Home Rule Promised

In the momentous general election of 1906 the Liberals won their greatest victory. But their triumph dashed the Irish Parliamentary Party’s expectation of Home Rule. The Conservative and Unionist vote crashed so dramatically that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the new Prime Minister, had no need of Irish Nationalist support. Indeed one leading Liberal, Herbert Asquith, made it clear in his election address that '…it will be no part of the policy of the new Liberal government to introduce a Home Rule Bill in a new parliament.'

Younger nationalists had become impatient with the party’s reliance on the Liberals. Some transferred their allegiance to a new party founded in 1905: Sinn Féin. The name Sinn Féin – which means ‘ourselves’ – had been suggested by Máire Butler, Sir Edward Carson’s cousin. The party, founded by Arthur Griffith, a Dublin journalist, called on Irish MPs to abstain from Westminster, to set up an assembly in Dublin and use passive resistance to undermine British rule in Ireland.

Looking anxiously over his shoulder, the Nationalist MP, John Dillon, wrote to his leader, John Redmond, in 1908: 'An effort must be made to put some life into the movement. At present it is very much asleep, and Sinn Feiners, Gaelic League, etc., etc., are making great play.'

Little did he know that at that moment, to his party’s advantage, the United Kingdom was entering the most dangerous constitutional crisis since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For three years the House of Lords had been rejecting or emasculating Bills sent up from the Commons. Campbell-Bannerman had died in 1908; Asquith had become Prime Minister; and David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made ready for a robust struggle with the peers of the realm.

As expected, the ‘People’s Budget’, introduced in 1909 to wage, in Lloyd George’s words '…implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness…' was haughtily rejected by the Lords. Asquith had no choice but to take the issue to the people.

In the general election of January 1910 the Liberals were so reduced in numbers that they now needed the support of the Irish Party to stay in power. The Lords, with no choice but to accept the budget, then faced a Parliament Bill designed to deny peers the right to reject Bills outright. When the Lords threw out this Bill, once again the issue could only be solved by an election.

The outcome of the election of December 1910 was almost identical to that at the beginning of the year. The Liberal government still needed the Nationalists to stay in office.

In gratitude for the Irish Party’s support throughout this crisis, Asquith promised Home Rule. And in 1911 the peers bowed to the inevitable and passed the Parliament Act. Henceforth, the Lords could reject Bills only for three successive parliamentary sessions – roughly two years. If Asquith kept his promise, Ireland seemed sure to have its own parliament by 1914.

Irish Unionists were horrified. They had chosen Sir Edward Carson as their leader in 1910. One of the most brilliant lawyers of his day, Unionist MP for Trinity College Dublin and a former Conservative minister, Carson had become a household name in 1895 when he brought down the playwright Oscar Wilde.

On 23 September 1911 he addressed 50,000 men from Unionist Clubs and Orange lodges at Strandtown in east Belfast: '…with the help of God you and I joined together…will yet defeat the most nefarious conspiracy that has ever been hatched against a free people…We must be prepared…the morning Home Rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant Province of Ulster.'

The Conservatives threw caution to the winds and gave full backing to Unionist resistance. Their leader, Andrew Bonar Law, whose father had been Presbyterian minister in Coleraine, came to Belfast on Easter Tuesday 1912. Seventy special trains brought in 100,000 loyalist demonstrators who, after marching past the platforms at the Balmoral Showgrounds, listened to prayers by the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and the Presbyterian Moderator and joined in singing Psalm 90.

After the unfurling of the largest Union flag ever woven, Bonar Law assured them that they were like their forebears besieged in Derry: 'Once more you hold the pass, the pass for the Empire. You are a besieged city. The timid have left you; your Lundys have betrayed you; but you have closed your gates. The Government have erected by their Parliament Act a boom against you to shut you off from the help of the British people. You will burst that boom.'

Two days later, on 11 April 1912, Asquith introduced the Home Rule Bill in the Commons. Redmond told the House with evident emotion: 'If I may say so reverently, I personally thank God that I have lived to see this day.'