1916 (3 page)

Paradoxically in the longer-run, 1916 arguably set in motion a calming of old conflicts with new concepts and confidence which, as they mature and take shape, stand us is in good stead today.

Our relationship with Britain, despite the huge toll of the Troubles, has changed utterly. In this, the year of the ninetieth anniversary of the Rising, the Irish and British governments, co-equal sovereign colleagues in Europe, are now working side-by-side as mutually respectful partners, helping to develop a stable and peaceful future in Northern Ireland based on the Good Friday Agreement. That agreement asserts equal rights and equal opportunities for all Northern Ireland’s citizens. It ends forever one of the Rising’s most difficult legacies, the question of how the people of this island look at partition. The constitutional position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom is accepted overwhelmingly by the electorate north and south. That position can only be changed by the electorate of Northern Ireland expressing its view exclusively through the ballot box. The future could not be clearer. Both unionists and nationalists have everything to gain from treating each other with exemplary courtesy and generosity, for each has a vision for the future to sell, and a coming generation, more educated than any before, freer from conflict than any before, more democratised and globalised than any before, will have choices to make and those choices will be theirs.

This year, the ninetieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, and of the Somme, has the potential to be a pivotal year for peace and reconciliation, to be a time of shared pride for the divided grandchildren of those who died, whether at Messines or in Kilmainham.

The climate has changed dramatically since last September’s historic announcement of IRA decommissioning. As that new reality sinks in, the people of Northern Ireland will see the massive potential for their future, and that of their children, that is theirs for the taking. Casting my mind forward to ninety years from now I have no way of knowing what the longer-term may hold but I do know the past we are determined to escape from and I know the ambitions we have for that longer-term. To paraphrase the Proclamation, we are resolved to ‘pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole island’. We want to consign inequality and poverty to history. We want to live in peace. We want to be comfortable with, and accommodating of, diversity. We want to become the best friends, neighbours and partners we can be to the citizens of Northern Ireland.

In the hearts of those who took part in the Rising, in what was then an undivided Ireland, was an unshakeable belief that, whatever our personal political or religious perspectives, there was huge potential for an Ireland in which loyalist, republican, unionist, nationalist, Catholic, Protestant, atheist and agnostic pulled together to build a shared future, owned by one
and all. That’s a longer-term to conjure with but, for now, reflecting back on the sacrifices of the heroes of 1916 and the gallingly unjust world that was their context, I look at my own context and its threads of connection to theirs. I am humbled, excited and grateful to live in one of the world’s most respected, admired and successful democracies, a country with an identifiably distinctive voice in Europe and in the world, an Irish republic, a ‘sovereign independent state’ to use the words of the Proclamation. We are where freedom has brought us. A tough journey, but more than vindicated by our contemporary context. Like every nation that had to wrench its freedom from the reluctant grip of empire, we have our idealistic and heroic founding fathers and mothers – our Davids to their Goliaths. That small band who proclaimed the Rising inhabited a sea of death, an unspeakable time of the most profligate world-wide waste of human life. Yet their deaths rise far above the clamour – their voices, insistent still.

Enjoy the conference and the rows it will surely rise.

In 1988 Professor Dermot Keogh wrote: ‘The theme of Ireland and twentieth century Europe has not been tackled in any systematic way.’
¹
Sixteen years later, in 2004, Professor Joseph Lee emphasised this fact again: ‘The subject of Ireland’s relations with continental European countries in the twentieth century is a grossly neglected one.’
²
Yet, as various diplomatic and military archives located in Berlin, Brussels, Freiburg, Paris, Rome and Vienna reveal, continental Europe was much interested in Ireland between the turn of the century and the end of the First World War. For a long time, Ireland was of interest to foreign powers opposed to England and then Britain. By occupying her they believed that the British would have to surrender. Spain tried first, followed by France, but all in vain.
³
Even imperial Russia seemed to have had some interest, as a document in the French military archives shows that ‘a Franco-Russian landing in Ireland’ might have been contemplated in the summer of 1902 just after the Boer War, which had exposed serious weaknesses in the British army.
⁴
When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany’s turn to play the Irish card had come.

The aims of this paper are to shed new light on Germany’s involvement in Ireland and also to analyse France’s reaction to the events in Dublin in 1916. Austria-Hungary had been interested in Ireland before the beginning of the hostilities in Europe. It would seem that Vienna bore in mind the home rule crisis in the summer of 1914 in the formulation of her disastrous policy towards Serbia that would ultimately lead to war. How was the news of the Easter Rising received in Vienna and Budapest? Also, the Vatican knew about two weeks beforehand the date of the Rising. What was Eoin MacNeill’s role in the events? The paper will also confirm that some British officials at the highest level took the decision to let the Rising happen intentionally in order to decapitate the republican movement. This is proven by the existence in the German archives of a document entitled
Aufgabe P
.

The years between 1890 and 1907 saw some major realignments in
the system of European alliances. Briefly, in 1892 a military alliance was signed between France and Russia. Owing to naval tensions between Britain and Germany, the
Entente Cordiale
between Britain and France saw the light in 1904. Eventually, the Anglo-Russian Agreement became a reality in 1907. The latter led to the formation of the so-called Triple Entente countries – Britain, France and Russia. It must be pointed out that the Entente and the Agreement the British signed were not military alliances, but from Germany and Austria’s perspective this constituted a strategic encirclement.
⁵
From that moment onwards, the German leaders would try to drive a wedge between their rivals but their efforts were not successful. In a future war, which many statesmen and militaries expected sooner or later, the German general staff relied on the famous ‘Schlieffen Plan’, which consisted in first knocking out France before rapidly transferring all divisions to the east front to deal with the advancing Russian army.
⁶
But the Germans were most preoccupied with the United Kingdom and its vast empire, which they considered to be their most dangerous enemy. Would the British interfere if Germany entered a war against France and Russia? This question bordered on the obsessive in Berlin. But did Britain not have a weak western flank, Ireland, which might be exploited or which might prevent her from entering a continental war? Germany was well aware that Ireland was rife with political tensions due to the nationalists’ struggle for home rule, which was opposed by unionists.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was closely following the Irish crisis. He was personally informed by Dr Theodor Schiemann, a historian, who was corresponding with George Freeman.
⁷
Freeman was a journalist who specialised in foreign affairs and was then working for the
Gaelic American
in New York, the newspaper owned by the Irish republican and Clan na Gael leader, John Devoy. Freeman and Schiemann had begun their correspondence in 1906 and had been put in touch with each other by a German editor working in Japan. Freeman had offered to work ‘against England’ [sic].
⁸
Most of their correspondence concerned anti-British propaganda and occasionally work of a cloak-and-dagger nature. Once, Schiemann asked how many Irishmen were serving in the royal navy, the answer to which Freeman was not able to ascertain.
⁹
Obviously the idea was to figure out whether Irishmen could be relied upon to disrupt the organisation of the royal navy.

As for the Kaiser, he became more and more frustrated by Britain’s attitude towards Germany and more and more aggressive in his comments regarding Ireland. He was being kept up to date about the latest developments in the Irish crisis by reports from his embassy in London. When, on 14 September 1912, Richard von Kühlmann, the
chargé d’affaires
of the embassy, suggested that the crisis would weaken England as a world power because of the influence the Irish exercise in America, the Kaiser wrote in the margin: ‘That would be a great boon.’
¹⁰
There was also some interaction between Germany and Austria-Hungary about Ireland. In August 1907 Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow sent a letter to Aloys von Aehrenthal, the powerful Minister of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, in which he explained that the British would probably not be involved in a European war lest uprisings should happen in Ireland and India. Bülow explained that this might be useful to know for Emperor Franz Josef before his scheduled meeting with King Edward VII.
¹¹
There was even more. In November 1908 the Irish nationalist Frank Hugh O’Donnell met the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, Count Albert von Mensdorff, in London. He had come to offer a plan of alliance between nationalist Ireland and Austria-Hungary designed to break the strategic encirclement imposed by the Triple Entente. Mensdorff thought that O’Donnell was ‘a little … eccentric’ but was sufficiently impressed to send a full report to Aehrenthal in Vienna. Interestingly, although the report was marked ‘secret’, the Austro-Hungarians passed it on to their German allies.
¹²
The matter was entrusted to Dr Schiemann, who lost no time in contacting George Freeman in New York. Freeman, however, advised the Germans to have nothing to do with O’Donnell as he was not reliable.
¹³

It must be emphasised here that these early contacts between the Irish republicans and the Germans did not result in concrete measures. After all, when the war broke out in 1914 there were no risings in Ireland nor anywhere else in the British empire, except a short rebellion led by Christiaan de Wet in South Africa. Not even contingency plans had been thought out, something bitterly regretted by Freeman in 1915.
¹⁴
The explanation of this lies probably in the fact that deep down the Germans still believed they could reach an agreement with the British and make sure that they would not interfere in a general war on the continent.

The home rule crisis intensified when, in 1913, the unionists set up the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the nationalists retorted by establishing the Irish Volunteers. It now looked as if a large scale civil war was only a matter of time. The Ulster crisis attracted the foreign press, but not only journalists arrived in Ireland. Baron Georg von Franckenstein, from the Austro-Hungarian embassy in London, was among them, and his stay in the country became controversial.
¹⁵
It should not be forgotten that
the 25,000 rifles delivered to the UVF on the night of 24–5 April 1914 came from the Steyr armament factory in Upper Austria.
¹⁶
The archives in Vienna reveal that Franckenstein wrote a report precisely on 24 April.
¹⁷
This was a most striking coincidence to say the least and prompts the question as to what he was really doing in Ireland all the more since the report has since gone missing. It is unlikely to be ever recovered as vast amounts of secret files were destroyed in Vienna after the war.
¹⁸
In 1939
Franckenstein published his memoirs in which he categorically denied any wrong-doing. The problem is that he seemed to have contradicted himself. In February 1913 he had been in India, and as he himself stated in his memoirs: ‘The purpose of my travels and stay in India was to study the general political situation and to ascertain what attitude the natives would adopt in a world war.’
¹⁹
This was exactly what people accused Franckenstein of having done in Ireland. Similar accusations were levelled at Richard von Kühlmann of the German embassy, who was suspected of having gone on a secret mission to Ulster in the summer of 1914. Like Franckenstein, Kühlmann denied everything. The plot thickens here, however, as Margot Asquith, wife of the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, clearly remembered Kühlmann telling her that he had gone to Ulster.
²⁰
Both men’s roles remain cloaked in mystery.

When the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by a young Serbian nationalist, serious tensions developed between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, involving the major European powers. Historians have named this the ‘July crisis’ during which politicians, diplomats and militaries were wondering who was going to do what. What was Ireland’s role in the unfolding events that would lead to the outbreak of the First World War? As seen, Germany was essentially obsessed by the position of the United Kingdom. As Professor A.T.Q. Stewart wrote in 1967: ‘The influence of the Irish crisis on German policy has generally been underestimated.’
²¹
This continues to be the case today as the many books dealing with the outbreak of the war rarely take into account the Irish crisis. And yet there can be little doubt about the veracity of Professor Stewart’s assertion. Indeed, on 26 July 1914 the Belgian ambassador in Berlin, Baron Henri Beyens, wrote that Germany could now wage war ‘in extremely favourable circumstances’. Among the reasons he mentioned was the situation in the United Kingdom: ‘England … is paralysed by her internal dissensions and her Irish quarrels’.
²²
Beyens could not have known how right he was for on the very same day a British regiment opened fire on a nationalist crowd in Dublin after a gun-running operation for the Irish Volunteers at Howth. Four people died and forty were wounded. The incident became known as the Bachelor’s Walk massacre. The long-awaited civil war looked to be on its way. The next day Albert Ballin, the German ship owner and personal friend of the Kaiser, reported from London, where he had been sent to ascertain the political situation, that Britain’s reaction to Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia had been very ‘mild’. He related it to the ‘present situation’.
²³
Undoubtedly, Ballin had the Irish crisis in mind.