Redmond and Carson, telling the former the exclusion of six counties of Ulster would be temporary, telling the latter their exclusion would be permanent. Carson secured the support of the Ulster Unionist Council for the proposals.39 Despite fierce opposition from nationalists, particularly from clergy members of the Catholic Church and nationalists from what would become the border counties in west and south Ulster, Redmond and the leading Irish Parliamentary Party member from Belfast, Joseph Devlin, secured the backing of Ulster nationalists for the proposals at a conference on 23 June 1916 by 475 to 265 votes.40 The vote revealed ‘a broad dichotomy in the body politic, between a pragmatic east Ulster wing, strongly identified with Joe Devlin, and a stridently anti-partitionist west Ulster alignment’.41 Once Lloyd George’s duplicity was revealed and Redmond was informed that the exclusion of six counties of Ulster would be permanent, he, outmanoeuvred once again, rejected the proposals.42 Lloyd George’s proposals were also vehemently opposed by southern unionists, championed by a member of the war cabinet, Walter Long, on the grounds that ‘it would divert the attention of the government and Parliament from the war to complicated and extremely controversial proposals relating to Ireland’.43 The attempts in 1916 were telling in demonstrating the British government’s firm commitment to the permanent exclusion of much of Ulster from Home Rule, particularly with Lloyd George steering government policy on Ireland, as he would continue to do, once he became prime minister in December 1916. The attempts of 1916 comprised yet another blow for Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose popularity was in terminal decline due to its continued support of the war and its perceived humiliating concession after concession in accepting some form of partition. John Dillon conceded in December 1918 that the 1916 negotiations ‘struck a deadly blow at the Irish Party and, since then, [it] has been going downhill at an ever-accelerated pace’.44
The next time an attempt was made to solve the Irish question was in 1917, with the formation of the Irish Convention in July 1917, an effort by Lloyd George to allow Irishmen to ‘work out their own salvation’.45 The Irish Convention was an assembly that met from July 1917 until April 1918 with the aim of finding a resolution to the Irish question. Diarmaid Ferriter states that Carson had in March 1917
prepared a plan to tempt Ulster into devolved Irish government, whereby Ulster would be left out of home rule but an all-Ireland council with representatives of a home rule Parliament and Ulster MPs at Westminster would consider legislative proposals for the whole of Ireland and ‘frame a procedure by which if agreement was reached they could be enacted simultaneously in Dublin and the excluded counties’. The British government was open to this and Carson was willing to try to sell it to his party, but it was shelved in favour of the Irish Convention.46
With the ever-growing Sinn Féin boycotting the conference and Ulster unionists present in body but not in spirit, the convention was doomed from the start, ‘a gigantic irrelevancy’ in the words of F.S.L. Lyons.47 The conference saw the cooperation of the Irish Parliamentary Party with southern unionists, who felt they were abandoned by their northern counterparts. According to Lyons, the Irish Convention ‘finally disposed the myth that any settlement was possible … on the basis of an Ireland which would be at once united and self-governing’.48 R.B. McDowell, in his study of the convention, considered it ‘one of the most striking failures in Irish history … the gaps were too wide, or, to put it another way, the main groups clung too tightly to their prepared positions. Moreover, the majority of the convention’s members were constitutional nationalists who were rapidly losing the confidence of the sections they were supposed to represent.’49 The convention limped on until April 1918. By this time, Redmond was dead, and the Irish Parliamentary Party was months away from a humiliating defeat in the 1918 general election. By the time the First World War ended in November 1918, the Irish question had been fundamentally transformed. The psychological partition between unionists and nationalists had widened significantly, with entrenched Ulster unionists pitted against a brand of nationalism that espoused a severance from all British ties.50
The December 1918 general election, the first since December 1910, was one of the most decisive in Irish history. Sinn Féin obliterated the Irish Parliamentary Party by winning seventy-three of the 105 seats available in Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party won just six seats. However, Sinn Féin decided to abstain from taking seats in Westminster, meaning that there would be just a handful of Irish nationalist voices heard in the House of Commons as the future of Ireland was decided.51 Sinn Féin had campaigned on an abstentionist policy, claiming that the British could not be trusted to deliver a solution to the Irish question. It repudiated Westminster and Home Rule, seeking a complete severance of ties with Britain instead, through an Irish republic. The election was also a spectacular success for Ulster unionists. Of the thirty-seven seats available in the province of Ulster, unionists won twenty-two. In the six counties that would form Northern Ireland, the unionists won twenty-two of the twenty-nine seats available, with Sinn Féin winning just three seats.52 ‘In the whole of Ulster the Unionists won 265,111 votes to a combined Nationalist total of 177,557; while in the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone they had a majority of slightly over two to one: 255,819 votes to 116,888.’53 Whilst three Irish provinces had shown their support for full separation from Britain, it was clear that Ulster was the polar opposite. Remarkably, the nationalists had held more seats in Ulster than the unionists as recently as 1913, with seventeen seats in comparison to the unionists’ sixteen.54 By 1918, the electorate of Ulster had moved decisively in favour of remaining within the union. Unionists were also bolstered by the success of their allies in Britain, the Conservative Party. Lloyd George’s national coalition was easily re-elected. Most of the seats in the coalition were won by the Conservatives, winning 339 seats, with Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals winning 136 seats.55 Afterwards, Lloyd George ‘was sensitive to his own vulnerability in the House and felt himself on occasion to be a prisoner of the Coalition’.56 This greatly influenced his subsequent decisions regarding Ireland. The Irish question barely featured in the election in Britain. The Conservative Party manifesto ruled out two options in relation to Ireland: ‘the one leading to a complete severance of Ireland from the British Empire, and the other the forcible submission of the six counties of Ulster to a Home Rule parliament against their will’.57 With the Conservatives and the unionists winning the vast majority of seats and with no strong nationalist voice remaining in Westminster, the ‘Tory stranglehold on Irish policy tightened immeasurably’.58 According to Michael Laffan, the 1918 general election saw ‘a shift in the Irish balance of power from southern nationalists to northern unionists’.59 This shift became even more apparent when the decisive Government of Ireland Act was introduced in 1920.
CHAPTER TWO
The Government of Ireland Act 1920
The genesis of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 came in the latter half of 1919, once Lloyd George was no longer constrained with the Paris Peace Conference, which lasted for most of the first six months of 1919. Home Rule was still on the statute book and had been since 1914; it could no longer be postponed.1 It was ‘scheduled to come into operation automatically when hostilities were formally concluded with the signature of the last of the peace treaties’.2 To stop the third Home Rule Bill from coming into effect by default, Lloyd George set up a committee chaired by Walter Long to draft the fourth Home Rule Bill, known as the Government of Ireland Bill.
Walter Long had a relationship with Ireland spanning his entire life. Born in Bath in 1854, his mother, Charlotte Anna, was the fourth daughter of Wentworth Fitzwilliam Dick of Humewood, County Wicklow, who had served as MP from 1852 to 1880.3 Long was a regular visitor to Ireland for fox hunting and other social events.4 He was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland in 1905 and subsequently became very popular amongst Irish unionists due to his trenchant unionist outlook. After losing his parliamentary seat in 1906, he became leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance and chairman of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1907.5 By 1918, as liaison officer between the war cabinet and the Irish administration, Long was the ‘most influential member of the government on Irish affairs’.6 He then favoured a settlement of the Irish question based on a federal solution for the entire United Kingdom. The federalism approach of the entire United Kingdom was seen by some
