Home Rule Act 1914

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 under the official short title Government of Ireland Act 1914, which granted Ireland national self-government within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

It was an Act of the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which allowed for the creation of a separate self-governing parliament in Ireland, within the United Kingdom. It was the first Home Rule Bill to have been enacted, its enactment having been made possible by the curtailment of the powers of the House of Lords, which had blocked the two previous Home Rule Bills.

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").

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.

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, with Irish Home Rule Speech beseeching parliament to pass the Irish Government Bill 1886 and grant Home Rule to Ireland in honour rather than being compelled to one day in humiliation, was defeated in the Commons by 30 votes, while the second, the Irish Government Bill 1893 was passed but defeated in the Lords. With its Conservative Party's 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.

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.

The Third Home Rule Bill

On 11. April 1912, the Prime Minister introduced the Third Home Rule Bill which foresaw granting Ireland self-government. Allowing more autonomy than its two predecessors, the bill provided for:

A bicameral Irish Parliament to be set up in Dublin (a 40-member Senate and a 164-member House of Commons) with powers to deal with most national affairs;
A number of Irish MPs would continue to sit in the Imperial Parliament in Westminster (42 MPs, rather than 103).
The abolition of Dublin Castle, though with the retention of the Lord Lieutenant.

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 after the third reading, the Bill passed the Commons on 25 May by a majority of 77, William O'Brien's Independent Nationalist All-for-Ireland League Party abstaining from voting on the grounds that the Act did not take account of Protestant minority interests and fears, being in effect a "partition deal". Having been defeated a third time, the Government used the provisions of the Parliament Act to override the Lords and send it for the Royal Assent

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 Ulster Unionist Party and backed up by the Orange Order they established in January 1913 the Ulster Volunteer Force, with 50,000 members who threatened to resist by physical force the implementation of the Act and to resist the authority of any restored Dublin Parliament by force of arms, hundreds of thousands of Unionists having previously signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912.

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, Irish Party leaders John Dillon and Joseph Devlin contending "no concessions for Ulster, Ulster will have to follow". Unionists continued to demand that Ulster be excluded, on New Year's Day 1913, their leader Sir Edward Carson, in the House of Commons , moved an amendment to the Home Rule Bill to exclude all nine counties of Ulster and was supported in this by Bonar Law , Carson and other leading men in Ulster fully prepared to ditch the Southern Unionists.

The Ulster Volunteers 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).

Nationalists, led by Redmond were adamant that Partition was not an acceptable option and raised a volunteer force of their own, similarly importing arms illegally for the Irish Volunteers to oppose Ulster and help enforce the Act.

The shaping of Partition

However, O'Brien's worst fears were confirmed when Sir Edward Carson and the Irish Unionist Party (mostly Ulster MPs) backed by the Lord's recommendation forced through an amendment on 8 July for the exclusion of Northern Ireland from the workings of the 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 by force the enactment of the Act, fearing Dublin rule would mean "Rome Rule".

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, but only after Carson had forced through his ammending "exclusion of Unster Bill" 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 political and religious antagonisms which in the end led to the partition of Ireland, regarding it as clearly an otherwise unresolvable internal Irish problem.

The Act was enacted and received Royal Assent on 18 September 1914 thereby establishing that "on and after the appointed day there shall be in Ireland an Irish Parliament of HM the King and two houses, namely, the Irish Senate and the Irish House of Commons".

The news was celebrated with bonfires alighting the hill-tops across the south of Ireland in the belief that independent self-government had finally been granted. But as World War I had just broken out, the Act was suspended for one year or for the duration of what was expected to be a very short war. This decision was to prove crucial to the subsequent course of events.

An Act overtaken by events

With the outbreak of what was oxpected to be a short Great War in August 1914, loomong civil war in Ireland was averted. Both mainstream nationalists and unionists, keen 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 war commitment under the Triple Entente.

The Irish Volunteers split into the larger National Volunteers and a rump who kept the original title. The NV and many other Irishmen, convinced at the time that Ireland had won freedom and self-government under the Act, joined the 10th (Irish) Division or the 16th (Irish) Division of the New British Army to "defend the freedom of other small nations" and to fight in France and Belgium for a Europe free from tyranny. 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 (in view of the heavy Irish war losses on the Western Front and in Gallipoli) (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.

Attempted implementation

After the rebellion, the British 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 Munitions, to open negotiations between Redmond and Carson. As to how long the period of partition was to last, due to the ambiguities of the wording of the final document, Redmond understood it would be temporary. He broke off negotiations when he realised this was not so. The tragedy of the failure to reach agreement between Redmond and Carson is underlined by the narrow division separating 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 All-for-Ireland League because Redmond objected to some Unionists he wished to have invited, and Sinn Féin 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 Dominion status to a federal solution within or outside the United Kingdom. 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 Spring Offensive of 21 March swept all before it, smashing the Allied and Irish Divisions, both the Irish Convention and any hope of Irish self-government within the United Kingdom.

The issue now became the threat of conscription, which the British threatened to introduce to Ireland for the first time. They could not have chosen a worse time. The moderate Nationalists and Sinn Féin stood united against it.

WWI Aftermath

With the Armistice ending the Great War on 11. November 1918, December saw Sinn Féin secure a clear majority of Irish seats in the general election, twenty five of these seats taken unopposed. The Sinn Féin 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. The Dail unrealistically refused to negotiate any understanding with London and abstained from attending Westminster, thereby abandoning Ulster and its Catholic Nationalists to their fate, firing in county Tipperary the first shots of the Anglo-Irish War fought between 1919 and 1921.

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. Carson now had a free hand to shape Home Rule in Ulster's favour, partitioning Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, no southern Irish Sinn Féin MP or Dail envoy to Westminster voicing a protest, adhering strictly to the policy of abstentionism. Lloyd George foresaw in each case a bicameral legislature and an executive presided over by a shared royal representative, the Lord Lieutenant. A "provisional" border was defined with the provision of a latter Irish Boundary Commission to settle the matter more in accordance with the wishes of the people who lived along the new border. (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 Russia recognising it internationally. Just 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, Éamon de Valera remaining in Dublin having been informed in advance by Lloyd George, that under no circumstances would a republic be conceeded.

Treaty, Partition

The outcome was the Anglo–Irish Treaty, signed on 6 December 1921, that gave Ireland Commonwealth Dominion status under the British Crown, acknowledged partition, and abolished the (1916) Irish Republic. After a long and acrimonous debate lasting some weeks, the Dáil ratified the Treaty on the 7 January 1922 by 64 votes to 57. Those opposed (led by Éamon de Valera) refused to accept the decision of the constitutionally elected Second Dáil and led their anti-Treaty forces into the Irish Civil War six months later, boycotting the Third Dáil after it had been elected.

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 16 June 1922. This parliament was recognised both by pro-Treaty Sinn Féin and the British Government and so replaced both the Parliament of Southern Ireland and the Second Dáil with a single body. Ninety-four out of a total of 128 elected members of the new Dail attended, thus democratically sanctioning it. Anti-treaty Irish republicans started the Irish Civil War on 28 June 1922. The new partitioned 26 county state (Leinster, Connaught and Munster plus three counties of Ulster) became the Irish Free State or Saorstát Éireann came into existence on 6 December 1922.

References

Geoffrey Lewis, Carson, the Man who divided Ireland (2005),
ISBN 1-85285-454-5
Alvin Jackson, HOME RULE, an Irish History 1800-2000, (2003),
ISBN 0 75381 767 5.
Thomas Hennessey, Dividing Ireland, World War 1 and Partition, (1998),
ISBN 0-415-17420-1.
Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism (2000 edition, first published 1972), ISBN 0140291652.
W.S. Rodner "Leaguers, Covenanters, Moderates: British Support for Ulster, 1913-14" pages 68-85 from Eire-Ireland, Volume 17, Issue #3, 1982.
Jeremy Smith "Bluff, Bluster and Brinkmanship: Andrew Bonar Law and the Third Home Rule Bill" pages 161-174 from Historical Journal, Volume 36, Issue #1, 1993.
Government of Ireland Act 1914, available from the House of Lords Record Office

1914 in law | Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom | Constitutional laws of Ireland prior to independence | Home Rule in the United Kingdom | History of Ireland 1801-1922

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