Irish Republican Army

“ Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory. ”

“ But they knew that by so doing they were, in the words of my father, "signifying their adhesion to the principle that the freedom of a people must in the last analysis rest in the hands of that people—that there is no outside force capable of enforcing slavery upon a people really resolved to be free, and valuing freedom more than life." Also that "The Irish Citizen Army in its constitution pledges its members to fight for a Republican Freedom in Ireland. ”

“ Ireland's highest material interests were at stake in the war. After referring to the high proportion of Irishmen in the Army from the Peninsular War onwards he said that Ireland wanted an Irish Army Corps, and at the same time the Irish National Volunteers would be kept intact, and would be an inexhaustible source of strength to the new Army Corps and Army. Speaking for an overwhelming majority of the Nationalists, he said to the Prime Minister and Great Britain: "You have kept faith with Ireland; Ireland will keep faith with you." ”

“ Still those men would, if they could, have got the people to possess their souls in patience and wait for aid from abroad before unfurling the banner of insurrection; for they were constant in their belief that without the presence of a disciplined army on Irish soil to consolidate their strength and direct it, a revolutionary effort of the Irish people could end only in disaster. But the government had reasons of their own for wishing to set an Irish rebellion afoot at this time, and they took measures to precipitate the rising. ”

“ Now, however, it is brightening up on the verge of the horizon, and, like chickens, England’s untold acts of infamy and oppression, in regard to Ireland, are coming home to roost. In every city and hamlet, throughout the great Republic of the United States, and in every town and village in Ireland, as well as throughout the rural districts, there exists a regiment or detachment of the vast army of the Irish Republic. No matter how invisible the force may be at any particular point, yet there it exists, awaiting the signal to pounce upon the enemy, and avenge the wrongs of ages ”

“ And the longer war delays in coming, the greater will be the danger when it comes. With the increase in armaments, this country must undergo a proportionate sacrifice. If compulsory service should be adopted, it must apply to Ireland as well as the United Kingdom. But how will an independent government in Dublin view the compulsory enrolment of the manhood of Ireland, two-thirds of which have been taught to regard England as the national and hereditary enemy? The Irish are, above all, a military race. ”

“ The peasantry of Ireland—already familiarized with trans-Atlantic ideas of independence and republicanism—are apt to become Americanized. Their sympathies are with the United States rather than with England. If war broke out between Great Britain and the States, no one doubts but that the first American army flung upon Irish shores would find Ireland one vast recruiting field, and that swarms of soldiers of Irish descent would fly from distant lands to Ireland to lend their aid in rendering it, throughout its length and breadth, a garrison impregnable to British attacks. ”

“ One of the principal planks in the Sinn Fein platform is to boycott the British army and navy. It is asserted that Ireland supplies more fighting men for the British empire than England; that 354 Irishmen out of every 10,000 of its population are British soldiers, while only 276 out of every 10,000 in England go into the army. If the Irish would refuse to enlist it would paralyze the military service of the empire, and deal a serious blow to British prosperity by drawing a large number of the employees of the shops and factories into the army and navy. ”

“ No people can be said to have rightly proved their nationhood and their power to maintain it until they have demonstrated their military prowess; and though Irish blood has reddened the earth of every continent, never until now have we as a people set a national army in the field. ”

“ Those who denounce us go beyond their duty as clergymen. They are either bad Irishmen, who would not wish to see Ireland a nation, or very stupid and ignorant zealots, who do not understand what they are about. Our association is neither anti-Catholic nor irreligious. We are an Irish army, not a secret society. We make no secret of our objects and designs. We simply bind ourselves to conceal such matters as are needful to be kept from the enemy’s knowledge, both for the success of our strategy and for the safety of our friends. ”

“ In the first place, the Irish Volunteers are prepared, if any attempt is made forcibly to disarm them, to resist, and to defend their rifles with their lives. In the second place, the Irish Citizen Army (the Labour Volunteers) are prepared to offer similar resistance, not only to disarmament, but to any attack upon the Press which turns out the Workers' Republic—successor to the suppressed Irish Worker—which is printed in Liberty Hall. ”

“ Ireland is now showing the world that her young men cannot only lead regiments, but compel senates. It is remarkable that never before in the history of nations has there been a great political national agitation, a great intellectual movement against an oppressive government, impelled and controlled by young men. It is a wonderful thing that hardly a single man who leads or is foremost in the movement of the Irish National party has yet seen forty years, and many of them have not seen thirty years. ”

“ If Castle government is wrong in Dublin it is wrong elsewhere; if militarism was wrong and foolish and futile in Cromwell's day, it is wrong to-day, to-morrow, and for all time; if England really intends at the great Peace Congress to come forward as the champion of small nations, she must be able to show an Ireland prosperous, contented, and freely allied to her without the aid of a single soldier or a single threat.
Such at least is the hope of all those who believe that only when we have solved the Irish problem have we solved the problem of Empire. ”

“ No people ever made a successful national rally unless they were on the rising wave of prosperity. It is not misery and degradation that bring success. Already Ireland was known in France as "that very wealthy country in which there were twelve cities, and wide bishoprics, and a king, and that had its own language, and Latin letters."
But the position of the Gaels was no longer what it had been before the invasions. The "Foreigners" called constantly for armed [78] help from their people without, and by political alliances and combinations fostered war among the Irish states themselves. ”

“ For my part, I heartily join in the admiration he, no doubt, feels for the patriots of 1782, but no man in his senses will maintain that the moral of that year is that a local Irish army can, under no circumstances, prove an embarrassment to the central Government. The general tone, even more than the precise language of Irish Federalists, all but forbids the supposition that they are prepared to secure the supremacy of the Federal Government by giving it the sole control of the only armed force which is to exist in any part of the Union. ”

“ There may be; humanly speaking, there must be, a mass of injustices in the militaristic government of Ireland. The militarism itself may be the least of them; but it must involve the concealment of all the rest.
It has been remarked above that establishing militarism is a thing which a nation had a right to do, and (what is not at all the same thing) which it may be right in doing. But with that very phrase ‘a nation,’ we collide of course with the whole real question; the alleged abstract wrong about which the Irish talk much more than about their concrete wrongs. ”

“ Redmond hurried home to rally Ireland to the cause of the Empire. The situation was summed up later with brutal frankness by a Belfast Unionist paper: “If the Nationalists will not enlist because the war is just, they should not [Pg 164] do so because they have got Home Rule; because they have not got it. The Unionist Party has declared that when it comes into power it will not allow the Act to stand.” Even so between 40,000 and 50,000 Irish Nationalists joined the Forces during the first year of the war. ”

“ King George III had, by a message through the Lord-Lieutenant, recommended the Irish House of Commons to augment the Irish army, and assured them expressly that on the augmentation being made, not less than 12,000 men should at all times, 'except in cases of invasion or rebellion in Great Britain,' be stationed in Ireland. ”

“ It may be safely laid down as an axiom in political history that the men who are not able to take account of the force of what they would call a mere national sentiment in public affairs are not and never can be fit to carry on the great work of government. Ireland was overrun by militia regiments, sent over from England and Scotland, who had no sympathy whatever with the Irish people, and regarded them simply as revolted slaves to be scourged back into submission or shot down if they persevered in refusing to submit. ”

“ The United Irishmen, whose aim was to establish a free and equal representation of all Irishmen irrespective of creed, despaired of obtaining their object by open agitation and, subjected to repressive enactments, transformed themselves into a secret association for the overthrow of the existing government and for complete separation from England as the only method of securing and maintaining the rights of Ireland. They were the first Irish Republican Party. ”

“ The instances he cites of such abuses are sufficiently horrible to justify the strong language which brought down on his head so much hostility, when he declared in his proclamation of February '98, that the Irish army was "formidable to every one but the enemy." These well-known opinions were so repugnant to the Castle policy, that that party held a caucus in the Speaker's Chambers, at which it was proposed to pass a vote of censure in Parliament on the General, whom they denounced as "a sulky mule," "a Scotch beast," and by other similar names. ”

“ To-day there are in Ireland two large bodies of Volunteers, one of which has sprung into existence in the North and another in the South. I say to the Government that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose the armed Catholics in the South will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulster men. Is it too much to hope that out of this situation a result may spring which will be good, not merely for the Empire, but for the future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation? ”

“ Bishops, priests and political leaders of all shades of opinion met together to face the threat. In the moment of common danger all turned instinctively to the Irish Volunteers. If resistance was to come it would only come from their ranks; for England and Ireland well knew that the Irish Volunteers would be wiped out to the last man before they would allow a single Irishman to be forced into the British Army. ”

“ In the result disaffection quickly spread, and the organisation in America broke up into hostile camps, the majority, under the leadership of Colonel W. R. Roberts, revolting from the leadership of Stephens and Mahoney, and declaring their belief that “no direct invasion or armed insurrection in Ireland would ever be successful in establishing an Irish Republic upon Irish soil, and setting her once more in her proper place as a nation amongst the nations of the earth.” ”

“ It is useless to conceal the fact it is not regiments encamped in Ireland; it is not the militia of 12,000 peelers distributed over the whole of the surface of the land, which prevents revolt and preserves the peace. During a long period, especially in the last century, the excess of misery to which Ireland was reduced had multiplied the secret societies of the peasantry. Who have denounced those illegal associations with the most persevering, powerful, and formidable condemnation? Who have ever been so energetic in resistance to secret societies as the Irish Episcopacy? ”

“ For the army a vote was obtained for 55,000 men, of which 25,000 were to be employed in America. It was easier to vote the money than to find the men. The difficulty of recruiting was alleged by government to be a result of the briskness of trade and such like causes. Already the Irish army was reduced by drafts to less than the 12,000 men that by statute were to be kept in that kingdom, and the government excited the indignation of an independent section in the Irish parliament and of the protestants of Ulster by obtaining leave to withdraw 4,000 men more. ”

“ Their great weakness has lain in the fact that they have had no consistent aim. Some of their leaders have looked for a return to Ireland’s Constitution, and built upon the watchword of the volunteers, ‘The King, the Lords, and the Commons of Ireland.’ Some have dreamed of a complete independence, of an Irish republic shaping its own world policy. Some have wholly distrusted politics, and given their strength to the intellectual, spiritual, or material regeneration of the people. Among these men have been found the sanest practical reformers and the wildest revolutionary dreamers. ”