Jamie O'Neill / At Swim, Two Boys / resources / Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook

Home Rule was the long-sought goal of the constitutionalist strand in Irish nationalism, as signified by the Irish Parliamentary Party: that Britain would grant a limited independence to Ireland, in return for Ireland's continuance in the United Kingdom. The term was first used in the 1860s. It envisaged an Irish legislature with responsibility for solely domestic affairs, while the imperial parliament at Westminster would continue to have responsibility for wider imperial business (such as wars and revenue) – something akin to what Wales enjoys now.

It's hard to evoke now the great terror and excitement that the cry of Home Rule brought about in mid-Victorian Britain. It wasn't just the break-up of the United Kingdom that was feared, but the dreaded concommitant of an Empire's disintegration. Neither of the two great parties in Britain at the time, the Conservatives and the Liberals, was ever much in favour. The Conservatives were positively against; and they allied themselves with the Unionists (anti-Home Rulers) in Ireland to oppose its introduction, and renamed themselves the Conservative and Unionist Party. The Liberals, under Gladstone, did introduce two Home Rule bills in the late 1800s, but the impetus, for all Gladstone's personal sincerity, was more strategical than ideological. Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power at Westminster. Such was Parnell's obstructionist policy: to render normal business impossible until Home Rule was granted to Ireland.

Both these early Bills failed: the first in the House of Commons, the second in the Lords.

Parnell's downfall, and the subsequent split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, saw the end of effective Home Rule agitation. The Conservatives came to power and embarked on a policy of "Killing Home Rule with kindness" – amelioration of past injustice, as opposed to democratic change.

However, in 1911 the reunited Irish Parliamentary Party, under John Redmond, once more held the balance of power at Westminster. The British Prime Minister, Asquith, needed Redmond's support for some other measure: in return he promised a new Home Rule bill. This third Home Rule Bill was introduced on 11 April 1912. After staunch Unionist opposition, led in Ireland by Sir Edward Carson, and extraordinary vacillation by Asquith and his fellow Liberals, an agreement was reached whereby the Bill would be enacted but the Act would immediately be suspended "for the duration" - for, in the meantime, World War One had broken out.

This vague compromise was applauded by most Irishmen, abroad as well as at home, as the long-awaited triumph of nationalism. "Home Rule," as they said, "was on the books." And yet, the Unionists had been promised that the Act would not become operative, even after the War, until some further and unspecified provision had been made for them. In the wings, the Republicans watched and waited.

By war's end events in Ireland had made Home Rule an irrelevance. The Irish Parliamentary Party, with its all-powerful all-embracing monumental party machine, was routed by Sinn Féin in the general election of December 1918. The republican tradition had won out over constitutionalism. Now there could only be war.

The Dublin Lock-Out, 1913

Larkinism, to be brutally brief, was the industrial organizing of unskilled workers – tramwaymen, dockers, carters – still a revolutionary concept in Dublin 1913. The Lock-Out was the employers' response to this, a resolve to starve the poorest third of Dublin’s people into submission to their demands. Dublin at the time was recognized to have the worst slums in Europe. The 1912 edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica commented that Dublin’s slums were worse even than Calcutta’s. You may wonder what was the response of Dublin Corporation to this – perhaps they were shamed at long last into meaningful action? Of course they were: they took Encyclopaedia Britannica to court, and sued for libel. The Lock-Out was a seminal struggle in Dublin’s history. It militarized the workers. And it is the event which, throughout At Swim, the boy Doyler hearkens back to, and wishes – sometimes, romantically, pretends – he took part in.

Larkin had organized the workers. The plutocrat, William Martin Murphy – newspaper magnate, tramway boss, international investor – organized the employers. In August 1913 they announced that no one – man, woman or child – might work in Dublin unless first he pledged to repudiate Larkin's union. The men and boys and women in their thousands refused to pledge. Whereupon they were locked out of work.

Thus began the “Big Strike” or the “Great Strike” or the “Great Lock-Out”, as it was called. The workers' leaders were arrested for sedition. The people demonstrated: they were baton-charged by the police. Strikers were shot. Hospitals were overcrowded with wounded and bewildered. The employers resorted to scabs and blacklegs, often arming them: these in turn were stoned and cudgelled by the workers. Even household coal might not be delivered, save with an armed police escort. The tentacled monumental Irish Parliamentary Party was set against the workers. Dublin Castle, seat of British administration, ranged its police, constabulary and military against them. The RC Church preached upon the workers' damnation. Only the artists and the intellectuals, some few Protestant pastors, and the more advanced guard of militant republicanism backed them. And the Fianna boys and girls, of course, under Constance Markiewitz.

After the first whirlwind weeks, what furniture there was had been pawned from the tenement homes; the father's suit joined regiments of others in the pawn office: real need and immediate hunger set in. William Martin Murphy took the opportunity to remind the workers that whatever happened, he would still have his three square meals a day; while they must starve.

Children were most at risk. Sympathisers in the suffrage movement in England formed a scheme to take the children to homes there, where at least food and shelter and some comfort might be promised. This scheme provoked the ire of the Catholic Church, which feared for the moral well-being of Catholic innocents in Protestant homes. The Church Militant, in its usual guise in Ireland of the Ancient Order of Hibernians [the same people who forbid nowadays gay Irish people to march in New York on St Patrick's Day], arranged howling middle-class mobs at the docks and railway stations to thwart the children's embarkation. The women accompanying the children were arrested for kidnapping. This was the same Church that had been silent hitherto on the children's innocent hunger.

Foodships began to arrive from trades unionists and other sympathisers in Britain. The nationalist Sinn Féin party, fabulously, opposed these shipments as a nefarious plot to advance British imports over Irish produce. In Liberty Hall, the union's headquarters, soup kitchens were set up. On Christmas Day, in Croydon Park, the recreational ground of the union, twenty thousand children received their first square meal in months. But a third of a city's teeming population cannot survive on goodwill. It was concerted action by brother trades unionists in Britain that was required, and which, in the end, was not forth-coming. The British dockers must refuse to handle blacked Irish exports, else the employers could continue uninterrupted with their three square meals a day. The Irish cargo was handled. The Irish workers were doomed. In January 1914 they returned to work.

In a very English way what had dismayed the British trades union bosses was the sheer populism of Larkin's strike. They existed in a more settled industrial climate and had, or could have had, no real knowledge of conditions in Ireland. Their climb-down stimulated Connolly's nationalism. During the Lock-Out he had helped set up the Citizen Army as a defence for picketing workers against police attacks. He would distil and galvanize that army now. He was certain that only a truly independent Ireland could advance the cause of Irish workers.

Ireland and the Great War

Home Rule for Ireland was “shelved” by the outbreak of war in August 1914. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who had won this great advance for the Irish people, in a speech at Woodenbridge in County Wicklow, September 1914, exhorted the entire membership of “his” Irish Volunteers to enlist in the British Army, in defence of “small nations” and “poor little Catholic Belgium”. And Irish men and boys did enlist. 300,000 of them – a huge number when you consider that conscription, though often threatened, was never actually enforced in Ireland.

County Wicklow, though rural and out-of-the-way, was not a chance location for this speech. It was Parnell land. As such, Redmond was evoking Parnell's sanction upon his notion of a new Irish Brigade. Unfortunately, the British authorities, in the person of Kitchener (an Irishman, would you believe), refused to countenance recognizably Irish divisions in the British fighting line. The Ulstermen, deservedly, got their own Division, and famous it was too. But the southern Irish were not allowed any territorial divisional distinctions. This, properly, has rankled the Irish fighting spirit ever since.

Nevertheless, there were two divisions of the United Kingdom army which were, for all intents and purposes, the Irish at war: the 16th and the 10th Divisions. In military history now they are belatedly accorded their nationality, albeit in brackets: thus, the 16th (Irish) Division, the 10th (Irish) Division. The 16th served to great glory in France. The 10th served in Gallipoli in Turkey, and afterwards in Salonika in the Balkans.The Kaiser described this British army in the Balkans as his cheapest prisoner-of-war camp: for the army had nowhere to go, and there was no chance of reinforcement; and they had little to do there beyond being shot at. Discipline was fierce. An Irish boy of nineteen years was executed for not wearing his cap, which cap had fallen in horse-dung.

I have a special feeling for the 10th Division, as my character Gordie, older brother to Jim Mack in At Swim, served with that army. In a sense, it was lucky for him he died at Gallipoli. He joined the army, as did so many others, to the great applause of friends and family; he went out and served to the best of his lights, he tried hard to understand what he was doing. But had he returned he would have found the world turned upside down. No longer a hero, but a despised quantity, whose suffering and courage must be hid. A terrible fate. But the fate of so many Irishmen.