158 Nationality, 23 June 1917, 8 September 1917, 3 November 1917, 17 November 1917, 8 December 1917, 10 August 1918, 5 October 1918.
159 Arthur Griffith (ed.), The Resurrection of Hungary with appendices on Pitt’s policy and Sinn Féin (3rd edition, Dublin, 1918), preface, xii.
2
A Republican Moment:
Ireland’s Independence
Struggle in a Global Context,
1919–1922
Sinn Féin’s pro-American take on international relations was intended to capitalise upon the development of a political lobby group in the United States known as the Friends of Irish Freedom. This raised the possibility of Ireland’s case being presented before the US Houses of Congress.1 The fact that the United States was the only western power to respond positively to Pope Benedict XV’s call for universal peace in August 1917 also found an appreciative audience in Ireland.2 In an address to Pope Benedict, US President Woodrow Wilson stated that the United States believed that ‘peace should rest upon the rights of peoples … their equal right to freedom and security and self-government, and to participation, upon fair terms, in the economic opportunities of the world’. During its triumph in the 1918 parliamentary elections, Sinn Féin cited this remark as evidence that ‘our sentiments are in keeping with the greatest organised opinion of mankind – that is, republican opinion’.3 Neither the US president nor the Pope evidently mentioned Ireland when they met in Rome just prior to the initial meeting of Dáil Éireann.4 Nevertheless, the members of this Irish parliamentary assembly, which was established unilaterally in the wake of the 1918 elections, adopted the stance of appealing to a universal and pacifist body of public opinion that, it was expected, was watching closely the course of Anglo-Irish relations, and to whom it was trusted that the Dáil’s appointed consular representatives were making an effective case. These Dáil consuls focused particularly on the two republican powers in international relations, namely America and France. Indeed, no other countries tended to be mentioned in the Dáil’s parliamentary debates.5
Historically, the idea that a set of egalitarian republican values existed and were likely to find support through a kind of universal brotherhood of man had been romanticised by many European artists ever since the days of Ludwig van Beethoven. On an intellectual level, however, this idea had often been associated with the cult of freemasonry.6 In the Irish case, this had been evident in the historic examples of the United Irishmen and the Fenians once they became secret societies. By the twentieth century, however, a desire to emphasise the greater role of Catholicism in protecting religious and intellectual liberties had become an issue in Irish politics. Reflecting this, in the wake of the 1916 Rising, Sinn Féin typified freemasonry as now being on the side of perpetual warfare, military intrigues and controlled medias that were spreading falsehoods about international relations.7 It welcomed the fact that Russia was responsible for exposing a secret Anglo-French agreement to pervert the Pope’s calls for peace, and that the proposal of Alexander Kerensky for holding plebiscites on all questions of national independence ‘was that substantially made by Sinn Fein’.8 Be that as it may, Sinn Féin generally saw the entire Russian revolution as but an episode in the many military intrigues surrounding the First World War. Therefore, it drew its hope almost entirely from Woodrow Wilson’s dismissal of great power, or ‘balance of power’, politics as a ‘great game, now forever discredited’.9 This was reflected by Sinn Féin’s 1918 general election literature. This included a collection of Wilson’s speeches entitled Self-Determination and the Rights of Small Nations; a reprint of the American Declaration of Independence alongside various historic and contemporary expressions of Ireland’s desire for political independence entitled The Case of Ireland Restated; and a publication by a Protestant Irish Christian-democratic thinker entitled Towards the Republic: a Study of New Ireland’s Social and Political Aims.10 The theme of the latter publication by Aodh de Blacam was designed to reflect the fact that an American Catholic cardinal had recently noted that ‘it is my impression that the strong confirmation of the Holy See of the old American principle will give a new impetus to civil liberty the whole wide world over.’11
The material and economic basis of the Irish independence struggle was shaped largely by First World War circumstances. British trade between Britain and Ireland (about £100 million a year) had been greater than British trade with any independent country in the world, with the single exception of the United States, and was also greater than British trade with France and Germany combined.12 For the duration of the war, exports from Ireland to Britain grew to the level of a positive balance of trade and this probably served to boost Sinn Féin confidence. However, German submarine warfare led the British War Office, amidst food shortages caused by decreased shipping, to make the unpopular decision that Irish food exports to Britain should now operate exclusively via Belfast.13 This helped to sink support for the old Irish Party at Westminster, prompting some of its supporters in either academia or business to embrace Sinn Féin’s re-imagining of the Atlantic economy.14 Albeit for only a three-year period, this led to a very perceptible increase in writings on international relations within the Irish Jesuit journal Studies, which was published by University College Dublin (UCD).
Sinn Féin emphasised the degree to which America’s entry into the war and the war itself had been economically motivated.15 Nevertheless, the writings of Alfred Mahan, a founder of the US Naval College, were cited as providing very valuable lessons for Ireland as to why all islands and maritime nations must rely on international trade for their prosperity.16 Unlike the British Navy League, Sinn Féin argued that there was no logical reason why the principle of the freedom of the seas should not apply to Ireland and allow for the development of its west coast ports as a home for international trade.17 This served to revive a debate that had been silent since the 1860s regarding the potential role of the Atlantic economy in boosting Irish nationalism. Arthur Griffith suggested that the ‘real test of the freedom of the seas’ was the degree to which the international community allowed this to happen.18 In this campaign, Sinn Féin found an ally in the Irish Industrial Development Association (IDA). From Cork, it claimed to have received thousands of business queries from every part of the globe, but it had hitherto been unable to respond to any of them because of the British legal restriction on separate Irish trade agreements.19 With the support of the IDA, Henry Ford, an Irish American businessman, had long intended to establish an agricultural machinery factory in Cork as a base from which to export to a European market, but this project faced considerable British opposition.20