It is almost a commonplace of the political moralists that every failure on the part of England to satisfy the moderate and constitutional demands of the Irish people for reform has been followed invariably by a deplorable outbreak of “extremist” activities in Ireland. Unfortunately for the moral, that constitutional demands should therefore be promptly and fully conceded, the statement is almost exactly the reverse of the truth, if Irish history as a whole be taken as the field for induction. T

The political history of Post-Union Ireland opens with an armed rebellion. Robert Emmet for an abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle was condemned and executed in 1803. His rising was the last effort of the United Irishmen. Since the Union, and for more than a century after his death, the country was governed under a species of martial law, and Coercion Acts were matters of almost annual enactment. The Government could not count on the steady loyalty of any class of the community. The Orange s

Of the origin of this name as the title of a political party a pleasant tale is told. It is said that some people, convinced that (in the words of Davis) “the freeman’s friend is Self-Reliance,” and wishing to make it the basis of a national movement, being anxious for a suitable Irish name for such an idea, applied to a famous Irish scholar to furnish it. He told them a story of a country servant in Munster sent with a horse to the fair. The horse was sold and the servant after some days appear

In the year 1906 Sinn Fein emerged from the region of ideals and abstractions, of academical discussion and preliminary propaganda, into the arena of Irish party politics with a fully formulated practical policy. Taking constitutional ground with the dictum that “the constitution of 1782 is still the constitution of Ireland,” it proposed to show how the people of Ireland, keeping within the letter of a law which they could not otherwise break, might render nugatory the effort to hold the country

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 parti

The genius of Ulster (perhaps through some happy combination of primitive stocks) has always been practical and militant. It was the last Irish province to submit to English rule. The Celtic population which survived the clearances and the plantings has exercised upon planters and settlers the ancient charm of the Celtic stock and made them, in spite of themselves, ipsis Hibernis Hiberniores . The O’Neills were the most formidable antagonists whom the invaders encountered in Ireland. They made t

Nationalist Ireland had been officially committed to a peaceful and constitutional policy since the inception of the Home Rule Movement in 1870. Home Rule did not satisfy, and was never admitted as satisfying, the national demand. But the Fenian Movement had at last driven into the heads of even Irish landlords and Tories that some concession to national sentiment was necessary if the government of Ireland was to be made a tolerable task for decent men. The Home Rule programme was one in which R

John Mitchel had prophesied that “in the event of a European war a strong national party could grasp the occasion” in Ireland, and Mitchel held too high a place in the estimation of Irish Nationalists for his words to have been forgotten or ignored. When Saurin (who, though an Orangeman and a Tory and, after the Union, one of the law officers of the Crown in Ireland, opposed the policy of Castlereagh) uttered his famous dictum on the validity of the Act of Union, he provided Irish Nationalism wi

There are many interesting topics of enquiry in connection with the Easter Rising: but they relate to points of detail or affect the responsibility of individuals; they do not concern the history of Sinn Fein. The Rising was the work not of Sinn Fein, but of the leaders of the Republican Party in the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army. Of the signatories to the proclamation of the Republic only one had any sort of connection with Sinn Fein and he had been a reforming, rather than an orthod

The months before the European War broke out saw Nationalist Ireland practically unanimous in its support of the Home Rule legislation of the Liberal Government, ready to be reckoned as a part of the British Empire, prepared to acknowledge the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, content with an Irish Parliament charged only with the control of a number of matters of domestic concern. Though the policy of the Home Rule Act had been definitely and deliberately adopted by the English electorate,