This idea of two nations in Ireland is to us revolting and hateful. The idea of our agreeing to the partition of our nation is unthinkable. We want the union in Ireland of all creeds, of all classes, of all races, and we would resist most violently as far as it is within our power to do so … the setting up or [sic] permanent dividing lines between one creed and another and one race and another.20
Asquith knew the Irish Parliamentary Party was as reliant on the Liberal Party as the Liberal Party was reliant on the Irish Party. By late 1913, as civil war in Ireland was threatened with unionists and nationalists forming military groups, great pressure was put on Redmond and his deputy leader, John Dillon, to compromise on Ulster. The Irish Parliamentary Party declared itself open to the concept of the Home Rule of Ulster within the Home Rule of Ireland. This was considered totally unacceptable by Carson. Asquith then pressured Redmond to agree to a temporary exclusion, but ‘the permanent exclusion of Ulster he [Redmond] would not however consider for a moment’.21 ‘In early March [1914] the proposals were formulated: individual Ulster counties might opt for exclusion for a period of three years, after which they would automatically come under the jurisdiction of the Irish Parliament.’22 Within days, Redmond was informed by Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary of Ireland, that the exclusion period needed to be doubled from three to six years.23 Birrell, realising from 1912 that the Ulster Unionists’ ‘yells are genuine’, delayed dealing with the Ulster conundrum until 1914.24 Cardinal Michael Logue, the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, had little optimism for the future and perceptively wrote:
I fear the concessions on the Home Rule Bill will be a bad business for us in this part of the North. It will leave us more than ever under the heel of the Orangemen. Worst of all it will leave them free to tamper with our education. I don’t think we have seen the last of the concessions.25
With the concessions agreed by the Irish Parliamentary Party, partition in some form was almost a certainty, and ‘What was now alone at issue was how much of Ulster and for how long’.26 Birrell and members of the British administration in Dublin Castle looked at a number of different options for partition based on divisions of counties, rural districts or poor law unions. These options could have seen the exclusion of roughly five counties of Ulster.27 Redmond was adamant that exclusion would be temporary; Carson threatened forceful resistance unless exclusion was permanent and insisted that unionists did not want ‘a stay of execution for six years’.28 The unionist reaction angered the British government, who were further perturbed by the Curragh Mutiny in March 1914. Aware of the anti-Home Rule sentiments of Arthur Paget, Commander-in-Chief of the British army in Ireland, around sixty officers in the Curragh military camp, under the leadership of Brigadier General Hubert Gough, threatened to resign if they were asked to use force on Ulster to enforce Home Rule. Gough claimed that ‘if it came to civil war … I would fight for Ulster rather than against her’.29 Soon after this, the gunrunner Fred Crawford, under orders from the Ulster Unionist Council, landed 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition in Larne, Donaghdee and Bangor on the night of 24–25 April. Fanning contends that ‘the Larne gun running made it almost impossible for the Unionist leaders to agree to any settlement short of the permanent exclusion of at least the six north-eastern counties of Ulster’.30 Both incidents also made the British government more nervous and eager to reach a solution. As the country spiralled towards civil war, King George V, a keen supporter of Ulster’s exclusion from Home Rule, intervened and called a conference of the main parties in Buckingham Palace in July 1914. The conference saw no solution, with Redmond seeking temporary exclusion for counties looking to opt out of Home Rule and Carson seeking permanent exclusion of all of Ulster.31 Carson originally wanted a ‘clean cut’ for all of Ulster, arguing ‘that the exclusion of the whole province, with its large Catholic minority, was the best guarantee of eventual Irish unity’.32 According to Eamon Phoenix, at the Buckingham Palace conference:
Carson revealed his ‘irreducible minimum’: the proposition that a six-county bloc, the area which was later to comprise Northern Ireland, should be precluded permanently from the operation of the Home Rule Act. Though firmly repudiated by the Nationalist leaders, this was a portentous development in the evolution of the partition debate. Among Ulster Unionists, it marked the beginning of a rethink which, in subordinating principle to pragmatism, sought to salvage the maximum possible area from the operation of Home Rule, whilst projecting an image of ‘reasonableness’ in the eyes of the British public.33
Civil war in Ireland was averted by another war – namely, the First World War, which was, according to Asquith, a case of ‘cutting off one’s head to get rid of a headache’.34 Once the war started, the Irish question no longer retained the dominance it once held in British politics. Most politicians in Britain wanted to be rid of the issue. Home Rule was put on the statute book with two important provisos: ‘On the one hand, a Suspensory Bill stipulated that the Home Rule Act would not come into operation until the end of the war; secondly, parliament had the Prime Minister’s assurance that special provision must be made for Protestant Ulster.’35 The Irish question was ignored but not completely forgotten about during the war. Fanning states:
Forty years after its foundation as a separate party [the Irish Parliamentary Party], its members appeared to have achieved their goal and yet they had nothing to show for it: no parliament to set up in Dublin, no offices to fill, no patronage to dispense, no trappings of power to cover their importance in the vortex of a war that sucked up all political energy for four long years.36
Redmond and the Irish Party supported the war effort, but when an opportunity presented itself for Redmond to serve in a national government cabinet created in 1915, he declined. ‘Bonar Law and Carson accepted … Unionists, as a result, found themselves at the centre of government; Irish party influence, meanwhile, soon began to dip’.37 From then until 1921–22, British government policy on Ireland was decided by a coalition government, with strong unionist representation.
The crisis caused by the Easter Rising in 1916 saw Irish Home Rule become an issue once again. Just months after the rising was quashed, Asquith tasked Lloyd George with initiating negotiations to implement the Home Rule Act ‘at the earliest practicable moment’.38 Lloyd George negotiated separately with Redmond and Carson, telling the former the exclusion of six counties of Ulster would be temporary, telling the latter their exclusion would be permanent. Carson secured the support of the Ulster Unionist Council for the proposals.39 Despite fierce opposition from nationalists, particularly from clergy members of the Catholic Church and nationalists from what would become the border counties in west and south Ulster, Redmond and the leading Irish Parliamentary Party member from Belfast, Joseph Devlin, secured the backing of Ulster nationalists for the proposals at a conference on 23 June 1916 by 475 to 265 votes.40 The vote revealed ‘a broad dichotomy in the body politic, between a pragmatic east Ulster wing, strongly identified with Joe Devlin, and a stridently anti-partitionist west Ulster alignment’.41 Once Lloyd George’s duplicity was revealed and Redmond was informed that the exclusion of six counties of Ulster would be permanent, he, outmanoeuvred once again, rejected the proposals.42 Lloyd George’s proposals were also vehemently opposed by southern unionists, championed by a member of the war cabinet, Walter Long, on the grounds that ‘it would divert the attention of the government and Parliament from the war to complicated and extremely controversial proposals relating to Ireland’.43 The attempts in 1916 were telling in demonstrating the British government’s firm commitment to the permanent exclusion of much of Ulster from Home Rule, particularly with Lloyd George steering government policy on Ireland, as he would continue to do, once he became prime minister in December 1916. The attempts of 1916 comprised yet another blow for Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose popularity was in terminal decline due to its continued support of the war and its perceived humiliating concession after concession in accepting some form of partition. John Dillon conceded in December 1918 that the 1916 negotiations ‘struck a deadly blow at the Irish Party and, since then, [it] has been going downhill at an ever-accelerated pace’.44
The next time an attempt was made to solve the Irish question was in 1917, with the formation of the Irish Convention in July 1917,