The Evolution of Sinn Fein

by Robert Mitchell Henry

Of these proposals the first would have been rejected by the Government, the second by the Ulster Party, and the third by the Parliamentary Party, which by this time was aware that such a method of choosing representatives would leave it almost without representation. The Government to “create an atmosphere” not merely accepted but improved on the fourth condition: the political prisoners were released unconditionally. It is significant of the way in which “atmospheres” are created in Ireland that though the prisoners were released unconditionally on June 17th, a meeting held in Dublin to demand their release, on June 10th, was prohibited by Proclamation, and an attempt to hold it ended in a riot in which a policeman was killed.

While the Convention was preparing to perform the duties which were to end in nothing, Sinn Fein was engaged in the task of rallying the country to its side. The death of Major Willie Redmond had created a vacancy in East Clare: the Parliamentary Party had selected its candidate to succeed him: but in little over a month after the release of the prisoners Mr. de Valera, who had been sentenced to penal servitude for his share in the Rising, was elected by an overwhelming majority. The leader “To the Men of Clare” in which, the week before the election, Nationality recommended him to the electors, was suppressed by the Censor. During the same month another vacancy occurred by the death of the member for Kilkenny City, and as a preliminary to the election the authorities suppressed the Kilkenny People, the editor of which was chairman of the convention called to select a Sinn Fein candidate, who was promptly returned. Some idea of the appeals which Sinn Fein was making to the electors may be gathered from the leader “To the Electors, Traders and Taxpayers of Kilkenny,” in which Nationality urged the return of its candidate. It began with a quotation from a memorandum addressed in 1799 to Mr. Pitt by Under-Secretary Cooke, “The Union is the only means of preventing Ireland from becoming too great and too powerful,” and by a quotation from another memorandum to the same statesman, “By giving the Irish a hundred members in an assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be impotent to operate upon that assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority.” Figures were given of the value of the trade between Great Britain and a number of countries in 1914, the trade with Ireland being nearly as valuable as that with the United States, twice that with France and nearly twice that with Germany. It went on: “It will be seen that with the exception of the United States, England has no customer nearly as big as Ireland.... England has had the market to herself for generations; Sinn Fein proposes that England should not continue to monopolise that market longer. Ireland has £150,000,000 worth of trade to do with the world each year, £135,000,000 of which is restricted to England. In return for part of that trade the other countries of Europe would gladly give Ireland facilities in their markets and Ireland would compel England to pay competitive prices.... So long as Ireland sends members to the English Parliament and relies upon that institution, England will plunder Ireland’s revenues and monopolise Ireland’s trade at her own price.”

Meanwhile the growing popularity of Sinn Fein was leading to a revival of the Irish Volunteers. Drilling was resumed and, though frequent arrests were made and the Government declared its intention at all costs of putting it down, it became more and more popular. Irish Volunteers even took possession of the streets of Dublin, in defiance of military orders, and kept the line of the procession on the occasion of the funeral of Thomas Ashe who had died as the result of forcible feeding and inattention in Mountjoy Prison. Though Sinn Fein held itself distinct from the Volunteer Organization it did not refuse to extend some indirect assistance. It printed a letter of Mr. Devlin’s, addressed from the House of Commons in July, 1916, to a correspondent, which was “captured” and read to a Convention of the National Volunteers in Dublin in August, 1917. In the letter Mr. Devlin had discouraged the importation of arms into Ireland for the National Volunteers, some of whom had assisted the troops in keeping order during the week of the Rising. This was of course intended to discredit Mr. Devlin in the eyes of the National Volunteers whose continued allegiance to the Parliamentary Party was now open to grave suspicion. In fact the prospect of their junction with the Irish Volunteers, a highly significant indication of the trend of opinion, decided the Government to disarm them. On the morning of the 15th August every place in which the National Volunteers had stored their arms was raided by the military. The only outcome of this action, combined with the steady and obstinate refusal to seize the arms of the Ulster Volunteers (the only political party in Ireland now left in possession of arms), was to alienate any sympathy remaining for the Government in the ranks of the National Volunteers. Had there been the least pretence of impartiality shown it might have been otherwise: but to disarm all Nationalists of any shade of national politics, while designedly and openly leaving the Unionists armed to the teeth, was a proof, now indeed hardly necessary, of the insincerity of official professions. The disarming of all sections of Nationalists gave an excuse for the practice of raiding for arms which now became common and often led to deplorable results. Innocent people were killed, either designedly or by accident, and the blame for the murders was laid upon the shoulders of Sinn Fein. When a return to the policy of physical force seemed threatened some of the ecclesiastical authorities took alarm, and issued warnings against breaches of the law of God and resistance to constituted authority. Murder was of course never countenanced by Sinn Fein: but as regards resistance to constituted authority, there were two sides to the question and Sinn Fein was not at all inclined to allow the ecclesiastical authorities to dictate its policy. Cardinal Logue might declare that the Sinn Fein programme was insane, but it was persisted in without regard to his opinion. Sinn Fein was always jealous of ecclesiastical interference: it welcomed gladly the co-operation of ecclesiastics as Irishmen, but it was determined to keep its own policy in its own hands.

While the Government Convention was sitting behind closed doors Sinn Fein decided to hold a Convention of its own, consisting of delegates freely elected by Sinn Fein Clubs throughout the country, and to lay its proceedings and conclusions before the country. The Convention met on November 1 and unanimously elected Mr. de Valera as the President of Sinn Fein, a position which Mr. Griffith had held for six years. The election was significant: it meant on the one hand that Sinn Fein thus silently and without any formal repudiation of its previous constitutional attitude accepted the Republican programme: it meant on the other hand that the party of the Rising now publicly and officially accepted the Sinn Fein policy and programme as distinct from the policy of armed insurrection. Mr. de Valera had already in a reply to the warnings of the bishops denied that another Rising was in contemplation: he had also in a speech at Bailieboro’ (28th October, 1917), replied to the kindred charge of pro-Germanism: “The Sinn Fein Party were said to be pro-Germans, but if the Germans came to Ireland to hold it those who are now resisting English power would be the first to resist the Germans.” The Constitution adopted by the Convention sets out at great length the policy and objects of Sinn Fein: its solution of the constitutional problem is as follows: “Sinn Fein aims at securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic. Having achieved that status the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of government. This object shall be attained through the Sinn Fein Organization which shall in the name of the sovereign Irish People (a) deny the right and oppose the will of the British Parliament or British Crown or any other foreign Government to legislate for Ireland; (b) make use of any and every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection by military force or otherwise. And whereas no law made without the authority and consent of the Irish people is, or ever can be, binding on the Irish people, therefore in accordance with the resolution of Sinn Fein, adopted in Convention, 1905, a Constituent Assembly shall be convoked, comprising persons chosen by the Irish constituencies, as the supreme national authority to speak and act in the name of the Irish people and to devise and formulate measures for the welfare of the whole people of Ireland.” It will be noticed that the status of an independent Republic is claimed not because Republicanism is the ideal polity, but because such a status will leave Ireland free to choose either that or any other form of government; further that the new movement expressly links itself to the Sinn Fein of pre-war days by a formal recognition of its identity with it and by the express adoption of its methods; and lastly that the means by which independence is to be achieved are defined as “any and every means available,” the party being pledged neither to nor against any particular method.

One of the methods upon which Sinn Fein now relied to achieve success was not the method of its earlier years. This was frankly acknowledged by its leaders. In an article on the Convention summoned by Count Plunkett to meet in the Mansion House in Dublin after his election for North Roscommon, New Ireland (which was next to Nationality the leading Sinn Fein weekly) wrote as follows: “In the years 1903—1910 the policy of Sinn Fein was a policy of self-reliance in the strictest sense of that term. It directed us away from Westminster and towards Ireland. It was revolutionary inasmuch as it sought to displace existing British institutions and substitute Irish institutions to which the Irish people would respond.... The newer Sinn Fein is not quite the same as the old: it varies in one essential characteristic. Whereas the old Sinn Fein directed the Irish people towards self-improvement as a basis of national strength and made it quite plain to us that many sacrifices might possibly be demanded, there is no trace in the newer Sinn Fein of these qualities. The older Sinn Fein deprecated the reliance upon any external source of strength and urged upon us the advantages of self-reliance and passive resistance. The new Sinn Fein places some of its faith at least in external bodies and does not inculcate the older doctrine of self-reliance and passive resistance. It is not, however, Sinn Fein that has changed so much as the world forces that condition such changes. The old policy flourished in a period of world peace and was in consequence disposed rather towards a long drawn out struggle: the new policy is specially devised to take advantage of the present temporary state of affairs.” This may not be very carefully worded, and it is certain that Sinn Feiners as a body would not have accepted it as a complete and accurate statement of the change in the Sinn Fein programme: but it is a statement (although a careless statement) by a Sinn Fein paper of an important fact—that an appeal to the Peace Conference was not an exercise of “self-reliance” but the adoption for the time of a totally different policy. It was in effect an admission, not that the policy of self-reliance was a failure, but that it had not yet been a success and was not so likely to be successful in the immediate future as an appeal for outside understanding and sympathy. The Parliamentarians had appealed to the sympathy and justice of England: Sinn Fein had declared such an appeal to be futile and had refused to join in it. It was now prepared to issue its own appeal for help and justice not to England but to the Peace Conference. Ever since the Rising the interaction of the two Nationalist parties upon each other’s policy had become more and more marked, though they still maintained to one another an attitude of hostility and contempt. If Sinn Fein seemed to change (at any rate for the time) its policy of strict self-reliance into one of an appeal for outside assistance, the Parliamentary Party had shown a disposition no longer to rely upon appeals to English parties and to the English Parliament but to call upon a wider audience to judge its cause. While they still differed upon nearly every other point, they were agreed in this, that to appeal to the Government of 1917 was a waste of time. The appeal to the Peace Conference was destined to fall upon deaf ears but this was not at the time believed to be possible. The Allied statesmen seemed to be committed beyond any possibility of denial or evasion to “the rights of small nations,” “government by the consent of the governed” and other formulae of national freedom. In reply to cynical suggestions that these formulae might possibly be discovered to be (to the regret of their authors) inconsistent with the “realities” of politics, New Ireland simply answered: “We frankly admit that we have faith and hope in the force of the great moral principle of justice to the nations and in its ultimate power of bringing back order to the chaos and tragedy of Europe and of imposing itself upon reactionaries.”

But as a matter of fact, in spite of the energy with which the idea of an appeal to the Peace Conference was taken up and discussed, in spite even of such sweeping statements as that quoted above from New Ireland, Sinn Fein had at most agreed to graft a new and temporary policy on to the old stem. It still inculcated self-reliance, the education of the Irish people in questions of national economics, national finance and national policy: it still urged the employment of all the means which could be employed by Irishmen in Ireland to enforce and secure national independence. The columns of New Ireland itself make this perfectly plain; and even in later references in that paper to the appeal to the Peace Conference and the hopes founded upon it, the editorial language is much less sweeping than when the idea was fresh in its fascination. The concentration of thought upon the Peace Conference was also exercising in another direction a modifying influence upon Sinn Fein. The old idea of the independence of Ireland was being gradually enlarged. It was no longer confined to the purely negative idea of freedom from foreign control: it assumed the more positive form of an Ireland entering its place in a great community of European nations, equally free and mutually dependent, bound to each other for the preservation of liberty and civilization. It was hoped that the appeal to the Peace Conference would result in the recognition of Ireland not merely as a nation to which the Conference was bound to see justice done, but as a brother and comrade in a new European Confederation for the advancement of democratic freedom. In this, Sinn Fein (though the fact is often obscured) merely represents the form, moulded by special conditions, which an aspiration, common to many of the democracies of Europe, had assumed in Ireland.

The winter of 1917—18 gave Sinn Fein an opportunity to show that the policy of “self-reliance” had not been abandoned entirely. During that winter the shadow of famine hung over Europe and every nation was engaged in the effort to avert it from its own shores by rigid conservation and economy of its food supply. From Ireland, under the final control of the English authorities, food continued to be exported recklessly. Cattle, oats and butter were shipped in large quantities to England, though it was known that the food supply of Ireland would barely suffice for its own necessities till the middle of summer. The independent and Labour members of the Irish Food Control Committee protested against this: but, being a purely advisory body and subject to the English Food Controller, the Committee found that all their advice was overruled (as one of the members put it) “by the man higher up.” The independent members resigned in disgust, leaving the work of the committee to the officials. Sinn Fein began at once to organize an unofficial food census of Ireland: members of the Sinn Fein Clubs were invited to put at the disposal of the central organization their local knowledge of the food supplies of their immediate neighbourhood. It was the first opportunity on a large scale which the Republican organization had to show what its powers and capabilities were and what body of real support it had in the country. The Chief Council (Ard-Chomhairle) of Sinn Fein called upon producers of, and dealers in, necessary foodstuffs to “co-operate in the imperative duty of saving Irish people from starvation by selling only to buyers for exclusive Irish use”: it urged the workers in the country, on the railways and at the ports, to refuse to co-operate in the exportation of food and called upon the public to treat food exporters as common enemies. The Food Committee established by the Sinn Fein Council sent circulars to the clergy of all denominations soliciting their help both in conserving the food supply and in making suitable arrangements for its distribution. It was not very easy either to secure a food census or to induce those who made money by the export of food to forego their profits. The principal export of potatoes was from Antrim, Down, Derry and Tyrone, counties in which Sinn Fein had very little prospect either of getting the requisite information from the farmers or of inducing them to forego their profits. English dealers were willing to pay large prices for Irish produce and Irish farmers were apparently willing to go on selling until, as New Ireland put it, there would be nothing left in Ireland to eat except bank notes. The situation was in all essentials what it had been during the closing years of the eighteenth century when (as Arthur O’Connor pointed out) Ireland was supplying the belligerents of Europe with food and leaving her own population to starve, while the traders waxed wealthy. The only difference was that, the inducement then being a bounty paid by Parliament on exported corn, the inducement now was a bounty paid by the purchaser in England in the form of an enhanced price. It was a situation which, as the Labour Party was quick to point out, could not be met by any unofficial organization however energetic, such as the Sinn Fein Food Committee, but required official action. The Labour Party demanded that the Irish Food Control Committee should be strengthened and vested with executive powers, no longer remaining subordinate to the London Controller: until this was done, private or unofficial advice or action was merely playing with the question. Whether Sinn Fein exerted, any but a slight influence on the export of food may be doubted; but it certainly managed the other part of its task—the distribution of the available supplies—with a certain skill. Measures were concerted for purchasing supplies in counties where food was relatively abundant and sending it to agents in districts where it was scarce. The usual abuses which attend attempts to supply food to a poor population could not, of course, be entirely eliminated, but on the whole the experiment seems to have been generally successful. In Ennis, for instance, the local Sinn Fein Club established a Sinn Fein market to which farmers brought their potatoes: the club purchased them at the current price and distributed them to 150 poor families at cost: each family was provided with a card endorsed with the quantity of potatoes necessary for its needs and on presentation of the card received the potatoes. The scheme was financed by some prominent men in Ennis who advanced the necessary capital, the Sinn Fein Club being at the cost of the working expenses of the scheme: there was “no credit and no charity.” Although this and similar schemes worked fairly well, and undoubtedly relieved the situation appreciably in many districts, they were open to the objection brought by the Labour Party that they were ineffective as compared both with genuine co-operative effort on the part of the people themselves and with official action taken by the County Councils or municipal authorities. They were, besides, likely to give rise to the question which Irish Opinion (the Irish Labour weekly) put “Is the object political or economic?” There is no doubt that the fact that Sinn Fein was actively promoting measures of relief, while official action tended to produce a situation approaching to famine, was used as an argument in favour of the Sinn Fein policy in general. It was hardly to be expected either that Sinn Feiners should not use the argument or that the public should not think that there was something in it. The Labour Party’s criticisms were, from the economic point of view, perfectly sound. An Irish Food Control Committee with executive powers, authority in the hands of locally-elected bodies to conserve and distribute local supplies of food, was ideally the proper scheme: but the proper scheme was, as usual, unattainable and Sinn Fein was doing what was perhaps the only thing that could be done under the circumstances. And though the Labour Party urged its criticisms, it did not withhold its assistance and hearty support to the Sinn Fein scheme.

The result was to increase the growing popularity of Sinn Fein. It was seen that it had another than the purely political aspect, that its principles of self-reliance were capable of being applied with a success limited only by the amount of popular support which they could command. It was, at any rate, plain that if the people who controlled the food supplies were all believers in Sinn Fein principles there need be no prospect of famine in Ireland, and the action of Sinn Fein (inadequate though it may have been) at any rate contrasted favourably with the indifference and inefficiency of the official bodies appointed by the Government and with the helplessness of other political parties.

The popularity of Sinn Fein was further increased by the continued activities of the Irish police authorities against its more prominent or active adherents. If the Cabinet had decided to create an “atmosphere” for the Convention by the release of the prisoners sentenced to penal servitude for their share in the Rising, an opposite “atmosphere” was being systematically generated by the Irish Executive. People were being arrested all over the country for offences incomparably less serious from every point of view than those committed by the people who had been released. The conclusion was drawn that the Government, while anxious to make a display to the world of impartiality and good will by a spectacular act of clemency, was in reality determined to regard the active support of Sinn Fein as a serious offence in the case of men too little before the eyes of the world for their arrest to lead to widespread comment or indignation. Their action was held to be an indication of their resolve to prevent the spread of Sinn Fein principles until the Convention should have presented a report palatable to the Cabinet: and Sinn Fein instead of suffering by this action simply grew in its own esteem and in the eyes of others.

The result of the South Armagh Election early in 1918, in which its candidate was defeated, only spurred Sinn Fein to further exertions. The election indicated more a desire “to give the Convention a chance” than a deliberate judgment of the electorate in favour of the Parliamentary as against the Sinn Fein policy. But a “chance given” to the Convention was in reality an opportunity denied to Sinn Fein. The Convention was to produce a scheme for the government of Ireland “within the Empire.” A tolerable and workable scheme produced unanimously (or nearly so) by the Convention would undoubtedly (or so it was thought) have to be accepted by the Cabinet; if such a scheme were accepted and put into operation, the feeling of relief in Ireland would have been so deep and so general as to deal to Sinn Fein, just when it was beginning to gain the ear of the country, a blow from which it might take long to recover, if it should recover it for a generation. It was felt that a Sinn Fein victory in South Armagh would mean that the Convention might for all practical purposes adjourn indefinitely, while a victory for the Parliamentary Party meant that it was given the opportunity, so far as Nationalist Ireland represented by this constituency was concerned, of producing a scheme of self-government wide enough to win the support of all Irishmen really desirous of a reasonable step in advance.