Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

162 LOYALTY AND THE CROWN
proclamation the rebels had referred to ‘gallant allies in Europe’,
but an ally presupposed an ‘alliance’, and an alliance was a union
between states of acknowledged rank for the purpose of offence
and defence. Who, outside the Sinn Feiners, recognised them as an
independent state, asked the writer? Moreover, an alliance was not
contracted other than by a specific treaty or agreement, in which
the object was definitely stated; in no imaginable circumstances
was an alliance associated with a sovereign state on one side and a
‘party’ on the other. The writer submitted that Ireland would have
no right to be heard at the forthcoming Peace Conference; she did
not possess an independent government, nor was she a state;
Irishmen were the subjects of a crown that was to be represented,
and it was not likely that every party or political section of every
country would be admitted. 26
Nationalists and the Crown: Sinn Fein and the Irish
Party
Within the broad church that was the post-1916 Sinn Fein
movement, there existed deep divisions regarding the final
relationship that a self-governing Ireland should have with the
British Empire and Crown, divisions so deep that ultimately, it can
be argued, they provided the foundations for the Anglo-Irish
Treaty split in 1921 and the subsequent Irish Civil War of 1922–
23. Sinn Fein was a coalition of extreme and moderate Nationalists
who, at the leadership level, were united in their ideological
commitment to a Gaelic-speaking Ireland, but were divided
between those who were prepared to accept some form of Irish
monarchy and those who wished to establish an Irish republic. The
Easter rebels, constituting themselves the Provisional Government
of the Irish Republic, had declared in the Proclamation of the
Republic:
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership
of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to
be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that
right by a foreign people and government has not
extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except
by the destruction of the Irish people…we hereby proclaim
the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State…. The
Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance
of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees
religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal
opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to