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Updated: May 20, 2025
Four months later, the Chief Secretary told Parliament that the young men of Southern Ireland, who had refused to serve in the Army, were being enrolled in preparation for another rebellion. It was only after some hesitation that the Ulster Unionist Council decided not to hold aloof from the Convention, as the Sinn Feiners did.
The men who leased the land were greatly pleased, everyone else looked forward to a period of employment at very high wages, and Gorman became very popular even among the extreme Sinn Feiners. Sir Bartholomew Bland-Potterton went about London, purring with satisfaction like a large cat, and promising sensational events in the Near East which would rapidly bring the war to an end.
Meanwhile, the party which once held these views as "the immutable first principles of Irish Nationalism" and was now so vigorously loyal and energetically military, appeared to the Sinn Feiners to have changed its ground, and thus to be betraying Ireland quite forgetting that all the while it was England that had to a large extent changed its attitude.
He was more tolerant now than he had been in the days when he had tutored Henry at Ballymartin. He admitted that the Sinn Feiners were widely unpopular. There were many reasons why they should be. Dublin was full of men and women mourning for their sons who had died at Suvla Bay ... and were in no mood for rebellion. "The war's popular in the Combe," he said.
Several hundreds of Sinn Feiners now assembled outside, and several dozen motor-cars which had been "commandeered," together with stores of petrol and food, and the men were all served out with ammunition, while amidst huge enthusiasm the green, white, and orange Republican flag was hoisted over the building.
Thus, when Sir Edward Carson raised his Volunteers in Ulster he had calculated most upon the moral effect the spilling of blood would have upon Englishmen. The Sinn Feiners had calculated upon exactly the same psychological factor with their countrymen.
For the danger is the making of the Sinn Feiners into a national scapegoat for the faults of all. For in a sense all were responsible.
I concluded that there had been a stampeded decision. But on going out I discovered the Associated Press correspondent there. He told me that he heard that I was to receive the news and that he did not believe that there was any necessity of bothering the Sinn Feiners twice for the same decision. "I think the reception is quite likely," he volunteered.
Consequently, when the General Election of 1918 revealed that the whole of Nationalist Ireland had gone over with foot, horse, and artillery, with bag and baggage, from the camp of so-called Constitutional Home Rule, to the Sinn Feiners who made no pretence that their aim was anything short of complete independent sovereignty for Ireland, no surprise was felt in Ulster.
As regards the general "sniping" methods employed in the whole of the Dublin rising it is hard to speak: certainly many of the Sinn Feiners would have preferred a fight in the open, and the soldiers especially at Mount Street Bridge felt it desperately unfair, but, under the circumstances, it became the only chance of the rebels, just as the use of shells was that of the military.
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