"...in contempt. Realistically, the so-called "Lull" was never going to last, because in many ways it never really existed. It was based entirely on a skewed view of the conflict from Whitehall that viewed Ireland (in contrast with India or punitive campaigns against native African tribes) as a pseudo-civilian police action rather than a military operation, and a narrative that sought to downplay the power and influence of both Ulster's increasingly splintered paramilitaries as well as the Irish Volunteers. Between the autumns of 1915 and 1916, however, the fighting had not really ended, and the description of Austen Chamberlain of "Ireland at a simmer, not a boil" was more apt than the Cecil government's insistence that it had pacified the island successfully. Vigilantes still wandered Belfast carrying out violent sectarian attacks, disproportionately organized by Loyalists with the tacit and often explicit support of the Army and the RIC; much of Western and Southern Ireland, meanwhile, were "pacified" on paper, with the Army in control of a handful of outposts and the railroads but with most towns and villages having resorted to their own communal policing because even Catholic RIC constables were afraid to go there.
The political conundrum for the Cecil government had also not been solved by the false respite. The British public was simultaneously vehemently opposed to the gauche thuggishness of Ulsterism in the aftermath of the Curragh Mutiny that had triggered the crisis, while simultaneously deeply unsympathetic to the Irish Volunteers and the idea of Irish independence. What made the "Lull" year so important in the war, then, was that it allowed other political groupings to consolidate around their own political views so that when the Lull did inevitably end, they would have coherent positions on Ireland to take. Due to the inability of Cecil to thread the needle that threatened his political coalition - he could neither safely indulge nor denounce Carson and Craig without threatening his government thanks to the Ulster sympathies of most of his Cabinet, particularly F.E. Smith - he essentially left the square of public deliberation entirely to Chamberlain and, to a lesser extent, Redmond.
This was an important development. The National government, satisfied by an uneasy false peace, turned its attention to India, negotiating an end to the various wars in the Americas, and concern about mounting tensions in Hungary that seemed ready to threaten to engulf Austria; the Liberals, in opposition, thus became the chief voice on Ireland, much as National ministers with portfolios unrelated to Ireland, such as William Joynson-Hicks, were able to create an image for themselves independent of Cecil's floundering unpopularity despite a modestly growing economy by late 1916. Chamberlain in early September gave a speech in Birmingham facetiously nicknamed the "Next Year, in Belfast" address, where he openly mocked the Ulster position as "seeking to rebuild some lost temple much like the Israelites, chanting to themselves that 'next year, in Belfast' they will finally have their kingdom on Earth." This puerile throwaway line distracted from the meat of the address, where Chamberlain outlined "the new Liberal position on the Irish Question," which for the first time fully endorsed Home Rule as a piece of the party manifesto. In this Chamberlain was, as this book has pointed out numerous times, a latecomer to the realization amongst most Liberals that Ireland could remain inside an undemocratic Britain or outside of a democratic one, but there was no future for British democracy with Ulsterism and the Irish agitation within it. While some Irish politicians, Dillon among them, huffed at Chamberlain's "conversion to sanity," others like Redmond or, maybe more surprisingly, Devlin welcomed this statement. Historians have debated what exactly moved Chamberlain to leave his previous position of extremely watered-down local controls and pivot to outright Home Rule, considering that as late as early 1914 he was part of the intraparty opposition to Haldane's Government of Ireland Act; the consensus seems to be that his horror at the attempted putsch in Ireland during March 1914 and the subsequent violence carried out across the island for the next year and a half persuaded him that there was no compromising with the Orange Order within Britain, and that Cecil's cowardice (and indeed sympathy) towards the Ascendancy threatened Britain's public institutions.
The second piece of this development was Redmond's gradual conversion to the "Grattanite" solution of an Ireland fully outside of the United Kingdom's domestic political institutions, aligning him increasingly with Devlin in supporting a "hard" Home Rule. Dillon, exposed as always by struggling to articulate what exactly an acceptable compromise would look like, was thus left increasingly irrelevant as the IPP started to consolidate around a compromise that Southern Loyalists like Chief Secretary Midleton could stomach - an Ireland under the Crown (helped along of course by King George's well-known Hibernophilia), with its own Assembly and House of Lords (this to mollify the Ulster-dominated aristocracy of Ireland), in a customs union with London but without representation at Westminster, responsible for its own internal security and policy. Dillon, seeking to undercut Redmond as ever, was unenthusiastic about a solution in which "Ireland would have no voice on trade, defense, or diplomacy" and dismissively huffed that "to pursue this would be render Ireland even more a colony, more a second Canada than a kingdom of her own right."
The solution was deemed by Devlin and Redmond as necessary, though. Some sort of formal and explicit political tie to Whitehall was necessary to prevent further unrest in Ulster, which already viewed their new compromise position as an unholy retreat and the harbinger of "Rome Rule." Devlin, for his part, saw it as an important first step; a settlement in the direction of a co-Kingdom of Ireland that existed as a dominion or personal union with Britain still empowered the Irish people in a way that the current arrangement did not, and further reforms could always be pursued in the future while maintaining many advantages of alignment with Britain, especially considering the esteem with which the current monarch was held in Ireland comparatively to his grandmother, who had let millions starve. [1] But so long as the war sat in a "Lull," there would be no movement, and so the tinder was lit as political machinations consolidated around the Nationals being the only party that truly wanted to keep the Irish inside Westminster any longer, and on September 20th, 1916, the match was lit.
The Irish footballing side of the early 1910s was, until Ireland's outstanding run of form beginning in the mid-1990s, probably the best group in the country's history. It had won the Home Championship in 1913 and 1914 against England (defeating them for the first-ever time) and a combined Wales-Scotland side, until the conflict erupting had threatened to tear the team apart. Club football in Ireland became a nest of sectarian violence, and the 1915 and 1916 Home Championships were cancelled. Simultaneous to this, a combined "British" football side had performed well in the 1910 and 1914 Olympics, despite being dominated by English players. In late September and October, after several months of delays, the first-ever "World Cup" of football was to be played, a tournament organized exclusively for that sport by Jules Rimet in France, and Britain, as the birthplace of the game, was alongside France and Austria one of three favorites. With the Irish conflict fresh in public minds and the need for unity clear, the Football Association elected, once again, to organize a British side as with the Olympics - where national distinctions between the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom were not a thing - and not separately by association, as had been practice in football for decades.
This decision was unpopular in Scotland and Wales; it was a national outrage in Ireland, especially to Catholics such as star captain Val Harris, who considered (with reason) the Irish national side to have earned a place in the World Cup thanks to winning consecutive Home Championships and accused, publicly, the British government of having cancelled the Home Championship the previous two years to "avoid the embarrassment of Ireland defeating England once again, perhaps next time on home ground." Protestant players such as Billy Gillespie or Billy Scott were less vocal, but nonetheless refused to make themselves available to the British national side that was being organized, stating flatly that "we represent Ireland." The conflict escalated as several Scottish players mulled refusing their invitation to France but in the end elected to participate; the movement towards a single British side of English, Scottish and Welsh players was now inexorable, and the Home Championship's days numbered. Ireland was, quite plainly to all who observed, left on the outside.
The final push towards Ireland erupting again was when the President of the Irish Football Association, Sir Hugh Hegan, accepted the invitation of the French to participate in the sixteen-team knockout tournament. The decision was popular amongst Irish of all political stripes, and the players on the team had held together well despite the conflict raging around them; Hegan's choice was not popular in Westminster, and the "inflammatory" speeches by Chamberlain and Redmond that month denouncing Cecil and consolidating around a much harder Home Rule option than in the past - the very thing Ulster had so feared - was taken as a final straw that Hegan's move, despite having been made weeks before, exacerbated.
From a purely legalistic point of view, Hegan had merely done what was his prerogative as the head of an independent football association: accepted an invitation to play a match, or in this case several, by a foreign football association. So as the Irish team gathered at Cork to set off for Calais and their opening match against Spain on September 28th, there was little thought about them potentially breaking the law, because by any objective measure they were not. At the docks in Cork, however, they were met by Royal Navy shore police as well as RIC constables who pointedly told them that they would be refused embarkation and passage to France; Hegan and trainer Ted Seymour angrily protested, as did Harris. Two nights before, the Cecil government had decided in a closed Cabinet meeting that to allow Ireland to play in France as "an independent side" would be acknowledging that Ireland was separate from Britain on foreign soil; as the rest of the UK was in France as a single side, this was taken as a particular affront to "the unity of the Realm." As such, despite the decision to send a single British side having ostensibly been made by coordination of the three football associations in England, Scotland and Wales, the government intervened to refuse the passage of Irish players to France to represent their home, an affront not tempered when Britain crashed out in the quarterfinal after barely defeating Sweden in their first match.
The intersection of sports, politics, and war is a strange thing, and often goes entirely hand-in-hand in ways historians do not realize until much later. This "Football Crisis" was a grievous blunder entirely of Cecil's own making that antagonized not only nationalists but even soft-Loyalists (such as star striker Gillespie) who took pride in their Irish identity even if they were ambivalent or quietly opposed to the most radical proposals of Home Rule. The confrontation at the Cork docks on September 20th ended with Irish winger Samuel Young being struck in the head with the butt of a rifle and a major scuffle breaking out, with a crowd descending angrily on the officers; while nobody was killed, Young took a year to recover from his injury and never played football again, and the riot over the football side did not so much polarize Ireland as outrage all of it but for a handful of approving Ulster Loyalists who viewed any action taken by Britain against Irish identity as worthwhile.
Three days later, at a rally at Dublin's Croke Park (a Gaelic stadium where football was not generally played, thus adding to its symbolism), violence broke out between RIC officers and protestors and six people, including a young mother and her baby, were shot and killed. This "Croke Park Massacre" at the height of the Football Crisis finally broke the lull - it was clear to most Irish nationalists at this point that the Cecil government "intended to extinguish the idea of Ireland until it is laid supine," as Michael Collins angrily declared in a letter to fellow Irish Volunteers in the United States, where he had been for over two years fighting the Confederacy in the American army.
These twin events in September 1916 also created the final impetus for the Irish Parliamentary Party to reach their point of no return. On October 20, 1916 - a month to the day after the Football Crisis began - John Redmond stepped up to the lectern of the House of Commons, with one Parliamentarian of his party having "quit" Westminster every day for the previous three weeks. "It seems apparent that there is no Ireland that can coexist with the worldview of this government," Redmond stated plainly. "Abstentionism has for years been a cause to which I have been bitterly opposed - I have always viewed it as my life's work to advocate for my country and her people, and that I can best use my voice from within these hallowed halls. The events of the past month have proven that that may no longer be possible. A government elected on the heels of an attempted overthrow of the duly chosen representatives of this country, who have tolerated openly and often with encouragement the extinguishment of democracy in Ulster, and the military occupation of the whole of Ireland by the same men who less than three years ago attempted to rebel against the Crown, cannot be said to represent the people who elected them nor the Crown either. As such, it seems my voice may be needed elsewhere, in Ireland, where it can be heard and where people will listen, and until a government as corrupt and craven as this no longer holds the day in Westminster, I and my fellow Irish partisans shall not return to these Commons."
It was Redmond's final address to the Commons - and it was met with loud, raucous cheers from the thirty-odd IPP Members who remained behind him, stunned silence from Liberals, and loud, angry jeers from the Nationals. As he walked out, the rest of the IPP caucus followed him. The party that had carried the balance of power in Westminster for close to a decade to effect Home Rule had just quit it - permanently..."
- Ireland Unfree
[1] YMMV on Victoria's role in the Famine (I don't think she had much to do with it personally) but suffice to say that's not the common view in Ireland, and this book reflects that
