I returned yesterday from a Conference in Monte Carlo, Monaco…Ireland in the Decade of the Great War, 1912 – 1923: Towards Commemoration. I attended as High Sheriff of Belfast, Chairman of the Somme Association and Convenor of the Posse Comitatus with my friend Councillor Tom Hartley from Belfast City Council, a fellow member of the Posse.
The proceedings were as follows:
Session 1: Arming Ireland, Arming Europe
Chair: Prof David Fitzpatrick (Trinity College Dublin)
Dr William Mulligan (University College Dublin) Varieties of Violence in Europe, 1911-1914
This paper was divided into two sections. The part first set out the broad processes of the militarization of international and domestic politics between 1911 and 1914. The Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911 prompted a decisive change in international politics, with much greater importance placed on military factors. The most notable features of this process were the land arms race, the tightening military bonds between allies, the judgment of national security on the basis of military power, the increasing popularity of popular militarist and radical national associations, and the centrality of military affairs in domestic and electoral politics.
The focus on the militarization of great power politics can obscure another dimension of the militarization of the international system before 1914, namely the use of military force by smaller powers and specific groups to achieve their political ambitions.
In 1912 the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro) fought the Ottoman Empire, already weakened by revolts in Albania and Yemen and the Italian invasion of Tripolitania in autumn 1911. The Balkans was at the centre of twin processes of nation-state formation and imperial collapse, processes which fuelled atrocities, notably the murder and expulsion of hundred of thousands of Muslims from the region. The Balkan states aimed to round off their own national territories, but the outcome of the First Balkan War left Bulgaria dissatisfied at its failure to make gains in the contested province of Macedonia. In the summer of 1913 Bulgaria was defeated by its erstwhile allies and the Ottoman Empire, after having started the Second Balkan War. The Peace of Bucharest, concluded without the input of the great powers, marked the end of the Balkan Wars.
States were not the only agents of militarization. Groups, such as Albanian insurgents and IMRO terrorists, also used military force to attract international attention to their cause. In these cases, military conflict aimed to internationalize a conflict. The comparison between Ireland and the Balkans, between the Western and Eastern Question was made at the time, as the work of Florian Keisinger has shown. The paper will conclude by asking whether the international context (or its absence) was an important factor in shaping the options open to various armed groups in Ireland, notably Irish radical nationalists. In comparison to other radical nationalist groups and to atrocities in the Balkans, restraint characterised Irish nationalist politics during the years before 1914.
Dr Timothy Bowman (University of Kent)
Guns and gunrunning: The UVF and Irish Volunteers, 1910-1914
The standard work on the Ulster Volunteer Force gunrunning of 1913-14 is A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (Faber and Faber, London 1967). However, this is a problematic work, drawing heavily on two earlier unashamedly Unionist works, Ronald McNeill, Ulster’s Stand for Union (John Murray, London, 1922) and F. H. Crawford, Guns for Ulster (Graham and Heslip, Belfast, 1947) and adopting a celebratory tone about the events depicted. This paper will re-evaluate the UVF gun running efforts demonstrating that the operations were not as well planned or as well funded as Stewart argued. It is also clear that Unionist success in obtaining and importing arms had much to do with the vacillation of the British authorities and inaction of the RIC, British Army and Royal Navy. Indeed, Stewart’s work failed to acknowledge the ease with which firearms could be imported into Ireland, at least in the early phases of the Third Home Rule Crisis. Stewart’s focus on the landing of rifles at Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee on the night of the 24/25th April 1914 tends to downplay the number of small scale shipments. Indeed, it is worth reflecting that the major arms shipments of April 1914, accounting for 20,000 rifles, made up no more than half of the total number of rifles held by the UVF by the end of July 1914.
The military value of the arms imported by the UVF has also been questioned by Charles Townshend and Alvin Jackson and this critique will be extended by discussing the distribution of arms. It appears that arms were distributed due to the requirements of political patronage rather than military needs. The paper will also discuss the propaganda use made of these weapons.
The Irish Volunteer gun running was on a much smaller scale than that carried out by the UVF (perhaps 4,000 rifles in total before August 1914). However, the bungled attempts by the British authorities to seize these rifles, which resulted in fatalities, are worthy of discussion in comparison to the inaction evident in Ulster. The recently released witness statements from the Bureau of Military History also serve to show just how poorly armed and equipped most of the Irish Volunteers were by the outbreak of the First World War and question the extent to which some Irish Volunteer regiments should be viewed as military formations at all.
To be continued