Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

106 THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
may blunder and blunder again quite safely, and spill the
blood of gallant men owing to his incompetence. 105
Coupled with resentment at the perceived snubbing of Irish
troops, it was steadily becoming apparent, throughout 1915, that
the Government was edging towards conscription. The first stage,
a National Register, involved a canvass of all men between the
ages of nineteen and forty-one who remained in civilian life in
Great Britain. A Cabinet Committee under Walter Long was
commissioned to draft a report for the conscription of all single
men, and this was accepted by the Cabinet on 28 December 1915,
with a Military Service Bill placed before Parliament on 5 January
1916. The vote on the first reading, on 6 January, saw 403 vote for
the Bill and 105 against, the opponents including the Irish Party,
thirty-four Liberals and eleven Labour MPs. By the second reading
opposition had dwindled with only the Irish Party abstaining, since
Ireland was excluded from the Bill, and witnessing 431 voting for
and 39 against. On 27 January 1916 the Military Service Bill
received the Royal Assent. 106
Conscription completely undermined the Irish Party’s position in
Ireland. In an attempt to reassure the nationalist community in
June 1915, the Irish Party’s organ the Freeman’s Journal had
supported Redmond’s personal view that the people of Great
Britain were opposed to conscription, and that any attempt to
break up the voluntary recruiting system would wreck British
national solidarity. Conscription, being similar to Prussian
militarism, would be resisted by the ‘liberty-loving’ people of the
British Isles. 107 The Freeman emphasised that the National
Register was compulsory in Britain but not Ireland—a
‘fundamental’ difference. 108 It pointed out that there was no
obligation to fill out any forms distributed in Ireland under the
National Registration Act, nor any penalty for not filling in the
forms in the limited number of districts where the Lord Lieutenant
had put the Act into force. The reason, claimed the Freeman, for
its ‘limited’, but ‘useless’, extension to Ireland was to appease the
Coalition Government and show that Ireland’s total exclusion did
not apply; an ‘amusing’ situation. 109 But such assurances
increasingly appeared to be ignoring the obvious movement of
British opinion in favour of compulsion, a factor compounded by
the actions and views of Redmond himself, who appeared
increasingly out of step with the feeling within the nationalist
community and even with his political colleagues.
Dillon was opposed to conscription in any form because, as he
explained in 1916, he remained ‘convinced and unshaken’ in his