Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

LOYALTY AND THE CROWN 159
have to be called to settle the issues of the war. In the spring of
1915, Arthur Griffith had prepared a memorandum on the subject
of a Peace Conference, which he had laid before many of those
involved in the rising. He argued that Ireland’s opportunity had
arrived, and that opportunity was to work towards the hearing of
Ireland’s case for nationhood by such a conference which would
assemble before the end of the war. Griffith based Ireland’s claim
to be at the Peace Conference upon the doctrine of ‘suppressed
sovereignty’. But, he warned, Ireland could not secure belligerent
rights unless Sinn Fein became de facto masters of the country.
First, they had to destroy representation at Westminster, for the
very existence of that representation denied Ireland’s claim to
sovereign independence. Second, they had to have in Ireland,
before the Peace Conference met, a constituent assembly chosen
by the Irish people and speaking in their name. They had to see
that every constituency met and chose its representatives and
together formed themselves as a constituent assembly, backed by
the moral and material strength of the Irish people, to act for
Ireland, and to speak in her name at the Peace Conference. 18
Griffith claimed that, because of the war, Ireland was no longer
an island lying behind England but was again, politically, as well as
geographically, part of Europe. The cant that pretended that the
Irish Question was an English domestic affair was as ‘dead as
Redmondism’, declared Griffith in 1917. In the Roscommon North
by-election, he argued, Ireland had elected a representative to
Europe instead of to the British Parliament. By one election Ireland
had done more to secure European attention than all the elections
since 1800. 19 Griffith pointed out that the Kingdom of Poland,
which before the war had no government or parliament, was now
recognised by Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and
Bulgaria because Poland had made herself an international
problem. England’s safeguard against Ireland doing the same
was the Irish Party, which, if returned in a general election, would
be pointed to as the authentic voice of the Irish people. 20
Sinn Fein adopted Griffith’s peace-conference policy and argued
that the Irish Party’s course of parliamentary agitation could not be
defended on the grounds of principle, for the nation that willingly
acknowledged the right of another nation to rule its territory, to
regulate its life, to control its activities, or to give or withhold its
liberties, was a slave nation. As long as Ireland willingly sent
representatives to Westminster, so long was Ireland a slave nation
or subject province, for ‘she accepts the Union, she acknowledges
the Conquest’, and logically, she should give up her claim to be a
nation. Sinn Feiners claimed that Westminster representation was