Asquith’s 1912 call on Home Rule led to Larne gunrunning episode

This is manifestly unfair. In December 1921 Bonar Law told the House of Commons in his speech commending the Anglo-Irish Treaty: ‘There is no greater defect in statesmanship than to propose something which in the nature of fact is impossible.’

By 1921 one would like to think most Liberals would have appreciated the wisdom of such an observation even if they did not in 1912.

Before the Great War, a major element of the Ulster unionist case was that if Ireland, by virtue of history, religion and race, merited special treatment from the rest of the UK, by the same criteria Ulster differed from the rest of Ireland. Therefore, Ulster merited different treatment from the rest of Ireland.

Furthermore, it was egregious for the Liberal government to expel loyal and contented citizens from a community to which by birth they belonged and to place them under the rule of a Dublin Parliament.

As early as 1911, Augustine Birrell, the Liberal chief secretary for Ireland; Lloyd George, the architect of the 1920 and 1921 settlements; and Winston Churchill, who presided over the bedding down of those settlements in 1922; all privately admitted the impossibility of a unitary solution to the Irish problem.

On April 11 1912 Asquith introduced the third Home Rule bill in the House of Commons on an all-Ireland basis despite the best efforts of Lloyd George and Churchill to argue for the immediate exclusion of part of Ulster from the operation of the bill in Cabinet on the eve of its introduction.

Walter Long, who was briefly chief secretary for Ireland in 1905 and chairman of the Irish Unionist Party between 1906 and 1910, noted in his memoirs that he found it incredible ‘that the government did not take some steps in this direction’ to defuse the situation.

The government’s earliest opportunity to step back from its folly came with the T C R Agar-Robartes’ amendment on June 11. Agar-Robartes, a Liberal representing a Cornish constituency, proposed the exclusion of counties Antrim, Armagh, Down and Londonderry from its provisions.

The amendment was defeated by 320 to 251 on June 18.

As the government had a potential majority of 114, a majority of 69 represented a humiliating drop in support for the administration. This was a source of quiet satisfaction to Unionists.

Birrell rejected the Agar-Robartes amendment, claiming that it would take a great deal of evidence from Ulster itself to lead to the belief that she desires to cut herself off from the rest of Ireland. This was disingenuous because privately Birrell was persuaded that Ulster was not bluffing.

It was also foolish because Birrell was effectively throwing down a gauntlet to Ulster unionists to redouble their efforts to demonstrate the depth and the seriousness of their opposition to Home Rule. After all, that was precisely the purpose of drilling, the formation of the UVF, gunrunning and the formation of a provisional government. Unionists were obliged to adopt extreme measures to make an essentially moderate and reasonable case.

Although Asquith promised George V to undertake a ‘careful and confidential inquiry as to the real extent and character of resistance’, the principal obstacle to such an inquiry was Birrell himself.

At this stage, the RIC made little effort to evaluate the scale of unionist militancy.

It was only in November 1913 when Birrell bowed to pressure from ministerial colleagues ‘about the inadequacy of Cabinet information on the “going-on in Ulster”’ and started circulating statistics on ‘the escalation in the importation of arms and ammunition’.

Asquith ought to bear responsibility for his failure to respond to Lloyd George and Churchill’s appeal that special provision should be made for Ulster in the 1912 bill and his failure to take the opportunity presented by the Agar-Robartes amendment for four-county exclusion in June 1912 or Carson’s amendment for the exclusion of the whole of Ulster in January 1913.

While the Cabinet fiddled Ireland armed, prompting Roy Douglas, the Liberal Party historian, to observe: ‘The longer the Home Rule debate continued the uglier the question became.’ And, perhaps more pertinently, the more difficult to resolve. (The Buckingham Palace conference of July 21-24 1914 underscored the difficulty of reaching agreement at the last minute.)

In practice, the ‘Curragh incident’ in March 1914 and the Larne gunrunning in April deprived the Liberals of the option of coercing Ulster unionists and placed exclusion, whatever the precise details, firmly on the political agenda. At last, Asquith was confronted with the inevitability of partition.

Unionist utterances after the Larne gunrunning were irenic rather than bellicose. On April 29 1914, Carson said ‘Nobody supposes that at my age I prefer strife to peace’, a position he underscored on May 5 by observing, ‘Only a fool would fight if there is a hope of accommodation’.

As Paul Bew has explained in ‘Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006’ (2009), the Larne gunrunning was ‘an extreme form of the politics of theatre and the danger of civil war was always more apparent than real’.

James Craig had the good sense to appreciate that ‘the effects of a civil war in Ireland would prove calamitous for generations to come and the memories of the event would be associated with cruelties that would not readily be forgotten’.

In ‘Ulster’s Stand for Union’ (1922) Ronald McNeill MP, the first unionist historian of the third Home Rule crisis, conceded that unionism perhaps had set nationalism a ‘bad example’ in April 1914 but he thought that there was ‘something humorous in the pretence … that the violence to which the adherents of Sinn Fein had recourse was merely copying Ulster. As if Irish nationalism in its extreme form required precedent for insurrection from Ulster.’ And was he mistaken in this?