Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

NATIONAL IDENTITY, HOME RULE AND ULSTER 35
culturally, although he did not desire total separation from the
Crown, instead believing in a workable and honourable ‘peace
treaty’ in which England and Ireland could be friends, allowing the
latter to develop her own national individuality. 98 Home rule could
be welcomed, however limited, in that it would concentrate the
Irish mind on Ireland, and away from English cultural influences;
‘but a permanent state of non-Home Rule would kill Irish Ireland…
under Home Rule it will have a fair chance to go on and
conquer’. 99
Arthur Griffith, on the other hand, regarded imperial Britain as
the ‘Anti-Christ’ of nations, organised on the principles of
Manchester liberalism and devoted to the commercial conquest of
the world. By the Act of Union, according to Griffith, Britain had
degraded Ireland from its potential role as co-ruler of the Empire
to the level of an agricultural colony. Griffith’s objective was to
unite Catholics and Protestants on grounds of Ireland’s inherent
rights to great-nation status. By 1902, Griffith devised a
programme for the parliamentary withdrawal of Irish MPs to
Ireland, the declaration of an Irish state, and passive resistance to
the British state, using the existing powers and resources of Irish
local government. Publishing these ideas in 1904, as a pamphlet
entitled The Resurrection of Hungary, he caused a sensation,
selling 30,000 copies. 100 Griffith, as with Redmond, denied the
moral right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland. He
argued that the Renunciation Act of 1783, which renounced the
right of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain to
legislate for the Kingdom of Ireland, was still on the British Statute
Book, was still the law, and that constitutionally no power existed,
or had existed since 1783, in the British Parliament to legislate for
Ireland. The Act of Union, Griffith claimed, was unconstitutional, a
fraud that was never valid. The old Irish Parliament, argued Griffith,
had no legal power to terminate itself, as it had done in agreeing
to the Anglo-Irish Union, for Irish MPs were the trustees of a
power proceeding from the Irish people and bound in law to deliver
that trust back into the hands of its owners. Quoting John Locke,
he claimed that a legislature could not transfer law-making into
other hands because it was delegated from the people, and that no
authority except the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland had the
power to legislate for Ireland. For Griffith the old Irish Parliament
had a contemporary legal existence, as in 1783. 101 Therefore:
(1) There is no constitution actively existent in Ireland today, and
therefore, no law which an Irishman is legally or morally bound
to obey.