Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

108 THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
O’Connor warned that an Irish Party intervention against
conscription in Britain might strike the British people as
inopportune and seriously wound Asquith. 117 There was also
Redmond’s attitude to consider, with O’Connor arguing that
fighting any conscription bill to the bitter end might result in the
choice of either losing Redmond as the Irish Party’s leader or
making a perfunctory protest and keeping him coupled with the
exclusion of the measure in Ireland. As O’Connor explained to
Dillon, ‘He [Redmond] feels so strongly about the war…that he
may feel himself unable to take up the same attitude as you do;
and your attitude, according to what I read in the Irish papers,
seems to be the only attitude which will satisfy Irish opinion’. 118
Redmond did indeed reject Dillon’s concerns, instead taking the
view that the conscription question was one of necessity and not
of principle. No man, he argued, could deny that, if the Germans
landed on the Kent or Irish coasts, his objection to the principle of
conscription should be allowed to prevent him from making a fight
to defend his country’s shores. Thus it was a question of degree,
not principle, as to whether men should be forced to meet the foe
at Calais, instead of Kent. If it could be shown that voluntary
recruitment had broken down and that compulsion was the only
means of raising the men needed to end the war, then Redmond
‘knew of no man who would allow his personal predilections
against Conscription to stand in the way of a course which had
become necessary to the very life of the country’. But he also
argued that the onus of proof lay with those who proposed
conscription, and until this was done, he remained hostile to it for
England. Ireland, he thought, was in a ‘fortunate’ position, having
been told how many men had been raised and how many were
wanted, officially 50,000. The three things Ireland had been asked
to do, said Redmond, were to provide the necessary drafts for the
old Irish regiments, to raise three entirely new divisions, and to
help keep the reserve Irish battalions at full strength, allowing him
to conclude that Ireland was in a much better position than Britain,
he having no doubt that Irish requirements could be met. 119
Redmond explained the differences in numbers of recruits
between Great Britain and Ireland by emphasising that the change
in Ireland’s relationship with the Empire had been so rapid that
men in Britain were apt to forget the difficulties the Irish Party had
had to face. Redmond used the example of General Botha, the
South African leader who had quelled a pro-German Boer rebellion
and then gone on to deliver the Empire’s only military success so
far with victory in German East Africa, to illustrate his point. Botha
had telegraphed the Irish Party leader, concurring with the latter’s