Home Rule Act 1914

Categories: 1914 in law | British laws | Irish laws | Home Rule in the United Kingdom | History of Ireland 1801-1922

The Government of Ireland Act 1914, more generally known as the Third Home Rule Act (or Bill) or the (Irish) Home Rule Act 1914, was an Act of Parliament passed by the British House of Commons in May 1914 which granted Ireland national self-government within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Though it received the Royal Assent in September 1914 its implementation was postponed until after the First World War (at that stage expected to last only a matter of months). After the Easter Rising in 1916 Britain made two serious, but failed attempts to put the Act into operation. The subsequent unexpected electoral success of Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election then made the Act redundant. It was eventually replaced by a Fourth Home Rule Act, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which gave Home Rule to six counties in the northeast (Northern Ireland) and (nominally) to twenty-six counties in the west and south (so-called "Southern Ireland").

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Origins

The Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of 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 British connection. These attempts to achieve what was simply called repeal failed.

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The battle for Home Rule

In the 1870s the Home Rule League under Isaac Butt sought to achieve a modest form of self-government, known as Home Rule. Under it, Ireland would still remain part of the United Kingdom but would have limited self-government. Two attempts were made by Liberal ministries under British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone to enact home rule bills. The first, the Irish Government Bill 1886, was defeated in the Commons, while the second, the Irish Government Bill 1893, was defeated in the Lords. With its pro-unionist majority, and ability to block any bill from becoming law, few expected a Home Rule bill to make it through the House of Lords.

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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 — the Commons accused the Lords of breaking the convention of not rejecting a budget (it has just rejected the budget of Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George) while the Lords accused the Commons of including in the budget measures and taxes that the Commons had traditionally agreed never to include as part of the bargain for the Lords not rejecting a budget, forcing it to veto that year's budget.

Two general elections took place in the same year to decide the issue. The Liberals held on to government, and with the agreement both of the late king, Edward VII and the new king, George V threatened to swamp the Lords with sufficient new Liberal peers to give the Government a majority. The peers backed down, and the relationship between the Lords and Commons was changed fundamentally, with the passing of the Parliament Act 1911 which allowed the House of Commons to overrule the Lords in set circumstances.

The two general elections had left the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party with the balance of power in the House of Commons. Prime Minister HH Asquith came to an understanding with IPP leader John Redmond in which, if he supported his move to break the power of the Lords, then Asquith would introduce a Home Rule Bill. The Parliament Act was passed in which the Lords agreed to a curtailment of their powers. Now they 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.

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The Third Home Rule Bill

In April 1912, the Prime Minister offered Ireland self-government in the form of the third Home Rule Bill. Allowing slightly more autonomy than its two predecessors, the bill provided for:

The Bill was passed by the Commons by a majority of 10 votes but the House of Lords rejected it 326 votes to 69. In 1913 it was re-introduced and again passed the Commons but was again rejected by the Lords by 302 votes to 64. In 1914, the Bill passed the Commons on 25 May by a majority of 77 and this time, due to the Parliament Act, it did not need the Lords' consent. However in June the Irish Unionist Party (mostly Ulster MPs) backed by the Lord's recommendation, forced through an amending Exclusion of Northern Ireland Bill, the number of counties (four, six or nine) and whether exclusion was to be temporary or permanent, still to be negotiated.

Some of these MPs had been instrumental in establishing the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force to prevent the enactment of the Act, fearing Dublin rule would mean Rome rule. They had illegally imported thousands of rifles from Imperial Germany in the expectation that the British army would be used to impose the Act upon the northeast (see the Curragh incident). The Act eventually received Royal Assent in September 1914 as World War I was breaking out, but was suspended for the duration of what was expected to be a very short war. This decision was to prove crucial to subsequent Irish history.

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Conflict of interests

In Ulster, Protestants were in a slight numerical majority. Much of the northeast was fiercely opposed to being governed from Dublin and losing their local supremacy — historically Protestants were the political élite in Ireland. Catholics had only been allowed to vote in 1791 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. Protestant privilege was endemic, and nowhere more so than in Ulster.

Represented mainly by the Conservative and Unionist Party and backed up by the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Orange Order, they threatened to resist by physical-force the implementation of the Act and to resist the authority of any restored Irish Parliament by force of arms. The main issue of contention during the parliamentary debates was the "coercion of Ulster" and whether or not some counties of Ulster should be excluded from the provisions of Home Rule.

Nationalists, led by Redmond were adamant that Partition was not an acceptable option and raised a volunteer force of their own, the Irish Volunteers to help the British army to enforce the Act; Unionists continued to lobby for some counties of Ulster to be excluded even though their leader, Sir Edward Carson argued that it would mean betraying the unionists of the south and west. Hundreds of thousands of Unionists signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912.

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The shaping of Partition

The compromise proposed by Asquith was straightforward. Six counties of the northeast of Ireland (roughly two thirds of Ulster), where there was a safe Protestant majority, were to be excluded "temporarily" from the territory of the new Irish parliament and government and to continue to be governed as before from Westminster and Whitehall. How temporary the exclusion would be, and whether northeastern Ireland would eventually be governed by the Irish parliament and government, remained an issue of some controversy. Redmond fought tenaciously against the idea of partition and was prepared to grant limited local autonomy to Ulster within an all-Ireland settlement. The British Government in effect accepted no immediate responsibility for the racial and religious antagonisms which in the end lead to partition, regarding it as clearly an otherwise unresolvable internal Irish problem.

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An Act overtaken by events

Image:1916proc.jpg
Easter Proclamation, read by Pádraig Pearse outside the GPO at the start of the Easter Rising, 1916.

Both mainstream nationalists and unionists, keen to win the support of the British government to ensure the implementation of the Act on the one hand and to influence the issue of how temporary was partition to be on the other, rallied in support of Britain's commitment under the Triple Entente in what was expected to be a short Great War. The Irish Volunteers split into the National Volunteers and a rump who kept the original title, and the NV and many other Irishmen joined the new 16th (Irish) Division of the British Army to fight to "defend the freedom of small nations" in France and Belgium. The men of the Ulster Volunteer Force went on to join the 36th (Ulster) Division, and unlike their nationalist counterparts, were allowed their own officers.

However, a fringe element of nationalism, represented by the remaining Irish Volunteers, opposed Irish support for the war effort, believing Irishmen who wanted to "defend the freedom of small nations" should focus on one closer to hand. In Easter 1916 a poorly organised rebellion, the Easter Rising, took place in Dublin. Initially widely condemned (the main nationalist newspaper, the Irish Independent, demanded the execution of the rebels) the British government's mishandling of the aftermath, including the protracted executions of the Rising's leaders) led to the rise of an Irish republican movement in Sinn Féin, a small previously separatist monarchist party taken over by the rebellion's survivors, after it had been wrongly blamed for the rebellion by the British.

This marked a crucial turning on the path to attaining self-government. The rising put an end to the democratic constitutional and conciliatory parliamentary movement and replaced it with a radical physical-force approach. Unionists became even more trenchant in their views on All-Ireland self-government, ultimately leading to a perpetuation of partition.

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Attempted implementation

However, after the rebellion the Britias Cabinet urgently decided in May 1916 that the 1914 Act should be brought into operation immediately and a Government established in Dublin. Asquith tasked Lloyd George then Minister for Munition, to open negotiations between Redmond and Carson. Agreement on the number of counties to be excluded, six rather than the nine Ulster counties Carson strived for, was reached. On the period issue, due to the ambiguities of the wording of the final document, Carson believed that exclusion would be permanent, Redmond understood it would be temporary. In anger Redmond broke off the negotiations. The tragedy of the failure to agree is underlined by the narrow division seperating the disputants and the fact that the deal was very nearly concluded.

A second attempt to introduce self-government in Dublin was made by Britain with the calling of the Irish Convention in July 1917, to which Lloyd George, now Prime Minister, invited representatives of all parties. Two refused to attend, William O'Brien's dissident Munster party because some Unionists he wished to have invited Redmond objected to, and Sinn Fein on the grounds that the Convention would not lead to the Irish Republic they aspired to. The Convention sat until March 1918, discussing various options from a Dominion status to a Federal solution within or outside the United Kingdom. The Southern Unionists, opposing the Northern Unionists, eventually sided with Redmond's nationalists on the question of setting up a Dublin parliament. But before anything could evolve from this new constellation, the massive German offensive of 21 March swept all before it, both the Irish Convention and the hope of Irish self-government.

The issue now became the threat of Irish conscription. The Nationalists and Sinn Fein standing united against it. This on the other hand finally convinced Carson and the Northern Unionists that agreement on an All-Ireland settlement could never happen. Their committment in the first instance was to stand by the 5500 killed Ulstermen their Division suffered on July 1-2, 1917, in the Battle of the Somme.

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The Aftermath

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War of Independence

Main article: Anglo-Irish War

By 1918 Sinn Féin secured a clear majority of Irish seats in the general election, and many of their seats were taken unopposed. Its MPs assembled in Dublin and proclaimed themselves as an independent parliament of an Irish Republic, the First Dáil. A ministry (Aireacht) was formed under Éamon de Valera. Between 1919 and 1921, the Irish War of Independence was fought.

The new British prime minister David Lloyd George responded by replacing the suspended Home Rule Act of 1914 by a new Fourth Home Rule Act, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which partitioned Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, each with a bicameral legislature and an executive presided over by a shared royal representative, the Lord Lieutenant. A "provisional" border was defined (without most Irish MPs' voices being heard due to abstentionism at Westminster), with the promise of a latter Irish Boundary Commission to settle the matter more equitably. (In fact it left it unchanged).

Whilst Home Rule for Northern Ireland did come to pass, Southern Ireland remained a political entity on paper only: the overwhelming majority of Irish MPs refused to recognise either of the imposed Houses and ratified the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hÉireann) proclaimed in 1916, sitting instead as Teachtaí Dála (Deputies) of the Second Dáil where they announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Only three MPs and four senators turned up for the state opening of the "parliament of Southern Ireland". The war continued until a truce was agreed in 1921. Dáil Éireann delegated five Envoys, with plenipotentiary powers, to negotiate terms of secession with the British Government.

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Treaty, Partition

The outcome was the Anglo–Irish Treaty, signed on the 6th of December 1921, that gave Ireland Dominion status under the Crown, acknowledged partition, and superseded the Irish Republic. After a long and acrimonous debate lasting some weeks, the Dáil ratified the Treaty on the 7th of January 1922 by 64 votes to 57. Those opposed (led by Éamon de Valera) refused to accept the decision and walked out of the Dáil to lead their anti-Treaty forces into the Irish Civil War six months later.

The Parliament of Southern Ireland functioned as such only once, when pragmatically and in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty, the House of Commons of Southern Ireland assembled in Dublin in January 1922 to ratify it.

Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty a provisional parliament, the Third Dáil, was elected on the 16th June 1922. This parliament was recognised both by (pro-treaty) nationalists and the British Government and so replaced both the Parliament of Southern Ireland and the Second Dáil with a single body. The new 26 county state (three counties of Ulster plus Leinster, Connaught and Munster) become the Irish Free State or Saorstát Éireann.

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See also

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References