John Redmond and the First World War

Abstract

John Redmond and the First World War John Redmond and the First World War Ronan McGreevy On the week before the centenary commemorations of the Easter Rising in 2016, a banner appeared in front of College Green, the seat of the Irish parliament until 1800. It was placed there to recognise the constitutional tradition in Irish history. The four men depicted on it were Henry Grattan, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond. There is no dispute about the legacy of the first three. They have GAA grounds and streets named after them. Their statues are in prominent parts of our capital city. But what of Redmond? Within days of the banner going up, a group I had never heard of, called Misneach, scrawled the number 35,000 on the image of Redmond.1 There was no explanation offered for the figure: none was required. 35,000 is the usual best estimate for the number of Irish who died in the First World War. I think the figure is greater than that but that’s an argument for another day. Not for the first time, John Redmond was blamed for the worst loss of life on the battlefields in Irish history. The graffiti was a provocation, but it raised a fair question about Redmond’s role in encouraging so many Irishmen to fight in the war. Much of the commentary about this is based on a false premise. As a nation, if you could call us that in 1914, we had no choice but to be involved in the war. We no more had a choice in the matter than the peoples of Scotland or Wales had a choice when the invasion of Iraq happened in 2003. We were part of the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom was at war with Germany. Build-up to war John Redmond’s choices have to be seen in that context. It is fair to say that the war came at the worst possible time for him, just a week after the breakdown of the Buckingham Palace talks in which he, John Dillon, Edward Carson and James Craig tried to find a compromise solution to the problems of Ulster and Home Rule. The principle of partition had been conceded with the greatest reluctance by Redmond. The question was what areas of Ulster would be excluded and whether that exclusion Studies • volume 107 • number 428 407 would be temporary or permanent. Just ten days before the outbreak of hostilities, the authorities tried to intercept guns that were being landed at Howth and, in what is known as the Bachelor’s Walk Massacre, three civilians were killed. The standing of the British Army in Ireland could hardly have been lower. The incident convinced nationalist Ireland that there was one law for nationalists and another for unionists in Ireland. At the same time, the long peace that Europe had enjoyed since 1815 was coming to a bitter end. Churchill, then a cabinet minister himself, memorably described the scene as cabinet colleagues pored over the poor law maps of Tyrone, trying to ascertain where there was a nationalist majority. Meanwhile, an ashen-faced foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, arrived with the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. As Churchill remembered it, ‘The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland and a strange light began immediately and by perceptible gradations to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’.2 Events that fateful August of 1914 moved with a stunning swiftness. On 2 August, the cabinet agreed it would not be sending British troops to the continent if Germany invaded France. A day later everything changed utterly when Germany invaded neutral Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan. The neutrality of Belgium had been guaranteed by the Treaty of London in 1839. It was this violation of international law that persuaded the British government to make the fateful decision to go to war. ‘Are you really going to defend Belgium for a scrap of paper?’, the German Chancellor asked the British ambassador to Berlin.3 The answer was ‘yes’. Germany had fatally miscalculated the willingness of the British to become involved...