The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 Read Online Free PDF Page A

rights as citizens of the United Kingdom and declared their intention to ‘defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland’ and refuse to recognise it should it be established. Over 200,000 women signed a declaration expressing similar sentiments [Doc. 2] . The covenant was signed throughout Ulster on 28 September 1912, which was declared as Ulster Day (Buckland, 1973: 45–67).
    The unionist strategy was successful in highlighting the cause of Ulster and eventually ensuring that home rule would need to be modified to accommodate unionist opposition. The first suggestion of making some form of separate provision for Ulster arose in June 1912 when a Liberal backbencher, T. G. Agar-Robartes, proposed an amendment that would have excluded the four counties with Protestant majorities – Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down. While unionists opposed the idea of partition initially, they were prepared to use the threat of it as a tactic to destroy home rule, in the belief that the IPP would accept nothing less than home rule for all of Ireland. However, by 1914, the home rule bill was entering the final stages of its passage having survived two defeats in the Lords, and both unionists and the government came to realise that the only solution to the Ulster crisis was excluding a part of Ulster from home rule.
    In March 1914 Asquith announced that those Ulster counties which chose to do so could remain outside the workings of home rule, a solution which satisfied neither side in Ireland, with Edward Carson describing it as a death sentence with a six-year stay of execution. There was an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate the area of Ulster that would be excluded at the Buckingham Palace Conference in June 1914. The counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone, which had Catholic majorities, proved to be insurmountable obstacles. The government’s ability to impose any solution without a compromise was made increasingly difficult when sections of the British Army based at the Curragh in County Kildare indicated that they would not be prepared to quell any uprising in Ulster against the imposition of home rule. Although often referred to as the Curragh Mutiny , no direct orders were disobeyed, but the incident was a further boost to unionist resistance and made a compromise on Ulster more likely (Laffan, 1983: 19–48).
    Curragh Mutiny: Threat by Irish officers in the British Army stationed at the Curragh in County Kildare to resign their commissions rather that use force against Ulster during the home rule crisis in March 1914.
    Should parliamentary and propagandist tactics fail to defeat home rule, unionists were prepared to resort to violence to protect their interests, asevidenced by the formation of the paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) , in January 1913. This force, which had an estimated membership of 110,000 by mid-1914, enjoyed the support of unionist political leaders, as well as prominent business magnates and senior British Army officers. The seriousness of its intentions was made clear in April 1914 when a large consignment of arms and ammunition was imported into Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee in the Larne gun-running (Bowman, 2007: 1, 142).
    Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) : A paramilitary force formed in Ulster in January 1913 to resist home rule by force, many of whose members were killed in the First World War.
    The formation and arming of the Ulster unionists served as an example to nationalists in the south, who formed their own Irish Volunteer Force in November 1913. Recruitment was slow initially with an estimated 10,000 enlisting in the final two months of 1913. This figure progressed steadily throughout the first half of 1914, inspired by the Larne gun-running and Asquith’s vacillation on the inclusion of Ulster in home rule. However, it was not until the summer of that year, when John Redmond succeeded in taking control of the organisation to ensure it did not derail the implementation