Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 97
They were in favour of Redmond’s policy ‘except in that of
recruiting’. 61 In October 1914, William O’Malley, the local Irish
Party MP, had held a recruiting meeting at which the attendance
was three hundred; the number who subsequently enlisted was
‘zero’. Instead, in a conscription scare, forty-five men fled from
the district and emigrated to the United States. 62 By February 1915,
although ‘Sinn Fein’ was faring quite badly, the County Inspector
felt that ‘public opinion is in favour of the Allies, not from any love
of England, but because of fear of the Germans’. 63 At a meeting in
Tuam, which had Richard Hazleton, MP for North Galway, as its
chief speaker, a local priest, Father Byrne, called upon the
nationalist community to stay at home and not to fight for England
overseas, although he emphasised that the nationalist community
was no friend of Germany either. 64
Even in Redmond’s home county of Waterford the people as a
body were said to be quite willing to pass resolutions in support of
his recruiting policy, until it came to the point of doing anything
definite, thinking the war a distant event. 65 Results from recruiting
rallies were poor. In Roscommon, at a meeting attended by Irish
Party MPs John Dillon, J.O’Dowd, L.J.Doris and William Duffy, there
were seven bands and 4,000 attending, but no enlistments. Again,
later in the same month, a similar meeting of 1,200, at which Irish
Party MPs John Hayden, J. Fitzgibbon, William Doris, Willie
Redmond, and P.O’Brien attended, saw no recruits.66 In January
1915 there were two recruiting meetings held, with 100 and 700
persons attending respectively, which met with more success—one
man enlisted. 67 By March 1915 it could be ascertained, in a pattern
repeated throughout the country, that of 262 recruits from
Roscommon, not one of the farming class had enlisted; 68 instead,
200 farmers’ sons had fled to the United States in October 1914
during a conscription scare. 69
Aside from socio-economic factors inhibiting recruiting, many
within the nationalist community did not feel that they had any
political liberties to fight for overseas. There was no home rule
government and the threat of the Amending Bill
remained. Redmond had hoped that the moratorium on home rule
for the war’s duration might lead to a very different Amending Bill
from the one envisaged. In September 1914 he accepted that the
two things he claimed to care about most in politics—no partition
of Ireland and no coercion of unionist Ulster—were incompatible;
but in the months ahead, through Catholic and Protestant Irishmen
fighting together on the battlefield and drilling at home together,
he hoped to resolve this by cultivating conciliation, suppressing
sectarian strife and hatred in Ireland, and producing agreement