‘Let Eire go, with God’s blessing and a shake of the hand’, wrote Jerome Ok. Jerome in Might 1920. This was an important yr in Anglo-Irish relations, when Irish women and men had been taking on arms towards British rule in Eire.
The English creator Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) was not recognized for writing on politics however for his performs, books, and journal articles. He’s greatest remembered right now for Three Males in a Boat (1889), a humorous story through which three mates take a boating vacation on the River Thames. This, mixed with how uncommon it was for such opinions to be revealed within the English press, notably by such a well-known creator, makes his article on British coverage in direction of Eire all of the extra fascinating.
‘Idle Ideas on Eire’ was revealed within the weekly journal Frequent Sense on 22 Might 1920. Jerome’s article was a plea to his compatriots to type out the ‘Irish Query’ peacefully as soon as and for all. It appeared on the top of the Irish Struggle of Independence (often known as the Anglo-Irish Struggle), a guerrilla battle that lasted from January 1919 till a truce was declared in July 1921 and the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in December 1921.
Along with his tongue firmly in his cheek, Jerome addressed a few options that had been being put ahead by the British political class and others to resolve the issue. He started by taking a potshot on the English higher courses, who, he alleged, had till just lately had a plan for the answer of the ‘Irish drawback’. The primary of those was to tow ‘Eire into the center of the Atlantic Ocean and there sink her’. That scheme appears to have fallen out of favour, he remarked, because of the unfold of training; the one individuals nonetheless advocating such a plan had been ‘very outdated gents who … clinch the argument by fiercely waving their umbrellas’.
The following answer Jerome outlined was the proposal to take away all of the Irish ‘irreconcilables’, along with their wives and households, from Eire and substitute them with English settlers. Nonetheless, whereas Oliver Cromwell got here up with the same plan ‘below circumstances rather more beneficial to success’, Jerome doubted if anybody right now was thanking Cromwell for his ‘contribution’. Cromwell was despatched to Eire by the English Parliament in 1649 with 12,000 troops to quell resistance to the brand new English Commonwealth. His New Mannequin Military crushed all navy opposition and his scorched earth coverage left a devastated land and folks, which led to famine and illness. It resulted within the dying of virtually one quarter of the inhabitants.
For 300 years, wrote Jerome, ‘all of the sources of the British Empire have been strained to the subjection of Eire’. And but the little nation of 4 million ‘is in additional defiant temper than ever’. ‘Why ought to it frighten us?’, he questioned. England was the one nation that ‘dare not stay facet by facet with a free individuals’. How would the French really feel if England dominated France in the identical approach that it dominated Eire? The ‘English Fortress in Paris shall rule them justly, as is our good English approach’, he wrote. This was a reference to Dublin Fortress, the seat of British administration in Eire. French peasants can be paid excessive salaries for working for the ‘(English) Royal French Constabulary’ and would assist England to take care of order over Frenchmen. Right here Jerome referred to the Royal Irish Constabulary that stored British rule in Eire. Recruited from the native inhabitants, it gained a repute for brutality in the course of the Land Struggle (1879-82). Nonetheless, whereas the French is likely to be permitted to take cost of their tramways and electrical lighting and have a Nationwide County Council in Paris, the concept that they may have their very own authorities can be ‘unthinkable’. Taking his analogy additional, Jerome urged that if America adopted the identical line of argument as Britain in relation to its coverage on Eire, America would conquer and annex Canada as a result of it couldn’t danger a British possession present beside it by way of which an enemy may assault. In the same vein, Spain would conquer and annex Portugal for concern of assault and Russia would do likewise with Finland and Poland. He posited that if Russia took such motion, a ‘howl of virtuous indignation’ would go up within the Imperial press. It will be seen because the ‘bully of the smaller nations merely as a result of they occur to be her neighbours’.
Irish republicans seized on Jerome’s phrases and used them of their propaganda battle. The Irish Bulletin, an underground newspaper arrange by the revolutionary authorities of Dáil Éireann, used it to indicate how Irish independence was not a menace to British sovereignty or safety. The article additionally gained worldwide consideration and references to it appeared within the American, Australian, Irish, and French press. Philadelphia’s Catholic Commonplace praised Jerome’s ‘braveness and good sense to rise to the protection of Eire’s independence’. Freeman’s Journal in Sydney mentioned Jerome’s article confirmed that ‘pondering males in England are breaking away from the concept that an enslaved Eire is crucial to British security’. In Eire it was reprinted both in full or partially in native and nationwide newspapers from Cork within the south to Donegal and Fermanagh within the north. Little or no commentary was added; the message was transmitted by way of Jerome’s phrases. Within the US in July 1920, a gaggle referred to as the Pals of Irish Freedom revealed a pamphlet entitled ‘Irish Independence Advocated by Jerome Ok. Jerome, British Author Calls England Cowardly’. There was no response to Jerome’s article in England.
As for the northern unionists who didn’t wish to be a part of an unbiased Eire, Jerome concluded that ‘Ulster may deal with herself as effectively inside the Irish Parliament as exterior it’. By ‘letting Eire go’, Jerome argued that the ‘hate and evil of a thousand years will likely be drowned’ and from the ocean ‘will come up a pleasant nation that we will stay with facet by facet’. However in fact Eire was not let go. The Struggle of Independence would proceed for greater than a yr after the article was revealed, with greater than 1,400 lives misplaced. Jerome didn’t remark on the conclusion of the battle.
Oliver O’Hanlon has a PhD from College Faculty Cork on Franco-Irish relations and Irish historical past.
