181. Ireland: deeper splits, more ugliness

The general elections of 1910 left Asquith’s Liberal government dependent, to stay in office, on the votes of the Irish Nationalist MPs. The price of their support was a renewed attempt to drive through Home Rule for Ireland. That would recreate the Dublin parliament absorbed into Westminster over a century earlier.

Gladstone had twice tried to introduce Home Rule but it had split the Liberals. The party then left it on the back burner. Now it was back on the front burner.

The problem was that there was powerful opposition to Home Rule, in Britain, but also in Ireland, where Protestant opponents, especially in Ulster, went so far as to raise an armed force to resist it. That meant that Britain might find itself in the paradoxical position of having to use the military against people not for wanting to leave British rule, but to stay within it.

The resistance had support in Britain, right up to the top of the Unionists, led by Andrew Bonar Law, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Antrim in Ulster.

However, the Parliament Act, which Law referred to as the ‘Home Rule in disguise bill’, meant that legislation could be driven through parliament without the agreement of the House of Lords, where the Unionists were in a powerful majority.

Long debates led to no compromise. With the Parliament Act behind it, the Home Rule bill finally became law, as the Government of Ireland Act of 1914. But lack of support in the army for action against the Ulstermen left it uncertain it could ever be enforced.

By then, though, other events had overtaken the whole issue. On 4 August, Britain joined what would become the Great War. Relations between Britain and Ireland would be relegated once more to the back burner.

Illustration: Ulster Volunteer Force parading in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1914. Public domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.