The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 5, 4 February 1925, Page 7

The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

(By William O’Brien)

The completeness of the overthrow was variously accounted for. The Hibernian theory that it was the shooting of twenty of the rebel leaders by Sir John Maxwell that turned over a whole people from .fanatical allegiance to the Board of Erin before the Rebellion to fanatical allegiance to Sinn Fein after its defeat was of a piece with the rest of the foolish miscalculations of the "doomed Party. The claim of Sinn Fein that the General Election meant a conscious and deliberate establishment of the Irish Republic by the main body of the voters "as, 1 think, a greatly exaggerated one, also. The Sinn Fein candidates put forward no rigid Republican programme—in fact, put forward no programme at all. I can answer for the half-a-million All-for-Irelanders, who turned the scale in the South that the issue for or against a Republic did not even cross their minds as a supreme decision binding them for the future. For the overwhelming mass of Irish opinion it was a choice between a Party corrupted, demoralised and effete, who had misused in the interest of an English Party the most irresistible power ever held by Irish hands—who, for the sake of establishing for themselves a boundless monopoly of patronage in Dublin, had conspired to separate nearly a fourth of the country into an Orange Free State —between a Party who .to the cries of “Trust Asquith!” “Trust Redmond!” and “Dp, the Mollies!” had for years led the most ignorant and credulous of the masses shamefully astray, and had held the most enlightened part of public opinion powerless to express itself by an unheard of tyranny of violence, bribery and Press manipulation on the other hand a band of '-enthusiasts, young, gallant, and 5 clean of heart, of whom all they knew was that whatever mistakes they might make would be those of a too passionate love of Ireland, and who would at the least clear the road of

CHAPTER XXV.— (Continued.)

the future by disencumbering it of a Parliamentary imposture which was ending in putrefaction. The country did not opt for any particular form of government, but did unquestionably transfer its confidence to the new men who were to frame it. “The Party” was as dead as Julius Caesar, but even in their ashes lived their wonted incapacity to understand wholesome Irish feeling. Captain Redmond, intoxicated by his .family success in Waterford, blithely undertook from the hustings that he and Mr. Devlin were about to proceed on a pilgrimage from constituency to constituency throughout the island to reclaim, the erring ones from their heresy, but no more was heard of the crusade of the twin Peters the Hermits. A defeated candidate in Roscommon Mr. Haydenfounded a brand new Home Rule Association of his own with thrilling proclamations through the Freeman that it was about to sweep the country; but after three meetings the Association and the speeches in the Freeman expired. Mr. Dillon had no sooner pulled himself together after his monumental overthrow in East Mayo than the exM.P. addressed an encyclical to some ghostly Branch raised from the dead for the occasion predicting that “before six months” the country would have returned to its allegiance to “The Party” and the rightful King would have come by his own again. He ought not indeed to have needed the reminder how sadly his prophetic stock had fallen on the National discount market for he must have received thousands of such reminders from the unpurchased tenants and the beggared shareholders of the Freeman who were beginning to haunt his doorstep. He had foretold that the Purchase Act of 1903 would land the country in bankruptcy and lo ! the Freeman office was the only conspicuous venue the bankruptcy messenger had visited, while the tenants he had forbidden

to purchase were now putting forth sighs from broken hearts for the opportunity of purchasing which was no longer available.* He had predicted that if the Act of 1903 were permitted to work there would be an end of the National movement in six months and behold I among the heroes of the rebellion thirteen years afterwards the sons of the new occupying owners were - among the foremost. He now added a new prophecy with the advantage that it was one calculated to fulfil itself. It was that Sinn Fein had destroyed for ever the sympathy of America with Ireland and the shaft was barbed by reference to an incident much paraded in the anti-Irish press, in the course of which some children in a western village wishing to tear down a British flag carried by the children of local British recruits by accident tore down also a Stars and Stripes, whose folds were mingled with those of the Union Jack. The unworthy appeal to American prejudice was so little heeded that American funds poured into the Sinn Fein exchequer in greater volume than had been subscribed in all the years since the Land League put together. If there was anything wanting to complete, the contempt for Parliamentary methods, it was the insignificance of the surviving Seven in the succeeding Parliament, when the Coalition passed Mr, Lloyd George’s Partition Act of 1920 formally establishing the two rival Parliaments of “Northern Ireland” and “Southern Ireland.” With the whole force of the Labor Party and the remnant of the “Wee Free” Liberal Party saved from the shipwreck at their backs, they might have offered an all but irresistible opposition to that infamous measure, forced upon Ireland without the sanction of a single Irish vote, Northern or Southern. The trouble was that Mr. Devlin denouncing Partition was in the position of Arius denouncing Arianism. If he now affected to hold out for “an undivided Ireland” he was met with the retort that the Partition Act was only the formal enactment of the “Headings of Agreement” he and his late Party and his late Liberal Prime Minister had collectively bargained for; if he protested (as he now plaintively did) his conversion to the doctrine of an Irish settlement by the commingling of Irishmen of all racial and religious origins, he laid himself open to the taunts of the tardiness of his conversion since the days when shouts of “our hereditary enemies!” and “Blackblooded Cromwellians!” were hurled at every Irish Protestant Unionist who extended a fraternal hand, and of his own special recipe of “ordering the police and military to stand aside and make a ring,” while he was disposing of the Ulster difficulty in the streets of Belfast. Accordingly he and his Liberal friends could think of nothing better than majestically to withdraw altogether from the Committee stage of the Partition Bill and by that stroke of genius left Sir E. Carson free to gerrymander at his sweet will

Mr. Devlin’s own constituency of West Bel- ‘ fast, in such a manner that the Nationalist Division of the Falls Road was swamped by the addition of two undiluted Orange Divisions. When he and his brother withdrawers --/came back to register a last impassioned demand for “an Undivided Ireland” on the Third Reading, it was to find that he had been effectually gerrymandered out of the Imperial Parliament for life, and the last nail driven in the coffin of the Board of Erin Ascendancy.

CHAPTER XX VI.—PEACEFUL SELFDETERMINATION. . Apologists for the infamies perpetrated by the Blaok-and-Tans, under the instructions of British Ministers, have striven hard to represent these as “reprisals” for provocations more infamous still. The men they warred upon were a “murder gang” who began by the wholesale assassination of defenceless police men and soldiers, and the amiable guardians of the peace whom Sir Hamar Greenwood picked out from the offscourings of a. demobilised army only came to the rescue of society by “taking the assassins by the throat.” It would not be easy for impudence to invent a grosser reversal of the true sequence of events. “The murder gang” was a nation engaged in putting bloodlessly in practice the right of “selfdetermination for the small nations,” by the promulgation of which England had won the war, and it was the British statesmen who had just rewarded with their liberty the revolted subjects of Austria for throwing off their allegiance, who started a war of brute r force against their Irish subjects for followforce against their Irish subjects for following the example. There were two distinct phases in the warfare which ended in the surrender of Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Hamar Greenwood; and in both it was England which was the aggressor. In the first phase (1917-’18) they were dealing with a nation peacefully exercising the right of self-determination; in the second (1918-’2l) with an Irish Republican Army whom they had deliberately goaded and forced into action. From the time when the General Election had invested Sinn Fein with unchallenged authority as the spokesmen of their nation, they proceeded, as was their indisputable right under the new law of nations, to supersede English rule by inducing the local governing bodies to renounce any connection with Dublin Castle and by organising a volunteer police force and Arbitration Courts to enforce a law and order and a system of public justice of their own, leaving the garrisons and Royal Irish Constabulary of England in isolated impotence within their barrack walls. It was a scheme of “peaceful penetration” of singular daring, and by reason of its very bloodlessness was succeeding with a celerity which drove the choleric soldiers and bureau- . crats of Dublin Castle to distraction. The -—‘K, insufferable offence was that the Royal Irish Constabulary was mysteriously melting away ' * under their eyes by voluntary resignation. The shrewdest blow aimed at English rule by the Sinn Fein leaders was the disorganisation of that redoubtable force. The Constabulary were the nerve-track by which

Dublin Castle transmitted its orders to and received its information from the remotest parishes in the country; the network cf espionage that penetrated every household; the array which had its detachment ready in every village to lay its heavy hand on the first stirrings of disaffection. It was assuredly the break-up of these village garrisons that eventually deprived the central government of it s eyes and ears and hands, and the regular army forces which replaced them, irresistible though they were against armed opposition in the field, could but stagger about blindly in dealing „with the hidden local forces respecting which the Constabulary could once have put them in possession of the most accurate particulars of place and persons. But it is a perversion of the truth to pretend that it was by violence and assassination the Royal Irish Constabulary was broken up. What dismayed the Castle authorities most was that, on the contrary, the process was throughout 'the years 1917 and 1918 a bloodless one, working within the body like some obscure epidemic; it sprang largely from the fact that the enthusiasm with which the rest of their countrymen were inflamed was infecting the younger and more generous-hearted of the Force, and no doubt, also, from The sharp pressure of local opinion upon their relatives in the country, and of those relatives themselves for whom it became an intolerable disgrace that men of their blood should stand in the way of the universal National uprising. It will be found that, long before the cruel, individual assassinations that subsequently nearly decimated the Royal Irish Constabulary, some 2500 of its best men had voluntarily resigned their connection with a service that had become hateful, and it was the dread that thousands more were on the point of imitating their example that drove the advisers of Sir Hamar Greenwood to endeavour to stop the lU'ijringolade by flooding the Irish Force with the infamous "Black-and-Tans, and theieby involved the Constabulary m the hell of barbarities and reprisals through which the rest of their countrymen were forced to pass. History will establish it as one of the fundamental truths of those awful times that it was not the assassinations which brought the Black-and-Tans, but the Black-and-Tans who gave the signal for the assassinations, and that, of course, even the Black-and-Tans were less culpable than their pay-masters.

There was another motive, baser still, for hastening to kill the process of peaceful selfdetermination before it was completed. In 1918 the General Election was pending. -Sinn Fein was busy with its arrangements for a trial of strength on whose upshot it would depend whether or not. Sinn Fein con'd speak as the authorised fiduciary of the nation. The old Hibernian Party was slid no less ousy, and was little less sanguine of its dunces. The Hibernian successes in est Cork, Waterford, and Armagh— last that visited their banners— filled them with the most extravagant hopes. One need not assume that Mr. Dillon, wdio still retained some portion of the influence which had made him the principal adviser of the Castle before the Easter Week rebellion, had

anything to say to the measures now taken by the official wirepullers. But the Hibernians still held 74 seats, and anything might happen at the polls. Accordingly, the Sinn Fein . Director of Electioneering was snapped up, some of his principal assistants in the provinces were arrested and their-confidential documents confiscated, and the most dreaded of the Sinn Fein candidates and organisers were kidnapped and shut up in Internment Camps. The General Election might'still be saved, if the Sinn Fein election arrangements could be sufficiently dislocated and the electors properly overawed. It all turned out, as anybody except the Tapers and Tadpoles of polities might have known. It did not alter the fate of the Hibernians at the General Election, but it did help to cripple the pacificators in their way of working out self-determination and it made the war spirits of the I.R.A. the masters of (he situation.-

The revolution by which the Royal Irish Constabulary was silently falling to pieces and their places taken by a - Volunteer police under whose protection now Courts of Justice were administering impartial fair play to Unionist and Nationalist alike, and the "local government of the country carried on with astonishing efficiency and with absolute incorruptibility, was in reality only the legitimate application of those principles of selfdetermination which England and her Allies had consecrated in the Treaty of Versailles, and it was the knowledge that the Government of the country was slipping away from them, without armed rebellion, by the mere organised enforcement of the people’s will, that impelled the bureaucrats of Dublin Castle, since the crimeless will of the people was proving too strong for them, to make m people s will itself the worst of crimes and let loose the dogs of war to put it down with bloody tooth and claw. (To be continued.)