Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE EASTER RISING AND AFTERMATH 151
However, no such special provisions were envisaged in the
proposed settlement, and Lord Midleton, the leader of Southern
Unionism in Ireland, explained to Lord Lansdowne that Southern
Unionists would fight to the death against the implementation of
home rule during the war. By all means, explained Midleton, there
could be a concordat between Carson, Redmond and the
Government, as to the course to be pursued after the war and
after a general election had taken place. Dublin Unionists, for
example, were quite prepared for post-war readjustments to their
position in the general consideration of relationships between
Britain and the Empire. But surely, Midleton asked, ‘no case can be
made from any standpoint for the handing over of the rest of
Ireland till we know whether those to whom it is committed can
govern it’. 98 As one Southern Unionist explained to Lloyd George,
the appeal to their patriotism would not have fallen on deaf ears
had they been persuaded that the war’s fate depended upon an
Irish settlement, ‘but, sir, we are absolutely convinced that no
settlement at such a moment as this would have anything but the
opposite effect which you surmise’. 99
Lansdowne took these concerns to the Cabinet. The recent
disturbances had, he argued to the Cabinet in June 1916,
generated a widespread desire for a settlement, but they had
certainly not softened aspirations or disarmed suspicion; on the
contrary it could be contended that the Easter Rising had revealed
the existence of subterranean forces which would continue to be
formidable, no matter what the government system. Was this then
the moment to concede in principle all that the most extreme
Nationalists were demanding? ‘The triumph of lawlessness and
disloyalty would be complete’ he warned, and the Government
might delude themselves that the arrangement was merely
provisional, but the capitulation would be palpable, and its
significance would not be diminished by the exclusion of Ulster.
Lansdowne reminded the Government that the Sinn Feiners who
had stabbed Britain in the back had achieved an amount of success
quite sufficient to encourage others to defy authority, and it was
idle to suppose that the men and women who supported Sinn Fein
would be conciliated by the grant of the proposed form of home
rule. Could Unionists look to a Redmond Government in Ireland to
deal with an anticipated recrudescence of the recent troubles,
Lansdowne asked. Furthermore, he objected to the presentation to
the world of a new Irish ‘nation’, an Ireland which, with an
excluded Ulster, would be an admission of failure; for if home rule
was to come then Lansdowne preferred it to embrace the whole of
Ireland, with safeguards for the minority. 100 Lansdowne’s speech