Besides devastating the European continent, the First World War dealt what would prove to be a mortal blow to European imperial ambitions. The Ottoman Empire collapsed completely, and although Great Britain, France and Belgium retained their imperial holdings until after the Second World War, in many corners of the globe the seeds of independence were sown in the earlier conflict, and as early as 1918 there were clear signs that the imperial powers were badly overextended. Britain's relationship with Ireland, which had always carried colonial overtones despite Ireland's nominal equal-partner status in the United Kingdom since 1801, proved no exception to the general rule. The war provided an excuse for die-hard Irish republicans to resurrect a movement that had been floundering with the passage of Home Rule in 1914. It also provided numerous opportunities for giving and taking offense that heightened tensions on all sides of the Anglo-Irish conflict; further weakened Britain's already-tentative grip on an intractable populace; provided a perfect backdrop for the Easter Rising of 1916; fueled the vicious crackdown that followed the Rising and made martyrs of the rebels; and created a generation of young men with military training throughout the British Isles for whom violence and bloodshed were natural means of achieving political ends. Many individual events during the years 1914 to 1920 nudged Ireland in the direction of independence, but overarching them all, the great catalyst, was the Great War.
When the war broke out in August 1914, an Irish Free State looked more like a pipe dream than it did a feasible, or even desirable, political scenario. In May, representatives of the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, and the Irish Party, led by John Redmond, had succeeded in crafting and passing a law that would extend Home Rule to Ireland. Under Home Rule, a Parliament would be established in Dublin to handle local Irish affairs while leaving international relations and other matters of empire to the Parliament at Westminster. The bill would give Ireland some measure of autonomy while keeping it firmly within the fold of the United Kingdom. King George V gave his assent to the bill in September, just as England was, reluctantly, entering the war on the continent; given the looming crisis, the Irish Party, reluctantly, agreed to put the implementation of Home Rule on hold until the end of the war, which was expected to happen before Christmas.
The fact that the war did not end quickly had major consequences for Ireland's political future. Even before the war had progressed into its third month, there was already growing controversy over the differences with which the way the British treated the Protestant and Catholic Irish volunteers who flocked into the armed services in 1914 and 1915. The preponderance of these volunteers, from both the North and South, were members of local volunteer militias that had in some cases actually acquired arms from Germany early in 1914 in anticipation of the civil strife that might well follow Home Rule. The Northern Protestants, led by Sir Edward Carson, were allowed to form their own division within the British Army, retaining their existing internal chain of command and given their own insignia, despite the fact that their actions leading up to the passage of Home Rule and the beginning of the waracquiring arms from Germany and openly announcing their intent to initiate civil war in the event of the law's implementationhad been "clearly criminal, if not treasonable." The Southern, Catholic, and often Nationalist volunteers, by contrast, while sometimes allowed to join their own divisions, were more often put under direct British command and were not given their own insignia. According to Redmond, Carson was given "all credit" for Irish enlistment despite the fact that "large numbers of Nationalists" had also enlisted. This affront drove a wedge between Asquith and Redmond, who had wished to have command over a fully constituted Southern Irish army. It also reinforced for Catholics their second-class status within the United Kingdom, a status that would presumably not be improved by Home Rule.
Redmond's inability to extract concessions from the British on the matter of the Irish regiments did not help his image as someone who could represent Irish interests effectively. By contrast, Carson was brought "into the heart" of the national unity government formed in 1915. The delay in the war's end further made the Irish Parliamentary Party look increasingly foolish and weak for having accepted the concomitant delay in Home Rule, particularly in the eyes of nationalists who had opposed the "soft" independence of Home Rule from the start. The longer the war went on, the weaker the Irish Party's position became, with the nationalist Sinn Fin party reaping the benefits. Because the vast majority of Irish citizens in both the North and the South preferred either Home Rule or Union to outright independence on pragmatic grounds, a "moribund" Sinn Fin had initially accepted Home Rule as a short-term measure as long as it was a temporary measure that would lead eventually to full independence. But as the war extended into 1916 and Britain continued to withhold Home Rule, Sinn Fin climbed down off the fence and planted both feet firmly on the side of independence. Combined with the erosion of the Irish Party's status, this meant that there was no one remaining in a strong position within Irish politics who could articulate the moderate view that had prevailed in early 1914.
At the same time, a small but fervent group of radical nationalists were plotting the revolt that would become known as the Easter Rising of 1916. Much credit has been given to this event for sparking the Irish push for independence, but it was the Great War that created the conditions that made the Easter Rising possible in the first place. It is clear that the rebels were inspired to a great degree by the climate of militarism and nationalism with which Europe was saturated during this period. Patrick Pearse remarked, "The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields . When war comes to Ireland, she must welcome it as she would welcome the Angel of God." But the single most salient factor that made the Rising possible was the fact that although nationalists were performing regular military-style drills in the open, Britain did nothing to quell the activity because it had its full attention turned towards the continent. The leaders of the Rising made reference to the fact that Britain's entanglements on the continent provided a rare opportunity to strike for Irish independence while the "alien government" was distracted. Even after the Rising was launched, the British were sluggish in their response, with the result that as many as 1,200 people had the time and freedom of movement to rally to the cause.
If the Rising itself can be seen as a manifestation of the spirit of violent struggle that marked the period of the Great War, the virulence of the British crackdown on the rebels may be equally attributed to the influence of the war. Once finally roused, the British military used overwhelming force to secure the surrender of the men and women holed up in the GPO, killing a few hundred civilian bystanders in the process. The Rising occurred at what might have been the lowest point in the war for England, coming just ten weeks before the slaughter of the Somme. Seen through this light, the extreme force used to quell the rebellion, and the fact that Britain dealt with the rebels in the harshest possible terms, not as political prisoners but as traitorsWilliam Pearse, for example, was executed simply for being Patrick Pearse's brotherbegins to make a good deal of (at least psychological) sense. Far more than the Rising itself, which was initially met with scorn or as an excuse to loot by the people whom it had been meant to inspire, the protracted aftermath of the event in the form of multiple executions and widespread brutality turned the Rising from farce into tragedy. Under different circumstances, Britain might have acted more prudently instead of, in George Bernard Shaw's words, "manufacturing" more "heroes and martyrs." But subtlety and restraint would have been the last options to be considered by a government fully mobilized for massive military action.
Yet even granting the fact that the British response left a bad taste in the mouths of many Irish, the Easter Rising may well have faded into history as another pathetic failure in the annals of Irish revolutionary action had the Great War not precipitated further cause for discontent with the United Kingdom regime. Sinn Fin, having leveraged the collapse of the Irish Party and outrage over the Rising executions to launch itself into the center of Irish politics, took the lead in drumming up further outrage when talk began to circulate of possible conscription of Irish men for military service as the war dragged into its desperate final months. Sir Horace Plunkett, writing to Woodrow Wilson's chief foreign policy adviser, took note of the growing sympathy the Irish mainstream had for Sinn Fin's positions, and he noted that "all the Nationalists have been compelled to join in the organised resistance to conscription." Thus did open resistance to the British government become an increasingly respectable position among those who had once fervently supported Home Rule.
Anti-British sentiment only grew in the months after the war ended, as the government continued to use quasi-military tactics in an attempt to quell the burgeoning nationalist movement. Faced with a surplus of young men with military training and no job prospects, and an economy in shambles, Britain sent many men to Ireland as the British Auxiliary Forces who operated as paramilitary units, terrorizing and even killing suspected nationalists on a whim. The odious reputation of these "Black and Tans" finally shamed Britain into coming to terms with a Southern Irish population that by now gave strong support to the idea of independence.
The Great War created a climate wherein the prospect of a cooperative relationship between an empowered Ireland and an insightful Britain was demolished in favor of something analogous to a divorce with alimony. This split would also tear Ireland itself apart with the creation of Northern Ireland and, in the South, the ugly civil war of 1922-1923 that brought about the murder of Ireland's great visionary of independence, Michael Collins. In Europe, the war created a lost generation; in Ireland, it created a nation and a new war.
Bibliography
Ferriter, Diarmaid. The Transformation of Ireland: 1900-2000. London: Profile Books, 2004.
Fitzpatrick, David. The Two Irelands: 1912-1939. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
O'Day, Alan and John Stevenson, eds. Irish Historical Documents Since 1800. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1992.
Ranelagh, John O'Beirne. A Short History of Ireland, 2nd revised edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.