Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

230 CONCLUSION
many of the political elite within Ulster Unionism, reinforced by
their geographical security, warned that the experience of the war
had begun a psychological process which might witness their
ultimate absorption into a narrower definition of Britishness. This,
it should be noted, was limited to the apex of the Ulster Unionist
political class; however, it signalled the genesis of a process which
might ultimately spread throughout the Ulster unionist communal
consciousness. The most likely catalyst for this would be if
republicanism became the dominant strain within Irish
Nationalism, involving breaking the link of the Crown, which would
involve the jettison of any concept of Irishness which retained a
Britannic identity, by the rejection of British subjectship.
It was in this way that the Great War transformed the Irish
Question. In 1914, the majority of Irish Nationalists accepted that
Irish self-government would be within the United Kingdom; by the
end of the war the majority of Nationalists apparently supported
the establishment of an Irish republic outside the British Empire. It
is, however, more accurate to state that the vast majority of the
nationalist community would have settled for a form of selfgovernment
on Dominion lines, within the Empire but outside the
United Kingdom, with many Nationalists recognising that the
Dominions within the British Empire were now developing into a
loose commonwealth of increasingly independent states. The
significance of the war was that it catapulted Irish republicanism
from an obscure, minority obsession into a potential form of
government for a self-governing Ireland.
The period prior to the war had witnessed a time in which the
precise nature of Irish and British identity was in flux. John
Redmond and his supporters had hoped that the common sacrifice
of Irish Nationalists and Unionists, on the field of battle, would
lead to the creation of a common sense of Irishness, within a wider
relationship binding Irishmen with Englishmen, Scotsmen,
Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans. The
central fact of Redmondite imperialism was that it was
aspirational; it was something to be acquired, slowly, as in South
Africa, which had also had a difficult relationship with the imperial
centre. When Redmond supported Britain during the war he had
hoped that it would be a short conflict. But, the longer the war
went on, the more problems it created for the British state and
changes at the heart of government made many Nationalists
believe that home rule would never become a reality.
Consequently, Redmond and the Irish Party were considered to
have wasted a golden opportunity to secure home rule at the start
of the war.