This address at the Memorial Hall address was his maiden public political speech and is of some interest because it demonstrates how his analysis of the political system was to change over the next five years. It was an ecumenical speech with a tolerance and understanding of Catholicism that probably was dictated by the composition of the audience. White said he saw Protestantism and Catholicism as ‘complementary and, if they but knew it, mutually necessary parties’.47 He maintained that all religions were not equal ‘in the sense that it is a matter of indifference to which one, one belongs’, but rather that different religions cater for ‘the needs of the universal human spirit at different stages of that gradual evolution of the spirit’.48 The difference to him was that Protestantism had
arrived at a recognition of having within itself its own supreme law, had glimpsed within itself, however dimly, the Logos or higher creative reason, whereas [Catholicism] had not, and consequently objectified its supreme law in a Church and priesthood external to, and having authority over itself.49
Protestant individualism proved a natural habitat for the liberal approach, and it was astonishing then that when the normally ‘authority’-embracing Catholics demonstrated a desire for autonomy, the opposition came from ‘some Protestants who exclaim the forces of hell are being let loose’.50 Maybe White was a little disingenuous in conflating political and religious mindsets, and it is difficult to imagine any audience grasping the sophisticated tenets of such an argument at a political gathering, but it indicates an original mind. White, even twenty years later, was still pleased with his speech: ‘The predominantly Catholic audience cheered it to the echo. At that time I was so fresh and ingenuous I would have got a blessing from the Pope for a eulogy on Luther.’51
White’s earliest comment on Irish affairs was in the letter he wrote from the Whiteway colony in April 1912. This made no such attempt at appeasement when denouncing a Protestant refusal to allow Winston Churchill to speak in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, earlier in the year as ‘the naked spirit of Popery’.52 White saw this as his entry into Irish politics, indeed all politics, because he almost never adopted any kind of nationalist perspective, seeing all struggles more or less, as he asserted in the Memorial Hall speech, as essentially against authoritarianism of one kind or another. The letter, although in one sense a crowd-pleasing exercise, is consistent with later utterances, lauding the ethos of Protestantism, but condemning bigotry and damning the perpetrators as doing Ulster ‘incalculable damage in the eyes of all to whom the true spirit and mission of Protestantism is most dear’.53
Preparation for Ballymoney
At this point White’s antagonism was directed almost entirely against unionism and in particular Carson and all the sectarianism that he seemed to foment. Although he held no brief for Catholicism, White’s entire efforts in finding a resolution to the impending strife seemed to lie in Home Rule. This support, it has to be reiterated, was not that of conventional nationalism; at that stage White would have had little, if any, sympathy for an independent thirty-two county Ireland. His socialism was at an embryonic stage; his notion of equality would have been freedom from religious discrimination for all the people in Ireland. The later influence of Connolly, coupled with his natural sympathy for the underdog – which would develop into an extremely radical political position – was never allied with an enthusiasm for Sinn Féin or any of the earlier Irish nationalist positions. He later indicated his lack of sympathy with nationalism, not just in the afore-mentioned letter in 1940 where he declared that he ‘was Red, I never was Green’, but there were occasions when he openly stated that under certain conditions he would take up arms, either for Carson (in his first speech in Dublin), or against the Free State (again in the 1940 letter).54 For all that, it would have been difficult to distinguish his actions, or at least the motives for his actions, from those of some of the nationalist activists he was involved with. On the other hand, and typical of the man, he writes about an enthralment to the country that would rival the emotions of someone like James Clarence Mangan:
With my Bible and shillelagh I went to the Route [the environs of Ballymoney] to chase […] the spirit of ’98. This spirit, though a potent intoxicant, is not the product of the local distilleries at Bushmills and Coleraine. To define it fully would take a history of Ireland and more than that. It would take one of those flashes of Kathleen Ni Houlihan’s eyes, which have been known to bind even full-blooded Englishmen under a spell for life. To some, these flashes come by way of the mind. To some they come lying out on a Donegal or Connemara mountain by way of – what? the aesthetic sense, a sexual susceptibility to something powerfully female in the Irish earth? Why bother to define it? Especially if, in these disillusioned days, one is almost tempted to suspect that Homer with his tales of Circe and the sirens knew at least as much about it as Yeats with his bean rows and his beehives. Enough to say that to the genuinely spell-struck, it disturbs the knowledge of how many beans make five. It disturbs the balance.55
White’s willingness to court the irrational, the transcendent, is always lurking under the most pragmatic positions he might take. It probably is this that fuels his ready embracing of anarchism, ‘a vital unreason’, in the phrase that George Dangerfield, the English historian, used to describe a related radical strategy, syndicalism.56
Making no mention of his father’s death, White recalls that when he returned to Ireland that he ‘knew little of the history of Ireland, nothing of her current parties and personalities’.57 He must have been reading up on the country around that time, however, because in his first speech on home soil he demonstrated not just a sense of history, in particular about 1798 and the subsequent Act of Union, quoting Lecky among others, but, more significantly, also mentioned Connolly’s writing. This direct reference in the speech appeared to be more for effect rather than of any particular relevance; he quoted Connolly: ‘The English were not yet eight years in Ireland [...] [and] already the Irish were excommunicated for refusing to become slaves.’ 58 White’s speech was given at a meeting in Ballymoney in County Antrim on 24 October 1913. Apart from marking Roger Casement’s Irish political debut and maiden speech, the meeting was an event of some significance because it was an attempt, initiated by White, to demonstrate that there was a substantial opposition to Carson among the Protestants of the north of the country. It is an event forgotten now but of interest and of some pertinence because of the alternative voices it recollects – voices, that is, that acknowledged the very different history of the smaller of the two main islands off the European continent but simultaneously embraced some of the traditions of the larger. A less important note is that White’s recollections confuse parts of his speech with that given by Alice Stopford Green. The pamphlet A Protestant Protest is accepted as the definitive account of the speeches delivered at the meeting.
In attempting to set up this meeting, White met a number of influential people including, in early October 1913, the Liberal Home Ruler, the Reverend J.B. Armour, who, despite his position, appeared to be far more concerned than White with the Lockout in Dublin. White was probably unaware of the crisis at that time. Armour, in a letter to his son, gives his analysis of the strike as a ‘kind of foreword of the future [when] the question before an Irish Parliament will not be Catholicism versus Protestantism –— but labour against capital with a by-play, clericalism versus anti-clericalism’. He follows this with a description of a meeting with White who was mainly concerned about Carson’s sectarianism.