Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 50, 20 December 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By Wilmam O’Brien.)

POSTCRIPTA.

11. THE UNDOING OF HOME RULE—(Continued.) 9. The first bargain for the establishment of a separate Orange State was made at a Conference at Buckingham Palace, which was a gross caricature of the kind of Conference that put an end to the Irish Land War —a Conference where the representatives of Nationalist Ireland were only two in a body of eight, and one of the two the arch enemy of the Land Conference, and of the Policy of Conciliation. The. concession of four counties to Sir Edward Carson at that Conference, was the source of all the disgraceful evasions, postponements, and acts of treachery to Ireland which were the inevitable sequel of the formal recognition of the right of his German gunmen to defy he law. 10. Nor was this the temptation of a cowardly moment. After eight months more for deliberation, the Liberal Government and their Irish followers reaffirmed the surrender of Ireland’s immemorial integrity in the aggravated form W « 11 Orange Free State enlarged to six counties, never to be revoked save by a fresh Act of the Imperial Parliament. Nay, the so-called representatives of Ireland this time stipulated that the existing Irish Party must automatically form the first Parliament of the three provinces that would remain after the mutilation, without giving the Irish people the smallest voice in the transaction and in the meantime they made a desperate attempt by sheer

Hibernian hooliganism, to thrust the shameful compact down the throats of their adherents in Ireland. 11. A situation was thus created which, it is no longer doubtful, had its share in precipitating the world war. The Kaiser doubtless first counted upon an Orange rebellion to paralyse the arm of England, but the Partition bargain made him still better assured of a. Republican one. Baron Von Kuhlman’s acumen must have been strangely at fault if his Envoy in Ireland was not able to make it clear to his Majesty that, although Carson had got his price, the storm of indignation let loose in Ireland by the astounding crime of partitioning the nation which the Government and the Irish Parliamentarians had been placed in power to endow with “full self-government,” was bound to produce a rebellion upon a vastly larger scale from the Nationalist side if cargoes of Mausers, such as "ere shipped to Ulster, in the Fanny, could now be put into the hands of three hundred thousand Irish National Volunteers thirsting to be even with their betrayers. “Whether Cassio killed Othello or he killed Cassio,” the Kaiser “honest lago” as he was stood to win, and took his steps accordingly. If Sir Edward Carson had been squared, Sir Roger Casement was still available. Whenever Englishmen realise all these things they will I think, be as furious as the Sinn Feiners who rose in Easter Week. 12. The Act was only placed “on the Statute Book” at all upon the public pledge of the Liberal Prime Minister and of his Irish followers, that it would never come into operation until after the passing of an Amending Act which could only be a Partition Act, and the group of All-for-Irclanders who refused to make ourselves parties to that infamous compact by our votes, were denounced by the triumphant Hibernian hooligans on the benches of the House of Commons, and throughout Ireland, as “factionists” and “traitors.” After which, the Irish Party with the power of life and death over a Government explicitly returned for the purpose of “conferring full selfgo\ ei nment upon Ireland,” sacrificed Ireland’s last chance b. v consenting to “The Home Rule Government” giving place to a nondescript Coalition mostly anti-Irish, without a word of protest or an attempt to make conditions. 13. With the outbreak of the war in 1914 came another chance for Ireland, and it was no less mournfully mishandled. Two courses were open to Ireland, either of which might have brought her incalculable advantages. Either, in the exercise of her legitimate right as a nation, she might have held altogether aloof from a power which had so basely betrayed her, or she might have cordially thrown her sword into the balance upon adequate guarantees foi her national freedom at the Peace Conference. Unluckily, Redmond neither took the one course nor the other, or rather assumed a facing-both-ways attitude that combined the disadvantages of the two. The War-speech which his enraptured English listeners so ludicrously misconstrued promised nothing except that if the British army was withdrawn and his Volunteers armed by the War Office, they would undertake to “defend the shores of Ireland” against whom, or with what programme, he forbore to specify. In order to live up to the English reputation thus amazingly earned, he did attempt the formation of an “Irish Brigade” for service abroad with the Allies; but while his recruiting speeches were made indoors to middleaged moderadoes, his open air speeches to reviews of his Volunteers were pitched wholly in the-Defence-of-the-shores-of-Ireland key and wore, of course, interpreted by his listeners as a hint to keep their arms for home service. He assuredly intended no conscious deceit. The pity was he did not quite definitely know what he intended. His advisors rejected with scorn a proposal of my own that we should all join with the friendly Irish Unionists in concluding a rational Home Rule treaty under the imperative pressure of the emergency. I was enabled to offer him the co-operation of almost every leader of the Southern Unionists worth counting in striking up such a treaty upon a twofold basisviz., no Partition, and the joint enrolment of an Irish Army Corps, which Mr. Asquith himself had specified to be the reasonable contribution of Ireland to the Allied forces. My offer, made at the request of Redmond’s own chief supporters in Cork, did not elicit

even the courtesy of a reply. His waverings and balancings met their reward in the .ignominious collapse of reC ff n f for his ‘lrish Brigade.” The principal practical effect of his recruiting speeches was to goad the Sinn Fein Volunteers to prepare for a genuine armed rising after their own reading of “the defence of the shores of Ireland,” and a bewildered England bestowed more gratitude upon Carson’s solitary “Ulster Division,” than upon the five hundred thousand individual Irish Nationalists scattered unspectacularly through the various armies of the Allied and Associated powers. By the half-hearted tactics of f Redmond s advisers the maximum of disadvantage for Ireand was combined with the maximum of profit for England, which ended the war unfettered by any sort of engagement to extend to Ireland the fine principles of selfdetremmation for the small nationalities which found eloquent expression in England so long as the attitude of the United States remained undecided. 14. With the desperate necessity for cajoling America into the world war came the crowning act of British hypocrisy, and of Hibernian complaisance. On each occasion when we of the All-for-Ireland League were ourselves called into council, we were prepared with precise suggestions which, when they see the light, may be left to tell their own tale. Enough to mention here that the four essential conditions of an actual settlement (if any actual settlement was ever intended by Mr. Lloyd George and his Coalitionists) were in our view these : (a) a Conference of ten or a dozen representative Irishmen, known to intend peace ; (b) a prompt agreement making every conceivable concession in reason to Ulster, with the one reservation that Partition in any shape was “inadmissible and unthinkable” (c) the immediate submission of the agreement to a Referendum of the Irish people (never before consulted upon a definite proposal); and (d) if any consider- . able minority of irreconcilables still muttered threats of an Ulster rebellion, a bold appeal by the Government to the British electorate at a General Election to declare once for all between reason and justice, and their incorrigible foes in the North-East corner of Ulster. I was even fortunate enough to be able to guarantee that to a Conference of this type, and animated by such a spirit, Sinn Fein would have sent a powerful representative, and thus saved us from the ludicrous predicament of Mr. Lloyd George’s “Irish Convention”—that it represented everybody except .the Irish people. The proposal was set whether by Mr. Lloyd George or by Redmond’s advisers has yet to be revealed—and Ireland and America were humbugged by setting up a nominated “Irish Convention” so constituted that it could not by any possibility come to any agreement except an agreement for Partition. Nobody with inner knowledge will now seriously dispute that, hut for the sweeping successes of Sinn Fein at the Roscommon, Longford, East Clare and Kilkenny elections in that critical hour, an agreement for Partition must assuredly have been the result. Nine-tenths of the members of Mr. Lloyd George’s “Irish Convention” consisted of delegates of the Ulster Party, and the Hibernian Party, both of whom had twice over pledged themselves to a compact for Partition. Mr. Dillon s complaint in the House of Commons was that the bargain had not been “rushed hot-foot through the House” before the Irish people could have had time to interfere. Rushed hot-feot ’ through the Convention it would infallibly have been had not the Sinn Fein revolution at the polls struck terror to the hearts of the seventy-five Hibernians who composed the majority of that extraordinary assembly, only one of whose .“Nationalist” members of Parliament survived the General Election, as probably not one of its extra Parliamentary “representatives” will survive their contact with their constituents at A be L ocal Government Elections from which they have been sheltered for seven years. The “Ulster” Partitionists in the Convention occupied a still more outrageously undemocratic position. They were the mere puppets of an invisible power behind the throne—“the Ulster Unionist Council” in Belfast—who were not even present at the f Convention, but put an instant extinguisher upon their delegates the moment there was whisper of any agreement other than the Partition agreement, of which Sinn Fein had forbidden the banns. (To be continued.)