America 1917, 2: Promises Given, Promises Broken

The 1916 election proved to be very close indeed. What matters in an American Presidential election is the Electoral College vote of which, in 1912, there were 530, so the winner had to reach a minimum of 266.

When the first returns from the Eastern States were announced, Republican Charles Hughes appeared to have won by a landslide. By seven o’clock on 7 November it was certain that Wilson had lost New York and the other populous Northeastern States with their heavy votes in the Electoral College followed in swift succession; New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin and Delaware went Republican. It was a rout. [1] Apparently.

Election extras were quickly on the streets bearing huge portraits of ‘The President Elect, Charles Evans Hughes’. As night fell on Washington, strange forces spread across the United States. President Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty was instructed not to concede. He was reported to have received a mysterious, anonymous telephone message warning him ‘in no way or by the slightest sign give up the fight.’ [2] Remarkably the American historian and New York Herald Tribune journalist, Walter Millis wrote ‘Who it was he never knew; perhaps it was a miracle.’ Absurd. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Must we always be taken as fools? How many anonymous callers have the telephone number of the President’s private secretary or could order him not to concede the election? Malpractice was afoot.

In London, The Times pronounced, ’Mr Hughes Elected’ in a Republican landslide. Its sober conclusion was that Mr Wilson has been defeated not by, but in spite of his neutrality. [3] The Kolnische Volkrientung cheered that ‘German-Americans have defeated Wilson’, while in Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse claimed that Hughes had been elected to bring an end to an era where ‘the Steel Trust and the Bethlehem works may still make further profits and that the price of munitions shares may be whipped up still further while Morgan further extends his financial kingdom.’ [4] The inference was that the people had turned against the military – industrial profiteers. But they were all running ahead of themselves.

At daybreak on 8 November, while the New York Times conceded Wilson’s defeat, Tumulty remained unmoved. He was quietly informed that the rot had been stopped at Ohio by a margin of 60,000 votes. Colonel House ordered the Democratic Headquarters to put every county chairman in every doubtful state across America on high alert. They were urged to exercise their ‘utmost vigilance’ on every ballot box. [5] How odd that such instructions should be issued on the day following the election. What did House know that others did not? Projections of a Hughes’ victory shrank from certainty to doubt until the entire election result hung on the outcome from California. Secret Service agents and US Marshals were drafted into the largest Californian counties to guard ballot boxes and supervise proceedings. California, with 13 Electoral College votes in 1916, was pivotal to determining the winner. On 8 November, the Electoral vote stood at 264 to Wilson and 254 to Hughes.

Before the mystical, middle-of-the-night change of fortune, the Democrats had conceded California to the Republican challenger, but they declared their decision premature. After a two day recount, Wilson was declared winner by a mere 3,420 out of a total of 990,250 Californian votes cast. Talk of election-fraud and vote-buying prompted the Republican party to file legal protests, [6] but nothing significant materialised. They were effectively too late. While scrutiny of the returns showed minor vote-tallying errors, and affected both sides, these appeared to be random. Nothing fraudulent could be proved.

An angry and suspicious Republican Party refused to concede the election. The final recount in California showed that Wilson had gained 46.65% of votes cast and Hughes 46.27%. The Republican candidate baulked at accusing his rival of fraud. His final statement acknowledged ‘in the absence of absolute proof of fraud, no such cry should be raised to becloud the title of the next President of the United States.’ [7] ‘Absolute proof’ set a very high level of certainty. In New Hampshire the lead changed hands during the canvassing of returns and Wilson won the State by a mere 56 Votes. [8]

Vested interests jumped to close down the Republican options. In London, The Times could not believe that ‘the patriotic and shrewd men who manage the electioneering affairs of the Republican Party will attempt to impugn that decision [Wilson’s claim to victory] without clear and conclusive evidence.’ [9] Consider the pressure that was heaped upon Charles Hughes. War in Europe raged on. A newly elected government in the United States would have brought about a complete change in all of the key cabinet posts with consequent dislocation of existing ties. Imagine the confusion if a President Hughes had to appoint new ambassadors, new consuls, new State Department staff, new White House staff and so forth.

Woodrow Wilson (left) and Charles Hughes. We will never know who truly won the 1916 election

Colonel House told the President that ‘Germany almost to a man is wishing for your defeat and that France and England are almost to a man wishing for your success.’ [10] They weren’t wishing for his success, they were dependant on it. In the end, Wilson won more popular votes overall, (9,129,606 – 8,538,221) and no clear evidence of malpractice could be found. On 22 November Charles Hughes accepted the election result as it stood. His acquiescence did not go unrewarded. Charles Evans Hughes became United States Secretary of State between 1921 and 1925, a judge on the Court of International Justice between 1928 and 1930, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. His son, Charles Evans Hughes junior, was appointed Solicitor General by Herbert Hoover.

Primed by his jubilant backers, Woodrow Wilson demonstrated an unexpectedly theatrical touch at the start of his second term in office. Not since George Washington had a president delivered his first formal presidential address to the Senate itself. Wilson did this on 22 January, 1917 in a barnstorming speech which created the impression of an enlightened, benevolent master-statesman to whom the world ought to listen. He called for ‘peace without victory’ because:

‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.’ [11]

As rhetoric, this was stout stuff. As policy, it did not last for long. He claimed that his soaring vision for peace and the future was based on core American values unshackled by entangling alliances. [12] The shining centrepiece of his dazzling new utopia was to be a League of Nations which could enforce peace. The Senate sat mesmerised and many rose to salute him at the end of an impressive performance. Democrats waxed lyrical with claims that Wilson’s speech ‘was the greatest message of the century … the most momentous utterance that has a yet been made during this most extraordinary era …simply magnificent … the most wonderful document he has ever delivered.’ [13] His Republican rivals were more circumspect in their appraisal, describing it as ‘presumptuous’ and ‘utterly impractical.’

American newspapers split opinion in predictable fashion. The New York World saluted his principles of liberty and justice; the Philadelphia Public Ledger declared that Wilson’s oration was inspired by lofty idealism and the Washington Post thought it constituted a shining ideal. The conservative New York Sun caustically remarked that having failed for four years to secure peace with Mexico, Wilson had no business lecturing the world on the terms for peace with Europe, while The New York Herald warned that ‘Mr Wilson’s suggestion would lead to the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon nations … propaganda for which ‘has been in evidence for a quarter of a century.’ [14]

In Europe reaction was naturally selfish. The British government refused to countenance his proposal first and foremost because he had added a passage on freedom of the seas which challenged their divine right to dominate the oceans. Having shed rivers of blood on the fields of Flanders and beyond, the Europeans were not attracted to ‘peace without victory’. The French novelist, Anatole France, a Nobel Prizewinner for literature, likened peace without victory to ‘bread without yeast…mushrooms without garlic … love without quarrels … camel without humps’. [15]

But Wilson strode that world stage for darker reasons. Who, one wonders, whispered in his ear that all of his visionary pronouncements could not deliver a place at the high table of international settlement at the end of the war if America was not a participant? He could not logically take part in the final resolution of the conflict unless the United States was a full partner in absolute victory. Peace without victory was an empty promise, a misdirection to the jury of hope.

On 4 March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave his second inaugural address to Congress and proclaimed that America stood ‘firm in armed neutrality’ but warned that ‘we may even be drawn on by circumstances … to a more active assertion of our rights’. [16] Twenty-nine days later, on 2 April, he again addressed a joint Session of Congress. This time his purpose was to seek their approval for war with Germany. In a lofty speech he revisited the same moral high ground with which the Secret Elite and their agents in Britain had previously gone to war. With claims about saving civilisation, it might have been penned by Sir Edward Grey:

‘It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.’ [17]

America was encouraged to war in order to fight for democracy. The phrase has a familiar ring. What had caused this violent swing from peace to war in barely four months?

1. Cuddy, Irish Americans and the 1916 Election, American Quarterly vol. 21, no 2, Part 1 p. 235.
2. Walter Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 352.
3. The Times, 8 Nov. 1916, p. 9.
4. The Times, 18 Nov. 1916. p. 7.
5. Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 353.
6. Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, p. 202.
7. New York Times, 11 November 1916.
8. Foley, Ballot Battles: p. 431.
9. The Times, 13 November, 1916, p. 9.
10. H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 281.
11. Woodrow Wilson: Address to the Senate of the United States; World League for Peace, 22 January, 1917.
12. Ibid.
13. New York Times, 23 January, 1917, Scenes in the Senate.
14. New York Times, 23 January, 1917. Wilson’s Senate Speech – Press comments
15. Alfred Carter Jefferson, Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism, p. 195.
16. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/wilson1917inauguration.htm
17. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War against Germany, 2 April, 1917. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366

America 1917, 1: He Kept Us Out Of War

One of the great myths of the First World War is that the United States was not directly involved until April 1917, at which point a coalition of circumstances demanded her formal involvement. Such a convenient interpretation has covered the lie of American neutrality virtually from the day that war was declared by Britain. If neutrality included the vast production of munitions for one side, the enormous loans and credits provided for that same side, the active propaganda which was pumped out, if not exclusively for one side, certainly heavily weighted towards that one side, the provision of vital food supplies and every avenue through which the Allies were aided in their war, then you might argue that America remained neutral. It remains an intrinsically false argument.

Yet the United States was not formally at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary for one overwhelming reason. The people did not want to be dragged into someone else’s conflict. There was no political consensus in favour of war. An active group of upper and upper-middle class businessmen advocated military preparedness but many public figures hated the prospect. Of these, President Wilson’s first Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, was the most outspoken and he had the honesty to resign as Wilson increasingly came under the influence of his minders, Edward Mandell House, and the Wall Street money-power. They supported Robert Lansing as Secretary Bryan’s replacement. A more outspoken opposition to American involvement came from German and Irish communities, but the bottom line was clear. The American people did not want to see American troops sacrificed in Europe. This was not their war.

How and why was America suckered into the conflict despite the overwhelming popular view against, demands examination. The first question to be asked focusses on the President himself.

Woodrow Wilson’s first term in office from 1912-1916, was predicated on an election victory subscribed to and underwritten by the ‘money-power’ in New York. [1] He campaigned under the banner of ‘New Freedom’ and opposition to big business and monopoly power, [2] yet like many presidents, before and after, his actions turned his promises to lies. However the daunting task of defeating the incumbent Republican President William Taft, who had steadfastly attacked the powerful business combinations in the United States, seemed beyond any realistic expectation.

Taft was popular. The Supreme Court’s legal actions against Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company were decided in favour of his government. [3] In October 1911, Taft’s Justice Department brought a suit against U.S. Steel and demanded that over a hundred of its subsidiaries be granted corporate independence. They named and shamed prominent executives and financiers as defendants. Big business was thoroughly shaken. William Taft earned many powerful enemies. Clear favourite to win a second term in office in 1912, Taft’s chances of success were destroyed by a well-contrived split in the Republican party. Financed by J.P. Morgan’s associates, the former Republican, Theodore Roosevelt created a third force from thin air, the ‘Progressive’ Bull Moose Party and at the ballot box in November 1912, Wilson was elected President with 42 per cent of the vote; Roosevelt gained 27 percent and Taft could only muster 23 percent. The split Republican voted totalled 7.5 million while Wilson and the Democrats won with just 6.2 million. [4]

1916 promised to offer better prospects for the Republican Party. The schism with Roosevelt and the Bull-Moose was closing fast. Wilson’s supposed neutrality was so transparently false that certain sectors of the American electorate were drawn to his opponent, the Republican, Charles E. Hughes, a former Supreme Court Judge. German-Americans and Irish-Americans had been particularly annoyed by what they believed was President Wilson’s partisan behaviour and were expected to vote Republican. These groups could not be ignored and came under sustained attack for what the President termed, ‘disloyalty.’ In his annual Message to Congress on 7 December 1915, Woodrow Wilson ranted against those born under foreign flags and welcomed ‘under our generous naturalisation laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life … who seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion.’ [5]

He expressed contempt for those who held fast to their original national identities because they did not put American interests first. These he termed ‘hyphenated Americans’. [6] Wilson’s attitude towards German-Americans was harsh. They had watched from across the Atlantic as their former homeland was bounced into a debilitating war by a British Establishment, financed and supplied by America.

By 1916, there were important and influential groups of ‘hyphenated Americans’. As the table below shows, almost 11,000,000 Americans had comparatively recent German, Austrian or Hungarian ancestry. If the Irish community was added, the total approached 15,500,000.

Table 1. 1910 Census of the United States: Total population 91,972,266 [7]

Defined by place of birth, by persons, both of whose parents were immigrants from that country or one of the parents was foreign born;

German – American 8,282,618
Austria – Hungarian – American 2,701,786
Irish – American 4,504,360
English – Scottish – Welsh – American 3,231,052
Russian – Finnish – American 2,752,675
Italian – American 2,098,360
Note: The U.S. Census of 1910 did not take into account renumbers of foreign-born grandparents or the huge numbers of immigrants from Europe who had settled in America over the previous two and a half centuries.

Social tensions diluted Democratic support amongst the American – Irish community. Though many Catholics were not Irish, and not all Irish were Catholic, there was a strong affinity between race and religion on the eastern seaboard states of America. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Wilson made himself even more unpopular by refusing to endorse an appeal for clemency for Roger Casement. [8] The President’s support for the anti-clerical President Carranza in Mexico gave rise to the claim that Wilson was anti-Catholic. [9] The New York weekly newspaper, The Irish World, accused his Administration of ‘having done everything for England that an English Viceroy might do.’ [10] Quite a calculated insult by any standard. In truth racism and bigotry lay centimetres from the surface of many American voters.

Little was said of another nascent power-block which was beginning to find its political feet; the hyphenated Jewish-American. The spread of Zionism in America brought with it a fresh wind of political influence. Though still in comparative infancy by election day 1916, certain pro-Zionist Jewish-Americans like Wilson’s newly appointed Supreme Court Judge, Louis Brandeis, were held in high esteem inside the Jewish community. Though Brandeis, and by default, Wilson who appointed him, were initially lambasted in the press. [11] It appeared to have little direct effect in November 1916. That would later change. [12]

Woodrow Wilson had one important advantage, the economy. At the outbreak of war in Europe, America was wallowing in a depression more serious than that of 1907-8, but the war trade brought phenomenal prosperity. [13] The very Trusts which Wilson had spoken against were profiteering on a scale hitherto unknown. Thanks to the massive order book from Britain and France, managed exclusively by the J.P. Morgan-Rothschild banks, the military-industrial complex thrived, as did the communities around them. There were more and better-paid jobs. On 21 August 1915 Secretary to the (US) Treasury, McAdoo told President Wilson (his father-in-law), that ‘Great prosperity is coming. It is, in large measure, already here. It will be tremendously increased if we can extend reasonable credits to our customers’. [14] The customers on whom he was focussed were Britain and France. Wilson’s America forged an economic solidarity with the Allies which made nonsense of neutrality, yet the tacit promise from the Democrats to the American nation in the 1916 election was that ‘He Kept Us out of War’. That was true, as far as it went. The inference was that Woodrow Wilson would continue to keep America out of the war, but the President never claimed that he would continue this policy. Indeed it would have been political suicide to whisper a call to arms. It would also have shortened the war.

1. Anthony Sutton, Federal Reserve Conspiracy, pp. 82-3.
2. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 76.
3. Paolo Enrico Coletta, The Presidency of William Howard Taft. pp. 154–157.
4. http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1912
5. Albert Shaw, President Wilson’s State Papers and Addresses, p. 150.
6. Hans P. Vought, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot, American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897-1933, p. 96.
7. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, p. 611.
8. Roger Casement was at that time a hero of the Irish Republican movement because of his support for and involvement in, the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916.]
9. Edward Cuddy, Irish Americans and the 1916 Election, American Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, Part 1, Summer 1969, pp. 229-231.
10. Irish World, 24 June, 1916.
11. For example, the New York Times urged the US Senate to throw out Brandeis’s nomination New York Times, 29 January 1916. p. 3
12. See chapter 28 in forthcoming book, Prolonging The War.
13. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, p. 622.
14. Paul Birdsall, Neutrality and Economic Pressures, Science and Society, Vol. 3, no. 2, (Spring 1939) p. 221.

Ireland 1916, 10: The Legacy Of Easter 1916

With the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising fast approaching (24-29 April 2016), the events of that awesome week will be celebrated throughout Ireland with parades, bunting and speeches with an emphasis on those who gave their lives in the cause of liberty. Politicians will, as ever, line up to be photographed and, by association, linked to the men who fell. 1916 was a year of atrocious bloodletting across the battlefields of Europe, but there is an essential difference between those millions sacrificed to an Empire’s war in a determined drive to crush Germany and those who took part in the uprising in the expectation that they would sacrifice their lives for Ireland. Indeed the Proclamation which Patrick Pearse read out in front of the General Post Office in Dublin invoked the readiness of Ireland’s children ‘to sacrifice themselves for the common good’. [1] It was an overt choice, a clear decision pledged to Ireland’s freedom from the British imperialist yoke. The consequent loss of life in Ireland cannot be compared to the horrendous carnage in the battles of attrition over the Somme from July 1916, [2] but its significance was to prove far greater than contemporary British historians and commentators have recorded.

The Secret Elite and their imperial guard in the press, the foreign and the colonial offices, the war office and the great money houses in London and New York, made every effort to downplay the actions taken by James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Sean Mac Diarmada, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett and the men and women who fought by their side. Because he represented an intellectual and dangerous challenge to the Empire, they promoted a devastating tirade against Roger Casement based on allegedly sexually explicit diaries which were circulated secretly to influence pro-Irish Americans.

Whatever the early success the anti-rebellion propaganda enjoyed, the rising was not a naive proposition to be dismissed by ‘Empire Loyalists’ as folly. [3] Nor was it simply the sixth in line in a series of rebellions against British domination over the previous three hundred years. It was not an aberration or a theatrically staged protest. It was a statement of intent from a small minority group which refused to follow Redmond and Dillon blindly into a war they knew was wrong and which they deeply resented. And their numbers grew, slowly at first, as men and women who initially acted in good faith to support the Empire came to terms with the unpalatable fact that yet again the British government was using them as dupes.

Though derided for their refusal to join the British army and labelled ‘cowards’, they were not. They saw the reality of the evil Empire ranged against Germany and refused to bend the knee. They were not to be fooled by false promises of Home Rule once the war was over. From an unforgiving courtroom Roger Casement caught the moment: ‘we are told that if Irishmen go by the thousands to die not for Ireland, but for Flanders, for Belgium, for a patch of sand in Mesopotamia, or a rocky trench on the heights of Gallipoli, they were winning self-government for Ireland. But if they dare to lay down their lives on their native soil, if they dare to dream even that freedom can be won only at home by men resolved to fight for it there, then they are traitors to their country.’ [4] Casement analysed it perfectly. The sacrifice of these men who joined up in 1914 did not win self-government for Ireland once the war had ended.

Just before he was executed, an unrepentant James Connolly wrote to his sister, ‘We went out to break the connection between this Country and the British Empire and to establish an Irish Republic. We believe that the call we thus issued to the people of Ireland was a nobler call in a holier cause than any call issued to them during this war…’ [5] Both men, and those who shared their conviction, acted not from narrow self-serving considerations but from a revulsion against Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. They sought no association with the barbaric war. Theirs was an act of faith whose realisation they never saw. From it came a political reawakening, fuelled by the intransigence and arrogance of the Secret Elite. Casement, Connolly, Pearce and all who sacrificed themselves for Irish independence, were the spark that lit the flame.
It need not have come to that.

Had there been a genuine will to accommodate the aspirations of the Irish people, it would have been so different. Had the Secret Elite addressed the issue of Home Rule in Ireland with a more enlightened touch, the rebellion might never have had any impact at all. In stirring Ulster for their own purposes, the Secret Elite promoted an absolute determination in the Northern Province to detach itself from any Dublin-centred national government. As we have seen in previous blogs, their parliamentary agents in the Conservative party derided the advocates of Home Rule, wallowed in the overt injustices and inequalities between the different communities and armed and trained a private army to defend Ulster. Had the Secret Elite ordained that Asquith’s coalition government, formed in December 1915, should acknowledge the great value of Ireland as part of the Empire’s war effort, Irish citizens might have felt valued. Had the War Office listened to John Redmond and his pleas for the establishment of an Irish Army Corps, which Asquith endorsed in a speech in Dublin in September 1915, but failed to deliver, there would have been a greater sense of identity with the Empire’s struggle. [6] Such pious advocacy is empty talk for the men of real power, the money power, the financiers and policy makers who acted behind the democratic front, the Secret Elite, had no intention of placating Ireland.

For the Secret Elite had caused the war, deliberately. Their purpose was to crush Germany and take control of the civilised world. They cared not a jot for the working people and the impoverished underclasses. They had no time to concern themselves about injustice in Ireland. And that is why the British establishment stuck to the mantra that Ireland could not be trusted. The irony was, it was they who could not be trusted.

Instead, the War Office engaged in ‘a systematic suppression of recognition of the gallantry of the Irish troops at the front.’ Redmond stated in parliament that: ‘I do not think that there was any single incident that did more harm to our efforts [to encourage enlistment] at that time than the suppression in the official dispatches of all recognition, even of the names being mentioned, of the gallantry of the Dublin Fusiliers and the Munster Fusiliers in the landing at V Beach at Gallipoli.’ [7] Such blatant discrimination by those in real power was indefensibly racist and counter-productive, but it represented their mind-set. Ordinary people did not matter and ordinary Irish men and women did not matter absolutely.

This suppression of national identity, this deliberate disassociation of a people with the valour and sacrifice of its fighting men because of their ethnicity and religion was a repression which rebounded and destroyed trust in Britain. How many historic prejudices were wrapped around the fact that ‘up to the time that the 16th went to the front, with the exception of two or three subalterns, there was not a Catholic officer in the Division’. [8] The final blow for many Irishmen in the South – and the biggest threat – came with the announcement of the coalition cabinet in December 1915. From that moment, recruitment to the British Army plummeted and support for the Irish Volunteers and independence, grew steadily. Home Rule was dead and buried, and a reborn Protestant ascendancy within the British government destroyed any lingering confidence in the impartiality of British rule.

Distrust and suspicion spread all over the South with the spectacle of Edward Carson taking a seat in the Cabinet as chief Law Officer. In the minds of large masses of the people, this meant that in the end, they would be betrayed. [9] The offer that was extended to John Redmond to join the Cabinet deceived nobody. While representatives of the small Unionist party in Ireland were given high office in the Coalition Government and in the Executive of Ireland, Redmond, who represented the majority of the Irish people, was offered minor post of no particular importance. It was a calculated insult.

The Secret Elite and their political agents believed that Ireland in 1916 was still a backward, ill-educated society, unable to comprehend what was happening all around its shores. Not so. People could clearly see that a Unionist executive had been installed in Dublin Castle, with a Unionist Chief-Secretary and a Unionist Attorney General. These bitter opponents of Home Rule imposed a system of universal martial law encompassing hundreds of untried prisoners, many of whom did not even know the charges of which they were accused. The political system which had apparently agreed a great measure of home rule for Ireland in 1914, was transformed into a military dictatorship. The unelected minority were in charge. Again.

Everything the London government did was unjust. Everything the War Office ordered, threatened the identity of the Irish soldier. Whether it was meant as a punishment or determined through fear, injured and recuperating Irishmen at Boulogne were sent back to the front to serve in English divisions. It was estimated that there were twenty times more Irishmen in English, Scottish and Welsh battalions than there were Englishmen, Scots or Welshmen in Irish regiments. There was no justice. There was no equality. Redmond told parliament that he had received ‘scores and scores of letters’ from Irishmen seeking transfer from their appointed regiment into the Connaught Rangers, but ‘never succeeded in a single case.’ [10]

The malignant aggression of Secret Elite imperialist ambitions used every obstacle to prevent Irishmen from being credited for the successful prosecution of the war. After 1916, young Irishmen, suppressed by a Dublin executive severely out of touch with its own populace, preached a new gospel; one in which Home Rule representatives were no longer entitled to their support. Redmond, Dillon, ‘wee’ Joe Devlin and the Irish Parliamentary Party had failed. They had failed because they stood by a government which patently failed the people. Unable to grasp the truth that stared them down, the old order in Irish politics blamed ‘prejudiced stupidity’ inside the British government for the return to pre-1910 attitudes. No, it ran much deeper than mere prejudice. The guiding force behind both Asquith’s and later in 1916, Lloyd George’s governments, unelected and full of place-men, was the Secret Elite, for whom Ireland was a mere side-show; an inconvenience which would be ironed-out in their good time. For the men and women of the Rising, an Irish Rubicon had been crossed.

The burning question is why John Redmond and virtually all of the Home Rule (Irish Parliamentary) Party, continued to stay loyal to the Empire? Was it, as Shakespeare put it, that they were stepped in blood so far, that ‘returning was as tedious as go’er.’ [11] They had never belonged to the political class of the Oxford Elite from whose staunchest ranks many in the Secret Elite were drawn. Redmond had been duped by the Asquiths into believing that loyalty to the Empire would be reflected in loyalty from the Imperial Parliament in London. He appeared to hold to the belief that in the end, even although time and again the Unionist-dominated cabinet thwarted his every good intention, he would be able to guide Ireland through the political turmoil. But his time had passed.

John Redmond continued to front parliamentary opposition to the British cabinet’s designs on Ulster though his political mandate became a thing of the past. His brother, 52 year old Major Willie Redmond, MP for East Clare, was killed in action at Messines in June 1917, a hard blow for a parliamentarian who knew he stood on shifting sands. Major Redmond’s parliamentary seat  was taken by Eamonn de Valera, whose death sentence in 1916 had been remitted solely because he was an American citizen. De Valera was adopted as the Sinn Fein candidate in East Clare and won with an enormous 70 per cent share of the vote. [12] John Redmond died broken hearted in London on 6 March 1918. [13]

The tectonic plates of political confidence in Irish politics in the South clashed absolutely. The old order shook and fell. Like an avalanche, Sinn Fein, which had been but a doctrinaire idea held by a very small number in the community, developed a giant’s strength. In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, Sinn Fein reaped a reward that many later claimed was undeserved. Be clear, Sinn Fein did not make the rising, but the rising made Sinn Fein. [14] They held no association with Britain. They had consistently rejected war. The British press repeatedly accused ‘Sinn Feiners’ of plotting the Easter Rising as if it was a mark of infamy. This badge of dishonour in British eyes became the standard for the honourable rebel. Their ranks were swollen both by participants in the rising and wrongfully deported sympathisers, freed from internment and prison in England. To paraphrase Yeats, in the aftermath of Easter 1916, ‘a terrible beauty was born.’ [15]

By 1918 Ireland was no longer the ‘one bright spot’ which had lit up Sir Edward Grey’s statement in 1914. [16] It had been transformed into one of the most doubtful and difficult spots that ever coloured the Empire. [17] Attempts by the British parliament to introduce conscription to Ireland later in the war only made matters worse. With 47% of the votes cast in the December 1918 General Election, Sinn Fein rose like a political colossus towering over Ireland. In 1910 they had no representatives; in 1918, they held 73 seats. The Irish Parliamentary (Home Rule) Party was destroyed. In 1910 it held 67 seats; in 1918, only six of their representatives were elected to Parliament. [18]

It was a disaster for the Secret Elite determination to bind Ireland to the Empire. In truth, their obduracy had blinded them to the consequences of democratic accountability.  Much like the Scottish Labour Party in 2015, an inability to divest itself from association with an English party opened the way to a nationalist revival and cast the Irish Parliamentary Party into the political abyss. And this was the legacy of Patrick Pearse and the men who signed the Proclamation of 1916; a legacy predicated upon the Secret Elite’s inability to accept that in a changing world – republicanism in Ireland had replaced the softer notion of Home Rule under the British flag. They had tried, and continued to try, to repress an idea which had found its time.

Yet questions remain unanswered about the tumultuous events of Easter 1916. Given that the evidence we have previously presented proves without doubt that key members of the British establishment’s most powerful political, naval and military decision-makers knew in advance that the uprising was scheduled, why was no action taken to forewarn Dublin Castle and the Irish Executive?

Given the fact that many documents pertaining to Easter 1916 remain classified, probably hidden amongst the thousands condemned to the government’s secret repository at the high security communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, [19] has the time not come for outright honesty? What better gesture to continue the process of truth and reconciliation than the release of every single remaining document covering Easter 1916? The memory of all Irishmen who were sacrificed for the Empire and those killed during the uprising, and afterwards, deserves that truth.

Perhaps we are being overly idealistic. Sad to say, the old lies persist; old propaganda continues to populate the pages of contemporary newspapers in Ireland. Incredibly, an article in the Irish Times of 2014 [20] began with this ridiculous statement: ‘The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 and ended on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918.’ Still the myth-peddlers stick to pro-war propaganda without a blush of shame. The First World War began on 4 August 1914 when the British Empire declared war on Germany. Prior to that, it was a European war involving France and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The conflict officially ended only after the Versailles Peace settlement was signed in 1919. Between November 1918 and June 1919, hundreds of thousands of Germany citizens were starved to death as the miserable food blockade continued unchecked. They apparently didn’t matter then, so they won’t matter now.

Bad though that is, we wonder why Ireland’s leaders today stand literally shoulder to shoulder with their British counterparts at war centenary commemorations in solemn unquestioning agreement which perpetuates the great lie that tens of millions died for freedom and civilization. In doing so they tarnish not only the memory of all Irishmen killed or wounded in Europe and on Gallipoli, but the Irishmen who were branded cowards because they refused to take part.

The memorable words of David Starret from the 9th Royal Irish Rifles have been carved in stone at the Irish Peace Park near Messines. He wrote home lamenting ‘the innocent slaughtered for the guilty, the poor man for the sake of the greed of the already rich, the man of no authority made victim of the man who gathered importance and wishes to keep it.’

His poignant observation describes the Secret Elite in all of their conceit.

The Irish government has to take more care lest its message infers that war was popular in Ireland and that those who stood against it acted dishonourably. They did not. Pearse, Connolly, Casement and all whom they urged into action, chose to sacrifice themselves for their country. As John Dorney pointed out ‘It is entirely appropriate for families and localities to remember their dead. But to suggest that the war for the Empire was popular in Ireland and only discredited by a malevolent plan by nationalists to ‘airbrush it from history’ is simply to twist the facts. [21]

How much more honourable to recognise that Ireland was committed to a war by politicians who believed that in the end Britain would reward the nation with Home Rule. In that, they were mightily deceived. Freedom is not a reward to be bestowed; it is a right that has to be fought for and defended. Thanks to those who sacrificed themselves for Ireland in 1916, Ireland in the 21st Century is an independent nation.

They were the few.

Do not forget those who were sacrificed and those who sacrificed themselves.

[1] Patrick Pearse’s proclamation can be viewed at goireland.about.com/od/…/Proclamation-of-the-Irish-Republic-1916.htm
[2] W. Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century, pp. 81-86.
[3] Liam O’Ruaire, The Global-Historical Significance of the 1916 Rising https://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/?s=the+global-historical
[4] Sir Roger Casement, Speech From The Dock, from The Crime Against Europe with The Crime Against Ireland, introduced by Brendan Clifford p. 167.
[5] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising,  p. 355.
[6] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916 vol 86 cc581-696.
[7] Ibid., cc586-7.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., cc587-8.
[10] Ibid., cc593-4.
[11] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, III. iv. 1136.
[12] Fidelma McDonnell, Riches of Clare: 1917 Rising of an Irish Political Colossus http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/claremuseum/news_events/1917_rising.htm
[13] Michael MacDonagh, The Life of William O’Brien, the Irish Nationalist, p.232.
[14] Warrre B. Wells, John Redmond; A Biography, p. 185.
[15] W.B. Yeats, Easter 1916.
[16] hansard.millbanksystems.com/…/1914/aug/03/statement-by-sir-edward-g…HC Debate, 3 August 1914 vol 65 cc1809-32.
[17] Matthew Keating, House of Commons Debate, 9 April 1918 vol 104 cc1412-13.
[18] http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/h1918.htm
[19] Ian Cobain, The Guardian, 18 October 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-office-historic-files-secret-archive
[20] Ronan McGreevy, The Irish Times, 2 January 2014.
[21] http://www.theirishstory.com/2012/11/12/opinion-remembering-world-war-i-in-ireland/#.VrjGn4R8Gi4

Ireland 1916, 9: A Scandalous Report

Let’s cut to the chase. When the powers that oversee and direct government set up a Royal Commission or Board of Enquiry, they do so under terms that normally come to the conclusion they seek. To ensure this, they place one or more of their trusted agents as chairman or prosecutor and then set the parameters within which the so-called enquiry must operate. That done, the findings will be exactly as they require. For example, they chose Viscount Bryce, the former (and popular) Ambassador to America, to chair the report on Alleged German Outrages [1] in December 1914, and set a remit which barred the members of the committee from interviewing witnesses. They had access only to the depositions taken by barristers and despite protests, second-hand accounts were as close as the committee members came to hard fact. [2] In like vein for the Enquiry into the sinking of the Lusitania, (issued July 1915) they chose Sir Edward Carson and his associate, F E Smith, both trusted agents of the Secret Elite, as the prosecutors of Commander William Turner in order to blacken his name and divert attention away from the lies the Admiralty had concocted to explain the sinking of the Titanic. [3] So it was with the Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland.

Given the outrage expressed in Unionist quarters, Asquith had no option but to announce a Royal Commission [4] to ‘enquire into the causes’ of the ‘recent outbreak of rebellion in Ireland.’ There was a second part to the remit entrusted to the King’s chosen Commissioners, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, Sir Montague Shearman and Sir Mackenzie Chalmers. [5] These men were charged to examine the conduct and degree of responsibility of the civil and military executive for the events over Easter Weekend. In other words the focus was centred on the presumed failure of British officials to take action which would have stopped the uprising, rather than the causes of the rising itself.

Typical of a Secret Elite-led pre-determined investigation, these men represented the British Establishment with Hardinge, a career diplomat and close personal friend and advisor to King Edward VII. He had accompanied the king on all of his foreign tours and was very influential in the creation of the 1904 Entente Cordiale and the secret convention with Russia in 1907. [6] Be assured, Hardinge was a central figure in preparing the war against Germany. Later Hardinge was appointed Viceroy of India. Shearman was a King’s Bench judge who had long-standing interest in Amateur Athletics. He was also the ‘unofficial standing counsel to leading moneylender’s firms’ and according to his biographer, was ‘not a profound jurist’. [7] His colleague, Mackenzie Chalmers, was a legal civil servant with a life-long love of cricket. Both were former Oxford men with no previous experience of Ireland, and their appointments were uncontroversial. That was just was well since the terms of the Royal Commission limited their investigation to the acts of omission for which the Ulster Unionists, including their Secret Elite associates, blamed everyone except themselves.

Poor Birrell. Though he had resigned his position as Chief Secretary for Ireland on 1 May 1916, the knives had been drawn by his Unionist critics immediately word of the uprising reached London. Lord Midleton leaped into the fray on 26 April blaming the Chief Secretary and his administration for refusing to act quickly and decisively against the enemies of the Crown in Ireland. ‘Nothing has been left undone by interview or memoranda, or the giving of evidence so far as it was necessary, to induce the Irish Government to act.

Yet they allowed parades of the Sinn Feiners to continue Sunday after Sunday; they allowed these [Republican] newspapers to circulate; they allowed posters of the most seditious character, especially directed against recruiting, to be broadcast in a number of districts in Ireland. As recently as last week all these matters were brought before the Irish Government, with an intimation that if they did not deal with them quickly the opportunity might come too late.’ [8] With only minor variations, these words could have been lifted from Hansard and inserted into Hardinge’s eventual Report. What transpired was an exercise in providing a pre-determined conclusion.

The Report duly followed Midleton’s litany of liberal blame, though it acknowledged that in Ireland, ’there is always a section of opinion bitterly opposed to the British connection’ and ‘in times of excitement this section can impose its sentiments on largely increased numbers of the people’ [9] Birrell himself commented on the ‘old hatred and distrust of the British connection, always noticeable in all classes, and in all places, varying in degree, and finding different ways of expression, but always there as the background of Irish politics and character.’ [10] No attempt was made to explain why this might be. The Report stated that the creation of a Citizen Army in 1913 during the industrial unrest in Dublin, and the criticism voiced by organisers like James Connolly should, like other examples of lawlessness and disorder, have been nipped in the bud

It was the old story. Inherent racism and disparagement of the Irish was never far from the English pen. They accepted the view that ‘Irish people are easily led’ [11] and argued that the government’s failure to take prompt action meant that ‘strong repressive measures became necessary, and much hardship is imposed on the misled, but perhaps comparatively inoffensive people’. These words could have been mouthed by a nineteenth-century slave-owner. Note the implied difference between the King’s subjects in different parts of Great Britain and Ireland. Irish people were easily led. Not quite up to the mark of the stout Englishman or the trusty Scot.

While the landing of arms and ammunition at Howth in July 1914 was examined in a twenty-line paragraph, the only reference to gun-running in Ulster was reduced to a ten-word aside. [12] Great attention was given to the alliance between the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army and their practice of drilling and ‘seditious’ practices. Without any concrete evidence it was asserted that ‘a considerable number of the younger members of the priesthood in certain districts joined in the movement and schoolmasters who were followers of the Sinn Fein movement disseminated treason amongst younger people through the medium of the Irish language’. And there you have it; the fault could be traced to young educated catholics, teachers, clergymen and Gaels.

Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party was also blamed for its negative attitude towards suppression and the deportation of agitators. [13] Examine, please, the following statement: ‘Irishmen no doubt appreciate the maintenance of order, but they appear to have an inveterate prejudice against punishment of disorder’. Was the Scotsman, the Welshman or the Englishman, for that matter, any different? Apparently so.

The Commission was given sight of letters confiscated by the Censor, confidential reports from the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and notes on speeches recorded by police spies at the first Annual Convention of the Irish Volunteers in October 1914. These had been duly submitted to the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, ‘but he wrote no comment on their content and no proceedings were taken.’ Here lay the principal accusation filed against Asquith’s representative in Ireland.

His enemies unearthed evidence of reports from Tyrone, from County Wexford, letters from Clan-na-Gael in America [14] and more indicating ‘disloyal and anti-British’ sedition in various parts of the country… and in their eyes, he did nothing. It was as if Birrell’s chief fault was that he tried to retain a balance in his approach to both sides in Ireland, a heinous crime to those of unionist persuasion.

Lord Midleton had attended an interview with Chief Secretary Birrell in November 1915 in which he strongly urged the disarming of the Irish Volunteers (but not the remaining Ulster Volunteers) and the prosecution of those responsible for seditious talk. Just how that would have been achieved or the impact it would have had on the Irishmen who had enlisted in their thousands, is not considered. However, ‘his warnings were entirely neglected.’ Indeed Lord Midleton, active at the very heart of the Secret Elite, sent regular warnings of dire consequences if the prime minister and his cabinet continued to adopt a cautious approach to dissent in Ireland.

Every Unionist prejudice was aired. The government was accused of knowing that various parts of the country were lawless; that the Irish volunteers had stolen arms and high explosives; that trial by jury was a failure and magistrates could not be entrusted to enforce the law. The Army Intelligence Department sought to close down and impound newspapers and suppress ‘seditious’ books but the civil authorities would not listen. [15] Sir Matthew Nathan submitted a list of ‘seditious newspapers’ in circulation in February 1916 to the Royal Commission, The aggregate circulation was at best around 24,000 copies (averaging 2,400 copies per paper) and these were not all daily publications. [16]

Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March 1916 was watched very carefully by the intelligence services and the consequent report from the Inspector-General of the RIC stated that; ‘there can be no doubt that the Irish Volunteer leaders are a pack of rebels who would declare their independence in the event of any favourable opportunity, but with their present resources and without substantial reinforcements it is difficult to imagine that they will make even a brief stand against a small body of troops.’ [17] On the morning of 24 April 1916, the authorities in Dublin Castle, concerned that some action needed to be taken, proposed to intern and deport to England all known ‘hostile leaders’, but, before any further steps could be taken, the ‘insurrection’ broke out. [18]

Had they been in possession of the secret information divulged by Roger Casement to his interrogators in London [See Ireland 1916, Blog 7] even as late as Easter Sunday, everything would have been different. But it clearly did not suit the hidden powers to stop the planned insurrection. Their’s was a different agenda.

The report’s conclusion was exactly as Lord Midleton had pronounced. It determined that the main cause of the Uprising was the ‘lawlessness’ which was allowed to grow unchecked in a country which had been administered for the past several years ‘on the principle that it was safer and more expedient to leave law in abeyance if collision with any faction of the Irish people could thereby be avoided.’ [19] No mention was made of injustices; of one law for the south and another in the north. It was the fault of the Irish Government (by that they specifically meant Augustine Birrell) in not suppressing and prosecuting those flagrantly breaking the law … though no reference was made in any part of the report to activities like drilling and bearing arms in public in Ulster. ‘We are of the opinion that the Chief Secretary as the administrative head of Your Majesty’s Government in Ireland is primarily responsible for the situation that was allowed to arise and the outbreak that occurred. [20] Just as Midleton had pronounced in Parliament in April 1916.

But there was more. It was, they also determined, the fault of the Irish Home Rule Party which was accused of promoting the belief that the government would take no action against sedition. According to the report, ‘this led to a rapid increase of preparations for insurrection and was the immediate cause of the recent outbreak.’

What? The Home Rule Party was to blame for the uprising? What balanced examination of evidence elicited that conclusion? Not one member of the Home Rule Party had been invited to contribute to the Royal Commission. Such arrogant, politically motivated invention was completely out of order. But there it stood in black and white. Tellingly, the Report was not debated in parliament, but an outraged John Dillon condemned its findings in a later speech on Irish matters: ‘It is in my opinion a scandalous Report; it is one-sided, full of misrepresentations, but our main objection is as regards the personal character of its evidence and the method of its procedure, … what sense of justice or fair play is there in a body of men who hold up myself and the hon. and learned Member for Waterford (Mr. J. Redmond) as responsible for the government of Ireland and never give us an opportunity of appearing before the Commission?’ [21]

Poor Dillon; all of his hopes and expectations for Ireland crumbled before his eyes. Asquith’s promises, the very will of parliament itself, took a different shape after the introduction of the Coalition Government in 1915. Ulster’s men were in the ascendency once more. The Home Rule Party was undermined at every turn and as the months progressed, the Irish people felt increasingly betrayed by those who had promised, and apparently guaranteed, a Dublin government. The Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland was part of the charade in which Ireland’s future had become embroiled.

[1] Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, published, 12 May, 1915, https://archive.org/details/reportofcommitte00grea
[2] See our blog of 10 September 2014, The Bryce Report, Whatever Happened to the Evidence?
[3 See our blog, Lusitania 6: Lord Mersey’s Whitewash.
[4] Although announced beforehand by the prime minister, the formal notice of the Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland was issued on 10 May, 1916.
[5] Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p. 2. see http://www.garda.ie/Documents/User/Royal%20Commission%20on%20the%20Rebellion%20in%20Ireland%201916.pdf
[6] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 24-5.
[7] Theobald Mathew, revised by G R Rubin, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Lord Hardinge.
[8] Hansard, House of Lords Debate 26 April 1916 vol 21 cc819-22.
[9] Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p.5.
[10] Ibid., Causes of the Outbreak.
[11] Ibid., evidence of Sir David Harrel, p.5.
[12] Ibid., p. 6.
[13] Ibid., p. 7.
[14] Set up by Irish emigrants in America, Clan na Gael supported an independent Ireland. The Clan was prepared to enter into alliances with any nation ranged against the British which meant Germany on the outbreak of war. It was the largest single financier for the Easter Rising.
[15] Specific mention was made of the series of pamphlets, ‘Tracts for Our Times’, produced by Irish Volunteer Supporters, Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p. 10.
16] These included the Irish Volunteer, Nationality, The Irishman, The Hibernian, The Spark, The Gael, New Ireland and The Worker’s Republic, – Sir Matthew Nathan’s list of newspaper circulation, Royal Commission Report, Minutes of Evidence, p. 118.
[17] Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p. 10-11.
[18] Ibid., p. 12.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., p. 13.
[21] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 31 July 1916 vol 84 cc2127.

Ireland 1916, 8: Men Out Of Bedlam

On 3 May, Augustine Birrell tendered his resignation as Chief Secretary for Ireland to the unconcealed delight of his detractors. It appeared that a new consensus had emerged. From the ranks of the Home Rule Party, John Redmond confessed that he shared in the blame for not anticipating the rebellion because like Birrell, he did not think that an outbreak of such violence was possible. [1] Sir Edward Carson, still seen as Ulster’s guardian angel, then announced that he associated himself with Redmond’s stance in these ‘unfortunate and terrible occurrences’ and made an unexpected plea:

‘While I think that it is in the best interest of that country [Ireland] that this conspiracy of the Sinn Feiners, which has nothing to do with either of the political parties in Ireland, ought to be put down with courage and determination, and with an example which would prevent a revival, yet it would be a mistake to suppose that any true Irishman calls for vengeance. It will be a matter requiring the greatest wisdom and the greatest coolness, may I say, in dealing with these men, and all that I say to the Executive is, whatever is done, let it not be done in a moment of temporary excitement, but with due deliberation in regard both to the past and to the future. [2]

Even had this been said with the best of intentions, Carson’s words became part of the rumblings which were to shake John Redmond and his party to the core. Firstly the Home Rulers were directly associated with the British view that ‘this conspiracy’ was a Sinn Fein plot. It was not, but the repeated accusation in parliament and the ‘loyal’ press, English and Irish, gave a credence to Arthur Griffiths’s party which it hardly deserved. The Irish independent member of parliament for Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell, spelled out his disgust at what he and others saw as a deliberate insult in early May 1916:

‘In all the preceding speeches this House has been bombarded with the expression Sinn Feiners. There are no such people in Ireland, and never have been, as Sinn Fein Volunteers. The Sinn Fein movement is purely a political, economic, and non-military movement … The name was adopted and applied solely for the purpose of opprobrium, solely for a purpose corresponding to that which impels the people and the Press of this country to call the Germans Huns. The expression Sinn Fein Volunteers is no more correct than it would be for me to call you, Mr. Speaker, and all the English Members of this House English Huns.’ [3]

The insult backfired. Sinn Fein gradually became equated in the minds of Irish men and women with an anti-British resentment and the fight for a Republic. In fact Griffiths was not even a Republican but an advocate of a dual monarchy on the lines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. [4] By damning Sinn Fein for its own purpose, the British State gave rise to a political rebirth.

Secondly, Carson’s advice about the dangers of rushing to a vengeful judgement were already too late. The response to the uprising was swift and absolute. The ‘Irish Executive’, an interesting phrase given that no-one really knew exactly who that might include, was instructed by Westminster to proclaim martial law over the whole of Ireland. Within 24 hours of the uprising the normal rule of civil law was suspended. A military censor was appointed and a curfew was imposed between the hours of 20.30pm to 05.00 am. Anyone seen on the streets between these hours could be shot on sight. Body and house searches could be imposed by the army, and citizens imprisoned without legal representation. [5] General Sir John Maxwell, who had recently returned from his command in Egypt, was chosen by Lord Kitchener to take charge of the governance of Ireland. [6] Asquith declared that the British government was ‘stamping out the rebellion with all possible vigour and promptitude’. [7] It was as would be expected when dealing with colonial uprisings, as far as the Secret Elite were concerned.

Statistics for the arrest and deportation of the unsuccessful rebels suggest a much larger uprising, but it gave the police an opportunity to round up and harass all whom they chose. A total of 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested, though 1,424 men and 73 women were subsequently released after initial enquiries. [8] Those deemed responsible for the crime of ‘waging war against His Majesty the King … being done for the purpose of assisting the enemy’ were court-martialled. The sting in the tail was a bitter lie aimed to assuage the Conservative party and press, and convince the general public that it was all a German plot. Ned Daly one of the Dublin commanders, protested vehemently that ‘all that he did was for Ireland’ [9] and there was no evidence to the contrary against any of the uprising’s leadership.

The main instigators were tried by secret military court between between May 2nd and 9th. All bar two of the trials were held in Richmond Barracks. The seriously wounded James Connolly was deemed fit to plead, so a special court was assembled in the Red Cross Hospital at Dublin Castle. Those sentenced to death by firing squad were transferred to the bleak grey of Kilmainham Jail to await a final decision on execution from General Maxwell, the arbiter of life or death. All of the signatories to the Proclamation of the Republic outside the General Post Office were shot, as were the captured commanders from the Irish Volunteers. By 10 May, fifteen rebels, including James Connolly, had been executed by firing squad.

Undoubtedly, Maxwell came under strong government pressure to limit the number of executions but Asquith’s public confidence in the General was bathed in warm terms, insisting that he had shown ‘discretion, depth of mind and humanity’. [10] That said, the prime minister found himself caught between the increasingly partisan stances taken by Unionists and Home Rulers. In the Lords, Midleton focussed attention on the military casualties including Police Officers and Loyal Volunteers which Kitchener, as Secretary of State for War gave as 124 killed and 388 wounded. [11] [12] In the Commons, the Independent MP, Laurence Ginnell, demanded ‘a full list of unarmed civilians killed after the rebels had surrendered’. [13] Home Rule stalwarts like John Dillon could feel the ground beneath his feet being shaken by what he saw as the imposition of a British military dictatorship of undefined duration. Given the paucity of rebellion outside Dublin he demanded to know why the whole of Ireland had been placed under martial law, why wholesale arrests had taken place in districts where there had been no disruption and in which the population remained peaceful and loyal? [14]

Lurid tales of mass executions without trial at Portobello Barracks were rife in Dublin. In fact a leading Dublin citizen, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a committed pacifist and anti-war critic of Redmond’s recruitment drive, was arrested on 25 April as an enemy sympathiser and put under the charge of the psychotic Captain Bowen-Colthurst. Sheehy-Skeffington was an eccentrically attired advocate of just causes, to whom James Joyce affectionately referred as ‘Hairy Jasus’. [15] He and two journalists were shot without trial and buried in the barracks yard and his family home raided by armed police. Though the attempted cover-up failed, the military and legal establishment were forced to introduce a new Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) regulation, so that the civil trial of Bowen-Colthurst was avoided. He was found guilty of murder and confined to a hospital for the mentally insane. [16] Colthurst was not the only one whose sanity was in question.

John Dillon warned Asquith that British reaction in Ireland was spreading disaffection and bitterness from one end of the country to the other with the withering comment that ‘If Ireland were governed by men out of Bedlam you could not pursue a more insane policy.’ [17] He warned parliament that ‘You are letting loose a river of blood, and, make no mistake about it, between two races who, after three hundred years of hatred and strife, we had nearly succeeded in bringing together.’ [18] This was the key to a future which Midleton, Carson and Bonar Law embraced; which the Secret Elite eagerly supported. Ireland ‘had nearly succeeded’ in gaining Home Rule for the whole island, though the thorny issue of Ulster remained unresolved. Despite their years of endeavour to unite Ireland under one flag, with devolved powers in Dublin, Redmond, Dillon and the Irish party at Westminster realised that this was in fact not going to happen. In their eyes, the British over-reaction to the Easter rising ripped asunder any chance of a united Ireland – precisely as the Ulster Unionists had demanded.

Easter 1916 changed the parameters. It was an enormous blow for the policy of Home Rule. Men like Redwood and Dillon who had steered Ireland forward through a difficult democratic process feared the return of the old ascendency party. Through martial law, the Irish Establishment, dominated by Protestant business and landed and professional networks emerging from the Big House, the Kildare Street Club and Dublin Castle [19] was back in the driving seat. In other words, with the military in overall control, the backwoodsmen who had dominated Ireland, from local squires to exclusive Dublin Unionist Clubs, could once more dictate the running of the country. The Irish Times, ever the voice of the Unionist party in Ireland, welcomed martial law as a blessing which would allow the country to be strengthened and re-established beyond the powers of injury which nationalism had brought. [20] The Secret Elite appeared to have taken back control of a divided Ireland. But appearances often deceive.

In those anxious days of May 1916 a seismic change began with this clash of political ideology. While the fear of revolution receded, the tremor shook complacency from the ocean of men’s minds. Words changed shape and meaning. Those who had been called ‘traitors and rebels’ became ‘patriots and freedom-fighters’. An insignificant political party metamorphosed into a Republican movement. Men who had volunteered to fight as heroes for the Empire were derided. A once Liberal and sympathetic government in London became a Coalition into whose promoted ranks more and more establishment and unionist figures were pressed. What was good for ‘little Belgium’ was no good for Ireland. In the smouldering ruins of central Dublin oppression replaced progress. Cracks even appeared in the unity of the conservative Catholic Church.

Condemnation of the rebellion as a the work of madmen and criminals turned into admiration. Bishop Edward Thomas O’Dwyer told his Limerick flock so in September 1916. [21] Younger clergy were more openly supportive. Masses were said for the souls of the departed patriots all across Ireland. The only promise that seemed certain was a return to second-class citizenship inside a heartless Great Britain. The first tremors hardly registered on the Richter scale. But this was only the beginning. The Secret Elite and their establishment agents were far from finished and each act of regression, of suppression and back-tracking deepened the chasm of resentment.

[1] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 03 May 1916 vol 82 cc36-7.
[2] Ibid., cc38-9.
[3] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 11 May 1916 vol 82 cc966-7.
[4] Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary; a Parallel for Ireland, especially pages 75-95. view online at https://archive.org/details/resurrectionofhu00grifiala
[5] http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/city-struggles-under-martial-law-34385785.html
[6] Maxwell had served with Kitchener in Egypt and Sudan and they formed a lasting friendship. He had returned to England to convalesce in March 1916 and declared himself fit for appointment in May. Kitchener originally favoured giving military command in Ireland to Sir Ian Hamilton who had carried the can for the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. However, Hamilton’s appointment was deemed insensitive because of the lack of justified recognition given to Irish troops in the Dardanelles. Asquith favoured Maxwell over Hamilton. Unfortunately like many such appointments, Maxwell was better suited to keeping colonial natives in line than military governor of a section of the British Isles. He was ignorant of the Irish situation, but was left in sole charge for a critical fortnight, during which time the trials by secret court martial of those involved resulted in his approving fifteen execution. [H. de Watteville, ‘Maxwell, Sir John Grenfell (1859–1929)’, revised by Roger T. Stearn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.]
[7] The Times, 28 April, 1916, p. 7.
[8] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 347.
[9] Ibid., p. 349.
[10] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 11 May 1916 vol 82, cc959-60.
[11] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 09 May 1916 vol 21 c946 .
[12] Lord Kitchener’s figures on 9 May were as follows; military – 104 killed (including one naval fatality) and 359 wounded. Police figures were given as 15 dead and 26 wounded, with 5 Loyal volunteers killed and 3 wounded.
[13] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 10 May 1916 vol 82 cc631.
[14] Ibid., cc632-3.
[15] Aiden Lloyd, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington – A Pacifist in an Age of Militarism, in Roger Cole [editor] The Irish Neutrality League and the Imperialist War 1914-1918, pp.17-19.
[16] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, pp. 292-6.
[17] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 11 May 1916 vol 82 cc939-10.
[18] Ibid., cc942.
[19] Fergus Campbell, The Irish Establishment 1879-1914, p. 171.
[20] The Irish Times, 10 May 1916.
[21] William Henry Kaputt, The Anglo-Irish War 1916-1921: A People’s War, p. 46.

Ireland 1916, 7: Who Knew What … and When?

The Rising of 1916 did not take everyone by surprise. According to The Times, ‘those who knew how to read the signs’ believed that it was imminent. [1] Within the Unionist minority in Dublin, voices had complained that for months the rebels were flaunting their ‘arms and accoutrements’ in the streets and proclaimed to the world their disregard for law and order. [2] At a localised level such post-hoc observations might be expected in most situations of serious disorder. In this instance foreknowledge appears sufficiently extensive to obligate a deeper analysis. Other than the insurgents, who knew the Easter Rising was about to happen? What, if anything did they do about it?

The British Secret Services knew. Naval Intelligence had been in possession of German secret codes from mid-October 1914 [3] to the extent that virtually any wireless signal made by the German Navy could be intercepted by a select and very secretive group. [4] It was established at the Admiralty in London, in Room 40, under Captain (later Rear-Admiral) Reginald Hall. Possession of these priceless codes was a strategic coup of the highest order and proved invaluable in guiding the Lusitania towards U-20’s location in 1915. [5] The story of how these codes fell into the Admiralty’s hands stretches credibility [6] but further ‘good fortune’ also delivered the German diplomatic codes to the same people in March 1915. [7] Whether or not the codes originated from the sources stated in official histories is immaterial to the fact that in 1916, British Intelligence monitored Roger Casement’s activities while he was in America and Germany and knew of his intentions to return to Ireland. Room 40 decrypted at least thirty-two cables from the German Embassy in Washington to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin dealing with German support for Irish nationalism. [8] Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador at Washington, cabled Berlin that an armed uprising was planned for 23 April, Easter Sunday, and requested that rifles, machine-guns and field artillery be provided to support it. Naval Intelligence knew that arms were to be sent in the small steamer Aud, knew the codewords to be broadcast and had more than enough information to closely follow its progress. [9]

Casements’ activities in America and Germany were also betrayed by his manservant and alleged lover, Adler Christensen, to the British minister in Oslo, who passed this to the Foreign Office in London. Sir Edward Grey forwarded the report to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, the chief secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, and to Lord Kitchener at the War Office. [10] Casement’s letters to the Irish Volunteer’s chief of staff Eoin MacNeill were intercepted en route to Ireland [11] and when he eventually stepped on to Irish soil in Tralee Bay, he was arrested within hours. From the moment he landed back, Roger Casement repeatedly stated that his sole purpose was to stop the rising which he knew to be a ‘fatal mistake’ [12] He had not returned to lead the rebellion but to stop it.

Roger Casement was promptly whisked off to London to be jointly interrogated by Sir Basil Thomson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Reginald Hall from the Admiralty and Major, later Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hall (no relation), MI5’s resident Irish Expert. All three were pro-Empire loyalist who followed the Secret Elite agenda with ruthless determination.

What Casement did not know was that Frank Hall had been military secretary to the UVF in Ulster, served on the 12-man committee on gun-running and was a signatory to the Solemn League and Covenant.  It was Frank Hall who, as secretary of the Unionist Clubs of Ireland [13] and senior staff officer in the UVF, had forwarded Sir Edward Carson’s letter asking all Ulster Clubs and Orange Lodges to help in the ‘immediate organisation of the UVF’, in August 1913. [14] The British Intelligence Service, and even Churchill himself, relied on Frank Hall’s assumed ‘expertise’ on matters pertaining to Ireland. And he despised Casement. Indeed all of his interrogators treated Roger Casement with contempt.

Was this why Casement’s request to be allowed to appeal publicly to the Irish Volunteers to call off the proposed Easter Rising and stop the useless bloodshed, was refused? Records in the National Archives at Kew confirm Casement’s requests. [15] Sir Ernley Blackwell, legal adviser to the Home Office cited an internal document [16] which recorded that Casement ‘begged to be allowed to communicate with the leaders to try and stop the rising but he was not allowed.’ This request was made before his interrogation at Scotland Yard. Blackwell’s appeal for more information about Casement’s interrogation added ‘On Easter Sunday at Scotland Yard, he implored again to be allowed to communicate or send a message, but they (Thomson and both Halls) refused, saying ‘It’s a festering sore, it’s much better it should come to a head.’ [17] Sir Ernley Blackwell specifically asked Inspector Edward Parker of Special Branch if this claim was true because he had ‘several similar statements from different sources’ which he was anxious to answer. Pertinently, the Home Office legal adviser had to hand ‘several similar’ claims that the interrogators wanted the rebellion to go ahead. [18] And it did.

Consider the awful implications of this admission. The most senior men in British Intelligence knew that the uprising was about to erupt, but refused  to make any effort to prevent it. Indeed, the inference is that they welcomed it. Basil Thomson replied by letter that same day, quoting first from Special Branch shorthand notes. Here Casement stated that: ‘The rising would take place on 23 April whether arms came or not…’ [19] At this point, the Assistant Chief Commissioner wrote that ‘after the shorthand writer left on Easter Sunday, Casement said, ‘I hope you will announce my arrest. I said Why? He said, because if they know that I am taken, nothing will happen, they will know that the game is up. I am positive that he did not ask to send a message, nor did anyone say, ‘It is a festering sore…’ Thomson ended his reply by stating that Casement said he felt it his duty to come and warn the rebels when he learned that the Germans had refused to send men. [20]

Thus according the Home Office records, Roger Casement made at least two requests to be allowed to communicate with Dublin to stop the Rising, the last on Easter Sunday. We know that Sir Ernley Blackwell had knowledge of ‘several similar’ statements that the Scotland Yard interrogators had expressed a comment about the need to let the festering sore come to a head. Who else was party to such a momentous decision? To have permitted an uprising against the Crown was treason itself. Yet the colouration of what did and did not constitute treason against the Crown changed hue dependent on whether one’s loyalties were to Ulster or not. Was Frank Hall under instruction? He had nailed his convictions to the union flag in August 1913, when he wrote that [Clubs] ‘must be kept going and encouraged by them in view of the possibility of a general election before the actual passage of the Home Rule Bill, and the consequent outbreak of hostilities.’ [21] Carson’s man had no love for the anti-war rebels in the South. What cannot be denied is that before a shot had been fired, a covert decision been taken to let the Easter Rising go ahead.

Other key members of the Secret Elite had foreknowledge of the outbreak in Dublin. Arthur Balfour, then in charge at the Admiralty, ‘knew beforehand that the rebellion in Ireland would start on Easter Monday 1916 and made naval preparations in advance.’ [22] Furthermore it was Admiralty staff who informed Downing Street about the outbreak of hostilities in Dublin. Balfour had instructed the Duty Officer at the Admiralty to stay constantly in touch with the Post Office in London to monitor the flow of telegrams to and from  Dublin. Immediately the line was blocked, Downing Street was told that that the rebellion had started. [23]

Herbert Asquith and his secretary, Maurice Hankey, another inner-core Secret Elite member [24] were ‘out of town’ and, according to Hankey’s diaries, arrived back in London late that Monday evening (12.30 am.) to be told that the Easter Rebellion had begun. Asquith’s reaction does not appear to include any surprise at all. According to Hankey, ‘Asquith merely said ‘well, that’s really something, and went to bed.’ [25]  Out of town? Merely went to bed? In the midst of a vicious war the prime minister could not be contacted about a rebellion in Ireland? How odd. Why did he not react immediately or ask why he had not been informed earlier or send for up-to-the-moment information, or contact Birrell or react with more concern? Why indeed?

On the morning of Holy Saturday, 1916, the British authorities in Dublin confidently believed that there was no danger of disruption in the city. They had been deliberately kept in the dark. With the capture and sinking of the Aud and consequent loss of arms and ammunition, the military commander in Ireland, Major-General Sir Lovick Friend retired to London for the Easter weekend. Similarly, Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland, was in London to attend a cabinet meeting on the impending and contentious conscription bill. Kept in ignorance of Casement’s statements or requests, Birrell decided to stay there for Easter. His under-secretary in Dublin, Sir Matthew Nathan was so confident that any danger of a rising had passed that he wrote an upbeat assessment for Birrell, though hard liners like Lord Wimborne still pressed for the arrest and internment of the Volunteer leaders. [26] Why had no-one told them what Casement had said? What Casement had offered? Regretfully, we can only surmise that for reasons that were never openly expressed, no warnings were issued through British Intelligence. The given excuse is that intelligence was in its infancy and not properly co-ordinated. How convenient.

The Admiralty Statement to the press that weekend made reference only to the German naval activity around the south coast of Ireland, linked to arms and ammunition. [27] Casement’s arrest and plea to be allowed to stop the Easter Rising was suppressed. Instead the events that transpired were predicated by news of German activity in and around Ireland. This is the context within which the general public learned about the rising.

On the following day, the first man into the breach in parliament was Lord Midleton, otherwise known as William St John Brodrick, an intimate member of the Secret Elite [28] and previously Secretary of State for War during the Boer War. As leader of the Unionist Association and Irish landowner, Midleton was primed for battle. He opened the attack with a simple question in the House of Lords, seeking information on the grave disturbances in Dublin [29] before anyone else had grasped the extent of the ‘disturbances’. Next day he was scathing in his attack on Asquith’s government. He dubbed the rebels ‘an organised body of Sinn Feiners’ and this label was stamped across the uprising by the British propagandists, even though Sinn Fein as a political movement had no place in the revolt. His typically partisan analysis criticised the regular Sunday ‘Sinn Feiner’ parades (no mention was made of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Connolly’s Citizen Army) which, in his view, should have been put down months, if not years before. Similar restrictions were not envisaged in Ulster. Of course, the Gaelic name Sinn Fein sounded foreign to the English ear – why – it looked like German on the printed page.

Midleton’s account of unheeded warnings obligated Lord Lansdowne, at this point a member of the Cabinet, to admit that ‘my noble friend has access to information to which I have not access.’ [30] We should ponder this; these men were pro-unionist allies and friends; both were Secret Elite insiders. Allegedly, Midleton was better informed than the cabinet minister. It was a charade. Asquith’s coalition Cabinet was replete with Unionists in 1916, and since Cabinet Ministers could not offer public criticism of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, the old-fashioned Liberal, Augustine Birrell, the attack was spearheaded by Midleton in the House of Lords. At this juncture, Parliament was first made aware of the arrest of Sir Roger Casement, [31] though the association between Germany and the uprising had been repeated in the press for days.

What can be fairly deduced is that those to whom the leading officers in British Intelligence were responsible, who knew that the Easter Rising was about to happen did not alert the appropriate government officials in Ireland. Was a decision taken at the highest level to ‘let the festering sore come to a head’? Such a vital decision could never had been taken by Thomson or the Halls. Naval command at Queenstown, led by Admiral Lewis Bayly, had been given explicit instructions to prevent German weapons reaching the Irish mainland, and they did. Knowledge about this and the German connection was shared with Lord Kitchener, Field Marshal French, Commander of the British Home Forces and Major-General Friend in command of the armed forces in Ireland. Yet the army was not put on high alert. Indeed no action was taken which might have forewarned the leaders of the rebellion that the authorities had wind of their intentions. [32]

Usually, the given excuse for not sharing critical information was that military sources were too sensitive or valuable to risk exposure. In this instance the burning question must be, who decided that it was in the best interest of Britain or Ireland or Ulster to let the rebellion take place? There is a worrying conflict between the belief that the rebel Military Council gained an outstanding success in concealing its intentions and the fact that the British military and naval commanders knew about the impending uprising, knew that Casement wanted to call it off, knew that without the guns, ammunition  and men from Germany  it could never succeed.

Consider for a moment the benefits of permitting the rising to go ahead. The damage to the Cabinet Liberals was bound to be extensive, and many within the Secret Elite wanted Asquith out of government. [33] The Ulster Unionists had predicted that the Irish Volunteers could not be trusted. Here was the ultimate vindication of their case. Furthermore, Redmond and Dillon, indeed, everyone inside the Home Rule Party was compromised. What future the Home Rule Act which Unionists wanted to kill in its suspended state? Additionally, it allowed the British government to ruthlessly crush anyone who opposed war in Ireland and sought independence from the Crown; the socialists, the Irish Volunteers, the Citizen Army, trades-unionists and republicans, those who advocated neutrality or were conscientious objectors, the writers and orators, the organisers and sympathisers, all fell victims to suppression.

Whatever else, there were serious winners and losers.

[1] The Times 1 May 1916, p. 10.
[2] Ibid.
[3] see Blog, Lusitania 1: The Tale Of The Secret Miracles.
[4] Patrick Beesley, Room 40, British Naval Intelligence 1914-1918, p. 7.
[5] Colin Simpson, Lusitania, p. 115.
[6] see Blog, Lusitania 1: The Tale Of The Secret Miracles.
[7] Beesley, Room 40, pp. 129-132.
[8] Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of M15, p. 87.
[9] Beesley, Room 40, pp. 186-7.
[10] These documents still remain classified one hundred years later.
[11] Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero, p. 119.
[12] National Archives, Home Office Records, HO 311643/51.
[13] Timothy Bowman, Carson’s Army, The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1910-22, pp. 22-3.
[14] PRONI D.1518/3/8, Circular Letter from Captain Frank Hall to Unionist Clubs.
[15] National Archives, Papers of the Metropolitan police, 2/10664.
[16] National Archives, Home Office Records HO 311643/51.
[17] National Archives Home Office, MEPO 21/10664.
[18] Letter from Inspector Edward Parker to the Assistant Chief Commissioner, 18/07/1916. NA file MEPO21/10664/C/701389.
[19] Confidential reply, Thomson to Blackwell, 18 July, 1916, page 1. MEPO 21/10664.
[20] Ibid., p. 2.
[21] Bowman, Carson’s Army, pp. 22-3.
[22] Recollections, Vols 1,2, Memoirs of Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Henry Oliver, (unpublished), National Maritime Museum, OLV 12 , p. 165. Cited in G. Sloan, (2013) The British state and the Irish rebellion of 1916: an intelligence failure or an failure of response. Intelligence and National Security, 28 (4). pp. 453-494. ISSN 1743-9019 doi: 10.1080/02684527.2012.735079  http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/25318/
[23] Ibid.
[24] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[25] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, Vol 1, 1877-1918, p. 265.
[26] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 79.
[27] The Times, 25 April, 1916, p. 4.
[28] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 9 et seu.
[29] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 25 April 1916 vol 21 c810.
[30] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 26 April 1916 vol 21 cc827-8.
[31] Ibid., cc826-7.
[32] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, p. 65.
[33] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 324.

Ireland 1916, 6: Framing The Story

The whole ‘miserable business’ (this dismissive phrase was first used by The Times on 26 April, 1916 ) that was the uprising in Dublin, could hardly have broken at a worst moment for prime minister Asquith’s Cabinet. With increased German naval activity around the east coast of England causing outrage in that area, it was the proposed introduction of compulsory conscription which was proving disturbingly contentious. Ironically perhaps, with their attention focused elsewhere, the disruption in Ireland caught them unaware. Parliament met in secret session on the night of 25 April to give vent to its anger at government proposals on conscription which many MPs thought unfair. [1] Important though it was, that anger hardly registered on the scale of incandescence which exploded from the Conservative and Unionist ranks over the following weeks on the subject dear to their hearts… Ireland.

The government was adept at managing the news through censorship. The British propaganda machine (which had been established at Wellington House in London from August 1914) ensured that journalists and newspapers across the world had strictly controlled access to the uprising in Ireland. News of the initial attacks in central Dublin at noon on Monday 24 April did not reach the London press in time for the morning editions on Tuesday 25th. But a war of words had already been declared. With a prescience which may even suggest pre-planning, The Times carried an Admiralty announcement about a German attempt to land guns and ammunition on the south coast of Ireland sometime between 20-21 April. Events in Ireland were also being monitored by other interested parties. Lord Midleton, a friend and close associate of Alfred Milner [2] and nominal leader of the Irish Unionist Party, was always one step ahead of the government. He was the first to question Lord Crewe in the House of Lords about ‘the grave disturbances in Dublin yesterday’ and was assured that the situation was ‘now well in hand’ [3] It was not. Midleton’s sources were far more reliable than the government’s and he, and those he represented, had their own deep-rooted agenda. They were passionately determined to have the Home Rule Act of 1914 permanently scrapped. [4]

One day later, on 26 April, newspaper headlines screamed ‘Rebel Irish Rising’ and ‘Serious Disturbances’ linked to a ‘concentrated German plan’. [5] Reporters, removed as they were from first hand accounts, so dependent on government propaganda, stated that the Germans had always counted on insurrection in Ireland and events in Dublin followed a carefully concealed plot between ‘Irish traitors and their German confederates.’ [6] Reference was made to Sir Roger Casement’s involvement as ‘mere opera bouffe’, an insult, likening his involvement to a farcical French comic-opera. It was a theme soon picked up by an embarrassed John Redmond who alleged that ‘Germany plotted it, Germany paid for it … it is a German invasion of Ireland.’ [7]

The second British tactic to manipulate the truth behind the events in Dublin, was to ignore the various political alliances which had coalesced in the rebellion, and dub the fighting as ‘The Sinn Fein Rising.’ [8] There was an immediate and determined effort to deny the integrity of those who had masterminded and executed the rebellion. Lord Wimborne, Lord Lieutenant for Ireland, gave a typically patronising account to The Times on 1 May. He declared that he had seen the prisoners, ‘ all of whom seemed to belong to the so-called labouring classes.’ Of course. It would never have suited had the rebels been portrayed as educated men of some standing. His Lordship continued his condescending view, claiming that ‘the Proclamation indicates by its text that they rely on foreign aid and is signed by Jim Connolly, Jim Larkin’s lieutenant, J.T. Clarke, and old Fenian and ticket-of-leave man [ex-convict] who kept a tobacconist’s shop, a schoolmaster named Pearse, another man named McDermott and three others.’ [9] Wimborne was unlikely to approve of James Connolly as General Secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union or Patrick Pearce as a University educated lawyer who established an independent Irish-speaking school in Dublin or admit that Thomas Clarke was a naturalised American…though he was a dedicated and wily old Fenian. It was all part of the dismissive put-down with which the authorities wanted to minimise the impact of the rebel effrontery in daring to attack the authority of the Empire.

Managing how these events were translated to America was one of the triumphs of the British propaganda machine. John Masefield, the English poet, had been sent on a lecture tour of America in 1915 sponsored by Wellington House. [10] He recommended that ‘some authoritative loyal Irish member [of Parliament], preferably a Catholic, should go over as soon as may be possible… to silence the Irish-American party, who exude poison from every pore.’ [11] Consequently, John Redmond and ‘ other Loyal Irishmen’ were persuaded to give interviews and write articles in defence of British reaction to the rebellion in the hope of tempering the virulence of the opposition from Irish-Americans. [12]

Redmond’s subsequent statement to the Associated Press, which was carried in full by the New York Times, was an unqualified condemnation of the uprising. He talked about his horror, discouragement, almost despair at the ‘insane movement’ and asked ‘whether Ireland, as so often before in her tragic history, was to dash the cup of liberty from her lips’ at the behest of an anti-patriotic cabal. He lambasted those responsible for trying to make Ireland a cats-paw of Germany. What’s more he took it very personally: ‘In all our long and successful struggle to obtain home rule, we have been thwarted and opposed by that same section. We have won home rule not through them, but in spite of them. This wicked move of theirs was their last blow at home rule. It was not held as much treason to the cause of the Allies as treason to the cause of home rule.’ [13] So desperate was he to achieve his life-time ambition, that Redmond was blind to the fact that Home Rule was thwarted not by the men who took part in the Easter Rising, but the men in London to whom he was pandering. It was their criminal war and they were playing him for a fool at every turn.

Redmond’s sentiments were reproduced in the Irish Independent. Under the banner ‘Criminal Madness’ the newspaper denounced ‘the insane and criminal rising’ and lamented that it would take ‘us many years to recover’. But the Irish Independent hailed as a shining light ‘the outpouring of Irish blood …. as expiation for the acts of unfilial ingrates who have besmirched the honour of their native land.’ With no sense of irony or reflection on the purpose of the Easter Rising, the article continued: ‘Were it not for the glory which has irradiated the Irish arms win the fields where the battle for human freedom is being fought, our heads might now hang low in shame for the misdeed of those who have been the willing dupes of Prussian intrigue.’ [14] In fairness, the article went on to allocate indirect responsibility for all that took place to Sir Edward Carson’s Ulster movement and the Chief Secretary to Ireland, Augustine Birrell, whom they blamed ‘for the state of affairs which led up to the events of last week.’ [15]

This new found acknowledgement of the glories of the fighting Irishmen might have come as a surprise to those who previously noted the singular absence of such expression. Indeed on 1 May under the title ‘The Gallant Irish Division’ The Times applauded the bravery of the Inniskillings and the Dublin Fusiliers at a point on the western Front ‘near Hulluch’, commenting that the Germans, believing that their ‘treasonable medicine’ was working in Ireland, probably thought it a good time to teach the loyal Irish a lesson. ‘If so, they are probably sorry now.’ The propaganda assault was not particularly subtle. Within days of the uprising, the British press suddenly became fulsome in their praise of Irish soldiers at the Front, while the ‘treasonable medicine’, a clearly pointed barb suggesting German intrigue, aimed to deflect attention away from the internal dissatisfaction with Britain’s treatment of Irish citizens. Around the same time, the Chicago Herald noted that it had received a book on ‘The Irish At The Front’ with an introduction by Mr John Redmond, forwarded from Wellington House. [16]

Once the rebellion had been put down in Dublin, journalists had greater scope to write their version of the truth. And it was a sombre story. The battle between British troops and British subjects was reported as ragged, intermittent, unequal but always deadly. ‘The Traitors’ had paid dearly for their ‘mad enterprise’ but behind the pejorative phrases lay a description which must have chilled the Empire. There was an implied warning that rebellion would be dealt with severely no matter where it took place. ‘Yesterday, a gun boat lying in the river … poured shell after shell into a large building a thousand yards away, over which flew the green flag of the rebels. Field guns hurled death and destruction into the broadest and proudest street in the city.’ [17] Three months later, the observation made at Westminster was that the ‘best part of Dublin looked like Liege or Ypres.’ [18] For those of us old enough to remember Hungary in 1956, it is particularly chilling to remember the feeling of helplessness when a city-centre is blown apart by a brutal military force.

Notice how the story was framed. Initially the Easter Rising was depicted as a German plot, an ingenious interpretation which placed the rebel Irishmen as traitors to the cause of civilisation and freedom and friends and allies of ‘Prussianism’. Not only did this relegate the rebellion from its national cause to an alien-inspired act of treachery, but it deflected attention away from more worrying sympathies like socialism, neutrality and the political machinations of the die-hard Unionists. In other words, the instigators who wanted to serve neither King nor Kaiser were mad, insane, wicked and selfish while the slaughter of Irishmen on the European field of battle for the freedom of small nations was deemed to have saved  Ireland’s reputation.

[1] House of Lords Debate, 25 April 1916 vol 21 cc811-8. On occasion during the war, parliament could use its procedure to dismiss all observers and have a debate that could not be reported to the enemy. The general public were served up an account of what transpired by the government itself. While the Secret Debate in the house of Lords is currently available online, there is no equivalent report from the House of Commons. However a communique was issued by the government and printed in The Times, April 26 1916, p. 7.
[2] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 8, 12, 24
[3] Hansard House of Lords Debate 25 April 1916 vol 21 c810.
[4] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 433.
[5] The Times 26 April, 1916, p. 6.
[6] Ibid., p. 7.
[7] New York Times, 29 April, 1916.
[8] The Times 28 April, 1916, p. 7.
[9] The Times 1 May, 1916, p. 10.
[10] George Robb, British Culture and the First World War, p. 121.
[11] H.C. Peterson, Propaganda For War, p. 241.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Redmond Assails Rebels; New York Times, 29 April 1916.
[14] Irish Independent, 4 May 1916 can be viewed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/newspapers/na02a.shtml
[15] Ibid, p. 3.
[16] Peterson, Propaganda For War, p. 242.
[17] The Times 1 May, 1916, p. 10.
[18] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 31 July 1916,vol. 84 cc2116-231.

Ireland 1916, 5: The Uprising – But Who To Blame?

Encapsulated in a bubble from which the air of democracy had been systematically sucked, the voice of protest in Ireland held little sway. Even the Catholic Church remained muted in its objection to war and recruitment. Redmond included an appeal to religion in his Woodenbridge address [1] and the Nationalist press made much of the burning of Louvain and the allegations of German atrocities in the rape of ‘Catholic’ Belgium. [2] The conference of Catholic Bishops at Maynooth in October 1914 gave great consideration to the need for Catholic chaplains, [3] but they had no power to appoint them to the British Army. There was no sense of episcopal unanimity. Though most Bishops approved of Redmond’s actions, neither Cardinal Logue in Armagh or Archbishop Walsh in Dublin were wholeheartedly supportive. [4] Indeed, the Archbishop objected to Redmond’s recruitment campaign citing it as the inevitable product of his subservience to the Liberal Party. [5] That said, no religious objection was expressed against Catholics in Ireland taking arms against Catholics in Germany. The Church offered little solace to the voice of protest.

Yet it was there in small pockets. Amongst socialist and trade unionists, some Gaelic League branch members, the leadership of the secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Citizen Army, created by the radical socialist, James Connolly and some nationalists, dismayed by Redmond’s capitulation to an imperial war, common ground was found, based on complete mistrust of ‘England’s’ intentions. [6] The Irish Neutrality League, which was active between September and early December 1914, tried to gather together influential opponents to the war at an open public meeting in Dublin on 12 October. Its purpose was to ‘define Ireland’s present attitude towards the Anglo-German War as one of neutrality’ in order to protect Irish interests and prevent employers from coercing men to enlist. The Neutrality League sought to promote the view that true patriotism required Irishmen to stay at home, taking steps to preserve the food supplies for the people of Ireland. [7] By any measure of optimism, success in opposing recruitment was limited. Redmond’s colleague, John Dillon had pontificated that ‘ the man who calls himself a neutral is either an enemy or a coward’. [8] The great danger of such sophistry is that it can backfire. Ultimately, many from this disparate collection of idealists mutated into a hard core of revolutionaries determined to make a stance against British rule in Ireland.

The event itself, the rising, was dramatic and bloody, and appeared to take the British State completely by surprise. That convenient assertion will be considered more fully later.

Briefly.

During the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913, a Citizen Army had been formed by the Trades Unionists under James Connolly to defend and protect strikers from the police. [9] The 130 men, boys and a handful of women were allowed to parade in public as were the Ulster Volunteers in the North. At the outbreak of war, a second different group, the Irish Volunteers, split into two unequal sections, the majority of whom stayed true to John Redmond and over 30,000 joined the British Army. The remaining 13,000 Irish volunteers, remained committed to the vow that they would stand firm until Home Rule was fully enacted. The Citizen Army and National Volunteers together represented a minimal armed militia compared with the forces of the Empire, and no action was taken to stop their ‘activities’.

The rising was planned in secret by a coterie of senior members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) who formed a Military Council to plan and oversee the rebellion. Their names, now legends in Ireland, were, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, Eamon Ceannt and James Connolly from the Citizen Army. The details were kept secret for fear of disclosure by a loose tongue or well-placed police spies. Even high-ranking members of the Volunteers, including its leader, Eoin MacNeill, did not know what they planned to achieve that weekend. [10]

Through negotiations led by Sir Roger Casement, [11] a large cache of weapons was to have been landed from Germany on Good Friday April 21st, to arm the rebels. Thanks to the British Admiralty Intelligence, the ship was tracked by the Royal Navy, arrested off the coast of Kerry and was scuttled off Queenstown. Some say it was deliberately sunk. There would be no arms to support a sizeable rising. At the last minute, the plans were revealed to Eoin MacNeill who issued a ‘countermanding order’, to call off the ‘manoeuvres’ for Easter 1916. Though he approved an armed insurrection, he withdrew his agreement when he heard that the weapons had been captured and Casement arrested. ‘I’ll stop this damned nonsense’ he vowed and posted an instruction to all Irish Volunteers in the Sunday Independent, rescinding parades, marches and movements planned for Easter Sunday. [12]

Too late. The organisers had gone too far to contemplate a stand-down, and on Easter Monday, the assault on Dublin began in earnest. The Rebels marched through the streets into the centre of Dublin and occupied the General Post Office (GPO), the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Boland’s Mill, Stephen’s Green and Jacobs’ biscuit factory. Their targets then  strategic are now iconic; their message proclaimed a Republic with Patrick Pearse as President and Commander in Chief. [13]

Over the following week, mayhem ensued in central Dublin. The British state eventually deployed over 16,000 troops, artillery and a naval gunboat on the River Liffey to suppress the rising. In that week of bitter fighting, around 450 people were killed and over 2,000 wounded. Bare in mind, we are talking about insurrection in one of the great capital cities of Great Britain and Ireland  at the heart of the Empire.

The fiercest battles took place around Mount Street Bridge. Early on Wednesday April 26th 1916, the newly arrived British troops assembled on the quayside in Kingstown. Some of these regiments comprised young men from Nottingham and Derbyshire, known as the Sherwood Foresters. They were inexperienced soldiers who had only had six weeks of basic training. Many had never fired a rifle. Official British casualties amounted to four officers and 216 other ranks killed or wounded during the Mount Street engagement. Around twenty civilians were killed or wounded as they attempted to assist the stricken Foresters on the bridge. In truth, there were more civilian casualties in the 1916 Rising than there were military casualties. [14]

The rebels’ headquarters at the GPO was bombarded into eventual surrender on 28 April on the instructions of Patrick Pearse. The Rebellion of Easter 1916 came to an inglorious end in Dublin, but the consequences extended beyond all expectations.

Who was most at fault for this exceptional rejection of the Empire’s war, apart, that is, from the rebels who planned and executed the uprising? Looker deeper and further than the named participants.

You may want to accuse Sir Edward Carson for the eventual Rising in Dublin over Easter Week 1916. He after all epitomised the virtues of illegality over the democratic process, though as we have shown, he was more of a figure-head-agent of the Secret Elite than independent leader. He is quoted at the end of his days as realising too late that he had been used, as Ireland had been used, to protect the imperialist dream; ‘I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster and so was Ireland, in the political game to get the Conservative Party into power.’ [15]

Their ambition extended well beyond the limitations of one political party, but the Secret Elite most certainly viewed Ireland as a second-class colony to be exploited as required. How had Lord Milner expressed his disdain in 1913? He saw it as their mission to protect a ‘white settler colony of superior British stock [Ulster] from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts [by which he meant nationalist Ireland.’ [16] Inside that kernel of arrogance the British establishment assumed that Ireland was still their colonial property. Their careful manipulation of the parliamentary process had succeeded. By May 1915 an internal coup of enormous historical significance had effectively replaced the elected majority government of 1910, supported by Liberal – Home Rule MPs. Asquith’s new Coalition cabinet was an entirely different administration, deeply hostile to an all-Ireland government. [17]

You might blame John Redmond and his puppy-dog roll-over to support the British Imperial ambitions in their war against Germany and blame his naivety. By urging the Irish Volunteers to enlist in the British Army and throw themselves against Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Turks, he committed the Irish nation to a course of action against which there could be no democratic protest. [18] But Redmond probably acted in good faith, encouraged by the Asquiths and the promises of a Home Rule Act that lay in a coma on the Statute Book. If Redmond thought himself prime minister of Ireland-in-waiting he had taken several steps beyond a presumption of authority. He was, more than Carson, a puppet. That neither saw themselves as such at the time, underlines the secrecy and deception of those who controlled the direction of British foreign policy during the war.

What of Sir Rodger Casement? He was the Dublin-born Anglo-Irish diplomat who exposed the atrocities in the Congo, where he clashed with Emile Francqui, later the head of the Society Generale, the immensely powerful bank in Belgium. [19] His reports on the inhumane treatment of the native population of Putumayo Indians in Peru [20] earned him international recognition as a human-rights activist long before the term had been coined. Casement’s disillusion with British imperialism grew from 1904 onwards, and he withdrew from the British consular service in 1913. He was a moving spirit in the founding of the Volunteers, and helped organise gun-running for them in July 1914. [21]

Roger Casement had tried to use his international standing to influence American opinion, but like his effort to recruit Irish prisoners in Germany to fight for the liberation of Ireland in 1915, he met with little success. [22] He tried to persuade the Germans that an Irish uprising backed by their support in terms of men and munitions would successfully destabilise the Empire, [23] but in 1916, Casement was arrested after he landed from a German U-boat in County Kerry.   How convenient for the British State.

You might argue that without Casement’s  promise that a large shipment of German arms would be landed at Limerick, later changed to Fenit, greater caution might have been taken. The expectation was that a provincial Rising spurred on by success in Dublin would create a national reaction against British rule. [24] Even when defeat stared the Rebel leaders in the face towards the end of Easter Week, the hope that the Germans would send help, lingered. What they did not know was that Casement’s relations with the Germans had deteriorated to the extent that he ‘was filled with almost paranoid suspicion’ that he and Ireland was being used to his host’s selfish ends. He knew that a rebellion without military assistance would be hopeless. [25] He was essentially correct on both counts and, as we will later show, that was the very reason he returned to Ireland.

It is not our purpose to give great detail on the events of Easter Week 1916 or expand on the backgrounds and qualities of the men who defied the British Army and led what has become known as the Easter Rising. [26] Their actions speak for themselves. They defied the Empire and paid with their lives. What else could the British Imperialists have allowed? These men were traitors to the crown, friends of Germany, from whom they were supplied with weapons, military protagonists and anti-democratic interventionists. So far that might describe Ulster from 1912-1914; an irony that was never acknowledged. In 1916, the difference was that the Empire was at war, as were hundreds of thousands of fellow Irishmen, and the State they sought to overthrow had already begun to back-track on Home Rule.

In the muddied waters of imperialist history, official blame for the Easter Rising in 1916 has been pinned on the Dublin executive which had been considerably relaxed about armed volunteers, on Sir Edward Carson and his Unionist cabal for giving leadership to a private armed force in Ulster, on John Redmond for his blind acceptance of Asquith’s promises on Home Rule, on Sir Roger Casement for his agitation against the Crown by attempting to involve Germany directly in an armed uprising, and on the treasonous rebels who attempted to overthrown the rightful government. Officially, the Secrete Elite found it convenient to centre blame on The Chief Secretary for Ireland, and by association, prime minister Asquith.

But as we will reveal in the weeks to come, there were darker forces close to the heart of the Secret Elite who knew what was about to happen, and chose not to stop it.

[1] K Jeffries, Ireland and the Great War, p.13.
[2] Church of Ireland Gazette, 18 September 1914. Cited in John Martin Brennan’s thesis, Irish Chaplains in the First World War, p. 11. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/3413/1/Brennan12MPhil.pdf
[3] Liam Kenny, Maynooth Goes to War, http://www.kildare.ie/ehistory/index.php/maynooth-goes-to-war/
[4] John Martin Brennan’s thesis, Irish Chaplains in the First World War, p.11.
[5] Ibid., pp 11-12.
[6] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 1.
[7] Roger Cole et al, The Irish Neutrality League and the Imperialist War 1914-1918, p. 7.
[8] Stephen Lucius Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years, p.165. http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook_text/John_Redmonds_Last_Years_1000438731/171
[9] Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, p. 444.
[10] John Dorney, The Easter Rising – A Brief Overview, http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/04/22/the-easter-rising-–-a-brief-overview/#.Vn-9RITPyi4
[11] Sir Roger Casement played a pivotal role before and during the war in outspoken attacks against British Imperialism. He had first hand experience of the vulgarity and inhumanity of European imperialism in his roles with the diplomatic and colonial service before disavowing it all in his books The Crime against Europe and The Crime Against Ireland. Casement worked to promote Irish independence in America and travelled to Germany in an attempt to garner German support in the form of men and arms for an uprising in Ireland. His role will be explained more fully in future blogs.
[12] Bardon, A History, p. 444.
[13] Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 195.
[14] Paul O’Brien, The Battle of Mount Street Bridge. http://www.paulobrienauthor.ie/the-battle-of-mount-street-bridge-1916/
[15] Brian P Murphy, Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal, p. 61.
[16] Milner letter to Carson, 9 December 1913, Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 183.
[17] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-1918, p. 27.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Fintan O’Toole, The Multiple Hero, in New Republic, 2 August 2012.
[20] HMSO, Cmnd. 6266, July 1912.
[21] Brendan Clifford, Roger Casement: The Crime Against Europe with The Crime Against Ireland and other writings, p. 5.
[22] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, p. 21.
[23] The Ireland Report by Casement and Plunkett was a 32 page document NLI MS5244.
[24] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, p. 39.
[25] Ibid., p. 64.
[26] There are several current books covering the Easter Rising, but the one which we would recommend for its combination of clear analysis, good writing and thorough research is Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising. (first published 1999.)

Ireland 1916, 4: Towards the Rising; No Justice for the ‘Rebels in Sheep’s Clothing’

Consider this. While John Redmond and his Irish Parliamentary Party colleagues paraded the length of Ireland to recruit soldiers for an ‘Irish Brigade’ of the British Army in the belief that Home Rule had already been guaranteed, the Secret Elite, who controlled Asquith’s government and the upper echelons of the British Army [1] had determined that neither would happen. [2]

Their influence over senior appointments in the British Army was virtually absolute and inside that special coterie of military commanders, Anglo-Irishmen were dominant. Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts, whose father was a native of county Waterford, had nominally retired from office in 1905 but in reality his imposing influence over military appointments continued unabated. [3]  He was also President of the National Service League which advocated four years of compulsory military training for every man aged between 18 and 30. [4]

Fellow members included his personal friend, Lord Alfred Milner with whom he frequently shared platforms. Sir Henry Wilson, Commandant of the Staff College at Camberley and Director of Military Operations from 1911 onwards was another very influential Irishman. [5]  He was born in Longford and his family claimed to have come to Ireland with William of Orange. Sir John French, Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force was of Anglo-Irish descent and Kitchener himself, resplendent as Field Marshal and Secretary of State for War, was raised in Ballylongford in County Kerry. They wore their ‘Irishness’ as it suited their purpose, but every one considered the Irish National Volunteers with deep suspicion. Kitchener is said to have regarded them as ‘rebels in sheep’s clothing’. [6] These senior commanders had colluded with Lord  Milner, Sir Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law to protect the Ulster cause from 1912 -1914. [7] When it came to Ireland, they were not impartial guardians of the nation.

Desperate to impress the British Establishment that Ireland would play her part loyally in defence of Belgium, and concerned that she would be dishonoured if the Nationalists did not support the war against Germany, Redmond went to meet Kitchener at the War Office as early as 6 August, 1914. [8] His reception was cold and friendless. [9] No-one took up Redmond’s generous offer that his Volunteers should defend the island’s coasts and the first of many opportunities to treat Ireland with a new found confidence and respect was rejected. [10] Much more was to follow. The preferential treatment which the Ulstermen had always enjoyed from the British State continued to manifest itself, especially in the army.

Prime minister Asquith appeared to promise a new approach when he addressed a great rally at the Mansion House in Dublin on 25 September. His speech was recorded over two pages of The Times, and the impression he gave promised that there would soon be an Irish Division in the South to match the Ulster Division in the North. He declared: ‘We all want to see an Irish Brigade or better still an Irish Army Corps…Don’t be afraid that by joining the colours they will lose their identity and become absorbed in some invertebrate mass, or, what is perhaps equally repugnant, be artificially distributed into units which have no nation cohesion or character’. [11] Clearly he had not discussed this matter with Kitchener who was prejudiced against Home Rule and would not countenance a distinctive Irish division with its own badge and colours, based on the Irish Volunteers.

Indeed Irishmen enlisting in mainland Britain who wanted their identity to be acknowledged in some tangible way were snubbed in like vein. [12] Despite this, Irishmen flocked to the standard in places like Tyneside where four Irish  ‘pals’ battalions were raised as part of the Northumberland Fusiliers. [13] An official request from Redmond that at least one of these battalions be trained in Ireland to encourage recruitment and pride, was summarily refused. [14] Kitchener believed, as did the Secret Elite cabal which had pushed for his appointment, [15] that if the Volunteers were trained, armed and kept together in coherent units, there would be civil war once the crusade against Germany was over, with no advantage to Ulster.

These same arguments were not applied to Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. They were treated with distinct preference and in consequence the Ulster Volunteers metamorphosed into the 36th (Ulster) Division with their own distinctive uniform and badges. Not since Cromwell’s ironsides had a military force been united by such political unity and religious fervour. [16] It was the status quo default, just one more injustice piled upon centuries of injustice.

And herein lay the reason why those few Irishmen who were not duped by the lure of London promises and spoke out against war, whose numbers grew slowly but inexorably through 1915, began to realise that the British Establishment had no intention of delivering a united Ireland once war was ended. Ireland (excluding Ulster) was being played as a fool, led by the nose with false promise and spurious argument. What was the point of fighting for Catholic Belgium when Catholic Ireland was still part and parcel of the British Empire? Why were Irishmen fighting for the rights of small nations, while the rights of the common man in the South were considered inferior to his counterpart in the North?

After the doubt came the hurt. Ireland had a strong military tradition stretching back beyond the sixteenth century. When Great Britain went to war there were approximately 20,000 Irishmen serving in the regular British Army and another 30,000 in the first line of defence. About 80,000 enlisted in Ireland in the first year of the war, around half of whom came from Ulster. Emigrant Irishmen enlisted in the armies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. [17]  The Irish went to war in huge numbers on behalf of the British Empire in the belief that they were fighting for civilisation and a just cause – and, in the South, that the Home Rule was part of that just cause. Irish regiments fought as vital components of the British Expeditionary Force. Spread across all the major regiments of note, Irish loyalty to King and Empire was consequently ignored by contemporary historians. Only the 36th (Ulster) Division retained its identity; the sacrifice of the soldiers from the South was intentionally suppressed.

The calamitous Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 has been dissected in previous blogs. Everyone who was sacrificed in the disgraceful, half-hearted and callous attack on the Dardanelles that was deliberately set up to fail, [18] deserves to be recognised as a victim of disingenuous British foreign policy. However, the court historians have focused their attention and approbation on the Anzacs – the unbloodied troops from Australia and New Zealand – with scant mention of the many Irishmen who fought and died there. The 1st Battalion of the Royal Dublin, Munster and Inniskilling Fusiliers suffered enormous casualties at the initial landings at Cape Helles in April. In the second major assault at Suvla Bay the new service battalions of the Irish regiments were sacrificed to no advantage with appalling loss. [19] That their artillery had been sent to France and the men arrived without maps or coherent orders was, sadly, par-for-the-course from the second-rate British commanders sent to oversee the disaster. [20]

The studied down-playing of the thousands of Irishmen slain or maimed in the horror of Gallipoli was truly ignorant and inexcusable. Basically they were taken for granted, as were all the troops condemned to a horrendous fate. Despite their immense loss, the British State ignored the extent of the Irish contribution in Gallipoli. A letter to The Times in April 1916 complained that Commander in Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton’s despatches (London Gazette no. 29429) were unaccountably misprinted such that the contributions of the 5&6 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the 6 Royal Irish Fusiliers and the 6&7 Royal Dublin Fusiliers were omitted. [21] Sad, and unkind as that ‘mistake’ was, it paled into insignificance when the vital contributions made by the Irish (and other British) divisions were all but ignored at the special service held in Westminster Abbey to hail the magnificent contribution from the Australian and New Zealand troops, the Anzacs in ‘the high cause of Freedom and honour’.

In the presence of the King and Queen and the most senior members of the Secret Elite including Lord Milner, Andrew Bonar Law and A.J. Balfour, every Anzac division and brigade was named individually and the imperial stamp of absolute approval was cemented by the Dean of Westminster with the words ‘In future the sons of our Empire will seek to emulate the imperishable renown of their daring and bravery.’ [22]

What of the ‘imperishable renown’ of the 10th Dublins, yet another ‘Pals battalion’ sacrificed at Gallipoli. Within two days of their landing, seventy-five percent of that gallant regiment was destroyed. [23] How did the widows of Dublin feel when everything that might arouse pride in Ireland was ignored or suppressed? Their dead were little more than spent cannon-fodder.

And still John Redmond and his Home Rulers clung to the belief that this time Asquith’s Liberals would not let Ireland down. Had they not placed Ireland firmly inside the British Empire? But Asquith’s grip on parliament was beginning to unravel. A Coalition Government was announced in May 1915 and its membership should have sounded a shrill alarm to the Home Rulers. British newspapers hailed the new non-party Cabinet for its inclusive strength, though John Redmond decided not to accept Asquith’s offer of a minor post. Given the prominent inclusion of leading figures from the Ulster campaign to oppose Home Rule, men who had openly defied the law and threatened a breakaway government in Belfast, he had no option. How could the appointment of Sir Edward Carson to the post of Attorney-General, of F.E. Smith to Solicitor-General and James Henry Campbell, a member of Carson’s provisional government, to the post of Attorney-General of Ireland [24] spell anything other than the bending of Westminster’s knee to Ulster? How ironic that British justice was placed in the hands of men who had been openly prepared to defy that rule of law [25] by raising and arming an illegal private army in Ulster [26] and taking Britain to the brink of civil war.

Others too should have given cause for concern. Andrew Bonar Law, Leader of the Conservatives and staunch defender of the Ulster cause, was promoted to Secretary of the Colonies, and several key associates of the Secret Elite were also given high office. Walter Long, the man who had passed on the cheque to facilitate the purchase of UVF guns, became President of the Local Government Board. [27]  A.J. Balfour, who claimed to have ‘made’ Carson, in that he raised him from ‘a simple Dublin barrister’ in 1887 to Solicitor General in his own government of 1900-1906, [28] took over at the Admiralty while Lord Milner’s friend, Lord Selborne, became President of the Board of Agriculture. Men who had stood at Ulster’s right hand, Lords Landsdowne and Curzon, walked into this new government. In lesser but still important posts, Milner’s proteges, Lord Robert Cecil and Arthur Steel-Maitland, were appointed Under-Secretaries at the Foreign Office and Colonial Office. [29] Asquith’s coalition government had assumed the mantle of a pro-unionist cabal dominated by the imperialist ant-Irish Secret Elite. Effectively, it was a bloodless coup.

Can you wonder at the doubt that grew in the hearts of that small minority of Irishmen who could not accept the road down which John Redmond had led the nation? The impressive propaganda of an Empire fighting for the rights of small nations rang hollow. Even from within the ranks of the conservative Catholic Church in Ireland, voices publicly expressed these doubts. Something had to give. Who would take a stand?

[1] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 194-202.
[2] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-18, p. 22.
[3] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 195-197.
[4] Mathew C Hendley, Organised Patriotism and the Crucible of War, p. 12.
[5] Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, A Political Soldier,  pp. 74-76.
[6] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 272.
[7] Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, pp. 118-9.
[8] Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914-1916, pp. 113-4.
[9] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 272.
[10] Freeman’s Journal, 2 September 1914.
[11] The Times, p.10, 26 September 1914.
[12] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 272.
[13] Matt Brosnan, The Pals Battalions of the First World War, Imperial War Museum at http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-first-world-war.
[14] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916, vol. 86 cc581-696.
[15] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 240.
[16] Howard Green, Kitchener’s Army, Army Quarterly, April 1966, vol LXXXXII, no.1, p. 93.
[17] http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Historical_Information/1916_Commemorations/Irish_Soldiers_in_the_First_World_War.html
[18] Gallipoli 1, The Enduring Myth, blog posted on this site on 11 February 2015.
[19] taoiseach.gov.ie/ …/Irish_Soldiers_in_the_First_World_War
[20] Gallipoli 17, The Blame Game Begins, blog posted on this site on 17 April 2015.
[21] Everard Wyrall, author of ‘Europe in Arms’, letter to the Times, 22 April 1916, p. 3.
[22] The Times 26 April, 1916 page 2.
[23] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916, vol. 86 cc581-696.
[24] Diarmaid Coffey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32265,
[25] Brian P. Murphy, Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal, p. 45.
[26] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-18, p. 25.
[27] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, p. 311.
[28] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 176.
[29] Ibid., p. 141.

Ireland 1916, 3: 1914-1916, Miracle or Mirage?

If the decision to advocate a suspension of the Home Rule Act came as a surprise to political Ireland, that was nothing compared with John Redmond’s pro-war-and-empire commitment given in the House of Commons at the end of Sir Edward Grey’s epoch-ending speech on 3 August 1914. [1] The unanswered question is why did Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary, or Home Rule Party, spring to his feet and commit Ireland to the Imperialist war? Some commentators have praised his spontaneity. [2] Forget that. It was preplanned, for sure. In a letter to  prime minister Asquith’s wife Margot the day before Sir Edward Grey’s warmongering speech, Redmond indicated that he hoped to speak with Asquith ‘before the House meets if only for a few moments, and I hope I may be able to follow your advice?’ [3] It transpired that Margot had written to him advising that ‘he had the opportunity of his life of setting an unforgettable example to the Carsonites in the House of Commons and in a great speech, offer all his soldiers to the Government’. [4] And indeed he did. Do you imagine that this took place without the Secret Elite’s prior approval? Next day, The Times saluted Redmond’s ‘singularly happy and weighty words’. [5] They would.

Redmond was an Empire loyalist who at times, seemed to have more in common with Sir Edward Carson than he did with the mass of Irishmen he presumed to represent. Sinn Fein, the minority nationalist movement formed in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, accused him and his party of being subservient to English considerations detrimental to the best interests of Ireland. [6] He maintained great faith in the British Empire and steadfastly refused to recognise its capacity for brutality. [7] Happy to play the parliamentary game, constrain radicalism and acknowledge the king emperor, Redmond danced to a Secret Elite air. [8] But let’s not forget that Redmond’s pledge that the government in London should leave the defence of Ireland’s shores to the Irish National and Ulster Volunteers, came in response to an amazing claim by Sir Edward Grey.

The Secretary for Foreign Affairs declared in his afore-mentioned statement that: ‘the one bright spot in the whole of this terrible situation is Ireland. The general feeling throughout Ireland – and I would like this to be clearly understood abroad – does not make the Irish question a consideration which we feel we have now to take into account.’ [9] From which sources had he conjured this concept? Sir Edward Carson? Certainly not. Ulster had not been consulted. Carson suspected that Redmond’s contribution was ‘calculated to humbug and deceive.’ [10] Indeed Redmond’s own party knew nothing about his intentions. Those who might have cautioned a more considered response were absent on that fateful day; John Dillon was in Dublin for the inquest on the murders at Batchelor’s Walk, and Joe Devlin, another Home Rule leader, in his constituency in Belfast. Fortuitously, perhaps? It was a pledge that changed Irish history; a pledge which historians have too readily accepted at face value.

The Munster Express [11] claimed that Redmond’s speech had wrought a miracle in changing Irish attitudes’. Understandably optimistic, perhaps, but that claim was published five days after the event and in the wanton euphoria that attends many a declaration of war. But there was no miracle change. War in Europe did not bring a complete end to the factions inside the British Parliament over the future of Ireland. Writing confidentially to the love of his life, Venetia Stanley, an exasperated prime minister Asquith declared on 31 August: ‘The Irish (both sets) are giving me a lot of trouble, just at a difficult moment. I sometimes wish we could submerge the whole lot of them and their island, for say 10 years, under the waves of the Atlantic’. [12]

Both John Redmond and Sir Edward Carson, wanted guarantees which stood poles apart. Asquith introduced a moratorium and suspended the Home Rule Act until the war was ended, just as The Times, ever an organ of the Secret Elite, had advocated. In a most acrimonious Commons meeting the bile of bitter mistrust focused on the fact that an Amending Bill which would have dealt with the future of Ulster separate from independent Ireland, had been dropped. [13]  At the end of his speech, the Conservative opposition walked out en masse behind their leader, Andrew Bonar Law. If it was supposed to be dramatic, it leaned more towards the pantomime that is Westminster.

To the Irishmen in the South, nothing was resolved. How much more damage had been inflicted on Irish hopes? Was this simply an interim solution to push Home Rule off centre-stage? [14] Was Redmond corrupt, deluded or just downright naive? [15] Flushed by his success in having the Home Rule Act steered through parliament, did he honestly think that by throwing the Irish Volunteers into the Empire’s war, he would reap a joyous reward for the nation? Had his head been turned by the Asquiths who seemed to make a habit of keeping him secretly informed as it suited, putting ideas into his head when they wanted him to follow their direction and, when he himself came forward with proposals, agreeing with him without delivering on their promises? Was he flattered by their attention to a degree which blinded him from the obvious – he was being used – the Home Rule party was being used.

The charge of corruption holds no water save in the sense that he was so comfortable amongst parliamentarians and gullible when it came to the Asquiths, that he believed the imperialist promise. He hoped for, indeed, expected a quick military victory in Europe, a reconciliation between Ulster and the South based on their common ‘blood sacrifice’ in the field of battle and the final reward of a devolved Irish parliament from a grateful British Empire. Why, if it all worked out, Ireland might even end the war with an army trained and equipped by the imperial government. [16] He also wanted to convince the Ulstermen that their acceptance of Home Rule did not mean that they had to abandon  their loyalty to Britain. Surely they would see Irish Nationalism in a different light if Nationalists stood shoulder to shoulder with them to defend Belgian neutrality and the rights of small nations? [17]

To that end, Redmond willingly became a recruiting agent for the British army and urged the Irish Volunteers to join up. At a well publicised address to the East Wicklow Brigade of the Irish Volunteers at Woodenbridge on 20 September 1914 he stated:
‘The interests of Ireland – of the whole of Ireland – are at stake in this war. This war is undertaken in defence of of the highest principles of religion and morality and right and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country if young Ireland were shirking from the duty of proving on the fields of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race all through its history… account for yourselves as men, not only for Ireland itself, but wherever the fighting line extends in the defence of right, of freedom and religion in this war.’ [18] How many later contemplated the value of their ‘rights, freedom and religion’ in Ireland?

Incredibly, the vast majority of the Irish Volunteers, like well intentioned men throughout the land, swallowed the propaganda. The initial response to recruitment in Ireland was equal to anything seen in the whole of Great Britain.

With hindsight it is easy to ridicule Redmond as an establishment lackey. If he was, the following four years disabused him of the notion that a ‘miracle change’ had taken place in the attitude and behaviour of the British ruling-class. He was not alone in his misplaced faith. John Dillon, his colleague in the Irish Parliamentary party, reconciled his anti-war instincts and made what was considered the pragmatic decision to stand with Redmond in the belief that it would pay to be on the winning side when the war ended. If Ireland stood against the rest of the Empire, as it had in the Boer War, the cause of Home Rule would be fatally undermined. [19] He was probably right.

We should remember that though the Home Rule Act had been passed, it remained suspended, and thus was unfinished business dangling like a golden carrot before Irish eyes. Ireland had been wounded many times before, but its resilience in 1914 was boosted by an injection of hope, an expectation of justice and a naïve belief in political honesty.

Early in December 1914 four Dublin newspapers were suppressed by the military authorities under the Defence of the Realm Act. All available copies of Irish Freedom, Sinn Fein, Ireland and The Irish Worker were seized by police and newsagents were warned neither to sell the offering papers nor exhibit placards displaying their headlines. Manuscripts and other documents were seized and the printing type and sections of the printing plant were removed to Dublin Castle. Steps were also taken by the postal service to prevent the circulation and sale of the Gaelic American newspaper. [20] There were dissenting voices. Unlike mainland Britain, where the press blindly supported the war, some Irish newspapers continued to attack the war and Ireland’s involvement in it.

British Intelligence Officers compiled the names and particulars of those who spoke out against recruiting, [21] including twenty-four catholic priests in various parts of the country. There was to be no miracle change in Irish attitudes – that was a self- serving mirage. A small but vocal minority opposed the sending young Irishmen to serve as cannon fodder for the army of their hereditary enemy. They saw through the warmongering, the empty promises and the British government’s intentions. They looked around at the continuation of injustice in Ireland and took stock of their nation’s future. They determined that only direct action could bring about permanent change and set themselves the objective of gaining full independence for Ireland, by force if necessary.

[1] Statement by Sir Edward Grey, Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 3 August 1914, vol. 65, cc1809-32.
[2] Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United, Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War, p. 178.
[3] Margot Asquith, The Autobiography of Margot Asquith, p. 164.
[4] Ibid., p. 163.
[5] The Times, 4 August, 1914, p. 5.
[6] Warre B. Wells, John Redmond: A Biography, p 122.
[7] Diarmid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000, p. 125.
[8] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 312.
[9] Statement by Sir Edward Grey, Hansard, House of Commons Debate , 3 August 1914 vol 65 cc1809-32.
[10] The Irish Times, 7 Dec 2015 http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/one-hundred-years-since-john-redmond-committed-ireland-to-the-first-world-war-1.1885199
[11] The Munster Express, 8 August 1914.
[12] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 209.
[13] Suspensory Bill, Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 15 September 1914 vol 66 cc881-920.
[14] Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, p. 442.
[15] Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 129.
[16] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-1918, p. 21.
[17] John Bruton, September 1914: John Redmond at Woodenbridge, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 101, No 402 (Summer 2012) p. 240.
[18] Charles James O’Donnell and Brendan Clifford, Ireland in The Great War, p. 41.
[19] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-1918, p. 19.
[20] http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/three-irish-newspapers-suppressed-by-british-government
[21] Dublin Metropolitan Police Report, 13 December, 1914, signed by Patrick McCarthy. National Archives of Ireland, CSO RP 1914.