Erskine Childers, a Liberal Party imperial theorist, not only supported this Irish Party stance but also offered his assistance in defining it; a move that the party welcomed. Redmond was currently promoting the idea that Ireland’s great destiny in the new twentieth century was to work with the diplomatic channels of the Catholic Church to assist in the better development of Anglo-American relations for the greater good of the British Empire worldwide.9 Reflecting this, Childers championed what he described as ‘the political Liberalism of the Church’. This was not a reference to liberalism, but rather the extent to which Rome was prepared to support this thrust of British foreign policy.10 Childers admitted that the Irish Party’s politics did not allow for any strategic economic thinking or planning specifically for Ireland, as the ‘Irish members [of parliament] have not the elementary motives for advocating economy or even sufficient motive for far-seeing and constructive statesmanship on Irish matters’. Furthermore, ‘the large majority are conscious of this fact…The mental habit of Ireland is to look outside her own borders for financial doles and grants and to completely disassociate expenditure from revenue.’11 From the British point of view, this was the inevitable positive result of Liberal government policy regarding Ireland ever since Gladstone’s imperial treasury reforms of the mid-nineteenth century.12
Ignoring the original terms of the Act of Union between the Three Kingdoms, Childers was absolutely categorical in defining Ireland as a colony (‘we must build on trust or we must build on sand’) and maintained that this was why the Irish Party must be supported.13 He also noted that the justification for the idea of colonial home rule was ‘a very old one and a very well-tried one in the history of the Empire’; namely ‘to throw on a people the responsibility for their own fortunes’ to help them ‘understand the extent of its own powers and limitations’. Childers believed that this was the best way to encourage the Irish, of their own accord, to eventually mature from their present status as a colonised inferior race into becoming true imperialists that realised that the economic interests of Ireland’s ‘mother country’, Great Britain, were the greatest safeguards of liberty in the modern world.14
Griffith’s differences with Childers were fundamental on an economic level. He believed that not unless Irishmen had the power to formulate an economic policy purely in Ireland’s interests, even if this was sometimes contrary to Britain’s, ‘we must remain poor and powerless’:
This condition of affairs renders our position unique in Europe. The study of economics with a view to their application to our needs and wants has never been encouraged in the Ireland which gave a father to modern political economy in Cantillon15 … Since Isaac Butt was Professor of Economics in Trinity College seventy years ago the national application of this half-science has been neglected in Ireland.16
All MPs accepted equally that the impact of British foreign policy developments on the imperial treasury’s policy regarding Ireland must necessarily be accepted perpetually. This meant that for all intents and purposes (public posturing notwithstanding) all Irish Protestant ‘loyalists’ essentially held the exact same political perspective as the Catholic Irish Party. This was reflected by the fact that Irish Tories were now abandoning the Buttite idea that Ireland was still technically a distinct political and economic entity under the original terms of the Act of Union.17 Tom Kettle generally emphasised the significance of the fact that David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, was envisioning creating a costly new social welfare system and was even prepared to consider limiting the vetoing power of the opposing House of Lords to facilitate this. The Tories were unenthusiastic about this idea. However, both the Liberals and the Tories were naturally wholly united regarding the long-feared threat of German naval supremacy; a threat which had now become a reality and needed to be provided against financially. As a result, from the winter of 1910 onwards, the sole determinant of British governmental policy regarding Ireland became to maximise the potential Irish contribution to the costs of British imperial defence and, in particular, the exigencies of a seemingly necessary (and covert) British war mobilisation (a development that Griffith would later claim had already been underway, in the expectation of an Anglo-German War, as early as 1907).18
The disputes regarding Lloyd George’s proposed budget led to the holding of a second British general election during 1910, which saw the balance of power virtually unchanged in the House of Commons. It resulted in a significant shift in political debate regarding Ireland, however. Earlier that year, Griffith had judged that Sinn Féin had no need to contest the elections and that Redmond’s unwillingness to support William O’Brien in opposing a budget that clearly could cripple Ireland financially must be politically damning for the Irish Party. In turn, Griffith expected the birth of a tradition among Irish politicians of engaging in strategic economic thinking or planning specifically for Ireland.19 However, that winter the British treasury claimed—in a complete turnaround from figures revealed earlier that year 20—that a very serious deficit now existed in the Irish contribution to the Imperial Exchequer which needed to be remedied and that this alone had to become the basis of all considerations of future political initiatives regarding Ireland. This announcement was made simultaneously with Prime Minister Asquith’s sudden declaration than he intended to introduce a ‘Government of Ireland Bill’ a year hence based entirely upon this principle of fiscal management.
To Griffith’s dismay, the Irish Party accepted these claims uncritically. In turn, the idea was touted to create Irish volunteer forces for the sake of the British war effort. Hobson’s creation of a new IRB journal Irish Freedom was one response to this trend.21 Its most significant manifestation, however, was Childers’ recommendation to the British government the raising of Irish Volunteers, such as were already being publicly advocated in Ulster, precisely because the treasury had now supposedly proven beyond doubt that Ireland was ‘costing more to govern than it subscribes in revenue and therefore contributing nothing in money to the expenses of the army, navy and national debt’ at a most critical time. Childers also suggested that such Irish Volunteers should be maintained perpetually until such time as ‘the return of Ireland to the position of a contributing member of the Imperial partnership’ was made feasible, however long that may take.22
To justify the Liberal Party’s stance on Irish finances, Childers was highly critical of past Irish Tory calls for increasing public expenditure in Ireland. He argued that it was an intolerable disgrace that the extraordinary poverty of Ireland was forcing Britain to pay out more money on insurance and old-age pension benefits than could reasonably be expected, as well as to subsidise by means of what he typified as a kind of ‘state socialism’ bodies such as the Congested Districts Board.23 To put an end to this waste of British money, Childers, who had an invincible faith in Gladstonian fiscal doctrine, claimed that it was self-evident truth that ‘the growth of the Liberal [Party] principle of government as applied to the outlying portions of the British Empire…support the principle of home rule for Ireland’ along a definitely colonial line, akin to South Africa, Malta, Jamaica, Newfoundland or New Zealand. A federal solution akin to the dominion constitutions of Canada or Australia must necessarily be ruled out for all time because Ireland’s close proximity to Britain would mean creating a new United Kingdom federation of parliaments purely for the benefit of the Irish, which was an absurd notion. Therefore, a colonial government linked to the United Kingdom by means of a form of external association was, in his view, the best solution for the Empire.24
In response to this British debate, Griffith was alive to the seeming impossibility of creating federal parliaments for the United Kingdom.25 This was why he had argued in favour of a return to a debate on the original terms of the Union and, in particular, the principle of Anglo-Irish equality, stemming from the Irish constitution of 1783, that it embodied.26