The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 34, 13 August 1924, Page 7

The Irish Revolution and How It Came About

(By William O'Bbibn.)

• * . (CHAPTER —(Continued.) On September 24, 1913, the conspiracy to resist Home Rule "by all means in their power, including force," took definite shape in the proclamation in Belfast of a "Central Authority for the Provisional Government of Ulster," under the presidency of Sir E. Carson. A Military Council of 84 members, together with the Officers Commanding, for the time being, the divisions and regiments of the Ulster Volunteer Force, was appointed. An Indemnity Fund of £fl,o'oo,ooO was set on foot for the grim purpose of "assisting/the widows and orphans, the wounded and disabled" who might suffer in the .course of active service. What the active service was to be was not disguised, was indeed noisily proclaimed. It was to resist the law of the King and the Imperial. Parliament—naked treason, bloodboultered rebellion. What the means were to be was made no less clear by the signing, four days afterwards, of . - "The Solemn League and Covenant" by which (as it was claimed) 250,000 men pledged their oaths to "stand by one another in using all means which may be found necessary." The means that were at once "found necessary" were to brigade this enormous army of Covenanters into divisions and regiments, to drill them and manoeuvre them, in the public sight under officers .in the King's pay, and to arm them to the,teeth—first indeed with "the wooden guns" which excited Mr. Devlin's hilarity, but presently with Mauser rifles and machine-guns "made in Germany." -These preparations for civil Avar were carried on and instigated for many months .by %-Cabinet Ministers, Privy Councillors and army officers in innumerable speeches, for any one of which the Sinn Fein rebels of a later day would * have been hanged or shot without ceremony. . Sir E. Carson, the ex-Solicitor-General, was foremost .J ~in bidding defiance to the King and his Parliament. His X, recklessness makes one suspect he was taking a leaf out of < ? ' V ; our own book, for we always calculated that the best means /. of avoiding prosecution was to seem to court it. Here are ~,/ hut a, few pearls from the interminable string of. his jffiSJp' -treasons: >~;■..;. >'•: • '•■ "fVe will shortly challenge the Government to inter- • fere.with us if they dare. We wll do this regardless of > , all consequences. They may tell us, if they'like, that that is treason... We, are prepared to take the consequences; •yy. ■■ (Blenheim;.- 27th July; 1912.), ■,. ~ *"I do not care twopence whether it is treason or not;

it is what we are going to do." (Coleraine, 21st September, 1912.) % 'jju"The Covenant was a challenge to the Government and they dare not take it up. Y . It was signed by soldiers in uniform and policemen in uniform and men in the pay of the Government, and they dare not touch one of them." (Belfast, May 19th, 1913.) "I know a great deal of that will involve statutory illegality, hut it will also involve moral righteousness. . . . We have the repeated pledges of our great leader, Mr. Bonar • Law, that .i. . whatever steps we may feel compelled to take, whether they be constitutional or whether in the long run they be unconstitutional, we will have the whole of the Unionist Party under his leadership behind us. . ~ The Government know perfectly well that , they could not to-morrow rely on the Army to shoot down the people of Ulster." (Belfast, July 12th, 1913.) "I hope Ave (the Provisional Government) shall go on sitting there from day to day until we have absolutely completed our arrangements for taking over the Government ourselves. . . It might be, probably it will be, an illegal procedure. Well, if it is, we give the challenge to the Government to interfere with us if they dare. . . But the Government won't interfere. They have not the courage." (Belfast, July 26th, 1913.) "I see by an announcement that his Majesty's Government are reported to have issued a warrant for my arrest. I know nothing about it and I care less. One thing I feel certain of is that the Government will never produce it, and will never execute it." (Port-rush, 4th August, 1913.) • "I don't hesitate to tell you that you ought to set yourselves against the constituted authority in the land. . . . We will set up a Government of our own. . . I am told that it will be illegal. Of course it will. Drilling is illegal; I was reading an Act of Parliament forbidding it. The Volunteers are illegal and the Government know they are illegal and the Government dare not interfere with them." (Newry, September 7th, 1913.) "I see it has created something of a commotion that they have at length ascertained that we have this great General (Sir George Richardson) amongst us. . . I tell the Government more than that. I tell them we have pledges and promises from some of the greatest generals in the Army that when the time comes and if it is necessary they will come over and help us." (Antrim, September 26th, 1913.) No Law Officer of the Crown, if consulted, could advise otherwise than that such speeches (and they were repeated in hundreds before reviews of many thousands of drilled rebels) must have led to the Ulster leader's conviction for treason felony if he were indicted for levying war against the King and seducing the Army from their allegiance. Sir E. Carson avowed and gloried in the,statutable illegality of his words and of his preparations for civil war. Any sensational punishment, when things had been allowed to go so far, might have only stimulated a reaction in his favor. On the other hand, imbecile inaction while a province was being openly organised for rebellion against the law of the King and Parliament was the abdication of the first duty of Government, and could only convince Sir E. Carson's followers that he was right when he boasted that' the feeble folk in command at Dublin Castle were cowed by his blood-thirsty threats that "if they dare to come to attack us the red blood will flow." For many months there was no real danger of "the red blood flowing" if 'the Government had only availed themselves of the Perpetual Coercion Act which Sir E. Carson and his friends had themselves placed at their disposal, and which the Hibernian Party had failed to use their omnipotent power to repeal. When the Ulster Provisional Government was appointed, Dublin Castle had only to publish a notice in the Gazette proclaiming the Provisional Government and its army as "an illegal association," and -to, summon Sir E. Carson under the Act of Edward 111. to give securities for his good behaviour, according, to the i r procedure he had himself made so familiar against his political opponents, and the prosaic ignominy of his fato as a 4 warrior chief would have done more 'to give an amused satisfaction to all sensible citizens than to excite any com- . motion which the local police could not deal with. When-

ever the. archives of Dublin Castle yield up their secrets, it' will be found that Mr. Birrell's Resident Magistrates and Police Officers in the North, assured him that at any date up to the landing of the Fanny's cargo of German arms, the dissolution of the Volunteers could have been effected without firing a shot, but warned him that it might soon be too late. They were chaffed for their pains and sent home with intimations that their warnings were unwelcome. Shouts of "Carson, King of the Bluffers"— the inscription oil the breast of the effigy binned on the Falls Roadcontinued to represent the wisdom of the Hibernians and their happy-hearted Chief Secretary. The time came when even Mr. Birrell found it necessary to do something that seemed serious. It was really something so little serious as a way of grappling with a great crisis, that it would rather have been taken for one of his jokes only that it was a sorry joke. In the December of 1913 he published a proclamation forbidding the importation of arms. Tardy, but excellent, if he had proceeded to give effect to it by vigilant preparations at the ports, and by seizing the arms already stored in dumps where his Resident Magistrates and Police Officers knew perfectly well to find them. As a matter of fact, neither then nor ever afterwards did the police lay hold of a single one of Sir E. Carson's rifles. Worse still, the Government made warlike faces at the Ulster rebels, and uttered threats from which they promptly ran away. Mr. Winston Churchill, as before, distinguished himself by announcing that the time had come "when these grave matters would have to be put to the test," and retorted from his own side if there should be any resistance Sir E. Carson's menace that "the red blood would flow." Nay, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he began business by ordering the Channel Fleet to Lamlash, within a few hours' steam of Belfast, and the air was full of preparations for a military expedition from the South as though it were no longer possible peacefully to move a regiment or a policeman in Ulster without the leave of Sir E. Carson's Provisional Government. This fit of governmental hysteria spread to the Army. On March 20, 1914, Gen. Hubert Gough, commanding a Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, was sent for by the Com-mander-in-Chief, Sir A. Paget, with, the news that his Brigade was to be" utilised for "active measures" in Ulster, and was timidly sounded as to whether he and his officers could be relied on to obey. The mutiny thus fatally invited did- not fail to come off. Gough got two hours to consult his officers as to whether or not they would disobey their rudimentary duty as soldiers. The General, generoushearted and hot-headed Irishman as he was, /ipted to send in his papers rather than march. His officers almost to a man resolved to follow their commander and telephoned their decision $ to the Marlborough Barracks, where the officers of a regiment of Lancers joined in the revolt, 70 out of the 76 officers pledging themselves to hand in their resignations. It was a serious manifestation directly provoked by irresolution at headquarters, and now to be crowned with triumph by further irresolution. General Gough has since made it clear that when he was summoned to London by the Secretary for War (Col. Seely) he would not have hesitated to obey orders like a soldier, if these orders were plainly given. He was, on the contrary, left under the impression that he was to be left free to judge for himself whether the expedition to the North was one he could approve of, and he returned to his command at the Curragh completely justified and glorified in the eyes of his brother mutineers, claiming that he had "got a signed guarantee that in no circumstances shall we be used to force Home Rule on the Ulster people." The effect upon the moral of the Army is accurately enough described by'the story, if iioV true, assuredly ben trovato, told at the time of the reply of the Commander-in-Chief, Sir A. Paget, to the inquiry what his army would do ifordered to the North: "All would go well until we met the first v of Carson's men somewhere north of the Boyne, when my fellows would go over to them to a man, and I should be sent as prisoner to Mount Stewart" (Lord Londonderry's place) "and have the time of my life." With a Secretary for War so apologetic, and a Commander-in-Chief so philosophic, there was no, more to be said. The fit of active governmental hysterics -died down. The Armv was never

ordered ,to the North, the Fleet was ingloriously ordered home from Lamlash, and Sir E. Carson might well boast louder than ever that the Army was at his beck when a campaign for the seduction of the Army, for which he might have been shot, went unpunished, and the officers who responded to his incitements were lionised for their indiscipline, in full sight of the German Emperor, who was at that moment making up his mind whether an English Army thus demoralised was worth counting in his impending World-war. The famous proclamation for disarming Ulster was about to receive a still more. contemptuous commentary even than the Curragh Mutiny, which it followed fast. On April 24, 1914 (according to the official organ of the Covenanters, the Northern Whig), "notwithstanding the Proclamation of the Government and the vigilance of the Customs Officers a cargo of over 35,000 magazine rifles and 2,500,000 rounds of ammunition purchased on the Continent was landed at Larne, Bangor, and Donaghadee." For days beforehand the affair was the talk of the province and the "many hundred private motor-cars" engaged in the slow work of discharging the cargo of the Fanny did not, of course, escape the eye of the police, many of whom were actual lookers-on without daring to raise a hand. They were overawed, not by the gentlemen law-breakers of the private motor-cars, but by the fear how their zeal would be regarded by their superiors in Dublin Castle. Most of the hiding-places where this vast store of firearms were stowed away were also perfectly well-known to the police authorities, and were duly reported to headquarters, but not a single search for arms was ordered anywhere in the province, not a single rifle of the 35,000 ever taken out of the hands of the victorious gun-runners. Well might Sir E. Carson, Privy Councillor and ex-Solicitor General, not only identify himself with the illegality, but publicly incite his men to offer a bloody resistance to any officer of the law who should try to disarm them. "And now, men," he cried to the West Belfast Regiment (June 6, 1914, two months before the outbreak of the World-Avar), "keep your armsrno matter what happens. I rely upon every man to fight for his arms to the end. Let no man take them from you. I do not care who they be, or under what authority they come, I tell you, ' Stick to your arms.' " When such a speech, following such an act of open war was left unchallenged, the Government of the King surrendered at discretion. As they and their Hibernian confederates had hitherto sinned by withholding the smallest concession from Ulster in the wise belief that to laugh at "The King of the Bluffers" and his "wooden guns" was the complete art of statesmanship, so, from the day the wooden guns were exchanged for Mauser rifles, they sinned by a cowardice which History will find as contemptible as their lack of foresight had been unpardonable. (To be continued.)