A great rebellion at the end of the 18th century was put down, the powerful reform movements of Daniel O’Connell and later Charles Parnell rose and faded, the Great Famine stalked the land in the 1840’s and many of Ireland’s sons and daughters fled their homeland in the melancholy ‘coffin ships' taking both their Irishness and their hatred of England to new homes in the United States. Finally it dawned on the English body politic that something had to be done about Ireland and the more enlightened members of the British government came up with the solution of Home Rule or devolution or limited autonomy as we would now call it. The Home Rule bills, however, were bitterly opposed by many in Britain and their passage through parliament was not easy. Although the process was started by Gladstone, it was only in the later years of the first decade of the twentieth century that Home Rule for Ireland became a distinct possibility.

On being called to form his first ministry, Gladstone had declared that his mission would be the solving of the Irish problem, but even his prodigious political talents failed. In his third ministry he seemed tantalizingly close to success and even managed to secure the acquiescence of Charles Parnell to the passage of a Home Rule Bill. The scandal-tainted fall of Parnell and the veto power of the Tory dominated House of Lords brought the scheme to naught, however, and it was not until the election of Campbell-Bannerman's Liberals (later led by Herbert Asquith) in 1906 that the next chance for Irish autonomy arose. Determined and able to curb the anachronistic power of the Lords, once more the Liberals put forward their proposals for reform of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. This time, most people were sure, the Bill would pass and this certainty brought forth a bitter opposition from both within and without Asquith’s party. It was probably the most divisive issue in 20th century British politics. What made the issue so highly emotive was not simply the desire of some sections of the British establishment to maintain an imperial hold on Ireland (though this existed in no small measure), or even the disbelief which Ireland’s desire to break away often engendered in Britons, but something much more tangible, much more visible and much more capable of causing real harm to the structures of British power than any rising of Irish peasants ever could. It was the presence in Ireland of a geographically concentrated minority of Protestants who called themselves Ulstermen, Loyalists, Unionists or more colourfully, Orangemen.

The descendants of Scots and English colonists ‘planted’ in Ireland more than two centuries before in a vain attempt to curb the persistent rebelliousness of the native Irish Catholics, they had cohered into a militantly Protestant community. They comprised a majority in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland which they called Ulster and, as so often with colonists who know in their hearts they are invaders and look on the people they had displaced with a mixture of contempt and fear, looked to an outside powerfor protection, in this case the British Crown. They were fiercely loyal to that crown.
The prospect of Irish Home Rule touched the most sensitive nerve of the Ulstermen who dreaded the thought of living under Catholic control. This dread pervaded all classes of the Protestant community. Businessmen feared that their efficient, prosperous industries would ruined by Socialist, Catholic agitation; the Protestant working class feared for their jobs if in competition with Catholic Irish prepared to work for lower wages; local politicians felt their gerrymandered stranglehold on Ulster’s municipalities would be swept away. Through it all ran a consuming fear for their religious liberties that was encapsulated in their slogan, ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’. For years the Protestants had seen one Home Rule Bill after another defeated in the British Parliament and as long as this continued they were content to express their loathing of the subject in constitutional ways. When the bill looked like becoming a reality, however, they rejected Parliament’s authority and, making a mockery of their loyalty to the British Crown, resolved to fight for their threatened way of life. Just as the Irish had done again and again over the centuries, the Protestants prepared for rebellion. 
Under the leadership of Edward Carson, the Protestants of the north formed themselves into a paramilitary organization, the Ulster Volunteers. Adopting a military-type structure, the Ulster Volunteers were financed by Belfast industrialists and led by mostly ex-British Army officers and as such had no lack of money or well-trained instructors. Over 40,000 men joined the volunteers and every weekend they paraded and drilled with old sporting rifles and dummy wooden guns. They were very well organized with cavalry units, a transport section, an intelligence section and medical services. They only needed weapons to convert themselves into a potent force and these they soon acquired. A consignment of 20,000 Mauser rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition was purchased in Germany, packed aboard an ageing collier, the Clydevalley, and sailed across the North Sea to the ferry port of Larne, not far from Belfast. There the Volunteers were waiting. The transport section had compiled a register of all members in possession of motor vehicles and obtained pledges that the cars and trucks would be placed at the disposal of the movement if the need arose. When the Clydevalley steamed into the harbour there were enough willing hands to unload the ship and enough transport to quickly spirit the guns away across Ulster to secret hiding places, no doubt with the connivance of the harbour authorities and local police. 
Now there were teeth to the second great slogan of Carson and the Ulstermen. As war clouds gathered unnoticed across Europe and millions spent the last peaceful spring and summer of their lives, in that little corner of Ireland concerned only with their own worries and fears, the Protestants of the north declared ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ They had many, many sympathizers in Britain both in the Government and the ranks of the general public but it was in the army that the greatest sympathy lay. When officers at the main British base in Ireland, the Curragh, were asked what their response would be if ordered to disarm and disband the Ulster Volunteers, almost to a man they declared their intention of resigning their commissions. The ‘Curragh Mutiny’, as it came to be known, could not be ignored by the government. The King, George V, wondered if as sovereign he was morally compelled to refuse to support orders , given in his name, for his troops to fire on their own countrymen.

To the Irish, of course, such royal musings were further evidence of Britain’s role as Ireland’s oppressor. British troops had never had any qualms about shooting Catholic Irishmen. The threat from the Ulster Volunteers was a serious one though and the Irish countered it with an organization of their own, the Irish Volunteers. It was very different from it’s northern counterpart. It was, first of all, very much bigger; perhaps 200,000 men were members at one point. It was less well financed, less well organized and it’s leaders tended to be professors and poets rather than the ex-colonels and generals of the Ulster Volunteers. What its men lacked in training, equipment and experience, they more than made up for in enthusiasm. Another military force opposed to British rule existed. It was the Citizen Army and had arisen as a workers' defence unit after a series of bitter strikes. It was led by James Connolly, an Edinburgh-born ex-soldier and Marxist trade unionist. The Citizen Army had an ex-British Army officer as their instructor. He was Jack White, Captain in the Gordon Highlanders and the son of Sir George White, the general who had defended Ladysmith from the Boers in the South African War. Both the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen's Army, however, were desperately short of weapons.
And now another ship sails into Irish history, literally sails. She was a ketch owned by Erskine Childers and his crippled wife Mary. Childers was a famous writer and another of those Protestants that seem to crop up so often leading or trying to lead the Irish to freedom. Childers and his wife sailed their little craft over to Germany and there picked up a cargo of just over 1000 rifles and accompanying ammunition. When she started back on the homeward voyage, the boat lay so low in the water that Childers was in perpetual fear of her foundering. He was however an accomplished sailor and braving both the elements and British patrols he brought the little vessel home; at one point brazenly sailing through the massed ranks of British warships when his course took him by the Fleet as it lay off Devonport. His destination was the little harbour of Howth, some miles south of Dublin and it was an exhausted Childers who brought the Asgard into port. As with the Clydevalley, many willing hands awaited his arrival and with great enthusiasm his cargo was unloaded. A great crowd escorted the guns out of the harbour and onto the Dublin road. The Irish Volunteers, however, were not favoured with the blind eye of authority that had missed the gunrunning of their northern counterparts. As the crowd turned a bend in the road they found a force of policemen and soldiers of the King's Own Scottish Borderers waiting for them at Clontarf. Their was a scuffle, a baton charge and in the confusion most of the guns were got away, less than twenty falling into the hands of the police. As the soldiers marched back to Dublin, a jeering mob followed them and pelted the troops with stones and garbage. Finally the patience of the Scottish troops ran out, one of them fired, then another and when the smoke cleared six people were dead and many more injured. It was not the first time that British troops had fired on Irish civilians and it would not be the last, but the Bachelors' Walk Incident as it came to be known was an evil portent of much that was to come

Now though, the pro-Home Rule camp were armed like their northern opponents and if the Ulstermen chose to resist Home Rule by force, civil war would inevitably follow. Unforseen events then arose to seemingly defuse the explosive situation in Ireland. In August of 1914, Britain went to war against Germany and in the first heady days of delirious popular support for the war, Home Rule was postponed for the duration of hostilities. Both the antagonists in Ireland seemed to accept this. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party in the British parliament pledged his, his party's and his countrymen's support. It was no idle pledge. Over 500,000 southern Irishmen, many of them members of the Irish Volunteers, fought for the British in World War I and Redmond himself lost a son on the battlefields of Flanders. The Ulster Volunteers enlisted en masse and were constituted into the 36th (Ulster) Division. Wearing the Red Hand of Ulster as their divisional badge, they were slaughtered on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign minister commented that the only bright spot in Britain's early wartime situation was the peacefulness of Ireland. On the face of things it seemed so. As a result of so many men joining the army, unemployment fell and Irish farmers enjoyed something of a boom as all the food they could produce was quickly purchased for the war effort. Most people also felt the postponement of Home Rule was, in the circumstances of wartime, not entirely unreasonable. Beneath the surface, however, the ancient soul of Irish resistance was stirring and one group in particular were determined to exploit Britain's temporary weakness and go all out for independence before the end of the war. That this would necessitate an armed uprising made little difference and was positively welcomed by some.