Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE IRISH CONVENTION AND CONSCRIPTION 225
change in tactics on the part of the Volunteers’. 75 Steps had been
taken to reorganise the Irish Volunteers at the end of August 1917.
De Valera met with senior military figures within the movement,
such as Cathal Brugha, Thomas Ashe and Michael Collins, to
discuss the revival of the Irish Volunteers. In October 1917, an
Irish Volunteer Convention was held and a Volunteer Executive set
up with representatives from the four Irish provinces. De Valera
was elected President of the Volunteers, Brugha as Chairman of
the Resident Executive, Collins as Director of Organisation, Rory
O’Connor as Director of Engineering, Diamuid Lynch as Director of
Communication and Richard Mulcahy as Director of Training. By
January 1918 it had become clear to the Volunteer Executive that a
General Headquarters staff needed to be set up and, in March
1918, two weeks before the conscription crisis, this was done.
Richard Mulcahy was selected as Chief of Staff, and Dick McKee as
Director of Training and Officer Commanding Dublin Brigade. 76
The Irish Volunteer movement looked to the future with a
commitment to solving Nationalist Ireland’s relationship with
Britain through a military confrontation. An tOglac pointed out
that ‘the Irish Volunteers are a military body pure and simple. They
are the army of the Irish Republic, the agent of the national will, an
instrument framed by Irishmen to further Ireland’s determination
to be free. Volunteers are not politicians; they were not created for
the purposes of parades, demonstrations, or political activities;
they follow no political leader as such; their allegiance is to the
Irish Nation’. 77
The absence of what most Nationalists considered a legitimate
Irish constitution led physical-force Sinn Feiners, such as Eamon
de Valera, to claim that Irishmen had a perfectly legitimate right to
seek freedom by force of arms if a suitable opportunity presented
itself, they having a moral right to arm and defend themselves. De
Valera understood the term ‘constitutionalism’ as acting in
accordance with the will of the Irish people and the moral law. 78
He asked ‘Would anyone tell him that the law they had in Ireland
was based on the will of the Irish people?’ De Valera held that
there was tyranny in Ireland, and the Irish people were permitted by
the moral law, and the law of God, to use any means they willed to
overthrow British rule in Ireland. 79 When an opponent complained
that Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical ‘On Human Liberty’, which de Valera
cited as justification for armed resistance, also stated that to
‘despise legitimate authority, in whosoever, is unlawful, as a
rebellion against the Divine Will, and whosoever resists that rushes
wilfully to destruction’, 80 a Sinn Fein supporter countered ‘But
English authority in Ireland is de facto not lawfully constituted’. 81