The Home Rule crisis was a political and military crisis in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland that followed the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in 1912.
Unionists in Ulster determined to prevent any measure of home rule for Ireland and formed a paramilitary force, the Ulster Volunteers, which threatened to resist by force of arms the implementation of the Act and the authority of any Dublin Parliament. Irish nationalists responded by setting up the Irish Volunteers "to secure the rights and liberties common to all the people of Ireland". Both sides then began importing weapons and ammunition from Germany, in the Larne gun-running and Howth gun-running incidents. HM Government's ability to face down unionist defiance was thrown into question by the "Curragh incident", when dozens of British Army officers threatened to resign or face dismissal rather than deploy into Ulster (ostensibly to secure arms against Ulster loyalist seizure), forcing a climb-down by the government. The crisis was temporarily averted by the outbreak of World War I. The Home Rule Bill was enacted, but its implementation was suspended for the duration of the war.
Background
The separate kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain were merged on 1 January 1801 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Throughout the 19th century Irish opposition to the Union was strong, occasionally erupting in violent insurrection. In the 1830s and 1840s attempts had been made under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell to repeal the Act of Union 1800 and restore the Kingdom of Ireland, without breaking the connection with Great Britain. These attempts to achieve what was simply called Repeal, failed.
Struggle for Home Rule In the 1870s, the Home Rule League under Isaac Butt sought to achieve a modest form of self-government for Ireland. Under this proposal, known as Home Rule, Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom but would have limited self-government. With the passing of the Third Reform Act of 1884 the size of the electorate was increased considerably. In the 1885 United Kingdom general election the Irish Parliamentary Party took 86 seats thereby becoming the third largest party in Parliament. The cause for home rule in Ireland was then pursued by Charles Stewart Parnell and two attempts were made by Liberal ministries under British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to enact home rule bills, accompanied by a revival of Ulster's Orange Order to resist any form of Home Rule.Stewart, A. T. Q., The Ulster Crisis, Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–14, p.31, Faber and Faber (1967) The Irish Government Bill 1886, personally advocated by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone as relinquishment of authority with honour rather than by compulsion and humiliation, was defeated in the Commons by 30 votes after the Liberal Unionists split from the Liberal Party to vote with the pro-unionist Conservative Party. The second Irish Government Bill 1893 was passed by the Commons but defeated in the House of Lords, where the Conservative and Liberal Unionist peers enjoyed a huge majority.
As early as 1893, plans were floated to raise 2,000–4,000 men, to drill as soldiers in Ulster. Many Ulster Unionists interpreted the southern and western violence directed against land grievances as pro-Home Rule (and thus believed Home Rule was appeasement of this violence), and resolved to defy the government militarily.Jeffery 2006, p111-13
The Parliament Act In 1909, a crisis erupted between the House of Lords and the Commons, each of which accused the other of breaking historic conventions. Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, hoping to clear the way for an onslaught on the Lords' veto on legislation, framed his budget so the Lords were likely to reject it. After the Lords, hoping to force a general election, rejected the Finance Bill in November 1909, the Commons accused the Lords of breaking the convention of not rejecting a budget, and the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith appealed to the country.Stewart, A. T. Q.: p.24
The January 1910 General Election left the Liberals and Conservatives equally matched, with John Redmond's Irish Nationalists holding the balance of power in the House of Commons. The price of their support to pass the budget through the Commons (the Lords allowed it to pass, as it now had an electoral mandate) was a measure to curb the power of the House of Lords, the last obstacle to Home Rule. After the Lords rejected that measure, a second general election in December 1910 left the House of Commons arithmetic barely changed. If the Liberals were to defeat the House of Lords, they would need to keep the support of the Irish Party with a Home Rule Bill.
With the promise of co-operation from both the late king, Edward VII, and the new king, George V, the Liberals threatened to swamp the Lords with sufficient new Liberal peers to assure the Government a Lords majority. The peers backed down, and the Parliament Act 1911 was passed. The Lords now had no powers over finance bills and their unlimited veto was replaced with one lasting only two years; if the House of Commons passed a bill in the third year and was then rejected by the Lords it would still become law without the consent of the Upper House.Stewart, A. T. Q.: p.25
Although hints about Home Rule had appeared in ministers' speeches throughout 1910, Asquith only admitted that he intended to present a Home Rule Bill late in the December 1910 campaign, when over 500 seats had already finished voting, leading to complaints that the British public had not given that issue a mandate.
Third Home Rule Bill On 11 April 1912, the Prime Minister introduced the Third Home Rule Bill which would grant Ireland self-government.Hansard online, start of the debate 11 April 1912; accessed 20 January 2009
Unionist opposition In Ulster, Protestants were in a numerical majority. Much of the northeast was opposed to being governed from Dublin and losing their local supremacy – before the Act of Union in 1801, Protestants were the businesses, political élite and landed aristocracy in Ireland. Catholics had only been allowed to vote again in 1793 and been excluded from sitting in parliament until Catholic emancipation in 1829. Since the Act of Settlement 1701, no Catholic had ever been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the head of the British government in a country that was 75% Catholic. In 1800 Protestant privilege in Ireland was based on land ownership, but this had diminished from 1885 with the Irish Land Acts which protected the rights of Irish tenants, the buying-out of landlords by a Land Commission and the introduction of elected local government.
By 1912 Protestant influence remained strong in Ulster, based not on farmland but on new industries that had been developed after 1800. Many Protestants in Ulster were Presbyterians, who had also been excluded from power before 1801, but now wanted to maintain the link with Britain. Further, Belfast had grown from 7,000 people in 1800 to 400,000 by 1900, and was then the largest city in Ireland. This growth had depended largely on trade within the British Empire, and it seemed that the proposed Dublin-based parliament elected by a largely rural country would have different economic priorities to those of Belfast and its industrial hinterland. The argument developed that 'Ulster' deserved separate treatment from the rest of Ireland, and that its majority was socially and economically closer to the rest of Britain. Unionists declared that the Irish economy had prospered during the Union, but with Ulster doing better than the rest of Ireland. The Protestants of Ulster had done well with their industries, particularly linen and shipbuilding. They feared a Dublin parliament run by farmers would hamper their prosperity by imposing barriers on trade with Britain.Collins, M. E., Sovereignty and partition, 1912–1949, pp.4–6, Edco Publishing (2004) At the time Cork city was also a centre of textiles, heavy industry and shipbuilding on the Island of Ireland at that time.https://archive.org/details/corkitstradecomm00corkrich |pg168 but was largely inhabited by Irish Nationalists who were willing to risk relative economic decline in exchange for the fulfilment of their political aspirations. In addition to economic factors Irish Unionists feared that they would suffer discrimination as a religious minority in a Catholic dominated Home Rule Ireland, taking up radical Quaker MP John Bright's slogan "Home Rule is Rome Rule". They were also concerned that Home Rule would be the first step in an eventual total separation of Ireland and Britain and that this was implicit threat to their cultural identity as being both British and Irish, Irish Nationalism drawing inherent distinction between the two.The Ulster Crisis: Resistance to Home Rule by A. T. Q. StewartCarson; a biography by Geoffrey LewisNot an inch: a study of Northern Ireland and Lord Craigavon by Hugh Shearman
Ulster crisis unfolds
All the arguments for and against Home Rule, in general or as proposed in the Bill, were made by both sides from the day it was introduced in April 1912.Hansard speeches "Settlement of an old controversy"; accessed 20 January 2009 The main issue of contention during the parliamentary debates was the "coercion of Ulster", and mention was made of whether or which counties of Ulster should be excluded from the provisions of Home Rule. During the crisis the future Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Milner established the Ulster Union Defence League in order to save "the white settler colony of Ulster from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts."
Irish Party leaders John Dillon and Joseph Devlin contending "no concessions for Ulster, Ulster will have to follow". On 'Ulster Day', 28 September 1912, over 500,000 Unionists signed the Ulster Covenant pledging to defy Home Rule by all means possible, drawn up by Irish Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson and organised by Sir James Craig,Stewart, A. T. Q., pp.58–68 who in January 1911 had spoken of a feeling in Ulster that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the "rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford (veteran Fenian) and the Molly Maguires".Stewart, A. T. Q., Ch.18 "The Kaiser's Ulster Friends" p.226
Unionists continued to demand that Ulster be excluded, the solution of partition appealing to Craig; Carson, however, as a Dublin man, did not want partition, which would leave 250,000 Southern Unionists at the mercy of a huge nationalist majority. He was willing to talk partition hoping that Redmond would give up Home Rule rather than agree to it.Collins, M. E., Sovereignty and partition, 1912–1949, p.27, Edco Publishing (2004) Redmond underestimated the resilience and strength of their resistance and thought they were bluffing and would accept Home Rule after Parliament passed it.Collins, M. E., p.28 On New Year's Day 1913, Carson moved an amendment to the Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons, to exclude all nine counties of Ulster and was supported in this by Bonar Law, then leader of the Conservative opposition.