rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_5d7d1fb5-f478-5b70-a925-8c41a52b1bd5">143 This arrival of a northern Irish role in British diplomacy coincided with a concerted campaign to portray all historic links between Ulster and Scotland as having been rooted purely in a common British nationalism, essentially in a desire to suppress the re-emergence of a ‘Gaelic’ Irish nationalism.144
James Bryce arranged an Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty (1911) under which any trade or related disputes between the two countries were to be sent to the Court of Arbitration in the Hague, a city located within Britain’s closest financial ally, the Netherlands.145 The US Senate, however, rejected Bryce’s treaty and the Gaelic American declared this as a victory for ‘Irish-America’. John Devoy repeated ad nauseum his founding editorial policy of working to ensure that ‘the direction of the foreign policy of this great Republic’ must never be allowed to fall into the hands of ‘a clique of pro-British sycophants’.146 The reality, however, was that Irish nationalist sympathisers in America had no access to the corridors of power. This situation in Ireland itself was not much different. Sinn Féin championed the idea of launching an Irish economic war against the British imperial treasury on the grounds that Ireland had been an almost perpetual victim of gross over-taxation,147 but James Craig, the rising new leader of unionism in Belfast, was a wealthy businessman who both cultivated political links with London bankers and accepted fully the logic of the British imperial treasury regarding Ireland. In particular, British investments in Ireland were now negligible compared to investments in Australia and India. The wealth generated by the latter had been used by religious ministers in Ulster to establish new Irish Presbyterian theological colleges (such as Magee College in Derry), while Ireland’s value as a source of revenue, providing but 4 per cent of the UK’s taxation, was small enough to be comparatively insignificant.148 Therefore, Craig and the British imperial treasury considered any injustices in the government of Ireland to be completely irrelevant compared to the much greater budgetary concerns of the empire. In an Irish electoral sense, this body of opinion was only a small minority voice, but its dominance in high politics naturally shaped the impact that the outbreak of the First World War would have upon Ireland.
Britain had anticipated the prospects of a major war with Germany as early as 1904. Although it was expected that ‘at most, Ireland would be subject only to a diversionary attack’, after 1905 the Royal Navy began including Ireland in a common naval defence scheme based upon the potential strategic significance of the three western Irish ports of Bearehaven (Castletownbere), Lough Swilly and Cork harbour as part of the island of Britain’s ‘western approaches’. This was done with an eye to the development of submarine warfare and potential attacks on trans-Atlantic shipping,149 although the ‘western approaches’ concept was justified in racial as much as geopolitical terms.150 In 1911, a treasury report claimed that Ireland was actually costing more to govern than it was contributing to national defence. Therefore, Erskine Childers of the British Foreign Office proposed that volunteer movements should be formed in Ireland to compensate for this fact until such time as the return of Ireland to the position of a contributing member of the imperial partnership was made feasible. Childers believed this could be accomplished by establishing a new colonial assembly, akin to that in Newfoundland, to govern Ireland without any cost to the imperial treasury.151 This was a proposal that the old Irish Party at Westminster, originally founded by Parnell (who died in 1891) and now led by John Redmond, accepted. However, rather than be subjected to this situation, James Craig and Dublin-born lawyer Edward Carson called for the partition of Ireland to reflect Belfast’s status as a centrally important imperial city. In support of this move, the British cabinet would soon invite Craig and Carson to serve as Treasurer and First Lord of the Admiralty respectively.152 Meanwhile, James Bryce, on retiring as British ambassador to the United States and concentrating on diplomatic work on the European continent, would promote the idea that Ireland, like many eastern European countries, was really the home of two separate ethnicities or nationalities.153 Prior to leaving the United States, Bryce also introduced President Taft to another Ulster-born British diplomat, Roger Casement, who would distribute his pamphlet Ireland, Germany and the Freedom of the Seas to all American government agencies and bodies of higher education in an attempt to convince the English-speaking world that Irish nationalism was merely a German conspiracy.154 Casement himself would subsequently do all in his power to make his ‘German Plot’ conspiracy seem real.
The shocking feature of these developments to Irish nationalists was the proof they offered of their total powerlessness. Although it held the vast majority of Irish seats, the Irish Party held just an eighth of the total seats in the House of Commons and had no effective spokesman on international affairs. The idea of partitioning Ireland and establishing a powerless national assembly in Dublin was deeply unpopular in Ireland, as well as in ‘Irish-America’. Britain was confident, however, that any potential American criticism could be neutered as soon as America could be persuaded to join Britain’s war effort against Germany. This was because ‘the day that American blood will have flowed, Irish opposition in America will become absolutely impossible’.155 Sinn Féin had promoted a campaign of non-enlistment in the British army to weaken Britain’s hold on the country ever since the entente cordiale between Britain and France (1904) seemed to indicate that Ireland could have no continental allies. Therefore, when a minority of Irish Volunteers opted not to enlist in the British war effort, they acquired the appropriate nickname of ‘Sinn Féin volunteers’. These expressed their desire to act as a national defence force that would be neutral regarding the war, but the British government started arresting its members. Before the anti-enlistment, or Sinn Féin, volunteer movement could be completely suppressed, members of the IRB, who had infiltrated its officer corps, decided to stage a symbolic rebellion in Dublin in the name of an Irish republic. This was done in the belief that the suppression of such a rebellion would serve to revive, or boost, Irish aspirations for complete independence.156
The 1916 Rising, as this Easter Week rebellion would be called, took the form of an 1848-style European protest, where barricades were manned within a deposed capital city in the name of a country’s right to have its own distinct political constitution. However, it was also intended to attract international attention to Ireland’s desire for complete political independence. The official policy of the anti-enlistment Irish Volunteers of strict neutrality regarding the First World War was championed in small Irish publications that had been funded by the 1916 rebels, such as Arthur Griffith’s Nationality. The latter had also argued that Ireland should seek entirely independent representation at whatever peace conference concluded the war. The British government and its supporters denied this claim of neutrality, however, by pointing to Casement’s Philadelphia publication, which had been sent to all US governmental officials, and his subsequent actions in Germany. Up until the war ended in November 1918, Britain used Casement’s ‘German Plot’ as its justification for imprisoning without trial any elected Irish politicians of professed nationalist sympathies on the grounds of their being supposedly pro-German or even paid German spies. Outrage at the extent to which the pro-enlistment Irish Party at Westminster supported this claim led to a complete swing of Irish public opinion behind the hitherto marginal Sinn Féin Party, which also attained popularity by resisting Britain’s efforts to introduce wartime conscription in Ireland. The latter development also created more public sympathy for the IRB’s underground efforts to keep the anti-enlistment Irish Volunteer movement in existence.
