"...particular irony that at a moment of profound escalation in the political conflict over Ireland, it was perhaps the most conciliatory figure in all of Irish nationalism who held the fate of his mother country in his hands.
William O'Brien is a character who has appeared frequently in this book, both the most aggressive agrarian agitator of his day and one of the most brilliant Irish parliamentarians; he was a Parnellite, a sympathizer of Dillon, and a man eager to mend bridges during the IPP's near-fatal split in the 1890s. At the turn of the century he had eclipsed all others for a brief moment as the most powerful figure in Irish nationalism, and subsequently his fingerprints lay on some of the most important Irish legislation of the previous twenty-five years, not just the Government of Ireland Act that had precipitated 1914's crisis but the Land Act, the Local Government Act, and countless other measures that had brought real local democracy, workers' rights, and economic decentralization to the island. What had ailed him as the 1910s advanced was his belief that Unionists could be not only drawn towards but included within a broader non-sectarian definition of Irish nationalism and brought to a final settlement to transfer all parliamentary control of Ireland to an entity in Dublin if their fears could be addressed, a belief viewed as woefully naive if not treasonous by Devlin and the AOH.
With the Quit Westminster abstentionist mantra having won the day after the Football Crisis, however, it was O'Brien who was still in the Commons in London, and thus O'Brien who again became the central Irish protagonist in Parliament as Redmond voluntarily withdrew himself. This meant that, while O'Brien and his All-for-Ireland League did not have the most support amongst the Irish electorate, they were there, and the ailing Redmond's IPP was not. Crucially, also, the math in Westminster had changed dramatically with the IPP's abstention. While all the MPs had technically not resigned, that was only a necessity to trigger a by-election; sans the IPP, the Nationals and what remained of what were once called the Tories were closer to an outright majority of the House of Commons that lacked either Redmond's MPs or Griffith's abstentionist Sinn Fein on their own.
The 1914 elections had returned 288 Nationals to the Commons and 10 "New Conservatives" under the moderate, aristocratic Balfour; together, they held 298 seats reliably. The Liberals of Chamberlain, who cut a much less radical figure than his father, had provided qualified support for this minority administration on a small list of questions related to Ireland and India, which had greatly moderated the Cecil ministry to the point that Carson and Craig openly questioned their continued participation in the National Party, viewing Cecil as "having abandoned Ulster for the consensus of the mob." The Liberals held 235 seats, which when combined with the 67 seats of Redmond gave them, in theory, the ability to defeat Cecil's government at their pleasure on any question. The left-wing Social Democratic and Labour Party, which spent most of its time invested in internecine feuds between its reformist and revolutionary wings, held 58 seats but was no sure thing to defeat the Nationals considering their lack of party discipline and their leader George Barnes' fear that a new election would see their numbers reduced in favor of the Liberals.
Redmond's abstention had, in some ways, effectively called the bluffs of both Chamberlain and Cecil. In the case of the former, the son of the People's Joe had wagered that a united British front in Westminster against the various "Irish parties" was sufficient to not only temper the more reactionary instincts of those in Cecil's orbit but also predicated on the belief that Redmond desired to keep the moral high ground after the Curragh Mutiny and the hideously unpopular Ulster Revolt and would thus only bring down a British government - which the IPP had never on its own done before even with the numbers to do it - if following the lead of the Liberals, as in 1910. As for Cecil, while the Prime Minister had deeply conservative and traditional ideas pertaining to Ireland, he too believed that his friendship with F.E. Smith, soon to be made Lord Birkenhead, frightened Redmond enough to prevent the IPP from gambling on a Nat-Tory majority that would unequivocally swing in favor of Ulster. What neither had predicted was Redmond's declining influence within his own party and the popularity of figures like Griffith and Devlin to the AOH and other Irish mass politics movements, to say nothing of the emerging advocacy of outright republican figures such as Padraig Pearse.
The winter of 1916-17 thus left Britain "dancing on the edge of a knife," in mathematical terms literally. The absence of the IPP and Sinn Fein together left Westminster 71 MPs short; by-elections over the past two years had previously seen two Liberal seats go to the Nationals and two National seats go to the Liberals, a net result of zero that left the math the same. That absence, however, left the National-New Conservative unofficial coalition one seat shy of a majority of the remaining seats, meaning that any single MP missing from any vote from another party meant they would have a majority for that day, with potentially disastrous results for Ireland. This was Redmond's gamble, in many ways with his hand forced by Devlin and Dillon.
O'Brien and his seven fellow AFIL MPs thus held the balance of power in Westminster, and in February of 1917 he finally made his move as a chorus of voices of "full abstention" reached their crescendo, hoping to symbolically end all participation in the Commons by Irish MPs unilaterally. The schadenfreude of the moment must not have been lost on O'Brien; having been driven from the IPP by nationalists and put off by Devlin's clericalism, it was he in this moment who "now wielded the sword" over the British government, not Redmond or Devlin. The moment was ripe for O'Brien's vision of consenting, constitutional reform for Ireland. In a speech to the Commons, O'Brien became the first Nationalist leader to address the concerns of Irish Protestants - including and especially Southern Unionists who were generally viewed as more reasonable than their Ulster counterparts - rather than dismiss them as a Tory plot. "It has always been the manifesto of our League to accommodate the project of Irish liberty in three matters. That first, we must understand the apprehensions of the Ulsterman, regardless of whether we regard them as real or imagined; that second, Ireland must have full, total and unamended control over her revenues; and that third, the solution for Ireland must come by way of constitutional conventions, not by force of arms, whether in Dublin, Belfast or London." O'Brien subsequently declared that "to abstatin from Westminster would be to leave Ireland voiceless; and I will speak until I can speak no more, whether for myself or for the whole of Ireland!"
"Ireland Voiceless," as the speech came to be known, vaulted O'Brien back into the public eye in Ireland and soon polarized Irish nationalist opinion into two camps; the "Quitters" or "Abstainers" who believed in escalatory options in opposition to London that polarized public opinion across the Irish Sea, and "Remainers" who advocated a negotiated solution to the conflict. For once, O'Brien's political future was not dependent on the ossified, conservative and oft-stagnant party superstructure of the IPP, which he mocked as "more interested in sloganeering than solution." The crushing of the IRB by the Royal Irish Constabulary and Irish Army over the course of 1915-16 had left Devlin influential but without much way to enforce his discipline, and his skepticism of Republicanism left him isolated as more of the muscle of the IPP than anything else; O'Brien's determination not to allow Cecil majority control of the Commons thus saved not only Ireland from further violence and suppression, but also likely kept Ireland a monarchy in the long run.
Griffith, whose abstentionism was more ideological than opportunistic, called a vote on March 7th of the Sinn Fein central committee on "cooperation" with the AFIL, and surprisingly the cooperative spirit won out; thus, AFIL suddenly represented Griffith and his "Grattanist" camp in Westminster by proxy, giving O'Brien an even broader base to deal with. This vote occurred only four days before the by-election in Londonderry City, where the National Hercules Pakenham had resigned from Parliament to accept a command in India. On March 11th, 1917, the Liberal Sir James Brown Dougherty won in a surprise result, a massive blow to the Cecil government in moving it one seat further away from its majority and serving as a massive signal of the government's unpopularity at a time when it would otherwise be thought to have a huge advantage. Riots then erupted across Londonderry and Belfast on St. Patrick's Day, with the AOH staging massive rallies and marches around Ireland to show its continued strength. O'Brien may not have been ready to quit Westminster as Redmond, Dillon et al had done, but Ireland was certainly no stabler three years after Curragh.
The aftermath of the St. Patrick's Day uprisings, which signaled to the RIC that their project to suppress nationalist organizations had utterly failed, left an opening for O'Brien's next gambit. On the 24th, having given matters a week to settle, he announced that he would call upon the Liberals to trigger early elections or request a minority government of their own with SDLP support, the first time an MP had ever seriously proposed an alliance with the Marxist element. This surprised many, considering O'Brien's personal conservatism and hostility to socialism despite his years of agrarian advocacy and his rural housing programs having been essentially a version of state socialism. But in reality, O'Brien was simply conceding the obvious - the firm hand Cecil had given Ireland and the soft hand he had given the Curragh mutineers had left Ireland in tatters socially and economically, all in the name of defending the interests of Ulster. Three years after Curragh, Ireland and Britain in general were no closer to a solution, and all that had been resolved was deepened hatred and great loss of life.
The contours of a solution were there - if Cecil could not solve the Irish Question in Ulster's favor by force, and Redmond, Dillon and Devlin could not secure Home Rule by militant agitation, then it was time for the King to appoint a government in Westminster that could attempt to find a genuine solution to the question by conciliation. The road to the Irish Convention had thus, in the haze of the Football Crisis, Ireland Voiceless, and the St. Patrick's Day Riots, emerged for those who sought to see it..."
- Ireland Unfree