Page 15 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 9

The potentially historic compromise of Home Rule was given
the run-around for half a century. The notion of a peaceful
evolution of even 26-county Home Rule evolving into
independence has no historical basis, or, as Garret FitzGerald
once described it, it is ‘alternative history gone mad’. In a pro-
Home Rule speech in Belfast in 1912, Churchill stated that ‘the
separation of Ireland from Great Britain is quite impossible’.
Prime Minister Lloyd George stated in 1917 in the House of
Commons:

‘It is not a question whether it is to be in the
form of a republic… The point is there is a
demand for sovereign independence in Ireland
… It is better that we should say that under no
circumstances can this country possibly permit
anything of the kind’.

In 2014, there was no force involved, but politically the British
Government did everything in their power to prevent the Scottish
people voting for dominion independence as something quite
distinct from devolution.

The foreseeable reshaping of Europe in line with the principle
of national self-determination provided a unique moment of
opportunity to achieve independence, at least for the greater part
of Ireland. In a later interview in 1916 by a member of Cumann
na mBan who was in the GPO, Moira Regan from Wexford, it
was about having a national life of our own. In that regard, from
the 1920s till today, that has been an emphatic success,
provided it is not defined unrealistically as shutting out external
influences, and even if the quality of national life can endlessly
be argued about.

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