A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

by G.J. Meyer

Legally, officially, Ireland was no longer a British possession at all, no longer a colony but rather as integral a part of the United Kingdom as Scotland and Wales. Its elected representatives sat in Parliament. They were numerous enough not only to influence policy but, when the House of Commons was narrowly divided, to cause governments to rise and fall. For the mainly Catholic nationalists of Ireland, such power was not nearly enough. They argued, and not implausibly, that in reality their homeland was still what it had been for centuries: conquered and oppressed. They wanted their own parliament and government—Home Rule. But for the Ulstermen of northern Ireland, descendants of the Protestants transplanted from Scotland by Oliver Cromwell two and a half centuries earlier when to be a Catholic was a crime, Home Rule meant subjection to the pope in Rome. They—the Unionists—were prepared to fight Home Rule to the death.