Crisis and Volunteering

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When the Home Rule crisis finally broke it transformed local politics. ‘Parish pump’ rivalries and considerations became dwarfed by the pervasive, national issue of whether the Home Rule Bill would fail. People who had been quiescent were mobilised into paramilitary activity through their participation in the Irish Volunteers. The response of the Irish party to this new movement was ambiguous. The change of policy in April 1914, to encouragement and participation, did not lead to the party's ‘vampirisation’ of the new movement. The eve of the World War saw provincial opinion almost totally absorbed in the Home Rule crisis, experiencing a mass political mobilisation, militarism, and bellicosity of language unseen in recent times. Though the goal of the Volunteer movement was to obtain and enforce Home Rule, the Irish party did not create the movement, was partly marginalised by it, and could not be said to control it.