A Liberal Chief Secretary and the Irish Question: Augustine Birrell, 1907–1914

Abstract

Augustine Birrell performed the thankless task of chief secretary for Ireland for a longer period than any of his forty-nine predecessors. His nine years of office from 1907 to 1916 included some of the most critical years of Anglo-Irish history, and ended tragically when he accepted blame for the 1916 Easter rebellion, which has haunted his political reputation ever since. Birrell has been generally condemned by the English and consigned to oblivion by the Irish. This article will reassess Birrell's work as Irish secretary by relating his actual achievements and failures to the complex problems which constituted the Liberal dilemma in Ireland. Emphasis is placed on the earlier and more successful period of Birrell's administration, which has been almost entirely neglected by English historians.

L’Exclusion de l’Ulster et le nationalisme irlandais : consentir au principe de la partition, 1912-1916

“…Lloyd George and Churchill had proposed special accommodation for Ulster to Cabinet as early as February 1912. 5 However, in public, the government remained adamant that Home Rule would be an all-Ireland settlement and insisted that universal safeguards written into the Bill, including on religious freedom, would assuage the concerns of unionists and Protestants across the island. 6 On 11 June 1912, a backbench Liberal MP, Thomas Agar-Robartes, introduced the first formal exclusion proposal to Parliament when, on the assertion that "I have never heard that orange bitters will mix with Irish whisky", he moved an amendment proposing the exclusion of the four Protestant majority Ulster counties.…”