Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

Edmund Purtill had contributed his shillings seemed to be coming to fruition. The Irish Party held the balance of power in Westminster and Home Rule was the price of their support for the government.* The possibility of nationalist advancement provoked a furious reaction from northern unionists whose response was to threaten civil war. They were encouraged by the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law. His words are worth remembering, coming as they did from the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. In July 1912 he told a rally at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’. This was no rush of blood to the head. A year later, on 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, Bonar Law again threatened treason when he told Ulster Protestants: ‘Whatever steps you may feel compelled to take, whether they are constitutional, or whether in the long run they are unconstitutional, you have the whole Unionist Party, under my leadership, behind you.’3 The Tory leader knew he was adding fuel to the growing fire. Anti-Home Rule agitation had a bloody history. When the first Home Rule bill was introduced in 1886 around fifty people were killed in Belfast, hundreds injured and scores of homes burned. In addition, Bonar Law and the government were well aware that the Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1912, were arming and drilling to fight Home Rule.

      I doubt that my relatives in Ballydonoghue thought much about the north before then. It was far away on a long train journey or by miles of bad roads. But the rise of the Ulster Volunteers electrified separatists in the south. They watched the British state do nothing to stop the import of weapons by the UVF. If the Ulster Protestants could have a militia to fight Home Rule the Irish nationalists should have an equal right to defend it. The formation of the Irish Volunteers in late 1913 created a second private army on the island. That December, in Listowel, the first meeting of the Irish Volunteers heard Mr J. J. McKenna, a local merchant, urge the locals to follow the example set by the Unionist leader, Edward Carson: ‘He has been going around so far preaching what some called sedition,’ said McKenna. ‘At all events he had been preaching the rights of the people of the North to defend what he called their rights, but whether they were rights or whether they were wrongs, he was urging on them to defend them in the way that God intended.’4 Another speaker said the Irish Volunteers wanted ‘no informers … no cads or cadgers [but] true, manly men’.5 Afterwards men and boys queued to place their right hand on the barrel of a gun and swear allegiance.

      From the outset the Irish Volunteers meant different things to different factions. The Home Rulers led by Parnell’s successor John Redmond wanted a force ready to defend the new devolved government when it came into being and hoped the drilling and marching would take some of the steam out of more militant nationalists. But the militants were ahead of him and gradually infiltrated the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Republican Brotherhood – the IRB – sought complete independence rather than Home Rule within the empire.* Separatist ideas in culture and sport had been growing since the end of the previous century.

      In the rural areas like north Kerry the appeal to ‘de-Anglicise Ireland’ provoked a strong response. Music, dancing and language lessons sponsored by the Gaelic League became popular.*