‘MUTINY ON THE CURRAGH’ – 1914 CRISIS AS BRITISH OFFICERS PREDICT DEFIANCE OF GOVERNMENT OVER ULSTER

“Mutiny on the Curragh” – 1914 crisis as British officers predict defiance of Government over Ulster.

By Liam Kenny

Mention “the Curragh Mutiny” of March 1914 and a barstool barrister is likely to retort that it was not a “Mutiny”. And he or she would be right, it wasn’t a mutiny … it was much worse. True there were no shots fired nor was there defiance of specific orders. But for a few days in March 1914 a crisis erupted, centred on the Curragh Camp, which sent shock waves through the British establishment.

The crisis was inflamed by the expressed potential of members of the British officer to refuse to obey if they received orders to march on Ulster so as to force the Unionists into accepting a Home Rule parliament located in Dublin.

In the early 20th century the Curragh Camp was one of the largest military assets in the British Isles. Thousands of troops across all the services trained, manoeuvred and exercised across the Curragh plains. The familiar redbrick buildings were hives of activity as soldiers and their horses engaged in the routines of military life. While a high tempo of military training was maintained at the Curragh, it was a relatively peaceful place. The Camp was regarded as part and parcel of local society and economy. The officers in particular were prominent in fashionable circles in the county, many of them being assiduous members of the Kildare Hunt and its related social activities.

However a frisson of excitement was to permeate the camp in March 1914 when tensions arising from the imminence of Home Rule led to rumour and counter-rumour about a mutiny-like response by officers stationed there.

The Curragh incident has to be seen in the context of the Home Rule campaign which divided opinion between the north and south of the island of Ireland. In the south the dynamic Home Rule movement under the leadership of John Redmond had skilfully negotiated the Westminster parliamentary process to prompt the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to bring in a Home Rule bill which would give a measure of independence to Ireland. 

In the north almost half a million Unionist people had the previous year signed a covenant and declaration vowing their outright opposition to any measure of Home Rule and made it known that they were prepared to resort to any measures to block the devolution of government functions to Dublin.

The Unionists were highly organised. For some months they had been organising and drilling and in the summer of 1913 had established the Ulster Volunteer Force which grew to 100,000 members. Two implacable opponents to Home Rule, Dublin-born Edward Carson, and James Craig, were the organisational brains who led the political and para-military preparations to resist Home Rule.

The Unionists had no shortage of support in political and military circles in Britain. The Conservative party under Andrew Bonar Law threw its weight behind the Unionist opposition to Home Rule while many of the most senior British army officers, serving and retired, were busy in the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall pushing the Unionist case, activity which included briefing sympathetic conservative media.

However the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was under political pressure to pass a Home Rule Bill. He depended on the votes of Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party to sustain his Liberal party in Government. Two previous attempts to bring in Home Rule in the 1880s and 1890s had failed to get through the parliament, but Asquith saw an opportunity to settle the Irish question for once and for all so that Britain could concentrate on other threats to its empire including the war drums emanating from Germany.

The Home Rule Bill went through the various stages of parliament in the winter of 1913/14. From the autumn of 1913 there were vibes of dissent among British officers who might be called to enforce home rule on the Ulster Unionists. They were summed up in a memorandum of September 1913 written by Brigadier-General John “Johnnie” Gough who, on the instructions of a worried King George V, had been invited to Buckingham Palace to speak to the King’s secretary on the attitude of the army if it came to marching on Ulster.

The fact that danger of a revolt among the officer class had reached the King who was commander-in-chief of the forces indicates how much apprehension there was in London as the Home Rule bill seemed to be in sight of becoming law. Gough estimated that as many as 60 percent of British officers would refuse to back up Home Rule by force on the Ulster Unionists. His reasons why – and these were the reasons put forward by the half million unionists in the North – were threefold.

Firstly the Irish (as in the southern Irish) were not loyal citizens of the United Kingdom and had taken every opportunity to sneer at the King and the army. He recalled how Irish MPs had cheered in Westminster in 1899 when news of British army defeats in the Boer War had come through. The thought of such disloyal men becoming leaders of and Irish government was repulsive.

Secondly, Gough told the King’s secretary that he wanted a “clean” government for Ireland and that a government run by southern Irish would promote “corruption and graft” and probably the country would be “inundated with unscrupulous Irish-American low class politicians”.

And thirdly he said that he could not tolerate having a priest-ridden government. He said that “knowing the Irish priesthood as I do I had little doubt that religious beliefs would enter into politics and administration.”

However having given this formidable statement of objections he said that, as was the British way, the army would obey orders as it always had if the Unionists began violent action and if the army was required only to back up the constabulary in maintaining law and order. But expecting the army to enforce Home Rule by firing on  Unionists resisting in an orderly manner would be an order that would test to breaking point the army’s duty to obey orders.

The Asquith Government was not deflected by such pre-emptive threats and continued to push the Home Rule Bill through parliament. However the rising opposition in Ulster prompted the Government and senior military officials to suggest that some troops should be moved from the Curragh and Dublin to guard isolated armouries in military posts in Armagh, Omagh, Enniskillen and Carrickfergus. This was to pre-empt the Ulster Unionists from raiding for arms to  equip their 100,000 volunteer force. The Government’s intention was that low-key reinforcement would take place. There was no question of a major movement to suppress Unionist resistance.

The War Office summoned the hapless Sir Arthur Paget, Commander of the British army in Ireland, to London on 19 March 1914 to discuss the security situation on the eve of the Home Rule Bill’s final stages in parliament. From this point the conflicting stories of what triggered the “Curragh Mutiny” began to get legs. Within a matter of days Britain faced a crisis which had the potential to alienate the British army from the British government – an unprecedented situation in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom and one which was centred on the hitherto peaceful out-station of the Curragh Camp. Leinster Leader 4 March 2014, Looking Back Series no: 372.