From 1910 to 1913 the Sinn Fein movement was practically moribund. Political attention in Ireland was largely centred on the fate of Home Rule and the tactics of the Irish Party at Westminster or the struggles of the Party at home with Mr. William O’Brien and the All-for-Ireland League. The Constitution which Ireland might enjoy in 1914 was of more pressing interest than the merits of the Constitution of 1782.

But there were other forces at work in Ireland in opposition to the two official parties of Unionists and Nationalists. There were in the first place the survivors of the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, whose ideal was an Irish Republic, independent of any connection with England or indeed with any other country. Fenianism had become to all outward appearance practically dead in Ireland. It had suffered, in the opinion of some at least of its members, from the fact that it had put revolutionary action first and the preaching of republicanism second. As one of them wrote afterwards, “The Fenian propagandist work in the sixties was entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism. Rightly or wrongly I have always held the view that the absence of the deeper Republican thought amongst our people accounted for a considerable amount of the falling away after ’67.” The people whose republican sentiments were weak “dropped back into the easier path leading only to a much modified national independence.” Accordingly after 1867 the Fenians attempted to make republicanism an essential part of their propaganda. There had been a large number of Protestant Irishmen among the Fenians, and, as Republican sentiment had been traditional in Ulster since the days of the United Irishmen, it seemed that a movement aiming at an Irish Republic might have more chance of success among Ulster Protestants than any form of “Home Rule.” Besides, the “New Departure,” the alliance of Fenianism with Parnell in the Land War, had weakened the movement still more. “It was disastrous,” says the same authority, “to the Fenian movement as such, but it drove the Land League through to a degree that no really constitutional movement could ever have reached.” In allying itself to some extent with Parnell, in abandoning for the time in his interests its revolutionary propaganda, it seemed to have weakened its own moral force, while it did not succeed in winning even Home Rule. And the fact of its being of necessity a secret society brought it under the ban of the Church. Fear of ecclesiastical censure most often kept young Irishmen out of Fenianism. It was not enough for the Fenians to say, as they did, that to the existence of a secret society whose aims were lawful there was no moral or theological objection. The experts in morals and theology said that there was, and their word, and not that of the Fenians, was accepted on the whole as final. And the actions of the Invincibles during the Parnellite struggle had gravely compromised not Parnell only but the Fenian Party, to which they were supposed to belong. As a matter of fact the Irish Republican Brotherhood had nothing to do with them. It had no sympathy with, nor reliance on, their policy of political assassination. A member of the Brotherhood who joined the Invincibles was regarded as having broken his oath to its members and its constitution. But this was not generally believed, any more than Parnell’s statement that he had been no party to the brutal murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish; and the prestige of Fenianism was lowered. Still, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was in existence as a centre of separatist and republican thought and the imminence of Home Rule could not but stimulate its interest. Its members must either decide to lend their support to Mr. Redmond as it had once been lent to Parnell, or to come out, whether openly or in private, as his opponents.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood was not the only centre of republican thought in Ireland. In 1896 the Irish Socialist Republican Party had been founded in Dublin by James Connolly, the ablest organizer and writer which Irish Labour has yet produced. Under his editorship The Workers’ Republic became an organ of Socialism and Republicanism in their application to Irish conditions. The new party took its part in Irish political activities. It joined the movement to commemorate the Rebellion of 1798, the work of the United Irishmen whose political creed had been republican. Along with other Irish Nationalists it joined in the work of the Irish Transvaal Committee and helped to organize and equip the Irish Brigade which fought on the side of the South African Republics. But till after the General Election of 1910 it made no attempt to enter Irish politics as an independent party. It remained in its constitution a purely trade union party though sympathetic with, and ready to lend its aid in, the Irish national movement. In 1911 the proposal to found a combined political and industrial movement was defeated by only three votes at the Congress held at Galway, and in the following year the Clonmel Congress decided to found “an Irish Labour Party independent of all other parties in the country, in order that the organized workers might be able to enter the proposed Irish Parliament as an organized Labour Party upon the political field.” Though the Irish Labour Party was not professedly republican, and though its political activities were confined for the time to the enforcement of the political interests of Irish Labour, yet the leaders and a considerable number of the rank and file were undoubtedly republican in their aims and sympathies.

The Irish Labour Party had need, in truth, to be independent of all existing political parties in Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party was definitely and irrevocably committed to the Conservative and capitalist programme. It would as soon have admitted to its ranks a professed dynamitard as a professed socialist (whatever his views might have been on the subject of the Legislative Union). On Socialism the Church could not be expected to smile (and did not smile) and its attitude determined that of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Party was in a delicate position: it could not say a word against Socialism for fear of offending the English Labour Party, whose votes were required in the parliamentary struggle: it could not say a word in favour of it for fear of offending the Church. It was sitting upon a razor’s edge and a word too much in either direction might easily disturb its balance. So it voted steadily, manfully and silently for Labour measures in England and left its action to the country. In the frame-work of the Sinn Fein programme there was no place for Labour. Among all its plans for the relief of Ireland from the evils of the English connection there was none for the relief of the evils of which the workers complained. Its official organ was against strikes, and even considered that the connection of Irish with English Labour was an act of treachery to the country. Some of the most pungent criticism to which the party was subjected came from the paper founded in 1911 by James Larkin, The Irish Worker and People’s Advocate. In its first number, the editor defined his attitude to the O’Brienites, the Irish Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein. He described the last as a “party or rump which, while pretending to be Irish of the Irish, insults the nation by trying to foist on it not only imported economics based on false principles, but which had the temerity to advocate the introduction of foreign capitalists into this sorely exploited country.” “Their chief appeal” (he goes on) “to the foreign capitalists was that they (the imported capitalists) would have freedom to employ cheap Irish labour.... For eleven years these self-appointed prophets and seers have led their army up the hill and led them down again, and would continue to so lead them, if allowed, until the leader was appointed King of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782.”

The definitely Republican movement found an organ of expression in the autumn of 1910 by the establishment of Saoirseacht na h-Eireann, Irish Freedom, a fortnightly paper of eight pages, under the management of Seaghan MacDiarmada. Its motto was a quotation from Wolfe Tone: “To subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects.” Its policy was explained at length in its editorial: “We believe that free political institutions are an absolute essential for the future security and development of the Irish people and, therefore, we seek to establish free political institutions in this country; and in this we wish not to be the organ of any party, but the organ of an uncompromising Nationalism. We stand not for an Irish party but for National tradition—the tradition of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, of John Mitchel and John O’Leary. Like them we believe in and would work for the independence of Ireland—and we use the term with no reservation stated or implied; we stand for the complete and total separation of Ireland from England and the establishment of an Irish Government, untrammelled and uncontrolled by any other Government in the world. Like them we stand for an Irish Republic—for, as Thomas Devin Reilly said in 1848, ‘Freedom can take but one shape amongst us—a Republic.’”

The attitude of this new republican movement to that of the previous Sinn Fein movement is clearly defined in a subsequent leader. “The temporary suspension of the Sinn Fein movement is often cited as a throwback but it is nothing of the kind. Under whatever name we propagate our ideas the Irish Nation must be built on Sinn Fein principles, or non-recognition of British authority, law, justice or legislature: that is our basis and the principles of the Sinn Fein policy are as sound to-day as ever they were. The movement is temporarily suspended because some of its leaders directed it into an ’82 movement, thinking they could collar the middle-classes and drop the separatists; but when the separatists were dropped there was no movement left.”

The new movement was in fact an attempt to rehabilitate and re-establish the Sinn Fein movement by making it definitely republican while adhering to the main lines of the policy by which Sinn Fein hoped to succeed. But the original Sinn Fein continued on its way. Its paper continued to be published and to find readers. It was unrepentant with regard to its political aims: “We do not care a fig for republicanism as republicanism,” said Sinn Fein two years later; but from the winter of 1910 dates the movement which eventually drove out of Sinn Fein the idea of the re-establishment of the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782 and replaced it by that of an Irish Republic.

The new movement was the direct outcome of the Wolfe Tone Clubs. It was they who carried out all the work entailed by the publication of Irish Freedom. These clubs had just been founded “to propagate the principles and disseminate the teachings of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the other true Irishmen who in 1798, 1803, 1848 and 1867 strove for the complete independence of Ireland; to encourage the union of Irishmen of all creeds and sections in working for the freedom of their country; to promote the advancement of national thought and inculcate the spirit of self-sacrifice and self-reliance by which alone true liberty can be attained.” The members pledged themselves to substitute the common name of Irishman for that of Catholic or Protestant; no person serving in the armed forces of England was eligible for membership.

This new branch of the Sinn Fein movement attempted to do what the old Sinn Fein had not as yet done, get into direct touch with labour questions and the labour movement, though perhaps not very successfully. The first number of Irish Freedom had an article on sweated industries, pointing out that though Nationalists talked as if Belfast were the only place in Ireland where workers were underpaid, many Nationalists were open to the same reproach. It pointed out the duty of the universities in the matter, pleading for a really scientific study of Irish economic problems, including (besides the wages system) such questions as the working of the Land Acts, Co-operation, the conditions of the Congested Districts. It welcomed with enthusiasm the Co-operative Movement. “The co-operative spirit,” it said, “is perhaps the greatest asset in modern Ireland and it will require a stronger flame than the speeches of political firebrands to melt it away.” On the occasion of the strikes in Belfast, Dublin, Cork and other towns in 1911 it took sides with the strikers, in marked contrast to Mr. Griffith’s Sinn Fein, which preached something approaching “abject surrender” on the part of the workers. It induced Mr. George Russell to contribute an article on the Co-operative Commonwealth. This undoubtedly went a certain way to bring about a friendlier feeling on the part of Labour towards Sinn Fein, but it was long before the attitude of strict Sinn Feiners was forgotten by the workers. Its attitude towards Ulster was more outspoken and definite. In 1910 the objection of Ulster to the approaching Home Rule policy of the Liberals began to harden into a threat of extreme militancy. A section of Ulster Unionists announced their intention not to submit under any circumstances to the Home Rule Bill even if it should become law and receive the Royal assent. To the Republicans this seemed “tantamount to an admission of the whole Irish case for self-government. If it means anything it means that Ireland, north as well as south of the Boyne, refuses to recognize any inherent right of the electors of Great Britain to decide how it shall be governed.” The justness of this appreciation of the Ulster position must be examined later: but, true or false, it is characteristic of the attitude which the whole Sinn Fein Party was afterwards to take. But the Ulstermen coupled with their attitude towards the Liberal Party and its doings a truculent defiance of all Catholic Ireland. The cause of this hostility the Republicans found in the attitude of the Parliamentary Party. While that party was in the height of its success “no attempt was made to understand their [i.e. the Ulster Protestants’] attitude or grapple with problems that appealed to them, and the economic grievances of Belfast workers were regarded as their own affair, not as the business of men who professed to represent the Irish people as a whole. The prevailing idea seemed to be that they should be left to stew in their own juice, and if they did not fall in with whatever scheme the Liberals carried through the English Parliament that they should be, in the phrase of a prominent parliamentarian, which has never been forgotten, ‘overborne by the strong hand.’... The party of the future must make the conversion of Ulster the first plank in their platform and recognize that a national settlement from which Ulster dissented would not be worth winning.” In the Ancient Order of Hibernians, all sections of Sinn Fein as well as the Labour Party saw a menace to any prospect of an accommodation with Ulster. This strictly sectarian society, as sectarian and often as violent in its methods as the Orange Lodges, evoked their determined hostility. “This narrowing down,” wrote Irish Freedom, “of Nationalism to the members of one creed is the most fatal thing that has taken place in Irish politics since the days of the Pope’s Brass Band.... That the driving power of the official Nationalists should be supplied by an organization of which no Protestant, however good a patriot, can be a member, is in direct opposition to the policy and traditions of Irish Nationalism.” The Ancient Order was described as “a job-getting and job-cornering organization,” as “a silent practical rivetting of sectarianism on the nation.” The Irish Worker was equally emphatic. “Were it not for the existence of the Board of Erin, the Orange Society would have long since ceased to exist.... To Brother Devlin and not to Brother Carson is mainly due the progress of the Covenanter movement in Ulster.”

Devoted to the cause of an independent Irish Republic and of the union of Irishmen without distinction of creed under one national banner, the cause of Wolfe Tone, the movement attracted idealists who had so far held aloof from the older, non-republican, form of Sinn Fein. Chief among these were P. H. Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, both poets and men of fine literary gifts, both regarded with affection for their high and disinterested devotion to the cause of Ireland. And in accordance with Irish Republican tradition it took up an attitude with regard to armed revolution somewhat different from that of Sinn Fein. While the latter held that in the present state of Ireland an armed revolution was impracticable, the Republicans, though not directly advising it, held that it had a reasonable prospect of success if England should become involved in a European War. Some Irish revolutionists who had so far held aloof from all political parties were encouraged by this to join the republican branch of Sinn Fein and try to infuse into it a more determined revolutionary spirit.

The Labour Party, whose opinions were expressed by the The Irish Worker and People’s Advocate, adopted a similar attitude. Their motto was the phrase of Fintan Lalor: “The principle I state and mean to stand upon is this—that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested in the people of Ireland.” Their own language was equally explicit: “By Freedom we mean that we Irishmen in Ireland shall be free to govern this land called Ireland by Irish people in the interest of all the Irish people; that no other people or peoples, no matter what they call themselves, or from whence they come, now or in the future, have any claim to interfere with the common right of the common people of this land of Ireland to work out their own destiny. We owe no allegiance to any other nation, nor the king, governors or representatives of any other nation.” In spite of the criticism that a purely Labour movement should confine itself to Labour questions, and leave the broader political issues to the one side, The Irish Worker declared for an independent Irish Republic: “We know,” it said, “that until the workers of Ireland obtain possession of the land of Ireland and make their own laws they can only hope for and obtain partial improvement of their conditions. We ask no more than our rights: we will be content with no less.” The desire for a “free independent nation, enjoying a true Republican freedom” linked the Labour Party to the republican branch of Sinn Fein, but on other questions there was much disagreement. The attitude of Arthur Griffith to the Wexford Strike in 1911 was the subject of bitter comment. The Young Republicans, who objected to English Trade Unions sending “English money” to finance the Irish strikers, were bluntly told to mind their own business: the Gaelic League, which encouraged Irish manufactures, was said to have failed in its duty by taking no account of the conditions under which they were manufactured, or of the wages paid to the workers who made them: “the revival of the Irish language is a desirable ambition and has our whole-hearted support; but the abolition of destitution, disease and the conditions that cause them are even more necessary and urgent. What is the use of bilingualism to a dead man?”

But however they might differ on minor points, both of these new parties, the Independent Labour Party of Ireland and the Young Republican Party, were at one with each other and with Sinn Fein in opposition to the Parliamentary Party. It was pointed out that in the twenty-one years which had elapsed since the death of Parnell his policy of “blocking the way to English legislation until Ireland was accorded self-government” had been abandoned without any other definite policy being substituted for it: that during ten of those years an English party, professing sympathy with Ireland, had been kept in office by the Irish vote: that Home Rule was still in the future and the principles governing the expected measure still undetermined. In March, 1912, the Executive of Sinn Fein resolved unanimously: “That this Executive earnestly hopes that the promised Home Rule Bill will be one that may be accepted as a genuine measure of reform by the people of Ireland and that it may speedily become law. Should the Bill, on the contrary, be rejected as unsatisfactory by the people of Ireland, or should it, though satisfactory, fail to become law—which we would deplore—the organization is prepared to lead the country by other and effective methods to the attainment of self-government.” In reporting this resolution Sinn Fein wrote, in words which at the time seemed to many supporters of the Party offensive, but which now seem charged with portent: “No new parliamentarian movement will be permitted unopposed to build upon the ruins of that which goes down with a sham Home Rule measure. To make this clear before the Home Rule measure be introduced is the last service we can render the Parliamentary Party. They have had the Government ‘in the hollow of their hands’ for years—they have removed the House of Lords from their path—there is nothing to prevent the Liberal Government introducing and passing a full measure of Home Rule save and except its enmity to Ireland. With a majority of over 100 and the Lords’ veto removed the fullest measure of Home Rule can be passed in two years. It is the business of the Parliamentary Party to have it passed or to leave the stage to those who are in earnest.”

The appearance of the text of the Bill was not reassuring even to those advocates of Irish independence who were willing to take a measure of Home Rule as an instalment. The financial provisions of the Bill met with severe and justified criticism. In spite of the fact that Ireland had been systematically over-taxed for a century, and that a Parliamentary Commission had so reported nearly twenty years earlier, the financial provision for the proposed Irish Parliament could only be described as beggarly. And almost everything that really mattered in the government of Ireland was withdrawn from the competence of the Irish Parliament. It was described in mockery as a “Gas and Water Bill,” and even convinced supporters of the Parliamentary Party had their qualms in declaring their acceptance of the measure. There was no dubiety about the verdict of the Nationalist organizations opposed to Mr. Redmond. The Worker’s Republic was outspoken in the extreme: it complained that the Bill had been extorted from the Liberals “by whining and apologizing”: in an Open Letter to the United Irish League of Great Britain, it said, “You are told that the people of Ireland accepted the Bill as a full and complete recognition of our claim as Irishmen. That is a lie ... a Bill, which is the rottenest bargain ever made by a victorious people with a mean, pettifogging, despised Government.” “A beggar,” it wrote again, “gets only crumbs and we, Irish workers, want a country.” The verdict of Irish Freedom was equally emphatic; it was summed up in the phrase, “Damn your concessions; we want our country.”

But whatever individual Irish Members of Parliament may have thought of the Bill, the Party was as a whole committed to it. No one in Ireland knew what negotiations, barterings, and bargains preceded the actual drafting of the measure: what the difficulties and objections were which had to be met by Mr. Redmond: in how far he had offered concessions, in how far they had been forced upon him. They only knew that he was prepared to support the resulting Bill and that the resulting Bill was less than they had been led to expect. There was little open discussion of principles, criticism was not relished or welcomed. The Party had done its best for the country and the country was now called upon to back the Party. A bargain had been made by the representatives of the Irish people and the Irish people were expected to stand by the consequences. Under other circumstances this appeal would have been accepted, but it was no answer to the complaint that the Irish representatives had not been empowered to abandon in express words every national claim that went beyond those satisfied by the provisions of the Home Rule Bill. This was the kernel of the dispute between the Party and the Nationalists who opposed them. It seemed as if by the deliberate renunciation of any desire or intention to claim for Ireland anything more than the status of a dependency of Great Britain, deprived forever (so far as an act of legislation could deprive her) of her immemorial claim to be an independent nation, the Party had betrayed the national demand and sold the national honour. But the Party did not see (or betrayed no sign of having seen) the relevance of the criticism; and certainly they miscalculated the strength of the opposition which was gathering in the country. In the face of Ulster’s attitude, they confidently expected the whole country to rally to their support. And, after all, what could, or would, the dissentients do about it? Sinn Fein continued loudly to proclaim its policy of opposition to the use of force. It was all very well to say “Sinn Fein is the policy of to-morrow. If Ireland be again deceived as to Home Rule, she has no other policy to fall back upon”; but the same article (December, 1912) contained the words: “The great offence of Sinn Fein indeed in the eyes of its opponents is that it does not urge an untrained and unequipped country to futile insurrection.” If Sinn Fein then would only talk, and the only place to talk to the purpose was the House of Commons, what was there to prevent Home Rule from being an accomplished fact “in the not far distant future?” Ulster supplied the answer, not for itself only, but for the rest of Ireland.