The All for Ireland League

Introduction

In those days, you see, politics was very hot in Cork city; very hot, very passionate. Of course, they were the old Irish party days, long before your time when politics was taken much more seriously than I’ve ever seen them taken anywhere else. John Redmond had one party called the Molly Maguires, and William O’Brien had another party called the All for Irelanders. Mind you, if you asked me now what it was all about, I’d find it very hard to tell you, because they were all the one party at Westminster, and they were all agreed about Home Rule, but once it came to election time, they tore each other to pieces. Fights in the street every night, baton charges, clashes between rival bands, instruments smashed on the pavements. One night, with my own eyes, I saw a big six-foot countryman take a running jump down the Grand Parade and land right on top of a big drum.

—Sean O’Faoláin, Up the Bare Stairs

In December 1909, the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, frustrated by the House of Lords’ rejection of his government’s ‘People’s Budget’, called a general election. In one part of Ireland during the election campaign serious and sustained rioting and violence broke out between supporters of different parties. In one incident police had to disperse rioters with rifle butts, the police report states that the rioters were armed with sticks and revolvers and that, ‘they were mostly half-mad with drink and excitement’. Rival groups led by brass bands and armed with cudgels clashed frequently. A sitting MP was set upon by supporters of the rival candidate and forced to withdraw his nomination. Two MPs had lime thrown in their faces and another was pelted with turnips and driven out of town. The homes of one side were attacked by a large and violent mob. Priests were booed, jeered, and roughed up.

These disturbances did not take place in Belfast or other Ulster towns where sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants frequently boiled over. They erupted in Cork City and in towns in the west and north of the county between Catholic nationalists; a conflict that one MP claimed had ‘set man against man, labourer against farmer, son against son, brother against brother, and father against son’.¹ The violence was triggered when William O’Brien, MP for Cork City, an iconic figure in Irish nationalism, launched a breakaway party from the Home Rule movement led by John Redmond called the All for Ireland League (AFIL) and contested seven of the Cork seats, in addition to constituencies in Kerry and Limerick. This was the only organized schism in the history of constitutional nationalism. It split politics in Cork, brought underlying divisions, particularly in the labour movement, to the surface, but more importantly, challenged the foundational narrative of Irish nationalism.

Change pervaded Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first elections held under the new Local Government Act of 1898 handed power to nationalists in local councils all over the country except the north-east; the Irish parliamentary party, with a powerful new grassroots movement in the United Irish League (UIL), was reunited after the trauma of the Parnell split of the previous decade; the British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour’s policy of constructive unionism – ‘Killing Home Rule with Kindness’ – offered hope that a resolution of the land question was imminent; and there was a belief among many nationalists that self-government was coming, even if, as David Fitzpatrick notes, ‘the geography of the Home Rule paradise was not discussed’.²

Also rarely discussed was what kind of nation would emerge. Would a democratic settlement result in an ethnocentric Catholic nationalist hegemony? Or could some form of reconciliation between the two traditions that would ensure the protection and participation of Protestants and unionists in a Catholic-nationalist dominated Home Rule Ireland be forged? Or would Ireland once again descend into a maelstrom described by F. S. L. Lyons as ‘an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their narrow history’.³

Pádraig Pearse, in a furious denunciation of the Home Rule movement, declared: ‘There has been nothing more terrible in Irish history than the failure of the last generation’, and pleaded ‘let our generation not shirk its deed, which is to accomplish the revolution’.⁴ A leitmotif of Irish nationalism is that in every generation a cadre of inspirational young men and women will emerge to carry on the fight for freedom. William O’Brien called this the ‘Banshee’s Kiss’: a seductive, but lethal invitation to each new generation to carry on the struggle for Irish independence which, although inspired by high ideals, runs the risk of descending into a narrow ethnic nationalism that wilfully ignores those who do not share the same aspirations, resulting in an endless cycle of conflict and violence as ‘The Torch of Irish Nationality’ is passed down from generation to generation, ‘ending in the prison or the grave’ for many young nationalists.⁵

Pre-independence Irish nationalism based its concept of the nation-state on territory (the island of Ireland), ethnicity, and implicitly though not explicitly, religion. It came to identify itself with only one ethnic group and one religion: Irish Catholic. More pluralist interpretations, for example the United Irishmen’s ‘Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter’ tradition of civic nationalism were overwhelmed by the powerful and inexorable pull of ‘Irish-Ireland’ intermeshed with Catholicism, an abiding sense of victimhood, and a deeply ingrained Anglophobia. And for a section of physical-force nationalism, politics was always secondary, as Liam Lynch, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader claimed: ‘The army has to hew the way for politics to follow’.

The failure, or more accurately, the refusal of nationalists, to consider the fundamental issue of how Irish self-government and long-term stability for Ireland might be achieved was nothing short of disastrous. Using their balance of power advantage following the two general elections of 1910, John Redmond and the Irish parliamentary party forced the Liberal government to introduce a Home Rule Bill and did this in the knowledge that unionists were overwhelmingly opposed to Home Rule. The results were predictable, leading to the creation of unionist and nationalist militias and an inexorable drift towards civil war which was only halted by the far greater cataclysm that opened in August 1914.

The other consequence we are still living with is partition. William O’Brien predicted that the border would introduce a destructive dynamic and instability into Irish life and politics, leading to an endless cycle of conflict. O’Brien and his small phalanx of AFIL MPs were the only nationalists not to support the Home Rule Bill in 1914 because of the inclusion of partition. He declared, ‘In the course of these Debates, my honourable and learned Friend (Mr T. M. Healy) and myself have done our best to make it clear that we are prepared to go to almost any lengths to meet them, with one exception – that is, the partition of our country’.⁶