‘These Quiet Days Of Peace' 1

The beginnings of the ‘home rule crisis’ have been dated variously from the general elections of 1910, the September 1911 launch of the ‘Ulster campaign’, the publication of the Government of Ireland Bill in April 1912, the Ulster Covenant of September 1912 or the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in January 1913. Each of these events has been seen as initiating a deepening crisis, in which the issues of Irish home rule and ‘Ulster’ resistance dominated political life in Ireland. This was a period, according to one of the first biographers of John Redmond, Warre B. Wells, in which parliamentary democracy became ‘an impolitic fiction’ and the Irish lost ‘their habit of obedience and respect towards parliament’. ² More recently, George Boyce has written that in the years 1912–14 there was a sense that constitutional politics were ‘failing’, with home rulers paralysed and uncertain in the face of unconstitutional opposition, while the exclusion of Ulster was seen as an unmitigated wrong and home rule as being in jeopardy. ³ The Unionists' inexorable Ulster campaign has been chronicled by many, ⁴ and across Ireland there was certainly by 1914 what David Fitzpatrick has called an ‘extraordinary outburst of mimetic militarism’, ⁵ with over 230,000 Irishmen participating to varying degrees in private paramilitary organisations. According to the Irish party MP and writer Stephen Gwynn, ‘the political effect of their [the UVF's] existence was so great that it inevitably called out a counterpart’. ⁶