Counterfactual Parnell

In relation to Daniel Mulhall’s article “Parallel Parnell” in the May/June 2010 issue, which speculates on the course Parnell’s career might have taken if he had married in 1880 and never become involved with Katherine O’Shea:

  Parnell seems to be the figure of modern Irish history who most strongly attracts counterfactual speculation.   This is because he died at a point in his life when a significant proportion of his career might have been expected to lie ahead of him, whereas de Valera died in his nineties after a lengthy retirement and O’Connell’s later years were marked by morbid depression, incipient senility and political decline.   (Counterfactual speculation might more fruitfully centre on their possible early removal.  If D’Esterre had killed O’Connell in their 1815 duel, what course might Irish Catholic politics have taken?  If the bullet which grazed de Valera at a 1923 election rally in Ennis had shot him dead, how might the Irish state have developed?)

   Only Michael Collins rivals Parnell as a focus for “lost leader” speculation – but though Collins had shown himself to be a capable administrator and organiser of guerrilla warfare, he did not have time to build – or destroy – a record as a statesman, whereas Parnell operated adroitly and successfully at the highest levels of British as well as Irish politics for a decade.  (In his unpublished memoirs the lawyer and Freeman’s Journal reporter Ignatius O’Brien remarked that Parnell’s problem was that he led his party with such little effort as to make it seem that anyone could do it, until he was gone and everyone else tried it.)

  Such speculation usually rests on the possibility of Captain O’Shea’s dying or being bought off; Mulhall’s postulation of an American marriage in 1880 is unusual, and perhaps less satisfactory because it introduces a new range of imponderables.   Might marriage to a woman less maternal and more assertive than Katherine O’Shea, perhaps involving publicly-acknowledged children, have blunted Parnell’s mystique?    By 1880 Parnell‘s political position was too firmly established to make it likely that he would have left politics for some other sphere (perhaps undertaking mining speculation in Gilded Age America with his life’s money, like his brother John Howard Parnell with his Georgia peach orchards) or that he would have failed to become Irish Party leader.  Leaving aside such intriguing possibilities as whether an American wife might have intensified Parnell’s Anglophobia or developed social ambitions, passing over possible marital incompatibility and a divorce suit brought by Mrs. Parnell (perhaps with Katherine O’Shea as co-respondent), it may be best to discuss this counterfactual on the basis of the Parnell Split being averted by the convenient demise of Captain O’Shea at some point before 1890.  For one thing, this avoids the question of how Parnell might have negotiated the Kilmainham Treaty in the absence of the O’Sheas as intermediaries.  Let us further suppose, for the sake of argument, that Parnell had the same lifespan as O’Connell, dying at the age of 72 – that is, in 1918.

  Let us suppose, then, that at some point in 1887 Captain O’Shea, crossing a London street, is struck and killed by some horse-drawn vehicle.   So far as the general public is concerned, after a decent interval of mourning for his deceased friend, the Irish leader consoles the grieving widow.    Liberal and Nationalist political insiders congratulate themselves on the defusing of this potential bombshell, and some of the more aggressive Unionist humorists make cryptic references which are decoded by those in the know.   Parnell’s affection for his younger stepchildren is noted (as was that of Lord Palmerston for his wife’s children by her first marriage under similar circumstances); some decades later, his official biographer follows the example of the official biographer of the Duke of Devonshire [Lord Hartington] who records his subject’s marriage to the widowed Duchess of Manchester without mentioning that the Duchess had been his mistress for years before the death of the Duke.[1]  What next?

  It is extremely unlikely that even without the Parnell Split Gladstone could have delivered Home Rule in 1893; by the time of the Split the Plan of Campaign land agitation had failed in its objective of making Ireland ungovernable and was bogged down in financial and political difficulties, while the realignment of British politics around socio-economic issues, with most of the Whig aristocracy defecting to the Tories and Conservative support increasing in suburbia, make it unlikely that Gladstone could have secured the electoral mandate needed to overawe the House of Lords into passing Home Rule.   Perhaps without the Irish debacle the Liberals might have secured a few more seats.   In 1893 Gladstone proposed a new general election on the Home Rule issue after the Bill was thrown out by the Lords but was overruled by his Cabinet colleagues; would Parnell have backed up Gladstone by threatening to bring down the government, precipitating a general election which the Liberals would probably have lost?

    Presumably the extent to which Parnell continued to resent and distrust Gladstone (who had, after all, imprisoned him in 1881-2) might never have found public expression.   The Grand Old Man would have retired with a final blessing on Parnell as the leader of a people rightly struggling to be free, expressing his confidence in the eventual success of the cause. The Irish leader, however he might grit his teeth, would return his compliments to the enlightened friend of Ireland, and whatever might be the impact of subsequent divisions within the Liberal Party on Irish opinion, without the denunciations of the “Grand Old Spider” voiced by Parnell and his followers during the split, Gladstone would have been regarded much less ambivalently by Irish nationalist opinion as a friend and benefactor who had devoted his last years to seeking justice for Ireland.   There might have been an occasional courtesy visit by Parnell to Gladstone in retirement at his home in Hawarden (North Wales) and after Gladstone’s death in 1898 the unveiling of a Gladstone statue on the site of the present-day Parnell memorial, with Parnell’s speech on the occasion a masterpiece of equivocation, praising Gladstone on Home Rule while hinting at his personal dissatisfaction with the old man.[2]   (In real life, a proposal to erect a Gladstone statue in Dublin was defeated by Parnellite councillors who blamed Gladstone for Parnell’s downfall; the statue intended for Dublin now stands outside the Gladstone memorial library at Hawarden.)

   One reason why the majority of Liberals supported Gladstone’s Home Rule policy was that the party suffered deep internal divisions, and personal loyalty to Gladstone was its main unifying factor.  After Gladstone’s retirement the Liberal Party’s divisions came to the surface.   “Liberal Imperialists” saw Home Rule as a political liability to be minimised or discarded altogether, while others continued to support it from loyalty to Gladstone’s memory or as part of a wider democratic agenda; some Liberals maintained the Gladstonian vision of a low-taxing small government, while others favoured a more expansive role for government and the expansion of state welfare, and the growth of government functions made it necessary to tap new sources of revenue.

   Gladstone’s 1892 election victory was partly secured by offering a number of social reform measures, the Newcastle Programme, and in real life the Cabinet’s refusal to support Gladstone in calling an election was followed by a strategy of passing reform measures through the Commons in the hope that by defeating them the Lords would arouse popular fury.  (The Lords defeated this strategy by passing those reforms they thought too popular to oppose.)   The 1894 Liberal Budget marked the beginning of a switch towards redistributive taxation which was never reversed and laid the foundations for Lloyd George’s later legislation (and which was also criticised by Irish nationalists because it fell disproportionately on Ireland).  In our counterfactual, the Liberals’ limited reform achievements never happened, because the government fell in 1893.  How far would the introduction of the British welfare state have been delayed (or perhaps implemented in more limited form and with a more “social imperialist” ethos by the Unionists, who had themselves passed some social reforms in the 1870s and 1880s)?[3]  Would hostility towards Home Rule as a political liability have been more widespread among radicals if the Newcastle Programme had been so visibly sacrificed to Home Rule?  Would this in turn have influenced some Irish Home Rulers, such as Michael Davitt, who saw British radicals as Ireland’s natural allies, presented Home Rule as part of a wider reform agenda in which Ireland shared a common cause with the “British democracy”, and suspected that Parnell was at heart a cynical conservative principally concerned with self-aggrandisement?[4]

   How might Irish nationalism have developed in the 1890s without the Parnell Split?  To begin with, although the defeat of the second Home Rule Bill would have encouraged the view in some quarters that parliamentarianism had been discredited, the sense, deriving from the Split, that the failure had been utterly disgraceful would have been absent.   Without Parnell’s appeal to the “hillside men” and the emergence of the posthumous myth of Parnell as honorary Fenian, the separatist/IRB subculture might have been more clearly differentiated from parliamentarianism than was in fact the case; the overlap with Parnellite Parliamentarianism would not have been there, and Arthur Griffith’s “Hungarian Policy” (in which the Hungarian statesman Francis Deak is presented as a proxy Parnell) might have been stated differently.   American support, nostalgia for Fenian heroism, and social discontent would have kept separatism alive, but it might have renewed itself more slowly.  Under Parnell’s leadership, the Irish Party might have opposed the Boer War but in a manner more akin to that of the British “pro-Boers”, with fewer separatist overtones and less injudicious rejoicing at British defeats.[5]

  To some extent the Parnell Split represented the breaking into the open of existing discontent with Parnell; these discontents would have surfaced, but more slowly and on a smaller scale.  Without the defining issue of the divorce case, TM Healy’s career would never have had its defining moment; his extended family connection would have received less clerical support than it actually did, and would probably have been driven from parliament by Parnell in the mid-1890s, with Healy retreating to a legal career.[6]  Without the Parnell Split the Freeman’s Journal would have remained the dominant newspaper of nationalist Ireland, since it was the damage inflicted by the Split that crippled it and subjected it to politically-motivated proprietors who were outflanked when William Martin Murphy applied the techniques of the “new journalism” to the Irish Independent.  Under the continued proprietorship of the Gray dynasty, the Freeman would have maintained a wary and limited autonomy within the nationalist movement; perhaps, instead of losing his inheritance and emigrating to pursue a political career in Tasmania, the youthful Edmund Gray (1870-1945) might have emerged as one of Parnell’s chief lieutenants?  On the other hand, it is unlikely that John Redmond would ever have become party leader if it had not been for the fact that Parnell’s chief lieutenants all opposed him in the Split, leaving Redmond to emerge as the Chief’s dashing principal champion.  Perhaps a likelier role for him would have been as discreet and loyal Chief Whip, delivering eloquently-worded appeals to the party rank and file to trust their inspired leader.  

  Many Parnellites interpreted the clerical role in the Parnell Split as an expression of resentment at the curtailment of clerical and episcopal power through the emergence of an established nationalist party.  When Emmet Larkin first gained access to the Dublin archdiocesan archives, this Parnellite tradition conditioned him to expect to find evidence that the bishops had conspired to bring down Parnell, and he was startled to find that Archbishops Walsh and Croke had in fact done their best to contain the split and work out a compromise to preserve Parnell’s dignity.  Without the Parnell Split, despite the grumblings of episcopal mavericks like E.T. O’Dwyer of Limerick, and the suspicions and discontents of some provincial clergy, Walsh, Croke and their allies would have continued to maintain the unofficial concordat whereby Parnell received episcopal support in return for safeguarding Catholic interests in areas such as education.[7]   Given the extent of residual Protestant privilege and the development of European Catholicism in the same period, the vision of Ireland as a specifically Catholic nation and the rise of an Irish Catholic Action movement would certainly have taken place; but without the shock administered to clerical opinion by the willingness of a third of Irish Catholics to side with Parnell against clearly-expressed clerical condemnation, its full development might have taken longer. Perhaps in that parallel universe, one of Joyce’s short stories might have presented as its crowning symbol of Irish hypocrisy and conformity, Sir Charles and Lady Parnell being shown around Maynooth by obsequious clerics perfectly well aware of the nature of their original relationship.  Similarly, anti-clericalism of various types among the Catholic population existed before the Split and would probably have continued to spread afterwards, but as a slightly more marginal phenomenon, more visibly reflecting separatist and British or Continental radical influence.[8]  Bishop Thomas Nulty of Meath would not be remembered (as he now is) chiefly for his massive excommunications of Parnellites during the Split, but for his longer record as a “patriot prelate” like his contemporary Patrick Duggan of Clonfert (whose retirement before the Split due to ill-health left his reputation relatively untainted by its squabbles).[9]    

    On the left, the renewed agrarian discontent which erupted in Connacht at the end of the 1890s might have been contained and turned to the service of Parnell’s party, as was actually the case in the reunion of the party in 1899-1902; perhaps William O’Brien, instead of leading the UIL in his own right, might once again have served as a proxy whom Parnell could use while disavowing his more reckless words and actions.

  An united party under Parnell’s leadership would have maintained a far more dominant role in Irish civil society, allowing less space for the cultural revival to flourish – though it is arguable that the revival was a response to the upheavals of the land war, and the Parnell Split provided its catalyst rather than its genesis.  The party might have succeeded in turning the Gaelic League into an auxiliary institution (as Redmond tried to do) with Douglas Hyde feeling constrained to accept the offer of a parliamentary seat from Parnell (which he turned down from Redmond) in order to represent the League’s interests at the table of power.[10]   WB Yeats might have written even less of Parnell (and some of that little in scorn) and more of John O’Leary.  It is even possible that there might have been an alternative cult of a heroic lost leader.   Some of Isaac Butt’s friends, such as John Butler Yeats and Bishop O’Dwyer, resented Parnell as his supplanter.  Even though Parnell and his lieutenants regarded the deposition of Butt as politically necessary, they had uneasy consciences about it; during the Split Parnell accused Healy of wishing to kill him as he killed Butt, while Healy in turn accused Dillon of having betrayed not only Parnell but Butt before him.  Without Parnell’s martyr-cult, Butt’s ultimate political ineffectiveness might have been overshadowed by recollections of his personal charisma and courtroom presence, and by the tragedy of his downfall.   Even his whiskey-drinking and messily public maintenance of two families (by his wife and a mistress) might have appeared audaciously romantic in contrast to the furtive, hypocritical and half-concealed Parnell-O’Shea relationship; even separatists could have contrasted the gifted lawyer who abandoned prestige and promotion to defend the Young Irelanders and Fenians in court, and who refused official appointments from patriotic motives when he and his family were struggling in poverty, with the prosperous imperial statesman of Avondale.[11]    How might Yeats have handled these themes in “Butt’s Funeral?”[12]   

  The problem with Mulhall’s hypothesis of a Parnell-led Irish party securing devolution from a Conservative government in 1904-5 (at the time of George Wyndham’s flirtation with the subject) is that it overestimates the willingness of the Unionist government to make such a concession.   Opposition to Home Rule was the government’s central defining issue – it was, after all, a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists; furthermore, unionism had considerable popular appeal.   Arthur James Balfour, the Conservative Prime Minister, believed that his principal task was to keep together a government deeply divided on other policy issues, and above all else wished not to imitate Sir Robert Peel, who by repealing the Corn Laws which he had been elected to defend, split his party and kept it out of office for a generation.  It is inconceivable that Balfour would ever have accepted devolution.

  The devolution issue is more relevant to the possibility of Parnell accepting the devolutionary Irish Council Bill which the Irish Party was offered as an interim measure by the Liberal government in 1907, and which the membership rejected as insufficient despite the leaders’ initial support for it.  Could Parnell, with his greater prestige and political skills (and perhaps with the ability to obtain a few more concessions from the post-1906 Liberal government) have persuaded his followers to accept devolution as an interim settlement, to give Irish nationalism a chance to show that it could govern competently?  Could we even hypothesise that he might have been able to persuade them to bypass Ulster Unionist opposition accept the exclusion of the unionist regions of Ulster from the scheme on a trial basis, arguing that this would enable nationalists under his leadership to show how baseless were fears of maladministration and religious persecution?[13]             

   The prospect of Parnell at the head of a devolved Irish administration raises speculation to a whole new level, for Parnell as we know him was to a considerable extent a protest politician.  One argument advanced by nationalist opponents of the Irish Council Bill was that its acceptance would have forced the Irish Party to share responsibility for the governance of Ireland without having sufficient power over it.   The central problem facing the Irish Parliamentary Party in its later years in some ways resembled that facing Sinn Fein in the later stages of the peace process; it had to be at the same time an anti-system protest party, channelling nationalist discontent, and a potential party of government which could convince British political opinion that if admitted to power under Home Rule it would work responsibly within the British political system.   This dilemma only arose after Home Rule became a real possibility with Gladstone’s conversion in 1886, and the real-life Parnell never had to face its full implications because Gladstone’s 1886 government was so short-lived, and after its fall Liberals and Nationalists were able to join in attacking Salisbury’s Unionist government without spelling out their preferred alternative in detail.

   In our hypothetical situation, the ageing Parnell opts for real though limited power, in a devolved assembly with a significant minority of government nominees (mainly Southerrn Unionists) with the aim of showing that nationalists can govern competently and the hope of using it as a base to lever further power.[14]  He gains the prestige of office and the reinforcement of official patronage; but he has to take tough decisions which disappoint some of the high expectations aroused in the past (e.g. policing land disputes) and the Irish Party support coalition splinters at its edges.  At the time of the third Home Rule Bill, its supporters predicted that the first Home Rule parliament would see the overwhelming return of the existing Irish Party leadership as an endorsement of their achievement, but that over time a realignment would occur, with the existing leadership coalescing with the more moderate southern unionists in a conservative government drawing on clerical, middle-class and large to medium farmers, while local and social discontents produced a loosely-knit opposition describing themselves as “democrats”.  (Davitt made a similar prediction, with more optimism about the prospect of the “democrats” eventually becoming the majority.)  Under a devolved Parnell administration, we might imagine the principal opposition arising from a loose alliance of local and agrarian malcontents under a figurehead such as William O’Brien (highly volatile, a natural protest politician, and financially independent) or the “ranch warrior” Larry Ginnell.[15]  As part of this grouping, or in loose association with it depending on the electoral system, might be an independent Labour Party channelling the Edwardian upsurge in trade union militancy and an IRB front party led by a figure such as Arthur Griffith (who stated in 1913-14 that his advocacy of abstentionism applied only to Westminster and not to a Home Rule Parliament.)   In the eyes of these more determined opponents, Parnell would be a highly compromised figure, and they would regularly criticise his regime as supported by undemocratic nominated members, and sustained by jobbery and corruption.  The Young Irelanders’ criticisms of O’Connell’s reliance on Whig patronage, and Parnell’s own youthful denunciations of the “nominal Home Rulers” would have been quoted frequently.[16]

   Under these circumstances, Parnell would have relied on displaying firm but competent government (he might, for example, have been better able to broker and enforce a compromise in the 1913 lockout than the Dublin Castle administration, even at the cost of some discontent among the most militant Larkinites, though if an Irish parliament had come into existence before women’s suffrage it might have been delayed in Ireland for a considerable time)[17]and on reiterating the need for unity in order to secure further devolved powers from Westminster.  Assuming the indecisive elections of 1910 were replicated under this turn of events, he might well have succeeded in using his parliamentary strength to secure further concessions; the Conservatives might have criticised them, but without the Ulster issue and with a noticeably loyalist Parnell administration in Dublin Ireland might not have been the great mobilising factor of post-1910 conservatism, which would have turned more on social and economic issues.  In actual history, in 1910-14 some Conservative intellectuals talked of a historic compromise with Irish nationalism as a stepping-stone towards imperial federation; under these hypothetical conditions such suggestions might have been more numerous and influential.[18]   

    This brings us to the last chapter in the career of the parallel Parnell, during the First World War.   Having made the crucial move away from protest politics in 1907, Parnell might be expected to support the British declaration of war in 1914; if the South African Jan Christian Smuts, who waged war against Britain in 1899-1902, could support the British war effort and even join the War Cabinet, surely Parnell could have done so, despite criticism from more radical nationalists (as Smuts was criticised by his own bitter-enders, the ancestors of the later National Party) and angry reminiscences by John Devoy in the Gaelic American[19].   Part of John Redmond’s problem in the first years of the real-life World War One, was that he saw himself as an equivalent to the Dominion Prime Ministers, but was seen by officialdom as just another minor British politician; Parnell, as Prime Minister of Ireland, would have had a recognised position.

   Mulhall’s suggestion that Parnell might have used the war situation to secure greater autonomy, perhaps even Dominion Status, is plausible – but he does not address the question of what price he might have had to pay in return.  Perhaps we may visualise him in the debates on the introduction of conscription to Britain at the beginning of 1916 announcing that, symbolising the shared Allied commitment to the freedom of small nations, Ireland would consent to conscription in return for the implementation of further autonomy (perhaps full Dominion Status) and a Council of Ireland to explore matters of common concern with their Ulster brethren, whose accession would surely be brought nearer by their shared sacrifice.[20]  We may even hypothesise him winning a narrow victory in a wartime election, sustained (according to his opponents) by ruthless use of official patronage and wartime emergency legislation; the harsh and decisive censorship of the dissident “mosquito press”, the arbitrary arrest and detention without trial of well-known malcontents such as Pearse and MacDermott merely for using martial language of a sort frequently deployed by Parnell’s own lieutenants in the past, and which surely was not meant seriously[21], would be recalled with bitterness in a post-war Ireland full of traumatised veterans and coming to terms with its losses and the post-war slump.

    On 6 October 1918 Parnell dies in the arms of his grieving wife, a victim of the great influenza epidemic.  At his funeral in Glasnevin on 11 October (heavily policed against Larkinite and separatist demonstrators), his chosen successor, Edmund Gray, hails the recently-created Lord Avondale as the greatest hero of Irish history, the Moses who led his people into full national freedom and whose practical statesmanship won his country renown in the councils of the empire.   In somewhat more measured tones, and with a mild undertone of scepticism, the long-serving Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, John Dillon, salutes his old colleague’s talents, remarking that a more eloquent tribute might have been paid by the dead man’s most faithful disciple, the recently-deceased John Redmond.  On behalf of the government, Lord Chancellor Carson pays tribute to the late-flowering imperialism of the deceased while intimating that while Ulster is willing to assist the Irish administration so long as it remains true to the dead man’s policies of Imperial loyalty, its own interests require it to remain separate.   Some of the more militant Catholic papers make veiled remarks about Freemasons; Mr Justice Healy drops a few private witticisms about the grieving widow.   Those separatist commentators who are not already in jail make comparisons with Pitt and Castlereagh.   In the less restrictive atmosphere of Belfast the trade union leader Joseph Devlin, with one eye on police note-takers, declares to a mainly Catholic audience that they have been sold into slavery for the sake of one man’s political ambitions, and calls for the release of their brother James Connolly, so unceremoniously jailed under an Irish government for resisting conscription.[22]

  How such a Home Rule government claiming political descent from Parnell might have fared amidst the economic and political upheavals of interwar Europe, or responded to the contrast between the continued urban and rural poverty of post-1918 Ireland and the expectations of economic development under protectionism (Home Rule, of course, entailed continued free trade) entertained by Irish nationalists (including, in the distant past of the early 1880s, Parnell himself) may be matter for further speculation.[23]  The fate of WT Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government may provide an indicator; but we will never know whether an early grant of Home Rule would have released enough of Ireland’s inbuilt stresses to prevent an eventual explosion, or whether this would have merely postponed it.  

                       *

  Perhaps all this speculation is beside the point.  Writing in retirement in the late 1920s, Ignatius O’Brien claimed that Parnell’s personal physician and political ally, Dr. J.E. Kenny (d.1899) had told him that Parnell suffered from a heart condition which he knew would shorten his life expectancy, and this was one reason why he refused to entertain proposals that he should retire for a time after the divorce and return to leadership later.  Certainly Parnell suffered a serious illness in 1887 which led to rumours that he was dying (though these were partly due to his seclusion as he was nursed by Mrs. O’Shea).   How might Irish history have been affected if he had died in 1887?    

Patrick Maume


[1] Stephen Gwynn Avondale: a  Life in Two Volumes (London, 1923)

[2] R. Barry O’Brien (ed.) Selected Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Parnell (London, 1910)

[3] J.L Garvin The People’s Hero: Joseph Chamberlain and the Old Age Pension (London, 1909).

[4] Michael Davitt Ireland and the Struggle for Democracy (London,1905)

[5] J. E. Redmond The Empire of Law and Morality: Burke on America and Parnell on South Africa (Irish Press Agency, 1902)

[6] T.M. Healy Tales of Bar and Bench (London, 1926)

[7] Frank Hugh O’Donnell The Heroes of Tyrconnell and the Spider of Rathdrum (London: Britons Publishing Agency, 1911).

[8] Frederick Ryan Of Hierarchs and Hypocrites (Dublin: Irial Press, 1905).

[9] Fr. Richard Humphreys The People’s Truest Friend: the life of Right Rev. Thomas Nulty, Bishop of Meath, with a Discourse on Masonic Conspiracy by Rev. Denis Fahey D.D. (1925)

[10] Dubhglas de h-Ide Mo Turas go Bheistminster (Baile atha Cliath, 1910).

[11] Arthur Griffith Butt’s Policy (Dublin, 1911).

[12] First published in King Spider’s Castle and other Poems (1926).

[13] Irish Unionist Alliance The Road to Ruin (1907); T.M. Kettle A Stepping Stone to Freedom (Dublin: Irish Press Agency, 1907).

[14] R. Barry O’Brien College Green and the Irish People (London, 1911).

[15] William O’Brien Ireland Betrayed, and How I Fought to Save Her (London, 1910); idem Ireland in the Tarantula’s Cocoon (London, 1912); Laurence Ginnell My Prison Writings, 1915-1919 (Dublin, 1920).

[16] Arthur Griffith Whiggery and Corruption from Daniel O’Connell to the Present Day (Dublin, 1912); Padraic Pearse “Cuchulainn Breaks the Web” in Poems 1906-1926 (Dublin, 1927) 

[17] J.J. Clancy Patriotism and Labour Hand in Hand (Irish Press Agency, 1913); W.F. Dennehy Betrayed into Socialism (Irish Catholic, 1913); F. Sheehy Skeffington The New Feudalism in Ireland (London, 1913).

[18] Lionel Curtis, Viscount Milner and Albert Earl Grey Canada and Ireland: Imperial Parallels (London: Round Table, 1912). 

[19] John Devoy Personal Memories of the Dynamite Campaign (New York, 1914); Arthur Griffith (ed.) Some Forgotten Speeches by an Irish Patriot Who is Dead (Dublin, 1914); TH Sloan The Jesuits’ Web; A History of the Parnell Conspiracy (Imperial Protestant Federation, 1914).

[20] T.M. Kettle and GK Chesterton Prussianism versus Patriotism (London, 1916); J.E. Redmond The Apogee of Statesmanship: A Speech Delivered at Wexford, March 1916 (Irish Press Agency, 1916)

[21] E.D. Morel Freedom and Militarism Far and Near (London, 1919); Alice Milligan The Present Eclipse and the Distant Dawn (Dublin; no publisher’s name given, 1917). 

[22] James Connolly Flies in the Imperialist Parlour: Letters from Kilmainham (Glasgow, 1919)

[23] Edward de Valera, MA The Bankruptcy of Free Trade: the Statistical Case for Protecting Irish Manufacture (Dublin, 1926).