Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 87
Party supporters, was given an enthusiastic reception. Sharing a
platform with Redmond, Asquith gave a clear pledge that he
wanted to see the raising of an Irish Brigade, or Irish Army Corps,
which would allow Irish soldiers to retain their collective Irish
identity rather than become absorbed in some ‘invertebrate mass’
and ‘artificially’ distributed into units which had no national
cohesion or character. While he could not say what precise form of
organisation the Irish National Volunteers would be turned into,
Asquith believed that they would become a ‘permanent, an
integral and characteristic part of the defensive forces of the
Crown’. In a phrase which was taken by many Nationalists as a
pledge not to impose conscription upon Ireland, Asquith said ‘What
we want, what we ask, what we believe you are ready and eager to
give, is the freewill offering of a free people’. 34
On the eve of Asquith’s visit the members of the original
Provisional Committee issued a manifesto attacking Redmond,
declaring that ‘Ireland cannot, with honour or safety, take part in
foreign quarrels otherwise than through the free action of a
National Government of her own’. They repudiated the claim of
any man to offer up ‘the blood and the lives of the sons of
Irishmen and Irish-women on the service of the British Empire,
while the National Government, which speaks and acts for the
people of Ireland, is not allowed to exist’. Redmond announced
that, owing to the publication of the minority manifesto, he had
taken steps to request the majority of the Provisional Committee,
his nominees, to meet and recognise the governing body of the
‘National Volunteers’, the name by which the pro-Redmondite
section of the Irish National Volunteers was now to be known;
those who remained loyal to the original Provisional Committee
became known as the ‘Irish Volunteers’.
Of the numbers enrolled prior to the split, totalling 180,000, not
more than about 11,000 adhered to the original Provisional
Committee, with the vast majority declaring themselves loyal to
Redmond. On 25 October 1914, a convention of the Irish
Volunteers, under the presidency of Eoin MacNeill, was held in
Dublin where they pledged:
1 To maintain the right and duty of the Irish nation henceforth to
provide for its own defence by means of a permanent armed
and trained Volunteer Force.
2 To unite the people of Ireland on the basis of Irish nationality
and a common national interest; to maintain the integrity of
the nation, and to resist with all our strength any measures