for international trade.17 This served to revive a debate that had been silent since the 1860s regarding the potential role of the Atlantic economy in boosting Irish nationalism. Arthur Griffith suggested that the ‘real test of the freedom of the seas’ was the degree to which the international community allowed this to happen.18 In this campaign, Sinn Féin found an ally in the Irish Industrial Development Association (IDA). From Cork, it claimed to have received thousands of business queries from every part of the globe, but it had hitherto been unable to respond to any of them because of the British legal restriction on separate Irish trade agreements.19 With the support of the IDA, Henry Ford, an Irish American businessman, had long intended to establish an agricultural machinery factory in Cork as a base from which to export to a European market, but this project faced considerable British opposition.20
Henry Ford had been a pacifist during the First World War. In this capacity, he had promoted an American Protestant women’s movement that had appealed to the Vatican for its support in creating an international pacifist movement.21 The resulting international women’s movement prompted Hanna Sheehy Skeffington to go to America to look for its support for the cause of Irish independence. It also played a part in inspiring Katherine Hughes, the founder of the Catholic women’s movement in Canada (which was reputedly the world’s largest lay Catholic organisation), to support the cause of Irish independence.22 Another significant channel of pacifist support for Ireland came from Éamon de Valera’s decision to look for the support of Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier of Belgium, who had been the leader of a Catholic pacifist movement in Europe since 1915. Mercier would call for an independent investigation into Irish political circumstances and, in the process, attracted international support for the Irish claim that its independence struggle was a non-violent one based purely on a claim to national self-determination. As a result, G.K. Chesterton, a noted Christian humanist, became one of the very few English commentators to defy British Prime Minister David Lloyd George by expressing support for the justice of Irish nationalists’ demands.23
This growing international association between Irish nationalism and a liberal pacifism also impacted on domestic American politics. An Irish Progressive League was created in America that championed a new anti-militarist form of labour politics radicalism that issued a direct challenge to the tradition of Irish support for socially conservative American republican patriotism, represented politically by Devoy’s Gaelic American and the Friends of Irish Freedom.24 This trend played a significant part in setting the tone for subsequent American debates on Ireland.25 The most critical development in this regard, however, was that the foreign affairs committee of the US Houses of Representatives left itself open to hearing claims for Irish independence between December 1918 and September 1919. British aristocratic peers who supported Belfast unionists deemed this to be ‘intolerable gross libel’ upon British statesmanship.26 This American initiative, however, was an information gathering exercise regarding Ireland rather than an actual expression of American diplomacy. On the most critical question of the post-war peace settlement, the Irish belief that the American government and, in particular, Edward House, the key diplomatic advisor to President Wilson, would not be influenced by Britain,27 was not well founded.28
The first official diplomatic exercise of the republican government of Dáil Éireann was to issue a ‘message to the free nations of the world’ alongside an Irish declaration of independence. In keeping with Sinn Féin propaganda ever since America’s entry into the war in April 1917, this argued that ‘Ireland is the gateway of the Atlantic’ and that ‘her independence is demanded by the Freedom of the Seas’ since, geographically, Ireland was the ‘point upon which great trade routes converge’: ‘her great harbours must be opened to all nations, instead of being the monopoly of England’, and, in the process, make an independent Ireland ‘a benefit and safeguard to Europe and America’.29 America had recently announced that it intended to increase by fourfold the size of its mercantile marine. Ireland was now suggesting that altering British monopolies in international trade could be in everyone’s best interests. However, the fact that Britain was essentially the prime mover in promoting the idea of creating a post-war ‘League of Nations’ as a forum for multilateral diplomacy played a significant part in overshadowing this Irish claim.
The Belfast-born British diplomat James Bryce, a key intermediary in Anglo-American relations, was an author of the League of Nations idea in his capacity as a member of the International Court of Justice at the Hague.30 With an eye to Anglo-American relations, the Irish unionist leader Lord Midleton was likewise supporting the strategy of Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary and a long-term close personal associate who had also done much to set the tone of Anglo-Irish relations ever since the 1880s.31 Balfour had recently sent T.P. O’Connor (a well-known and Irish-born Liverpool MP who had formerly been the chief political advisor of the late John Redmond) to America to promote its level of wartime cooperation. This was done by networking with the two key American banks that financed the Allied war effort. This included J.P. Morgan, which had been the sole agent for the British and French governments in purchasing American munitions and supplies. While O’Connor’s mission was opposed both in ‘Irish-America’ and by Sinn Féin, a small and unsuccessful Irish League of Nations Society supported it. With the patronage of the British foreign office, this society also sought to win Irish support for the British government’s right to speak on Ireland’s behalf at the post-war peace conference,32 which would be held at Versailles. With the encouragement of Edward House, Woodrow Wilson had first announced his support for the ‘League of Nations’ idea as part of his ‘Fourteen Points for Peace’ during January 1918. In doing so, he made no mention of Ireland. Sinn Féin’s response was to suggest that ‘diplomatic pressure, no doubt, deterred President Wilson at this stage from placing Ireland side by side with Poland’, but this ‘does not mean that Ireland is ruled out of the international court’. As soon as Ireland spoke out ‘in definite terms for independence’, it was expected that the international community would have to recognise that ‘President Wilson declares that “all well defined” national aspirations must be met.’33
To enhance its capacity to maintain a competitive advantage over all its rivals, the British Empire purposively made all its overseas dominions representatives at the Versailles peace conference. In turn, this entitled them to both membership and voting rights in the proposed League of Nations at Geneva, which was announced as part of the final Versailles peace treaty of May 1919. As the Irish republic’s consul at Paris, Sean T. O’Kelly had attempted in vain to gain admittance to Versailles. The Irish government’s position with regards to the League of Nations was that it was prepared to support Irish membership of such a league if it was ‘based on equality of right’ with ‘guarantees’ that there would be no ‘difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak’.34 Dublin’s response to the Versailles treaty was to repudiate the UK’s right to sign the agreement on behalf of Ireland and to send Éamon de Valera, as the Dáil’s president, to America where he made the case that
