Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

176 LOYALTY AND THE CROWN
she has given loose to the old resentment. It is a short step
from this temper to the state of mind in which every soldier
wearing the British uniform will be looked…at in the streets
as a servant of the oppressor. How are you going to base a
national claim on the services rendered by Irish soldiers if all
your sympathy has been given to those who treated them as
enemies and fired on them in fight?
There is great pity and admiration for the young men who
died in Dublin, bravely and dramatically. Of those who died
overseas…there is little mention, little thought. When I think
of my own dead, it is hard not to be indignant…. These
Irishmen who did not share their dangers should at least bear
them in mind, and consider when they shape their course how
it is going to affect the men in the trenches. If it leads to an
Ireland in which the soldier returning will find himself
unwelcome, unregarded, unrewarded, then it will be a course
unwise, because [it is] ungrateful to the truest patriots and
best servants that Ireland has to-day. 58
George Russell, a Sinn Fein supporter, also expressed his fears as
to what sort of Ireland would emerge from the war. ‘AE’ created
much public debate when he asked how Irishmen considered that
they might live together in the future. The war would have a finale
and thousands of Irishmen, pointed out Russell, would return to
Ireland having faced death for ideals other than those which
currently inspired thousands of Sinn Feiners in Ireland. How, he
asked, were these to co-exist in the same island if there was
no change of heart, for each would receive passionate support
from their relatives, friends and parties. Ireland would be a most
unhappy country if some ‘moral agreement’ could not be arrived
at. Russell asked Ireland’s ‘national extremists’, the Sinn Feiners,
in what mood they proposed to meet those who returned. For
example, would these returning men endure being termed traitors
to Ireland? Would their friends endure it? Would they who mourned
their dead endure to hear scornful speech of those they loved?
Russell did not believe that those who held to, or were upheld
by, loyalty to the Empire could hope to coerce the millions clinging
to Irish nationality; seven centuries of repression had left that
spirit unshaken, and it could not be destroyed, unless the Irish
people were destroyed because it sprang from ‘biological
necessity’. If, as had been claimed, there had been two nations in
Ireland, this was no longer the case, for the union of Norman,
Dane, Saxon and Celt had, through centuries of work, produced
one Irish character. Whatever views they might hold about the