Ulster's Stand For Union

by Ronald McNeill

But to Carson himself, and to all who listened to him that day, the heartrending question was whether they could suffer a separation to be made between the Loyalists in the six counties and those in the other three counties of the Province. It could only be done, Carson declared, if, after considering all the circumstances of the case as he unfolded it to them, the delegates from Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal could make the self-sacrifice of releasing the other counties from the obligation to stand or fall together. Carson ended by saying that he did not intend to take a vote—he "could be no party to having Ulstermen vote one against the other." What was to be done must be done by agreement, or not at all. He offered to confer separately with the delegates from the three omitted counties, and the Council adjourned till the 12th of June to enable this conference to be held.

In the interval a large number of the delegates held meetings of their local associations, most of which passed resolutions in favour of accepting the Government's proposals. But there was undoubtedly a widespread feeling that it would be a betrayal of the Loyalists of Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal, and even a positive breach of the Covenant, to accept exclusion from the Home Rule Act for only a portion of Ulster. This was, it is true, a misunderstanding of the strict meaning of the Covenant, which had been expressly conditioned so as not to extend to such unforeseen circumstances as the war had brought about[^[95]]; but there was a general desire to avoid if possible taking technical points, and both Carson himself and the Council were ready to sacrifice the opportunity for a tolerable settlement should the representatives of the three counties not freely consent to what was proposed.

In a spirit of self-sacrifice which deeply touched every member of the Council, this consent was given. Carson had obtained leave for Lord Farnham to return from the Army in France to be present at the meeting. Lord Farnham, as a delegate from Cavan, made a speech at the adjourned meeting on the 12th which filled his hearers with admiration. That he was almost heart-broken by the turn events had taken he made no attempt to conceal; and his distress was shared by those who heard his moving words. But he showed that he possessed the instinct of statesmanship which compelled him to recognise, in spite of the powerful pull of sentiment and self-interest in the opposite direction, that the course recommended by Carson was the path of wisdom. With breaking voice he thanked the latter "for the clearness, and the fairness, and the manliness with which he has put the deplorable situation that has arisen before us, and for his manly advice as leader "; and he then read a resolution that had been passed earlier in the day by the delegates of the three counties, which, after recording a protest against any settlement excluding them from Ulster, expressed sorrowful acquiescence, on grounds of the larger patriotism, in whatever decision might be come to in the matter by their colleagues from the six counties.

It was the saddest hour the Ulster Unionist Council ever spent. Men not prone to emotion shed tears. It was the most poignant ordeal the Ulster leader ever passed through. But it was just one of those occasions when far-seeing statesmanship demands the ruthless silencing of promptings that spring from emotion. Many of those who on that terrible 12th of June were most torn by doubt as to the necessity for the decision arrived at, realised before long that their leader had never been guided by surer insight than in the counsel he gave them that day.

The Resolution adopted by the Council was a lengthy one. After reciting the unaltered attachment of Ulster to the Union, it placed on record the appeal that had been made by the Government on patriotic grounds for a settlement of the Irish difficulty, which the Council did not think it right at such a time of national emergency to resist; but it was careful to reserve, in case the negotiations should break down from any other cause, complete freedom to revert to "opposition to the whole policy of Home Rule for Ireland."

Meantime the Nationalist leaders had been submitting Mr. Lloyd George's proposals to their own people, and on the 10th of June Mr. Redmond made a speech in Dublin from which it appeared that he was submitting a very different proposal to that explained by Carson in Belfast. For Mr. Redmond told his Dublin audience that, while the Home Rule Act was to come into operation at once, the exclusion of the six counties was to be only for the period of the war and twelve months afterwards. That would, of course, have been even less favourable to Ulster than the terms offered by Mr. Asquith and rejected by Carson in March 1914. Exclusion for the period of the war meant nothing; it would have been useless to Ulster; it was no concession whatever; and Carson would have refused, as he did in 1914, even to submit it to the Unionist Council in Belfast. Mr. Lloyd George, who must have known this, had told him quite clearly that there was to be a "definite clean cut," with no suggestion of a time limit. There was, however, an idea that after the war an Imperial Conference would be held, at which the whole constitutional relations of the component nations of the British Empire would be reviewed, and that the permanent status of Ireland would then come under reconsideration with the rest. In this sense the arrangement now proposed was spoken of as "provisional"; but both Mr. Lloyd George and the Prime Minister made it perfectly plain that the proposed exclusion of the six Ulster counties from Home Rule could never be reversed except by a fresh Act of Parliament.

But when the question was raised by Mr. Redmond in the House of Commons on the 24th of July, in a speech of marked moderation, he explained that he had understood the exclusion, like all the rest of the scheme, to be strictly "provisional," with the consequence that it would come to an end automatically at the end of the specified period unless prolonged by new legislation; and he refused to respond to an earnest appeal by Mr. Asquith not to let slip this opportunity of obtaining, with the consent of the Unionist Party, immediate Home Rule for the greater part of Ireland, more especially as Mr. Redmond himself had disclaimed any desire to bring Ulster within the Home Rule jurisdiction without her own consent.

The negotiations for settlement thus fell to the ground, and the bitter sacrifice which Ulster had brought herself to offer, in response to the Government's urgent appeal, bore no fruit, unless it was to afford one more proof of her loyalty to England and the Empire. She was to find that such proofs were for the most part thrown away, and merely were used by her enemies, and by some who professed to be her friends, as a starting-point for demands on her for further concessions. But, although all British parties in turn did their best to impress upon Ulster that loyalty did not pay, she never succeeded in learning the lesson sufficiently to be guided by it in her political conduct.

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