Precision about the exact political future was still comfortably avoided. In personally pinning his colours to an Irish Republic, de Valera seemed to do so undogmatically.
‘Until the Irish people declare that another form of government is more suitable,’ he said at Mullingar soon after his victory, ‘the Irish Republic is the form of government that the Sinn Feiners will give allegiance to.’1 And though Redmondite Nationalists might complain with reason that when ‘asked to say in simple words how the Irish Republic is to be raised on the ruins of the British Empire, he takes refuge in vague and impalpable generalities’,2 his argument that for Ireland’s case to be heard at the Peace Conference she should first claim total independence seemed reasonably flexible to many old Home Rulers. The dominant political note of the day after the East Clare election was that Ireland was declaring for ‘independence’ not by revolution but by resort to the Peace Conference. As to what ‘independence’ itself actually meant to most new Sinn Fein supporters a writer in the Irish Independent of 14 July 1917 was accurate in saying that at that time ‘Dominion Home Rule within the Empire would be accepted with practical unanimity by Nationalists and possibly a substantial section of Unionists would also vote for it’. The correspondent of the Westminster Gazette, analysing the East Clare election result, wrote that while the young genuinely did want total independence, the older voters did not think it feasible but had been content to vote for it, arguing that ‘the more they ask for the more likely they are to get “Colonial Home Rule”, a phrase now common in the mouths of moderate Irishmen everywhere – even in Unionist circles’.3 He added that the Sinn Fein policy of abstentionism from Westminster hadn’t really worried moderates at all, because the Irish party at Westminster had proved so totally ineffective against a combination of the two British parties anyway. He predicted, incidentally, that there would be no split between the de Valera-Volunteer type of Sinn Fein and the Griffith-Plunkett type until after the end of the war.
And if any moderate Irishman, disillusioned with Redmond, should momentarily raise an eyebrow at the way in which young men at the end of Sinn Fein meetings increasingly arranged themselves in military formations and marched off in fours singing national songs into the countryside, he could find reassurance enough in de Valera’s definition of the reconstructed Volunteer body’s task, namely that they would be ‘the best protection that England could not come and rob them’ of their rights.4 This was, after all, the very purpose behind the mass Volunteer movement of 1914 in which all ardent Home Rulers had joined after the Curragh mutiny. And when at the beginning of August 1917 Colonel Maurice Moore again presided over an Irish National Volunteer Convention of 176 companies in Dublin, he called for a healing of the split of three years before and a reconciliation with the Irish Volunteers, implying that it was logically one movement again. The reality of his contention received some substantiation from the British Government ten days later when the Irish National Volunteer headquarters in Parnell Square, Dublin, were raided together with Catholic halls all over the country, and the rifles and other arms in them seized. The arms of the Ulster Volunteer Force in the North were, of course, not touched, and the Irish Independent remarked: ‘This fact like the immunity enjoyed by the UVF in the past is setting people furiously to think.’ If there was to be one law for the Unionist and a different law for the Nationalist, it seemed all the more logical for all Nationalists to be in the same boat.
The result of yet another by-election, this time in Kilkenny, declared just before the raids, had shown a further consolidation of the new nationalist front. The Sinn Fein candidate, William Cosgrave, had been fairly confidently expected to win, but even so it had hardly been expected that his victory, which turned out to be a two-to-one majority, would be so decisive, and once again there were enthusiastic celebrations in many parts of Ireland involving Volunteer parades and the singing of national songs in which the song of the 1916 rebels, ‘The Soldiers’ Song’, increasingly figured.
The increasing efficiency and self-confidence of the newly reconstructed Volunteers was indeed beginning to disconcert the authorities. Predictable counter-measures were set in motion by them with the inevitable result of increasing their prestige among all Nationalists still further. Arrests for drilling began. Austin Stack, the commandant of the Tralee Volunteers, who, faithfully observing orders, had failed to rescue Casement from his police cell in the town the year before, was arrested and sentenced to two years’ hard labour for wearing Volunteer uniform at a demonstration at Ardfert on the first anniversary of Casement’s execution. Three thousand Volunteers of whom two hundred were on bicycles and three hundred on horses had attended the ceremony and the road from Tralee to Ardfert had been thronged all day, with orange, white and green colours visible everywhere. Sean MacEntee, the former Redmond supporter sentenced to death after the rebellion, was now court-martialled for a recent speech at Drogheda in which he, however, maintained he had simply advocated peaceful means to obtain a Republic, telling the meeting that Ireland’s status would be recognized at the Peace Conference and that any further resort to violence and rebellion would not be necessary.5 Also re-arrested at this time, for a speech at Longford, was Collins’s associate, Thomas Ashe, who after his release with all the other 1916 prisoners in June had been elected President of the Supreme Council of the IRB.6 By the middle of September 1917 there were over thirty such Volunteers, or Sinn Fein prisoners, in Mountjoy gaol serving sentences from six months to two years for drilling or making so-called seditious speeches.
The Volunteers were controlled, in so far as they were centrally controlled at all, by their own executive which included Collins and the reconstituted IRB machinery. But more often than not they acted with local individual spontaneity, and they now lent assistance to the new political movement in a form even more valuable than the practical organization they had been supplying at elections. They began to provide martyrs. For the repression they invited from the authorities aroused old emotional springs of Irish nationalism at the very moment when the mass of public opinion might otherwise have paused and wondered whether there really was anything coherent enough to follow in the new leaders after all. A number of contemporary political commentators had already noted that Sinn Fein’s failure to produce a really positive national policy was giving rise to serious second thoughts.7 But it was at this very moment that something happened to swing sympathy towards Sinn Fein more markedly than ever before.
The prisoners in Mountjoy gaol, curiously perhaps in view of the Sinn Fein insistence that there was no need for a further resort to arms, were demanding for themselves treatment as ‘prisoners of war’. An explanation was that since no such special status as ‘political prisoner’ was recognized by the authorities, ‘prisoner of war’ was the only recognizable status by which they could be distinguished from common criminals. The prison authorities adhered strictly to their own regulations which recognized no distinction between anyone sentenced by the courts and placed in their custody. The Volunteer prisoners, however, refused to work or wear prison clothes and eventually, after some smashing of cell windows and organized singing of national songs, resorted to the old suffragette weapon of the hunger strike. The prison authorities again applied their own regulations and began what was officially described as ‘artificial’ or forcible feeding. Some forty prisoners were soon being subjected to the procedure. Large protest meetings were addressed in Dublin by de Valera, by Cathal Brugha, recovered from his wounds of Easter week, and by Griffith who did not hesitate to make clear in the course of them that he had disapproved of the rebellion.8
The warders in Mountjoy were not brutal, but did their duty. The practice of regulation forcible feeding involved the strapping of a prisoner to a chair at the elbows and below the knees, the placing of an eighteen-inch rubber tube either via the mouth, or if the prisoner refused to open his mouth, via the nostrils down his throat and the pumping of two eggs beaten up in a pint of warm milk into the stomach by some twenty to thirty strokes of a stomach pump.9 The whole business took between five and ten minutes. The prisoner usually vomited at first when the tube went down his throat. If fed through the nostrils, the nose and throat invariably bled.
Austin Stack, then the official leader of the prisoners in Mountjoy, thus described at the time what happened to him personally on Tuesday, 25 September, at the hands of the doctor in charge that day. This doctor was by all accounts more than usually maladroit.
He got the tube down eventually. I was unable to see as water was running from my eyes, and with the pain and a kind of vomiting I could not see what was going on. When he took up the tube I vomited about a quarter of a pint of liquid. I thought I had been fed then; when the doctor came again and asked me to open my mouth I said, ‘What for? Haven’t I been fed?’ He said: ‘No, not yet.’
While the doctor made another attempt, Stack thought he ‘seemed to be using more force than skill, grinding his teeth practically’. His finger reached down his throat almost to his neck. When the operation had been completed Stack heard a warder call out. ‘Ashe next’.10
Thomas Ashe had spent fifty hours the previous week deprived of his boots, bed and bedding as a punishment for insubordination. However, the prison medical officer had passed him as fit: ‘… fit for close confinement, fit for scale punishment no. 1 and 2. Also deprivation of mattress, fit for restraint in handcuffs, waist belt, muffs, restraint jacket or jacket in splints.’11 Ashe had first been forcibly fed on Sunday, the 23rd, when like every other prisoner he found the experience very unpleasant and painful. He told the doctor he was sorry to see him reducing a noble profession to the level of an executioner. Stack had given orders to the prisoners not to resist the operation physically. The only struggle was between the doctor and the tube. When Ashe was released from the chair after following Stack on Tuesday, 25 September, he felt ill and weak and another doctor, meeting him on his way back to his cell, allowed him to be released at once to the Mater Hospital. Within hours he was dead.
At the autopsy a bruise was found on his neck, presumably evidence of the clumsiness of the feeding doctor’s exertions. Grazes and scratches also found on his cheeks were probably caused when his beard was shaved after death. The coroner’s jury – which contained a number of Unionists – eventually found that Ashe had died of heart failure and congestion of the lungs, and condemned forcible feeding as ‘inhuman and dangerous’.12 Every detail of what had been done to Ashe and was being done to the other prisoners could be read by the public in the inquest reports in the newspapers.
Arrangements for Ashe’s funeral were made by Michael Collins and the IRB through their cover organization, the long-standing Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee, and the occasion was made one in the tradition of the great patriotic funerals of the past: T. B. McManus, Parnell and Rossa. In fact it was generally admitted that the funeral was even more impressive than Parnell’s. After Ashe’s body had lain in state the day before in the City Hall, from which troops were removed for the first time since the rebellion and replaced by Volunteer guards in uniform, and where last respects were paid to Ashe by a large Volunteer contingent headed by de Valera and a group of the Citizen Army led by Constance Markievicz, the funeral took place at Glasnevin cemetery on 30 September 1917.
Almost all Dublin was in mourning, and a procession estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000 followed the coffin through the crowded streets, the hearse itself being flanked by Volunteers in uniform with rifles reversed. Immediately behind it came about 150 clergy, then 8,000 members of the Irish Transport Workers’ Union, 10,000 members of various trades bodies, 9,000 Irish Volunteers, most of them in uniform and, of some significance in denoting the unanimity of the reaction of Irish Nationalist opinion to Ashe’s death, a large body of the Irish National Volunteers, previously Redmond supporters, under Colonel Moore. Constance Markievicz led a Citizen Army contingent, wearing full uniform with a revolver in her belt Orange, white and green colours were extensively worn, even by the Dublin Fire Brigade. At the cemetery three volleys were fired over the grave by a Volunteer firing party and Collins delivered the only funeral oration. It was a very short one. After a few words in Irish he said, ‘Nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make over the grave of a dead Fenian.’13
The efficiency and order displayed throughout the proceedings were remarkable evidence of Collins’s organizing ability. The various Volunteer tingents from many parts of Ireland drilled freely and marched in military formations to and from their various assembly points in defiance of all the regulations and regardless of the presence of the police. A film taken of the volleys fired over the graveside by the Volunteers was developed in motors on the way back to the city and was on view in Dublin the same night. The whole event testified strikingly to the growing power, both emotional and material, of the new movement.
The day of the funeral de Valera, speaking at Ennis, recalled the dead man’s role at Ashbourne the year before and allowed himself to strike his most belligerent note since his release. Nothing but freedom, he said, would satisfy the Irish people and they were ready to perish one after the other rather than submit to be conquered. ‘I feel as certain as I stand here that I shall see, before my day comes, Ireland free!’14
All commentators agreed that a new and much-needed stimulus had been given to the Sinn Fein movement. ‘The circumstances of his [Ashe’s] death and funeral’, wrote the London Daily Express, have made 100,000 Sinn Feiners out of 100,000 constitutional nationalists.’ The Daily Mail remarked that a month earlier Sinn Fein, despite its success at the by-elections, had been a waning force. ‘It had no real practical programme, for the programme of going farther than anyone else cannot be so described. It was not making headway …. Sinn Fein today is pretty nearly another name for the vast bulk of the youth of Erin.’
Because of the war and the abrupt drop in emigration, there was a far higher proportion of that youth in Ireland than there had been for generations.
While the Volunteers grew bolder in public – 1,500 of them parading and marching through Cork with officers and many of the rank and file wearing uniforms and bandoliers – the political half of the movement set out to give itself a more plausible coherence at a great convention in Dublin at the end of October 1917. It was attended by about two thousand people, including delegates from over a thousand Sinn Fein clubs. All it really revealed was a commendable degree of professional skill in political management. Where a contest had been anticipated between de Valera, Count Plunkett and Griffith for the presidency of the new Sinn Fein organization which was here formally constituted, all the public saw was a display of brotherly sweetness and light as both Plunkett and Griffith stood down by agreement in de Valera’s favour. The formal Sinn Fein constitution revealed itself as no more free of unresolved ambiguities than the movement had been since its inception. But it was to Sinn Fein’s advantage to offer as vague and wide a political platform as possible. Thus, while it was known that Sinn Fein stood for ‘total independence’ and de Valera himself and many of his Volunteer comrades for a Republic, the wording of the new constitution was designed to placate moderates when it declared that Sinn Fein aimed ‘at seeing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Republic, and, having achieved that status, the people might by referendum, choose their own form of Government, when they would deny the right of the British, or other foreign Government to legislate for Ireland’.
A further aim was ‘to make use of every available means to make impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjugation by military force or otherwise’. This significantly produced one of the few discordant notes in the meeting.
One of the several priests present moved an amendment to this part of the constitution to the effect that after the words ‘every available means’ should be added the words ‘which in the judgement of the National Council are deemed legitimate and effective’. As the rule stood, he said, it might cover anything ‘from pitch and toss to manslaughter’ and they did not want Sinn Fein sullied by ‘any crime or outrage’.15
This touched on the most awkward area in the minds of many who, while prepared to vote for Sinn Fein, feared that some of the Volunteer activists in the movement would lead Ireland into fresh violence. Another priest seconded the amendment, saying it was a slander to say, as some people did, that they were a secret society.
Now the movement had just benefited from a great access of public support, largely thanks to the discipline and organizing ability of a secret society deep in the heart of it, though this fact was, of course, unknown to all but a handful in that convention hall. And Collins and other IRB men and Volunteers had no squeamishness whatever about any methods that might be required to win an Irish Republic. But the majority of the Convention’s opinion was almost certainly behind the sense of the two priests’ amendment. For when voting took place for the twenty-four members of the Sinn Fein executive council MacNeill, who had opposed the rebellion of the year before and believed that the Volunteers should resort to violence only in their own defence, easily headed the poll by more than two hundred votes over his closest rival, the more uncompromising Cathal Brugha. Collins, himself not yet widely known, only just scraped on to the council in twenty-fourth place.16
De Valera’s first major political task therefore was to placate the moderate majority in his movement while leaving as free a hand as possible to those who gave that movement effectiveness and practical organization. Now in the cooperative mood of this first convention the two priests’ amendment presented him with no very severe test. He declared righteously that they were not going to truckle to anyone who insinuated such things as that they were really a secret society.17 And inasmuch as de Valera himself now saw no need for the IRB, and declined to remain a member of it after the rebellion, this was an honest expression of intent, though he must have known something of the extent of Collins’s activity and have been aware of its value to the movement.
He kept a wary option open, however, on the use of violence itself, adding that ‘available means’ meant ‘justly available in the minds of all Irishmen’. Cathal Brugha followed him in reply to the amendment. Brugha also disapproved of further use of the IRB, on the grounds that now that there was an open Republican party, with its open Republican army (the Volunteers), secrecy was unnecessary and dangerous. But he was in fact as implacable in his belief in unsanctioned violence as any Fenian who had ever sworn allegiance to an Irish republic, as his record the year before proved. Nevertheless, he now echoed the overall mood of the conference by saying that they did not intend to meet English rule by assassination.18 The Sinn Fein Convention concluded in an impressive display of superficial unanimity with the Chairman, Griffith, maintaining that they would never break the moral law, and a tumult of cheering greeting MacNeill’s election to the Council at the head of the poll.
A few days later de Valera was telling a meeting at Baillieboro’ that there were no differences in Sinn Fein. ‘They were all out for one and the same thing – to get international recognition for a free and independent Republic. The methods … were any methods and means in accordance with the moral law and the will of the Irish people.’ On the question of physical force he maintained that Irishmen had a perfect right to arm and defend themselves against any attempt to impose conscription on Ireland:
Nothing would please John Bull better than that they should put it into their minds that physical force in any shape or form was morally wrong …. As to the word ‘constitutional’, they had no Constitution of Ireland. The English Constitution was not theirs and they were out against it. What he understood as Constitutionalism was that they should act in accordance with the will of the Irish people and the moral law. Their movement was constitutional in that sense.19
With such skilled ambivalence did the new movement more or less successfully conceal for the time being its crucial discrepancies.
As a self-sufficient organization the Volunteers held a convention of their own, at the same time as the Sinn Fein Convention. Further to convey an impression of unified identity for the whole Sinn Fein movement, de Valera was elected President of the Volunteers as well as of Sinn Fein, while Brugha, Sinn Fein’s Vice-President, was made Chief of Staff. But the unity was far more apparent than real. Brugha himself was a split personality in his dual role. For all his moderation towards a Sinn Fein Convention he was always to regard the Volunteers as an instrument for wresting an Irish Republic from England by physical force. Furthermore Collins, with identical views, was now officially made the Volunteers’ Director of Organization. And utilizing the IRB network which Brugha thought redundant, Collins was increasingly to become the effective force in the central control of the Volunteers, placing other competent activists in key posts.
A letter for which Collins and the Volunteer Executive had been responsible a few months earlier caused some embarrassment when it came to light in the late autumn of 1917, inducing a critical priest from Wexford to raise that question which, he said, every man and woman in Ireland should ask themselves, namely: ‘What does Sinn Fein stand for?’
‘The principle duty of the executive,’ this Volunteer executive letter dated 22 May 1917 had declared, ‘is to put them [the Volunteers] in a position to complete by force of arms the work begun by the men of Easter Week … the Volunteers are notified that the only orders they are to obey are those of their own executive.’ They were reminded that in the past the conjunction of Fenianism with constitutional politics had led to the abandonment of physical force as a policy and were warned to join Sinn Fein only in order to propagate the principles of their own organization which was the only one to which they owed allegiance.20
De Valera applied himself to this difficulty with that evergrowing combination of dexterity and single-minded integrity which was to be his particular political talent. He pointed out with technical correctness that the letter had not been written by the present executive and that he had himself been in Lewes gaol at the time, but then added typically that there was in fact nothing in that document that he himself would not put his name to and that it was Sinn Fein’s own policy to proclaim that only sovereign independence would satisfy the aspirations of the Irish people.21 The need to discuss the crucial issue of physical force was thus somehow obviated.
Within the Volunteer movement itself there was little doubt both among the organizers and the younger and active rank and file that physical force would in the proper time be used to assert Ireland’s sovereign independence. Sinn Feiners who were not Volunteers were sneered at.22 To reassure opinion de Valera would himself point out in public that the Volunteers were a completely distinct and separate organization from Sinn Fein, as if this and his own dual role somehow clarified rather than obscured the political future. But the truth was that the situation carried real dangers. The Volunteers themselves, drilling, studying manuals of British field tactics, starting up their own local companies quite independently of any central organization, even unashamedly shocking the local Sinn Fein supporters by their audacity, were going their own way from early 1917 onwards, sometimes unamenable even to their own executive’s discipline in Dublin.23
De Valera’s attempt to reassure public opinion over the opaqueness of the political future was by no means wholly successful. The Irish correspondent of the Westminster Gazette commented that any Irish Parliament would split into several groups and that ‘of the Sinn Fein voters at elections there are a large number who deprecate under any circumstances, barring attempted conscription, a resort to armed force’.24 Cardinal Logue warned that ‘an agitation ill-considered and Utopian’ had sprung up and was spreading, and that if persevered in it would ‘entail present suffering, disorganization and danger and is sure to end in future disaster, defeat and collapse’.25 To redress the balance de Valera strove to win over more constitutional Nationalists by saying that though some who lived for their national interests might still feel bound up with the British Empire, this was no reason not to agree to differ about ways and means with other Nationalists and still march shoulder to shoulder with them.26 But The Times noted that in Mr de Valera’s ‘scholastic hands’ Sinn Fein was losing much of its political force.27 And a correspondent wrote to the Irish Independent warning of the consequences of Sinn Fein trying to win Irish independence on the field of battle, saying that it could not be done, but would bring upon Ireland ‘dire misfortune and untold horrors, and ruin and devastation, and the demon of civil strife’.28
From the beginning of 1918 raids for arms by independent groups of Volunteers began to be reported from different parts of the country. At the end of January a stud farm near Bansha in County Tipperary was raided by about twenty masked men calling for ‘arms for the Irish army’, but otherwise behaving in a scrupulously correct manner, taking neither valuables nor money and apologizing to the owner’s secretary.29 A month later more masked men – including one of Count Plunkett’s surviving sons – cleared the armoury and one thousand rounds of ammunition from Rockingham House near Boyle. Other Volunteers had long been buying or stealing individually British service rifles from individual British (often Irish) soldiers. In February 1918, a new activity loosely carried out under the auspices of Sinn Fein but recalling more ancient aspects of the Irish struggle began to disturb many moderates in the movement.
In the name of necessary precautions against famine, parties of men in the countryside, but particularly in the west of Ireland, began driving cattle off private grass land and commandeering it in the name of the Irish Republic and ploughing it up for food cultivation. Compensation was offered to the landlord and was often agreed, but where there was a dispute the last word tended to lie with whoever could produce the bigger battalions. Ironically, one such dispute took place on the land of the first ever President of Sinn Fein, Edward Martyn, the friend of Yeats and Lady Gregory, at Tulyra in County Galway. Martyn got an injunction from the courts to prevent local Sinn Feiners ploughing up his land after he had freely offered them one field which they had turned down as unsuitable.30 Evidence that there were stronger, more independent forces at work in this activity than those merely of the Sinn Fein political movement was revealed when the Standing Committee of Sinn Fein, after conceding that most cattle drives were ‘no doubt justifiable’, declared that some had taken place without due regard to the circumstances and that ‘foolish or indiscreet action’ was to be deplored. By the end of the month County Clare had to be declared a special military area and the town of Ennis itself was under curfew with troops lining the streets.
Not only the government but the local Sinn Fein Executives themselves tried, increasingly in vain, to keep things under some sort of control. But a lawlessness reminiscent of the old days of the Land League or even the Defenders was soon rife in that part of Ireland. Offences up before the Clare Grand Jury at the beginning of March included cattle-driving, raids for arms, ploughing-up of poor people’s land, firing into houses and intimidation. Two men in Kerry were even arrested under the old Whiteboy Act. And a man living with his wife and child in a remote part of County Roscommon woke to find that a warning grave had been dug on his land.31
Though some of this activity gained crude popular support for the movement and sympathy for the Volunteers in the countryside – crudest when, as in a few cases, individuals were actually able to help themselves to land – the growing signs of anarchical violence were an embarrassment to Sinn Fein and a liability to its attempts to woo moderate but disgruntled Home Rulers. At the beginning of March the headquarters staff of the Volunteers had directed not only that the raiding of houses for odd guns was strictly prohibited but that Volunteers should not take part in cattle drives as such because these were ‘neither of a national or a military character’.32 A week later Collins himself, speaking in County Longford, expressly stated that the raids on homesteads by Sinn Fein or Volunteers were not only not sanctioned but carried out in direct opposition to the leaders. But the rest of his reproof was hardly an assurance to the moderates. If, he said, the Volunteers wanted arms they would not have to resort to such methods of raiding farmhouses for useless old shotguns and rusty weapons.33 Drilling and the acquisition of arms by more sophisticated means in fact proceeded apace. Raids unauthorized by headquarters also recurred from time to time.
All this activity led to a substantial increase in the number of arrests made for offences such as illegal drilling, unlawful assembly, raiding for arms and cattle-driving. Prisoners in court who were almost always members of the Volunteers usually refused to recognize the court’s authority, declaring that they were soldiers of the Irish Republic, and generally disrupting proceedings by singing the ‘Soldiers’ Song’, smoking and refusing to remove their hats. In the middle of March two of Collins’s key men in the organization, Oscar Traynor and Richard McKee, received three months’ hard labour for illegal drilling.
That the organization itself was continuing both to recruit successfully from the numbers of young men in the country who in more normal times might have been emigrating, and to increase its efficiency, was displayed convincingly at three more by-elections that took place in the early part of 1918. These also served to give some indication of the degree of success Sinn Fein was having in winning over disgruntled Home Rule supporters, though their results represented something of a check to its hitherto annihilating progress.
The electors in fact, if they were beginning to see reasons for disillusionment with Sinn Fein’s lack of constructive policy or alarm at its anarchical tendencies, were in something of a dilemma. For the only political alternative, the old Nationalist Party, had done nothing to restore its fortunes in the Convention summoned by Lloyd George, which had made no relevant progress and was soon to founder totally in disaster. The negotiations themselves had run a predictably calamitous course. Quite apart from the inbuilt irreconcilability of the two chief attitudes to be negotiated, the total boycott of the Convention by Sinn Fein had further seriously undermined its plausibility from the beginning. However, Redmond by great perseverance did succeed finally in reaching agreement with Midleton and the Southern Unionists. But he achieved it only at the price of new concessions over a Home Rule government’s power to impose taxes. At a time when opinion was moving beyond the concept of Home Rule altogether a further diminution by Redmond himself even of such Home Rule as was at least on the statute book seemed preposterous. Moreover, Redmond had risked the concession without any categorical assurance from Lloyd George that the government would back the Nationalist and Southern Unionist agreement against the Ulster Unionist demand for permanent exclusion. The furthest Lloyd George had gone was to say that if in the end the only opposition to Home Rule for all-Ireland came from the Ulster Unionists then he would ‘use his influence with his colleagues … to accept the proposal and give it legislative effect’.34
Once again, it was a palatable Lloyd George formula without substance. The Prime Minister’s ‘colleagues’ when he gave that assurance included Carson and Bonar Law. More and more Redmond seemed manoeuvred out of the political ring altogether. We now know that the Ulster Unionists in the Convention had all along had a definite assurance from the government through Carson that they were not to be bound by any majority vote and that ‘without their concurrence no legislation was to be founded on any agreement between the other group in the Convention’.35 In other words Lloyd George’s promise of legislation on ‘substantial’ agreement allowed substance only to the Ulster Unionists. Any new ground that might have been opened up by the Convention had really been cut from under it from the beginning. It finally collapsed altogether in April 1918. Midleton, the Southern Unionist leader, afterwards asserted that the Southern Unionists would never have participated in the Convention at all if he had realized that it was thus committed in advance to Partition.
Redmond, humiliated and defeated, did not live to see the Convention’s formal closure. After a short illness and an operation for gallstones he died in London in March 1918, a saddened and bitterly disappointed man, confronted with the ruin of all his patient hopes. Staunch and generous-hearted, he had brought the cause of a popular and practical Irish nationalism inherited from O’Connell, Butt and Parnell to an apparent triumph in the Home Rule Act of 1914 and had seen his triumph turn to ashes.
The immediate effect of his death was to cause a by-election in Waterford – the second of three which Sinn Fein had had to fight in the early part of 1918.
None of these three by-elections could be said to provide a particularly representative cross-section of the country as a whole. And since Sinn Fein lost all three of them they drew consolation from that fact. All three defeats were at the hands of the old Home Rule Nationalist Party, but two were in Ulster where that party’s organization had for obvious defensive reasons long been more vigorous than in other parts of Ireland. Sinn Fein, on the other hand, had to build an organization from scratch there, which it did as in the 1917 by-elections by bringing in large numbers of Volunteers from Dublin and the South. On polling day in the South Armagh by-election in February there were twenty Sinn Fein motor-cars operating whose drivers carried special licences authorizing them ‘to drive and use a motor-car in the performance of the duty assigned to him. In the name of the Irish Republic – Signed Eamon de Valera, 31st Jan. 1918.’36
At the last election in South Armagh there had been a Unionist vote of 1,600 there. This time the Unionist candidate withdrew, and since the Sinn Fein candidate, the IRB man Patrick McCartan, lost by 1,019 to the Nationalist in a not greatly reduced poll, it was not unreasonable to deduce that possibly the Nationalist had won only thanks to the Unionist vote, and certainly that Sinn Fein had not done badly in the circumstances.
The same sort of deduction could reasonably be made in the other two by-elections. The second defeat, in Waterford, the seat made vacant by John Redmond’s death, was inflicted by his son, who campaigned in British uniform with a black armband for his father on his left arm. Not only could he command in that constituency the strongest personal loyalties of the old party but he could be reasonably sure of the greater part of the three to four hundred estimated Unionist voters in Waterford. Moreover, like all the by-elections fought before the General Election in 1918, it was fought before the extension of the franchise to all men of twenty-one and over and to women of thirty – so that Sinn Fein did not have the advantage of its undoubted wide support among the young.
De Valera, Griffith and Darrel Figgis of the Howth gun-running adventure bore the brunt of the campaigning for Sinn Fein in Waterford. De Valera made the tart point that there was little likelihood of the Parliamentary Party obtaining Colonial Home Rule when they had failed to get ‘even the miserable Bill that is at present on the statute book’.37 Captain Redmond’s main line of attack was that Sinn Fein meant ‘anarchy and destruction’. When de Valera charged him with being an English officer Redmond replied that he was an Irish officer and that anyway he had a high regard for English officers who fought for their country but none for a hybrid American who would not fight for the Stars and Stripes.38
There was a certain amount of violence in the election, the Sinn Fein candidate being hit on the head with a stick by a soldier when travelling on an outside car with de Valera and having to have his wound dressed in hospital. De Valera himself had a large block of wood thrown at him on one occasion and a number of Volunteers were severely beaten up. Captain Redmond won by 478 votes in a total poll of just over 2,000.39
Taking into account the Unionist votes, the old franchise and the personal element in this constituency, it was by no means a decisive defeat for Sinn Fein. And when the Mayor of Kilkenny hoisted the municipal flag over the Town Hall there to celebrate Redmond’s victory, the local Volunteers in a confident counter-demonstration seized the building, hoisted the orange, white and green tricolour in its place and held the building for a day. Equally indicative of an old order changing was the actual hauling down at Baltinglass of a green flag hoisted there to celebrate the Nationalist victory and its burning amid the cheers of the crowd.
A further defeat for Sinn Fein in the Ulster constituency of East Tyrone was hardly regarded as a setback for they had not even intended to contest the election at first, but on deciding to test the strength of Sinn Fein support there won over 1,200 votes in a poll of about 3,000. The following Sunday a body of about five hundred Volunteers carried out manoeuvres in the Dublin mountains quite unhindered and undismayed.
The recent by-elections demonstrated that Sinn Fein, while not perhaps gaining democratically and even causing a certain number of second thoughts among potential supporters, was still a very vital political force. If its strength lay perhaps more in the enthusiasm of the Volunteers than in its electoral policies, from now on things were to be made easier for it by the British Government.