Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE EASTER RISING AND AFTERMATH 131
policy, for until that statement Germany had never said or done
anything that implied a desire to meddle in another country’s
internal affairs. 36 However, as Count Blucher explained to
Casement, Gottlieb von Jagow, the Secretary of State, had told him
that ‘They (the German Govt) were not going to “make themselves
ridiculous” +say things they had no intention of carrying out or
attempting’. This, Casement confided to his diary, was what he
had guessed all along. 37 It was now clear that the Germans did not
take Casement’s fanciful designs for the Irish Brigade and German
intervention seriously
However, Casement had not been alone in attempting to enlist
German help. Joseph Mary Plunkett, representing the IRB’s Military
Council, had secretly travelled from Dublin to Berlin in 1915 with a
strategical sketch for a general uprising in Ireland involving
German assistance. In a memorandum, ‘Germany’s Future World
Policy’, Plunkett explained why he thought that Germany should be
interested in an alliance with an independent Ireland:
A World Power must have a World Policy. Whatever the
outcome of this war the German Empire is now a World
Power: that is to say a Power on whose continued existence…
whose welfare and…whose policy the fate of the nations of
the Earth depends. For not only may any portions of the globe
become…the future German ‘Spheres of influence’ as they
have…of other great Powers…but even those places that it
may be in Germany’s interest to avoid interference with will
for the future look naturally to Germany to influence the
actual or possible dominating Powers. 38
In Berlin, Plunkett delivered the Military Council’s plan for an
insurrection to the German Foreign Ministry. Plunkett was granted
a meeting with the German Chancellor, Bethman Hollweg, who
agreed to arrange for a cargo of arms and ammunition to be sent
to Ireland with, if possible, a number of German officers. The
Germans were planning a big offensive on the Western Front and
were interested in the possibility that a rising in Ireland might
prove helpful. 39 The Military Council’s plan envisaged substantial
German military assistance. Plunkett argued that, with troops in
Ireland having been reduced to 37,000, British forces there did not
constitute an army, nor even a garrison, but a small number of
scattered garrisons and many large training camps which were not
equipped for the occupation of Ireland, much less to resist a
German invasion. The Irish Volunteer leadership recognised that
its organisation, in its present unarmed, unequipped, and partly