Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

NATIONAL IDENTITY, HOME RULE AND ULSTER 23
is in favour of Home Rule because the Empire has seen what
effect Home Rule has upon Irishmen there…. There is no
Parliament in Australia…Canada…in any part of your Empire,
where Irishmen like ourselves of the same flesh and blood,
the same sentiments, the same history and traditions, the
same deep religious feeling, are not to be found among the
most loyal, the most able, the most contented, and the most
respected in the British Empire. Why? Because there they find
there are no traditions of prejudice against them, either on
account of their race or creed. 69
As Sir Thomas Esmonde, MP for North Wexford, emphasised ‘We
Irish people have no rooted antipathy to the Empire. The Empire is
quite as much our Empire as yours. As a matter of history Irish
brains…valour, and…genius have done quite as much to build up
this Empire…[as] either British genius or…intelligence. But we
must be allowed a proper position in the Empire’. 70
Redmond was a political nationalist. The goal of political
nationalists was Ireland’s normalisation among the nations of the
world by the regaining of her independent statehood. The
nationalism of the political nationalists was very much that of the
‘assimilationalist’ variety. Its leaders were long immersed in British
political and cultural life, securalist in their outlook and admiring
of its liberal democratic ideals. They were driven towards an ethnic
consciousness by the British response to the rise of Fenianism and
the agrarian agitations in Ireland, which appeared to have an
inherent anti-Irish Catholic bias in the metropolitan centre. Only
by the return of an autonomous Irish legislature, they believed,
could this bias be nullified. They wished for an Ireland modelled
on British liberal lines to be given its proper status as a partner in
the British imperial mission. Political nationalists conceived of the
nation largely in legal-historical and constitutional terms, and
rested their case on arguments first expounded by William
Molyneux and Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century. The
destruction of Ireland’s native parliament by the Act of Union, they
claimed, was an illegal act of usurpation, fostering only enmity
between the British and Irish peoples and divisions within the Irish
nation. The restoration of an Irish parliament was thus essential
not only for the reaction of a self-reliant and industrious nation
but also for the reconciliation between the British and Irish peoples
within the Empire. 71
According to John Redmond, what nationalist Ireland wanted was
‘so moderate, so reasonable, so commonplace’ in view of the
experience of nations and especially of the British Empire that,