Hibernian Party

XIII.

The Hibernian Party who, be it remembered, still held the balance of power in the House of Commons and could have dismissed the Liberals from office when they pleased, forfeited their last claim to the allegiance of Irish Nationalists by, twice over, without a shred of authority from the country, agreeing to surrender to Sir E. Carson in the first instance four, and later (under cover of the War) six of the counties most famous in her history, in obedience to the exigencies of a Liberal "Home Rule Government" who had heretofore jibbed at the mildest suggestion of concessions to Ulster. The story of the surrender will be found for the first time fully revealed in this book.

The surrender of the Six Counties changed the traditions and prospects of the Irish National movement in an all but irreparable degree. Partition became thenceforward the sharpest dividing line of all between the Hibernians and the All-for-Irelanders. Consent to Partition came to be common ground amongst every other section of the House of Commons. A Partition Treaty sealed by the assenting votes of 75 out of 83 Nationalist representatives of Ireland proved to be Ulster's incontestable Magna Charta for the future. The final temperate protest of the All-for-Ireland group in the House of Commons was shouted down with yells of "Factionists!" and "Traitors!" by the triumphant Hibernian majority, and bonfires were lighted in Ireland in celebration of what was really the Partition "Act on the Statute-Book" by a guileless public who, if they were to construct bonfires a few years later, would only utilise them to cast "the Act on the Statute-Book" into the flames, where, indeed, it ultimately found its fate amidst the impartial contempt of all sides. Partition was all that remained of it. The claim of Sir E. Carson, thus endorsed with the consent of the Hibernians, became so firmly fixed as a basis in all subsequent negotiations that, even after the Hibernian Party was dead and gone, the Republican plenipotentiaries who went to Downing St. in 1921, found themselves coerced to negotiate upon the recognition of that self-same separation of the Six Counties, from the responsibility for which the Hibernians will find no escape before the judgment-seat of History.

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William O'Brien was a County Cork M.P. who participated in the negotiations for Home Rule in Ireland. In this account, first published in 1923, he provides an insight into the politics and politicians of the time - John Redmond, John Dillon, Arthur Griffith, Sir Edward Carson, Bonar Law, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, etc. - and gives his analysis of the origins of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent Irish Civil War. From his own perspective, O'Brien was very much anti-Partition, and was evidently frustrated at the failure to give adequate reassurance to the Northern Unionists.

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