them as innocent of any complicity in the affair as the Prime Minister. To have been at any time a member of the Irish Volunteers was sufficient cause for arrest and deportation. They were taken through the streets in lorries and in furniture vans at the dead of night and shipped for unknown destinations.

In a normally governed country, a strong Government enjoying the support of the community has a comparatively easy task in dealing with an unsuccessful rebellion, if a rebellion should occur. It can shoot the leaders, if it thinks them worth shooting, or do practically what it pleases with them, and gain nothing but credit for its firmness or clemency (as the case may be). But in a country not normally governed (and no one either inside or outside Ireland considered the Irish government to be normal) the matter is more intricate. If the Government is united, has clean hands and unlimited force, and is prepared to employ force indefinitely, it may do as it pleases: but few Governments are in this position and those which are not have to pick their steps. In the case of the Easter Rising the Government began by going forward with great confidence beyond the point whence retreat was possible and then determined very carefully to pick its steps back again. At first it acted “with vigour and firmness”: it handed the situation over to the care of a competent and tried officer, who proceeded to treat it as a mere matter of departmental routine. He was alert, prompt and businesslike. He did not hesitate to take what seemed “necessary steps” or to speak out where speaking plainly seemed called for. He let it be known that he had come to act and he did what he had come for.

During the week of the executions an almost unbroken silence reigned in Ireland. The first hint that anything was wrong came on the cables from America. The men who were shot in Dublin had been accorded a public funeral in New York. Empty hearses followed by a throng of mourners had passed through streets crowded with sympathisers standing with bared heads. Anxious messages from British agents warned the Government that a demonstration like this could not be disregarded. The executions were over, but the Prime Minister decided to go to Ireland to enquire into the situation on the spot. When he landed the tide of Irish feeling had already turned.

The catastrophic change of feeling in Ireland is not difficult to explain. The Rising had occurred suddenly and had ended in a sudden and hopeless failure. The leaders and their followers had surrendered, and the authorities held them at their absolute disposal. The utter hopelessness of any attempt to establish a Republic, or effect any other change in the government of Ireland by armed force, especially at such a time, had been clearly demonstrated. England held Ireland in the hollow of its hand. After four days’ cool deliberation it was decided to shoot the leaders. They were not brought to open trial on the charge of high treason or on any other charge: the authorities who carried out the sentence were those who passed judgment upon their guilt and the only people who ever heard or saw the evidence upon which the judgment was based. They were shot in batches: for days the lesson was hammered home in stroke after stroke that these men were entitled neither to open trial and proof of their guilt before execution, nor to the treatment of captured enemies. The conclusion drawn by Nationalist Ireland was that if they had been Englishmen they would have been tried by English courts and sentenced by the judgment of their countrymen: that if they had been Germans or Turks they would have been treated as prisoners of war: but that being Irishmen they were in a class apart, members of a subject race, the mere property of a courtmartial. The applause of Parliament when the Prime Minister announced the executions was taken to represent the official sanction of the English people and their agreement with this attitude towards Ireland. It was resented in Ireland with a fierce and sudden passion: a tongue of flame seemed to devour the work of long years in a single night. After the execution of Pearse it would have been vain to argue against him that he had appealed to Germany for aid and invited to Ireland hands red with the blood of Irish soldiers: the reply would have been that he might have done so or he might not; that it had never been proved what he did; that he had acted for the best; that

What matters it, if he was Ireland’s friend?
There are but two great parties in the end.

The Prime Minister, less than a month after the Rising, spent a week in Ireland prosecuting enquiries: they resulted in two conclusions, one that “the existing machinery of Irish government” had broken down, the other that a unique opportunity had offered itself for a settlement. Negotiations for the desired settlement were, on the Prime Minister’s invitation, begun by Mr. Lloyd George. He contented himself with taking up the first settlement that came to hand, the old proposal for partition; but during the negotiations he left the idea in the mind of the Nationalist leader that the partition proposed was only temporary and in the mind of the Unionist leader that it was to be permanent. Each asserted that Mr. Lloyd George had been explicit in his statement, and the unexplained discrepancy wrecked the negotiations. Even had they succeeded between the parties principally concerned, they would never have led to anything; for the Unionist members of the Coalition when there seemed to be a risk of agreement, declared that they would have no settlement at all. The Prime Minister and his deputy yielded and reconstituted “the existing machinery of Irish government” by reappointing the former Viceroy and replacing the Liberal Chief Secretary by a Unionist. Apparently their chief object was not so much to make the Government in Ireland acceptable to Irishmen as to make it less objectionable to Unionists. The result in Ireland was what might have been foreseen. Any idea there may have been that the English Government was really desirous of establishing peace and justice in Ireland vanished like smoke. Mr. Redmond warned the Government of the consequences of their “inaction” (if any policy which was steadily producing the most profound revulsion in Irish feeling could be described by that word) but the Government was obdurate. It refused to release the interned suspects, it refused to treat them as political prisoners, it refused to mitigate the application of martial law: and gave as its reason the fact that the state of the country still “gave cause for anxiety.” The only party that had no cause for “anxiety” as to its future was Sinn Fein.

The resentment at the execution of the leaders of the Rising had not confined itself to the indulgence of feelings of rage and sorrow. It had led to an eager inquiry into what it was that had caused these men to do what they did. People who had hardly heard of Sinn Fein before wanted to know precisely what it was and what it taught: people who had not known Pearse and Connolly when they were alive were full of curiosity about them, their principles and their writings. Much of this curiosity was morbid and led nowhere: but a great deal of it led large numbers of people very far indeed. Sinn Fein pamphlets began to be in demand: a month after the Rising it was hardly possible to procure a single one of them. But if they could not be bought, thumbed and tattered copies were passed from hand to hand: their teachings and the doctrines of Sinn Fein were discussed all over Ireland. The (to many) surprising fact became known that the Rising was not an attempt to help Germany or to put Ireland into German possession, but to free Ireland from all foreign influence: that the leaders proclaimed themselves followers of Tone and Mitchel and Davis and Parnell, that they claimed that Irish Nationalism meant according to these exponents (and no man in Ireland ventured to question their authority) Irish independence, nothing less and nothing more. The instinct for freedom, the feeling that the existing Government of Ireland had not for a hundred years fulfilled the primary functions of government, became a reasoned and rooted conviction that something more was needed to mend it than mere Home Rule. The price that Ireland had been asked to pay for Home Rule, that it was still pertinaciously pressed to agree to, the partition of Ireland, seemed an unforgivable treachery beside the fair prospect of an Ireland one and indivisible, in which Orange and Green, Protestant and Catholic were united in the love and service of a common country. The policies of the past, barren as they now seemed of content and substance, were abandoned for the new promise of a commonwealth in which all Irishmen should be equal, in which the worker saw a prospect of a better and a fuller life than without it he could hope to have. This had been the ideal of the Rising; but it was the bitter truth that the Rising had not brought it any nearer, and that no Rising seemed likely to be any more successful. Sinn Fein with its policy of self-reliance, of refusing to recognize what it hoped by so doing to bring to nothing, of distrust of all policies of reaching freedom by an acknowledgment of subjection offered the means of realizing what the Rising had failed to bring nearer. But Sinn Fein could not be accepted as it stood: offering the Constitution of 1782 it had failed to carry with it more than a few doctrinaire enthusiasts: agreeing to the constitution which the leaders of the Rising died for it might (and did) carry the country with it.

All this was going on under the operation of martial law. Members of Parliament did not know it: the Competent Military Authority had no suspicion of it. It was believed that all that was required to “appease” the country, to restore confidence in the Government, to bring back the happy days when Ireland was “the one bright spot” was to release the prisoners and resume negotiations for a “settlement.” In December, 1916, the Asquith Ministry fell. According to its successors it had carried the art of doing nothing to its highest perfection: they were going to do everything at once. The new Prime Minister made vague promises of an attempt to settle the Irish question in the immediate future, and finally on Christmas Eve all the interned prisoners except those undergoing penal servitude, were sent back to Ireland. They were received with an enthusiasm which must have proved disquieting to the believers in compromise and negotiation.