Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

LOYALTY AND THE CROWN 185
and Wales. Those he called the ‘Gaelic Irish’ had to make it plain
that they loyally accepted Ireland’s position in the British Empire,
while those he termed the ‘British Irish’ had to make it equally
plain that they were inspired by a genuine and enlightened Irish
patriotic spirit, and were willing to place their time, talents and
energies at their country’s service. 77
Many Southern Unionists believed that the common Irishness of
Unionists and Nationalists could form the basis for a compromise
if the republicanism of Sinn Fein was dispensed with. In the Church
of Ireland Gazette, an ‘Anglo-Irishman’, in early 1917, emphasised
a common cultural Irishness when he asked other Unionists to
recognise that the present merits of the Union were not called into
question by a recognition that Irish history consisted of protest
and resistance to a monstrous political aggression and economic
oppression in earlier centuries. Englishmen, argued the writer,
were not invited to be loyal to the United Kingdom, but first to
England, their own nationality, not a political collaboration of
nations. He asked if Irishmen were to be submitted to a different
test of loyalty, holding that the ‘authentic flower of Irish loyalty to
the community of nations which is the Empire can blossom only
from a native soil; it must have its roots in Ireland and in Irish
history’. 78 This would involve Irish Unionists declaring, as did Lord
Meath in 1918, ‘I am an Imperialist, it is true, but I am an Irishman
first and an Imperialist afterwards’. 79 As the Bishop of Ossory
explained to worshippers in late 1917, accepting some form of
home rule would involve a shift from Unionism to Loyalism which
could be accommodated within an allegiance to the Crown, and,
consequently, British subjectship:
I want to reassure the minds of those who are uneasy on a
certain point, namely, whether loyalty to the King will not be
compromised by acquiescence in the new state of things….
Ireland is not going to be a Republic, any more than it was a
Republic before the Union. If duly constituted authority gives
Ireland a new form of government, the true loyalty is to accept
it, and to do our very utmost to make a success of it. Loyalty
to the Crown and Unionism are not necessarily equivalent
terms. There was loyalty in Ireland before the Union—there
was loyalty which vehemently deprecated the Union; and
there can be loyalty still if the Union is legally dissolved….
Before the Union…Ireland was acknowledged as being one
distinct Kingdom of several and not merely as a constituent
part of one larger Kingdom…. The dissolution of the