Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

LOYALTY AND THE CROWN 171
sunk, until its wealth is dissipated…until its home and
Colonial population is decimated or enslaved. We cannot coax
or enforce terms on the…Empire that would shake its
foundations, or imply its consent to commit suicide just to
please Irish idealists and aspirations, which might only be
allowed to last for a generation…by peoples altogether
outside the British Empire. 48
The O’Mahony, who had stood as an Irish Party parliamentary
candidate in 1915, wrote that he was tired of hearing that selfgovernment
within the Empire was the only attainable form of
freedom for Ireland; instead he described it as the best form.
During the past century Ireland had become, for good or evil, one
of the Empire’s mother countries. In Britain, and every Dominion,
there was a contented and loyal Irish population, and to ‘these
portions of our race Ireland owes the same duty that England owes
to Englishmen throughout the Empire’. Ireland, he believed, could
not separate from the Empire without lessening the Empire’s
strength and doing an injury to every population within the Empire,
including those of their own Irish race. Britain, The O’Mahony
wrote, would have as good a right to prevent Ireland’s secession
from the Empire as the ‘Northern States had to prevent the
Southern States’ secession from the United States’. 49
The Freeman’s Journal welcomed the efforts of constitutional
historian and Irish Party MP, Swift MacNeill, to dispose of the myth
which had gained popular credence that the 1782 constitution,
establishing the legislative independence of the Kingdom of
Ireland, was an anticipation of a demand for an Irish republic.
MacNeill reminded Nationalists that Ireland, under that
constitution, was in external affairs absolutely subject to the action
of the English executive, through the English sovereign, taken
under the advice of English ministers, and controlled by an English
parliament in which Ireland had no voice. MacNeill pointed out
that it was the English king who entered into treaties with foreign
nations on the advice of the English Privy Council; it was the
English king who by the same advice declared war or made peace;
and by these treaties Ireland was bound. The army was the army
of England; the navy was the navy of England; the ambassadors to
all foreign courts were those of the English king; all colonies were
dependencies of the English crown; and over their government
Ireland, or the Irish parliament, had not the slightest control. 50 It
was by way of an Irish statute—33 Henry VIII. Ir. c. 1.—that Ireland
was converted from a ‘Lordship’ into a kingdom; the kings of
England, who were previously lords of Ireland, were henceforth