Free 1916 by Gabriel Doherty Page B

encouragement of wartime recruiting into the British army to serve in ‘the firing line’. As J.J. Lee has summarised, Ireland’s participation in the war was intended to secure the operation of home rule, woo British opinion, unite nationalists and unionists in shared wartime comradeship and secure better arms and training for the Volunteers. By contrast, Irish ‘neutrality’ in the war would play into the hands of unionists, make partition certain, and forfeit British support. 13 The party’s commitment to support England and her allies in the war was essential to avoid outraging British opinion in the midst of what was already seen as the most terrible war in history. Home rule may have been on the statute book, but both the date of its implementation and the degree of Ulster’s exclusion were unknown. Both remained within England’s gift. The Ros-common MP John Hayden, speaking in May 1916, summarised the choice faced by the party in 1914:
Suppose, at such a moment, Mr Redmond had said ‘Ireland will hold aloof from the war unless you put the Home Rule Act into operation and defy the Ulster Volunteers,’ what would have happened? Not only would the Home Rule Act not be in force but it would not now be on the statute book. It would have been dead for their generation anyhow. 14
    According to the Longford MP J.P. Farrell, speaking in November 1916, ‘he [Redmond] had to decide in a moment whether to antagonise the British people in a fashion that could never be forgiven or forgotten, or endeavour to retain their friendship and goodwill.’ Farrell continued: ‘We can always revert to the policy that will revive the rule of Cromwell. Any fool can do that.’ 15
    As for the minority of nationalists in 1914 who could not accept a wartime alliance with ‘England’, they were, indeed, dismissed by the Irish party as fools, cranks and factionists, as mischief-makers, utterly inexperienced, impractical intellectuals, socialists or people of no standing. Above all, they were pilloried as ‘Sinn Féiners’. This was partly because several of their leaders had in recent years been members of Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin party. By 1914, as Matthew Kelly has written, Griffith’s incessant journalism had succeeded in establishing ‘an almost exclusive association between Sinn Féin and advanced nationalism’. 16 However, the Irish party also sought to link all of its nationalist opponents to a small movement that many believed to be a cranky failure. Moreover, the ‘Sinn Féiners’ were now branded, again and again, as ‘pro-German’ or, as the propaganda sheet the National Volunteer described them, ‘the Sinn Féin–Larkinite combination who have suddenly become convinced of the ineffable beauties of German militarism’. 17 The headlines for the first article in the first edition of the National Volunteer, in October 1914, summed up the Irish party line:

    In November, the paper published The Sinn Féin Voght , parodying the separatist, nationalist verse of the Shan Van Vocht :

    For much of 1915, the party believed that it had won its struggle with its opponents. In July, speaking to the New York World, Redmond dismissed them as ‘what is called the Sinn Féin movement … simply a temporary cohesion of isolated cranks in various parts of the country’, which did not ‘count for a row of pins so far as I am concerned’. 20 By the end of the year, however, it was clear to many press and police observers that constitutional nationalism was weakening, relative to what almost all called its ‘Sinn Féiner’ opponents. The response of the Irish party was to try to boost its flagging organisation on the ground, and to increase the volume of its verbal attacks. In late 1915 and early 1916, organisers such as John Keaveny, a Connacht director of the Hibernians, toured counties such as Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo trying to revive UIL branches. To the Breedogue, Roscommon UIL, Keaveny denounced ‘the Sinn