The Church paved the way for the republican victory in Ireland’s 1918 general election, writes Gabriel Doherty
As turning points in Irish history go, the ‘conscription crisis’ that enveloped Ireland a century ago in the spring of 1918 was perhaps second only to the Easter Rising in terms of its impact upon public sentiment and political alignments during the ‘Great War’ of 1914-8.
It began at a time when it appeared as if the increased support commanded by the republican separatist constituency since the Rising might have reached a plateau some way short of dominance; by the time it had run its course, the same republican cause was set fair for its overwhelming electoral victory in the General Election held in December of the same year.
The immediate cause of the proposal to apply compulsory military service to Ireland was the breakthrough on the Western Front achieved by German forces during their ‘Spring Offensive’ of March 21-23.
This, in turn, was attributable to the effective collapse of the Russian army on the Eastern Front the previous year (a collapse that was part cause and part consequence of the Bolshevik revolution), which allowed Germany to focus all of its – by then hugely depleted – resources for an all-out assault in the West.
Allied with the German offensive were the monumental losses the French and British Armies had experienced since the beginning of the war, with the recent slaughter experienced by the latter at Passchendaele merely the most recent of a seemingly unending list of engagements as costly in human life as they had been practically fruitless in military terms.
Scale
The scale of the German breakthrough meant that the Allies became engaged in a desperate race against time, as they sought to slow down the Germans sufficiently to give time for the large number of American troops then in training or en route to France to arrive and reinforce their own pitifully thin forces.
In this situation the London Government proposed to extend to Ireland the conscription regime that had initially been introduced in Britain via the Military Service Act of 1916.
Even had there been no domestic opposition to the plan, in military terms the suggestion had little obvious merit – for clearly it would take time that the Government did not have to admit large numbers of young Irishmen into the army, train them to the requisite standard, and ship them to France.
And opposition there certainly was – fuelled not least by the widely-held suspicion that the Government’s principal motive in proposing conscription was not to augment its armed forces, but to remove from Ireland’s scene the cadre of disaffected young men who had been flocking into the Irish Volunteers since that force had been reactivated following the release at the end of 1916 of those interned after the Rising.
It is important to appreciate the scope of this opposition to the proposal, for it consisted of four of the most significant elements of Irish life at the time.
Politically speaking, the running in the campaign was made by Sinn Féin, officially a republican separatist organisation since its Ard Fheis the previous October. Its senior echelons were comprised of those who had consistently opposed the war since its outbreak, and (over a longer period) even voluntary recruitment into the British army, so it was entirely logical for the party to come out very strongly against the conscription proposal.
More difficult was the position of the home rule party, which had lost its long-time leader, John Redmond, only a few weeks before.
His successor, the veteran John Dillon, found it all but impossible to reconcile the party’s opposition to conscription with its consistent support for voluntary recruitment into an army that was fighting a war that was purportedly being conducted, in words used by Redmond at the outset of the conflict, in “defence of right, of freedom and of religion”.
Ever since that call to arms, and as a direct consequence of the horrendous losses suffered by the British Army since the advent of trench warfare on the Western front in late 1914 and the Gallipoli fiasco in 1915, the party had been in near-constant retreat against separatist forces for control of Irish nationalism.
The simultaneous collapse of the Irish Convention as a result of the rifts opened up by the conscription proposal marked the end of the party’s last chance (albeit a slim one) to deliver on its historic goal of Home Rule for the whole of the Ireland, while the last vestiges of its long-standing association with the Liberal party were also dissolved.
Complications
The labour movement came out forcefully against conscription, which was not surprising as many of its members stood to be among those forcibly enlisted into the British Army. The position was complicated, however, by the existence of an Ulster unionist working class membership whose loyalism could not be ignored (although even, perhaps especially, in its Belfast heartlands the scale of wartime losses had hit such communities very hard indeed).
In addition, certain sectors of the union movement had done very well out of the war – perhaps most obviously the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, so comprehensively crushed in the Great Lockout of 1913, but which now enjoyed a crucial position at the heart of the strategically-vital railway network. Just how effective this industrial weapon could be if unsheathed was demonstrated by the success of the one-day General Strike against conscription on April 23, which paralysed the economy over most of the island.
And so to the Church, the fourth element in the equation, and in many respects the crucial one. The various Protestant denominations came out in support of the proposal (albeit rather unenthusiastically), but the Catholic Church emphatically aligned itself with the anti-conscription cause.
This was a strikingly different situation from the early months of the war, when a significant proportion of the hierarchy and clergy had spoken out in favour of voluntary recruitment.
Even at this high point of enthusiasm, however, there had been no unanimity on the issue, and neither of the two most important figures within the hierarchy, Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin, and Cardinal Michael Logue of Armagh (both of whom shared a low opinion of Redmond), publicly called for voluntary recruitment into the army.
The burial, on August 1, 1915, of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, with the veteran Fenian having been accorded full church obsequies in St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, marked an important shift in the Church’s position regarding the republican separatist cause it had historically condemned.
Even though Archbishop Walsh himself did not preside over the requiem Mass, the mere fact that he allowed the most hardline Fenian of them all to be given a Church funeral (something denied to some of Rossa’s Fenian contemporaries), whilst rejecting requests for similar access to the pro-cathedral for the small number of Great War casualties who had died after being returned to Ireland, was a clear signal that the tide of opinion within the Church was turning fast, even at the elite level.
This change continued apace after the 1916 Rising, which was led by many of those who had organised the O’Donovan Rossa funeral, and/or, like Pearse, had had prior dealings with Archbishop Walsh, even though a small number of bishops publicly condemned the event in the immediate aftermath of its failure.
Again, neither Walsh nor Logue were to be counted among their number, though both privately were very critical – but in an era when bishops were expected to speak out forcibly on matters of public concern, this relative passivity was itself capable of favourable interpretation by republicans.
Request
Further, the fact that it was the Bishop of Limerick who was the first major figure to speak out on behalf of those who had been ‘out’ in 1916, while contemptuously rejecting the request/demand from General Maxwell that he restrain republican-minded priests in his diocese, opened the floodgates for those whose sympathies were with the ‘rebels’, but who had been afraid to speak out while the post-Rising coercion was on-going.
For the 18 months or so between the Rising and the conscription crisis this rapprochement between the republicans and the institutional Church continued apace – though Cardinal Logue, in particular, found the rise of Sinn Féin as a vehicle for whole-hearted republicanism impossible to stomach.
(In November 1917, having spoken out against the “ill-considered and Utopian” agitation sponsored by the party, he found himself on the receiving end of a riposte from Eamon de Valera that cited the late Pope Leo XIII to the effect that the Church did not “condemn those who, if it can be done without violation of justice, wish to make their country independent of any foreign or despotic power”.)
The death, and funeral, of Thomas Ashe – which outdid even that of O’Donovan Rossa in size and magnificence – further consolidated this process of reconciliation, all the more when Archbishop Walsh publicly associated himself with the event by allowing his carriage to take its place in the cortege.
And thus to the conscription crisis itself. On April 9 1918 the Government introduced a bill at Westminster that (in addition to other provisions) extended the Military Service Act to Ireland, and promised that a home rule bill would accompany same – a proposal on which even the outraged Home Rule MPs present in the Chamber poured scorn. By doing so it unleashed a veritable tsunami of anger in Ireland that threatened, not only to scupper the proposal, but to undermine the very foundations of British rule in the country.
Literally hundreds of protest meetings took place over the following weeks, with Sinn Féin and Church figures prominently placed on podiums, and with such home rulers as could be found seated as inconspicuously as possible – where the assembled crowds tolerated their presence at all.
The fact that in the initial draft of the scheme younger members of the clergy would be liable for service seemed to indicate that the Government had abandoned all concern for even moderate Catholic opinion in Ireland and gave succour to those who interpreted the Government’s actions as being motivated by political rather than military considerations.
The hierarchy’s standing committee, with Cardinal Logue at its head, responded the day after the Government’s move by releasing a statement that described the plans as “unwarrantable” and a “fatal mistake”, which would exceed and compound all the mistakes made since the start of the conflict. The communique concluded with a warning to Government “against entering upon a policy so disastrous to the public interest, and to all order, public and private”.
It was the events of Thursday April 18, however, that better expressed the juncture of clerical, lay and secular opposition to the Government’s plans. At Dublin’s Mansion House a meeting of leaders from Sinn Féin, the Irish party, the All-for-Ireland League (a small, largely Cork-based nationalist group) and the Irish trades union movement endorsed the taking of a pledge “solemnly to one another to resist conscription by the most effective means at our disposal”.
They then travelled to Maynooth, to meet and discuss the situation with the hierarchy, which had themselves just met and passed a resolution that described the proposal as “oppressive and inhuman”, and one “which the Irish people have a right to resist by all the means that are consonant with the law of God” – a formulation, of course, that could allow for the breaking of the civil law in certain circumstances. This pledge was administered at Masses the following Sunday, and was accompanied by a national collection to fund a campaign of resistance.
As things transpired such resistance did not become necessary. The German advance was halted in early July, and, exhausted, the forces went into a headlong retreat that was only halted by the armistice – in effect the surrender – of November 11.
Arrests
The British Government, therefore, had incurred all the odium of proposing compulsory service in Ireland, added to which were the widespread arrests without charge of leading republicans during the ‘German Plot’ crackdown in May, without adding a single soldier to the ranks of its armed forces – although, interestingly, levels of voluntary recruitment in Ireland increased significantly during the concluding months of hostilities.
The support afforded to the anti-conscription campaign by the institutional Church, from its highest levels down, unquestionably benefitted the republican cause, as the tensions between it and the Church that had been so evident during the Fenian times all but disappeared (at least publicly) during these spring weeks – with the Home Rule party the obvious casualty of this process of conciliation.
The cause of republican separatism in Ireland had received, if not an imprimatur from the hierarchy, at least a nihil obstat. For many Catholic voters this removed any lingering doubt they may have had with regard to the bona fides of Sinn Féin, and thus opened up the path for the party to achieve its stunning victory in the General Election at the end of the year.
Gabriel Doherty teaches in the School of History, University College Cork. A member of the national Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations, he has edited a number of books of essays on 20th-Century Irish history, including The Home Rule Crisis, 1912-1914 and (with Dermot Keogh) 1916: The Long Revolution.