"...as angry Nationals and Unionists tried to shout him down from the opposition benches, Chamberlain nonetheless stood his ground - rigid and awkward, his posture perhaps a bit too stiff, but upright nonetheless - and denounced, "the enemies of peace." He held aloft the document that contained the renegotiated Government of Ireland Act that had emerged from the Irish Convention and boomed, "This is the governing document of the Kingdom of Ireland; it is a compromise, imperfect but fair and crafted in a spirit of good intention towards all that island's citizens. It is our duty to deliver for the Irish people the democracy their anointed representatives have themselves negotiated; it is our task to secure peace in our time [1] for the whole of Ireland." Missing from his speech were words like "proposed" or "tentative," and this was no accident; Chamberlain had been the latest convert to the cause of Home Rule of them all, but it was the last convert who was the most zealous, and this was the hour in which the debate on the bill was to come.
It helped his cause that the Liberal Party was, finally, almost uniformly united behind the Government of Ireland Act 1918, with the March election having been unequivocally fought on the question, and the party enjoyed the confidence of both the IPP and the SDLP in passing the Act. The opposition Nationals were badly split; Carson had come around to the New Year's Day Agreement, but in a stroke of irony, many British conservatives were more opposed to it than Ulstermen themselves. Nonetheless, when the Government of Ireland Act came up for a vote on June 22nd, 1918, it passed on its first reading; three days later, it passed its second reading. With that, it was off to the House of Lords, where its passage was favorable but more of a question - the Liberal advantage in government over the previous few decades had left the peerage with a much more yellow hue than before 1878 (or 1890 especially), but there were nonetheless a great many Anglo-Irish Lords who were aggressively opposed to the New Year's Day Agreement and such a massive constitutional revision bothered even a good number of Liberals. Lord Crewe, the Liberal Leader in the Lords and the well-respected Foreign Secretary, began the process of whipping the Lords in favor of the Act, but was unsure that passage would be feasible until sometime in early September; as it was, the final vote was held on September 20, 1918, and it passed by a narrow margin.
But it had still passed, and was quickly granted royal assent - and with that, the Government of Ireland Act was completed, setting the stage for a roughly four-month transitional commission as provided for by the Act that would include representatives of both the future Irish government as well as Dublin Castle as the auspices of transitioning Irish law enforcement, the Irish judiciary, and other functions of state to the new Irish Assembly - which had yet to be convened, what with the IPP having returned to Westminster after the March elections - before the Union Jack was no longer the flag, or at least sole flag, of Ireland. [2]
The spirit of the Transition, a brief moment in Irish history which is generally capitalized and is considered as having begun with the New Year's Day Agreement in most Irish scholarship, was one of remarkable optimism everywhere save Antrim and Down. Songs about the major players of the Irish Convention, both nationalist and loyalist, were written in both Gaelic and English, and it was suggested that an opera depicting the Convention be composed and put on to celebrate the arrival at last of Home Rule. Celebrations were held throughout the summer, and it was the first July Twelfth in Ulster or Dublin to avoid sectarian violence; indeed, the tremendous bloodshed of the past four years seemed almost to have been forgotten, included by those who had just recently been organizing to kill their neighbors. The Transition was a time of healing and rapprochement, of bygones being bygones, of Irishmen being merely Irishmen with little attention paid to their faiths or politics.
That was, at least, how the common folk experienced the ebullience of the hour. Behind the scenes, especially once elections were called for an Irish Assembly in early December once royal assent was granted, this was most certainly not the case. The most immediate question even before Chamberlain had taken up debate on the Government of Ireland Act and passed the Redmond-Midleton Agreement into law was what was to become of the IPP. The party had been formed, after all, during the Plan of Campaign and land wars by Charles Parnell to be a catch-all vehicle for Irish nationalist agitation of all stripes, welcoming to all comers; Parnell, after all, had himself been a Protestant from a wealthy and influential family of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The first order mission being Home Rule in some capacity had continued on from Parnell to Redmond, and now that the mission was accomplished the question was asked: what was the Irish Parliamentary Party going to become, what was it going to be for, and who was it to represent?
In some ways, the IPP - organizationally, at least - had become a bloated, fat and content vehicle for Redmond's personal ambition, held together by little more than the broad admiration most Irishmen had for the man (indeed, one of the first orders of the Irish Assembly when it convened as the legislature of a free Ireland for the first time in February 1919 was to commission a grand statue of the man as the "Irish George Washington.") [3] Ideologically, it had been committed almost exclusively to the "first mission" of Home Rule, bringing under its umbrella a variety of figures who in a normal political system would have been scattered from right to left. This ideological incoherence can even be evidenced in the final Westminster elections in which it participated, in which it in fact did not perform particularly well despite its epochal, existential triumph at the Irish Convention and saw significant erosion to abstentionist Sinn Fein nationalists, Irish republicans organized in their own party, and the nascent Irish Labour. As such, it included at the end conciliatory figures such as William O'Brien with irreconcilable sticks-in-the-mud like John Dillon, and it included liberal radicals like Timothy Healy as well as clerical arch-conservatives like Joseph Devlin.
At Redmond's passing, and some weeks before the Westminster debate and vote on the Agreement, Dillon had predicted with some resignation that "Ireland shall be Devlin's from now on." It was not difficult to see why he deduced such. Redmond had never made much effort to cultivate a successor, in part due to his considerable personal disagreements with Dillon and political discomfort with Devlin's thuggishness, and this left the IPP enormously top-heavy. The Irish nationalist movement had triumphed, but it had also triumphed at the conclusion of the careers of its leading lights (quite literally in Redmond's case), and none of those lights were the types of men one could organize a movement, especially a movement of governance, around. O'Brien was too old, and had burned far, far too many bridges; Healy was too utopian and unfriendly with the Catholic establishment. For Irish nationalism, that then left some combination of Griffith, who had always eschewed the IPP and was thus a nonstarter, and one of Dillon or Devlin. But Dillon was famed not as much for his intelligence but rather for his reputation as the irreconcilable of irreconcilables, the man who eagerly allowed the perfect be the enemy of the good, the man who had tried at every instance to cut off Redmond at the knees because he could not swallow some small concession or deign negotiate some otherwise minor point in a grander compromise. He had been a parliamentarian found lacking when Irish nationalism was a populist cause of opposition; such a personality and instincts would be a nightmare now that it needed to become an establishment cause of governance.
That left, in other words, Devlin. There were so many factors that made him the natural choice to seize Redmond's mantle, and he did not even really need to seize it. He was a nationalist beyond reproach, but an Ulster native who understood the peculiarities of that province even if he did not always fully grasp the anxieties of the Protestant base within it. As the IPP had grown increasingly to be the tired party of the native Irish elite and high clergy, he had excelled in sliding into that role, what with his position within the Ancient Order of Hibernians and transformation of that organization into "Green Lodges" that could compete and indeed outdo the Orangemen at their own game. And he had proven himself an adept, canny and ruthless operator, who had become widely viewed as Redmond's natural successor not only for generational reasons but because he was, quite simply, the island's most talented politician and its best orator behind perhaps only the late Redmond himself and Carson. [4]
That the entire IPP organization essentially folded into Devlin's vehicle came as little surprise, but the speed at which it occurred did; no leadership ballot was even held as it became increasingly clear that a provisional election would be in the offing, and soon. Devlin quietly conceded to the lack of a provisional council for Ireland and to keep Samuel at Dublin Castle through the end of the Transition provided that the process was as rapid as possible; in the meantime, he declared a new "People's Party," which handily for voters had the same acronym as the old Parliamentary Party of Parnell and Redmond. The lineage was clear, but the result was something new - a clericalist, conservative party of Irish nationalism that was fully loyal to the British Empire in return for Home Rule, and which temporarily deemphasized the agrarian causes which Parnell, Healy and Dillon had invested such a great deal in. This new party did not have the AOH as its organizational arm; rather, Devlin's AOH would before long come to view the rebranded IPP as the political arm of the Hibs.
This political transformation in the background of staid debates in Westminster and bureaucratic procedure to prepare the Royal Irish Constabulary and other institutions of British rule for Irish governance reached its crescendo with the elections of December 6, 1918, in which Devlin triumphed by a decisive margin, able to form a majority government on his own with the People's Party winning nearly two-thirds of the seats. In opposition were a scattered assortment of parties; disagreements between Craig and Carson over the Agreement had led to the latter eschewing participation in the campaign to remain in London for the time being and thus saw "Unionism," or what was left of it, cleave in two, with a moderate Southern Unionist-dominated Irish Unionist Alliance campaigning on a separate ticket from the Ulster Unionist Party of Craig; failing to stand together meant they would proverbially hang separately, and both parties underperformed their own inflated expectations. Joining them in the opposition benches was the Farm League of Ireland, founded by dissident followers of Healy (with Dillon's quiet support) as well as a robust performance by Irish Labour, particularly in Catholic wards of Belfast.
It was clear who would take the reigns of Ireland once the finalization of Home Rule arrived; what that would look like, of course, was anybody's guess..."
- Ireland Unleashed [5]
[1] Couldn't resist
[2] More to come on this
[3] Suffice to say Redmond has a much more hagiographic reputation in Ireland ITTL
[4] Also, I have to say, after Redmond and (maybe) O'Brien he was one of the few non-Sinn Fein Irish nationalist leaders of this time IOTL who showed any kind of integrity, pragmatism and common sense (looking at you, Dillon), and after reading about what a bloated, lazy circular firing squad for Catholic bishops the IPP often was, it becomes increasingly obvious how Dev, Michael Collins and the gang were able to totally usurp the cause of Irish independence within the space of just over a year. Having Ireland's own-dick-shooting brigade manage to pull off Home Rule successfully might actually be one of the less realistic things I've written (with the obvious exception of "Successful Joe Clark" over in Bicentennial Man)
[5] Option B was "Ireland Unshackled" but I liked this title better. Consider it your formal Ireland Unfree sequel!