Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Home Rule Crisis, 1909–1914, by James Doherty

The tormented history of the relations between Britain and Ireland reached a climax in the 1916 Easter Rising, which in hindsight could be easily represented as inevitable, as much as partition was inevitable. Over the past decade, leading scholars such as Ronald Fanning and Charles Townshend have articulated such a ‘determinist’ interpretation with typical verve and vigour. The implication must be that Home Rule was doomed, a mere pawn in a Westminster game, in which the nationalist leader John Redmond was basically duped by the Liberal government and easily defeated by the Ulster Unionists’ relentless opposition to any compromise. By contrast, in this brilliant book James Doherty presents a more complex picture, in which the issue of Home Rule is placed in the wider context of the contemporary struggle for the democratisation of the electoral and representative system of the United Kingdom as a whole. In this sense, Home Rule was not merely an Irish question, but an issue of wider significance for the British electorate. This had also been the case in 1886, as I argued in British Democracy and Irish Nationalism (2007; rev. ante, cxxiv [2009], pp. 739–41), but Doherty rightly notes that the case is even stronger for the Third Home Rule Bill, which was introduced in 1912. By then, a generation of Liberals and radicals had come to the forefront of politics thinking that self-government for Ireland was part of a global democratic project on which the future of the British Empire must rest, while the Nonconformist media, which reached the apex of their influence in the wake of the 1906 revival, also regarded the Irish cause as the touchstone of Liberalism. They found a natural counterpart in Irish liberal intellectuals like Tom Kettle, whose Open Secret of Ireland (1911) was a powerful advocacy of devolution in terms which had wide resonance at the time.

Doherty is particularly interested in the resulting ‘cross-fertilization of ideas from Irish nationalist to British Liberal, and from propagandist to politician, and vice versa’ (p. 19). In this context, Redmond presented the issue as one about the self-government of the United Kingdom, not just of Ireland, especially after the House of Lords raised the stakes in 1910. If Peter Clarke was wrong in identifying the two general elections held in that year as the onset of ‘class politics’, Doherty reminds us that there was no shortage of contemporary evidence to support his interpretation. In Liberal, Labour and Nationalist rhetoric, Home Rule was championed as a working-class issue. Their appeal was successful to the extent that the anti-Unionist vote propelled Asquith back to No.10 twice in one year. In both cases, his government relied on a wide Liberal, Labour and Nationalist majority in the Commons. However, the corollary of their victory in such a polarised political context was to paint the Ulster Unionists into a corner, as misguided Orangemen, whose understanding had been obfuscated by Presbyterian hatred for Rome. As we know, this was not going to be the way to win over Protestant sympathies in Ireland, or indeed even in large parts of England. At times, Kettle himself—and with him Churchill and Lloyd George—saw the future in terms of a possible armed confrontation between Unionist rebels and the Liberal and nationalist champions of law and order. They were unable to exploit the tension within the Irish Protestant camp, which was rapidly dividing not along the lines of Home Rulers versus Unionists, but more radically between northern and southern Protestants. The latter saw the 1912 Ulster Covenant as de facto partitionist and could not condone armed resistance against the Imperial Parliament. The Protestant bishops of the southern dioceses were the first to distance themselves from the revolutionary logic of the north-east, but soon the pages of the Methodist press echoed the depth of the dissent within the wider Protestant community, and the extent to which a less polarised, more realistic Ireland might have emerged, given time. Even in Ulster, about a third of Protestants did not sign the Covenant, a document haunted by history.

Here, of course, we come to the point: Irish politics were deeply scarred by a past which was not remote, and which was artificially kept alive by the Orange Order, the Hibernians, the commemoration of 1798 and the disastrously-timed implementation of the 1908 Papal Ne Temere decree on mixed marriages. Yet, from the point of view of the history of democracy in the British Isles the Third Home Rule Bill crisis stands out not only for the verbal violence of the confrontation, but also for the articulation of possible constitutional ways forward, such as a federal reconstitution of the United Kingdom. It was a golden opportunity to recast the union in terms which would have prepared it to weather the storms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when similar ideas were again articulated in a very different context. Instead, the outbreak of the First World War ushered in an age in which brutal violence, the ‘blood sacrifice’ of many patriots (whether Liberals or Tories, Unionists or Nationalists, including Tom Kettle), paved the way for a more violent Ireland, and the renewal of ‘an endless legacy of troubles’, a nightmare from which we struggle to wake. This is an important book. It is revisionist in the best sense of the word, and it is a study which the historian of democracy and the political scientist will find as rewarding and inspiring as the historian of the Irish Home Rule question.