Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

LOYALTY AND THE CROWN 175
in Ireland’s present temper, seem far enough away’. Responding to
the widely held view that Pearse and his associates had created a
great opportunity for winning full home rule and that the Irish
Party were betraying the people’s trust, Gwynn asked the
nationalist community to consider what the implications of this
view were:
You cannot walk at the same time backward and forward. If
you accept as a service to Ireland what the Sinn Feiners did,
then you must set down the work of the Irish soldiers as a
disservice. The only thing in common between these two
bodies of men was their willingness to risk their lives in pursuit
of the ideal they believed in. Both had sincerity and courage,
and both loved Ireland. In every other respect they were
opposite. What one did the other strove to undo. The first
shots that the Sinn Feiners fired in action were flred against a
battalion of young Irish troops, Nationalist almost to a man.
Ireland has to be on one side or the other; she cannot claim in
respect of both. She must be for her soldiers and against her
rebels, or for her rebels and regarding her soldiers as
‘mercenaries of a foreign power’.
Gwynn claimed that for every Sinn Feiner involved in the rising
there were fifty Irish Party supporters in the trenches, and it was this
fact and its recognition that had rendered the offer of home rule in
1916 possible. Had it not been for Redmond’s Commons speech in
August 1914 and the response of thousands of young Irishmen, no
English minister could have come to Parliament to set up an
immediate Irish government. Yet it was said that the proposal was
made only because the Sinn Feiners had risen in rebellion. Gwynn
asked if anyone could really believe that if there had been no
Home Rule Act on the Statute Book, a rebellion in Ireland, allied to
Germany, would have been met with an offer of home rule? Without
the rebellion the Act would have come into operation at the end of
the war, when the work of reconciliation, carried out by Irish
soldiers, had gone through to unbroken accomplishment. In this
scenario, home rule would not have been offered as an emergency
war measure, as the least desperate way of establishing harmony
after civil war, but as it should have been, when all hearts were
uplifted with the joy of peace after the long misery of war. Gwynn
warned:
Ireland has felt intensely what happened within her own
doors, she has forgotten what has happened outside them;