The book has to be seen in the historical context of the political forces then at work: the Home Rule movement, Irish-Ireland, the Ulster situation, Liberalism and Toryism in England, and in particular in Oxford where my father was a student from 1910 to 1912. Having observed the developing threat of civil war, my father then wrote the book rapidly, publishing it in November 1913.

Biographical Sketch

There were six boys and two girls in the family. The elder of the girls died. J.J. was the youngest son. All seven survivors had university education, in most cases with the aid of scholarships. Of J.J.'s five older brothers, three (*)went into the Indian Civil Service; the other two became medical doctors. The education trail led in most cases from Dungannon Royal School to postgraduate work in Oxford, either from Trinity College, Dublin, or from Queen's College Galway.

J.J. came up to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1906 and studied Classics and Ancient History, taking his degree with two(**) large gold medals in 1910. He went on to Oxford and took a second BA degree (in literae humaniores) which was conferred in October 1912.

The environment in Oxford where J.J. was a postgraduate was highly politicised; the debates (1) in Lincoln College and in the Oxford Union were an entry-point into the understanding of the the issues of the time - Home Rule for Ireland being one such, votes for women being another. J.J. supported votes for women in Lincoln College debates. He undoubtedly would have attended Oxford Union debates on Home Rule, addressed by Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and later by Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Irish Unionists but there is no record of his participation. The Lincoln-Balliol political set with which he interacted was decidedly Liberal, even Socialist, and included Lionel Smith-Gordon, who worked subsequently in Plunkett House for the Irish co-operative movement, and G. D. H. Cole, the economic guru of the 1945 Labour Government, who visited J.J. in Ireland in 1946.

A significant influence from the University staff was likely to have been H A L Fisher, whose book, The Republican Tradition in Europe, published by Methuen in 1911, would have been a current discussion topic. Both Fisher and my father were interested in the opportunities presented by the Albert Kahn Foundation(2); J.J., however, upstaged Fisher by winning a Travelling Fellowship in 1914.

J.J. returned to Trinity College Dublin where he sat for the Fellowship examination, becoming a Fellow in 1913. Having achieved this relatively secure position, he felt able to defend Home Rule publicly against the Tory armed conspiracy, the political origins of which he had observed during his period in Oxford. His Civil War in Ulster, published in November 1913, is a polemic against Carson and the Tory leaders who were responsible for the Larne gun-running. He was among the few who appreciated the full destructive significance of this event in its time.

At the time J.J. wrote the book his thinking appears to have been dominated by his Trinity College Dublin (T.C.D.) and Oxford experiences, and he seems to have been only marginally aware of what was going on with nationalists such as Arthur Griffith, Bulmer Hobson and D.P. Moran, and their respective papers Sinn Féin, Irish Freedom and the Leader. His main contact with the world outside T.C.D. was probably with intellectuals like AE (George Russell); also Horace Plunkett and the co-operative movement. J.J. was instrumental in starting a consumer co-op for the supply of groceries to the Trinity students living in rooms, and this aroused the ire of the Dublin traders, as reported in the June 1913 issue of Hobson's Irish Freedom.

After writing the book, and seeing it published, J.J. embarked on a world tour as an Albert Kahn Travelling Fellow(2) which occupied him during 1915, and later in 1916, as the Fellowship procedures were disrupted by the war.

His actions after 1916 were concentrated on attempting to invoke a Canadian model, not unlike what eventually emerged as the Free State. In this context he contributed to the debate in the Liberal press in Britain, via pseudonymous articles in the Manchester Guardian. He also supported developments within Trinity College in which Sinn Féin's objectives could be aired politically (such as in the Thomas Davis Society).(3)

After 1922 his efforts were directed towards attempting to prevent the worst effects of Partition, keeping intellectual contacts in existence between opinion-leaders in both parts of the country, and specifically in attempting to keep alive a co-operative approach to Irish rural economic life, as pioneered before the War of Independence by Horace Plunkett and the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (I.A.O.S.).

His career in the Free State and subsequently in the Republic is for me a continuing research topic, with a future publication in mind. Between his experience and mine, we span the century. This early episode, which set the scene for what followed, forms part of an early chapter. It is worth publishing now because of the contemporary political developments, as part of the case for a positive Protestant role in the development of a multi-cultural Irish nation.

One final note on the family: apart from the older brothers, three(*) of whom were in the Indian Civil Service, the youngest and only sister Anne did a law degree in Trinity College, and entered the civil service in Dublin, pre-1914. She is on record, in the company of Douglas Hyde and others, in the group photograph of the 1912 Ard Fheis of Connradh na Ghaeilge, which is on display in the Hyde museum in Frenchpark. She stayed on in Dublin in the civil service, making her career there. With Thekla Beere and others, she was a founder-member of an Oige, the Youth Hostels Association, in the early 1930s.

So, on the whole, the family tradition was Protestant and Irish, looking to Ireland as its home, as an integrated whole, for which they sought Home Rule, while identifying with the British Empire, which they regarded as heading progressively towards Dominion-type independence.

The Home Rule Movement

Dunraven represented that sector of the landed gentry which identified with and lived in Ireland. His family had been associated with the foundation of St Columba's College, nearly a century earlier, which had been established to teach Irish to the sons of the landed gentry, the better to understand their tenantry. On the platform were William O'Brien M.P., who had launched the All for Ireland League, that year, and Tim Healy K.C. M.P., at one time a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell. The call went out for an all-party conference, to consider a federal system for the whole of the United Kingdom. The Home Rule bill was attacked as being bad financially; everything of any importance was reserved, but it was thought that the Ulster rank and file would accept a wise measure of Home Rule. The Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.) was seen as the enemy: '...must a man, before he dare call himself an Irishman, have a pass from Mr. Devlin?'(4).

In a visit to Dublin on 19 July 1912, Asquith remarked sarcastically that while it was apparently acceptable to the Tory press for '... Sir Edward Carson to go to Belfast, to Dublin and to Cork, breathing fire and slaughter, no member of the responsible Executive may, it would appear, go anywhere or say anything...'. He received a massive welcome and made a robust speech in favour of Home Rule and ridiculing Partition.

He could not help, however, becoming increasingly aware of the way in which the military establishment, in particular Field-Marshall Sir John French (who became Viscount French in 1916, Earl French in 1922, and who in 1914 was CIGS), was briefing the King, and he became more inclined to pay attention to this than to Liberal business interests, including Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilding firm, which supported Home Rule. On 11 August 1913, King George V wrote to Asquith suggesting the Partition of Ireland; again on 22 September he wrote expressing concern at the threat of army officers' disaffection (this would have been the first indications of what became known as the Curragh Mutiny of March 1914). These influences were to insulate Asquith against the arguments of supporters of Home Rule for Ireland.

There is much to done by historians to recapture the full potential of Home Rule for a united Ireland, initially as a partner in the British Empire, but increasingly in a position to assert its independent interest through a Dublin legislature. Parallels with present-day Scotland and Wales need to be teased out. The indications are (5) that, as well as being inclusive of the interests of the Protestant community, it would have offered an environment within which the co-operative movement would have been able to thrive, making the bridge between agricultural and industrial production, and the needs of the consumer, with a democratic control system in charge of economic development. Co-operative literature at that time was full of discussions of this kind, which subsequently could not be realised because of Partition. The consumer co-operative movement was strongest in Belfast, while the movement in what became the Free State was strongest among the producers in Munster.

Ulster and the Larne Gun-running

A Liberal pro-Home Rule meeting in Ballymoney was, however, reported, exceptionally, in full by the North Antrim Standard on 30 October 1913. Elsewhere it received disparaging treatment, with more space given to discrediting it than reporting on what was said. This meeting was a local reflection of the politics which J.J.'s book was aimed to support. The hall seated 400, and only Protestants were admitted, so that it could not be said it was packed by Catholic Home Rulers. It was addressed by Sir Roger Casement (6), by Captain White(7), by Alice Stopford Green(8) and by Alec Wilson J.P., the son of Walter Wilson, a Director of Harland and Wolff. There was a named platform party of some 40 or more of the great and the good: J.P.s, clergy, local councillors from near and far, including the Rev. J. B. Armour(9), J. Goold-Verschoyle, Robert Carson, James Hanna U.D.C., W.D. Hamilton J.P., J.L Taggart J.P.

The meeting passed a resolution protesting '...against the claims of Sir Edward Carson [the leader of the Irish Unionists] and the self-constituted Provisional Government of Ulster to represent the Protestant community of north-east Ulster in the policy they have announced of lawless resistance to the will of the Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland and, further, hereby pledges to offer such opposition as the law permits or enjoins to the arbitrary decrees of an illegal and entirely non-representative body.'

The Ballymoney meeting generated a deputation to Asquith. J.J.'s book would have been targeted at supporting this process. The deputation was reported in the Belfast News Letter of 26 November as including Professor Henry of Queen's University of Belfast, Alec Wilson, David Campbell of the Belfast Trades Council and Captain J. White among others. There is in the Asquith papers a memo from Professor Henry dated 18 November 1913, pointing out that the 'volunteers' opposed to Home Rule were landlords' retainers and dependants; in Saintfield, of 1600 Presbyterians only ten had joined and there was said to be substantial Liberal Home Rule support among Presbyterians. This memo in the Asquith papers is printed but of uncertain origin with marginal scribbles. It must have been part of the documentation of this deputation, which otherwise appears to have left little on record.

There are many indications that the British Establishment was actively conniving at the armed Ulster conspiracy, as a means of undermining a Liberal Government which they considered a threat to the Empire. Consider, for example, the evidence of Sir William Harcourt, a civil servant servicing the Imperial Defence Committee in the period 1911-14, whose papers are accessible in the Bodleian Library. There is simply no reference, at the time it happened, to the Larne gun-running on record at this level; they were more concerned with things like the strategic threat of the then current Channel Tunnel proposal. This is a case of 'the dog that didn't bark'. They knew it was going on, approved of it, and simply put nothing on record.

The treatment of the Home Rule issue at successive Conservative Party conferences:- Leeds 1911, London 1912, Norwich 1913 - shows the intensity of concern increasing. In 1912, there are echoes of the sabre-rattling of the Blenheim call to arms, rising to a peak in 1913, when calls went out for organising armed English volunteer participation, in an atmosphere of hysteria. The Spectator article in the Appendix to this book provides an example of the contemporary 'hype' and was timed to influence the 1913 conference.

The details of how the Larne gun-running was organised, and the political background, as seen from a current Unionist perspective, have been well documented by A.T.Q. Stewart in The Ulster Crisis (Blackstaff 1997). One can only conclude that the Tory conspiracy to prevent Home Rule by arming the Orangemen was the beginning of the end of the Empire that they aspired to defend. If Home Rule had gone through without Ireland being partitioned, the Irish nation would have evolved as a pluralistic participant in the British Empire. The Larne gun-running, however, gave the go-ahead to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) and led to the 1916 Rising in the form it took, with Partition as one of the outcomes. Had there been no 1916, the resistance to the First World War, as expressed in parallel but in different traditions - socialist and republican - of James Connolly(10) and the I.R.B., would have focused on opposition to conscription, which would have been strongly on the agenda by 1918 and which would have been opposed by all people in Ireland, giving rise to a united Protestant and Catholic anti-war national movement, and reviving the potential of 1798 for national-democratic revolution. This Catholic-Protestant unity has tragically, perhaps, begun to rediscover itself in the commemoration of the Irish in the 1914-18 war, as expressed in the memorial at Messen. It would have been more solidly based had unity emerged in opposition to the war.

I have always been appalled by the extent to which the significance of the Larne gun-running was misinterpreted by the I.R.B. in 1914. Besotted as they were with the Fenian tradition of physical force as a 'principle', they welcomed the Larne gun-running uncritically. James Connolly's scathing attacks(10) on this spurious 'philosophical position' were ignored. The I.R.B.'s illusions were however shared by Bulmer Hobson and by Arthur Griffith. Hobson as early as October 1912 was promoting the idea that '...the present campaign in the North ... will turn out beneficial ... drinking in the doctrines of physical force...'; he seemed to think that anti-Redmond Ulster policy would support a 'new Patriot Party'. By May 1914 he was welcoming the Larne gun-running, and saying that '...we must profit by the Carsonite example...'. Griffith in Sinn Féin on 2 May wrote that '...the Ulster Volunteers did well when they violated the English edict..'.

The Larne gun-running was in fact the most evil and destructive act in Irish history of this century, and the Tory Party in Britain, under Balfour's leadership, was to blame for it(11). If it had not taken place, the emergence of a pluralistic Irish nation would have been as peaceful as the emergence of Norway from Swedish domination.

An interesting question raised from studying the Asquith papers is how the Government view was switched, overnight, from fulminating about 'treasonable conspiracy' to concern about the level of customs and import licences. What was in the coded exchange of messages that must have persuaded Asquith to draw in on the 'treasonable conspiracy' approach? Why was the import of arms for the purpose of threatening civil war against the enactments of Parliament merely allowed to subside to the level of a 'customs' matter?

J.J. always regarded the Larne gun-running as one of the factors leading to the start of the First World War. Importing guns by the shipload, in 1914, from Germany? At Tory instigation, and with Imperial Defence Committee connivance? Was this not treasonable? The instigators ended up in the Government, so presumably treason when it succeeds is no longer called by that name.(12)

Civil War in Ulster and its impact

The Dungannon News on 27 November gives an extensive hostile nit-picking review, in which none of the key concepts is picked up. The reviewer is clearly a competent hatchet-wielder, and J.J. gets the attention due to a local who had made good, but had subsequently gone to the dogs. '...What has the Duke of Abercorn ... to gain by shouldering a rifle in defence of the Union?...'. Volunteer triumphalism is hailed as altruistic. He goes on to remark that '...the Donaghmore Nationalists passed a resolution ... that they look to Home Rule to override any local government of which they do not approve...', thus raising the bogey of Catholic nationalist exclusivist politics, as promulgated in papers like the Leader(13). The Dungannon News gave short shrift to the October Ballymoney Liberal rally, and they must have felt it necessary to nip in the bud any support for this position which might be generated by local sales of J.J.'s book. Despite this, I have handled a tattered copy in a Tyrone Protestant farmhouse, in recent years.

We are not able to rewrite history, but we can draw conclusions from it, and in situations where nations are emerging, try to set up processes to support their emergence without violence. In a global situation where world wars are becoming 'unaffordable', there are increasingly resources available for the avoidance of minor wars, and these need to be deployed, with good advance warning, in such a way as to avoid the type of situation which has occurred in post-Yugoslavia, and in the many African States where the boundaries were defined under various imperial systems.

If my father's 1914 book turns out to be of any use in helping to define the background to studies of such situations, as well as in the current Irish situation, this re-publishing will have been doubly worth while.

Coda

Notes and References: