Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

160 LOYALTY AND THE CROWN
futile in practice. Ireland had been sending representatives to
Westminster for 116 years by 1917, and during that time Ireland
had had two famine periods, years bordering on famine, four open
insurrectionary periods, long periods of partly suppressed
insurrections, wholesale evictions, abnormal emigration, scores of
Coercion Acts, ever-increasing taxation, destruction of industries,
decrease of tillage, and ‘mind-stupefying’ methods of education.
Irish MPs at Westminster made eloquent speeches, asked
questions, called attention to Irish grievances, pleaded, appealed,
voted with one English party and another, but were materially
unable to influence British government policy towards Ireland. 21
Abstentionism, the refusal to send its elected representatives to
Westminster, became the cornerstone of the Sinn Fein electoral
platform.
Sinn Fein’s case for Ireland to be heard before the Peace
Conference rested upon the claim that Ireland was a sovereign
state, one of the four ancient and sovereign European states, as
established among the European Powers at the Council of
Constance in 1417. There the question of precedence had arisen
between the legates of King Charles VI of France and King Henry V
of England, when the latter, abandoning any claim in respect of the
Kingdom of England, put forward a claim in respect of the
Kingdom of Ireland, which he ‘pretended and assumed’ had been
transferred to England. The King of England made good the case
of the ‘nation of Ireland’ to be considered third in precedence of
the four ancient and sovereign states of Europe; and his legates
took precedence of the King of France’s legates accordingly
Therefore, it was argued by Sinn Feiners that for over a thousand
years Ireland had exercised her full sovereign status and, for
another five hundred years, during which time the full exercise of
that sovereignty was frustrated, her sovereign status was
recognised by the European Powers and its re-establishment made
the subject of negotiation and treaty by certain of those powers.
Ireland, it was claimed, had never surrendered her sovereign
status, and no power, possessing title by conquest, by compact, or
by treaty, could claim to exercise Irish sovereignty, for Irish
sovereignty existed despite British suppression, its exercise being
prevented by external force. Sinn Fein also claimed that Ireland
was a sovereign state because the conscious will of the Irish nation
for the restoration of its sovereignty had been asserted in every
generation since its suppression, by rebellion against British rule,
and that Ireland, by history, culture, and language was a
distinctive, individual and separate nation. Therefore Ireland
possessed within herself all the moral and material constituents of