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1
Donal Lowry, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford
‘”Making John Redmond the Irish [Louis] Botha”: the dominion dimensions of the Anglo-
Irish settlement, c.1906-1922’
In 2016, the centenary year of the 1916 Easter Rising, much was made of the global impact
of Irish nationalism on the process of decolonisation in India and, later, Black Africa.
1
Such
influences can indeed be traced, particularly in the case of India, but for most contemporary
observers the most prominent parallels appeared to be drawn with the white settler Empire.
2
In the decades before the Great War, most British officials and constitutional nationalists
looked to the colonies of settlement, rather than the dependent empire, for political analogies.
The creation in 1867 of the Dominion of Canada, which appeared to reconcile francophone
and anglophone Canadians within a confederal system, provided the Prime Minister, William
Gladstone, with some his pioneering ideas for Irish home rule.
3
Several years later, in 1893,
the diamond magnate-turned-premier of the Cape Colony, Cecil John Rhodes, was largely
responsible for ensuring continuing Irish representation at Westminster in the second Home
Rule bill, not least through his donation of £10,000 to the Irish leader, Charles Stewart
Parnell, in support of his idea of imperial federation. The principle of continuing
representation in the Imperial Parliament continued to be embodied in all subsequent Home
Rule legislation, including the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921.
4
`The Irish position
within the British state up to the 1920s always seemed to be more “colonial” than that any of
the other non-English peoples’, John MacKenzie and Tom Devine have noted: `Thus, in a
constitutional sense, there can be little doubt that empire and the British state were closely
connected, not least through the Irish question.’
5
Indeed, Canada would ultimately provide
the constitutional template of the Irish Free State as a member of the British Commonwealth
after 1922 following the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which event, as MacKenzie has also noted,
`arguably began … the decolonization process’.
6
Running largely parallel with these constitutional developments was, of course, a
tradition of violent resistance, which touched on the British Empire at large. In the nineteenth
century, the Empire faced many real and potential enemies, but none seemed as existentially
menacing or as persistent in the imperial imagination as Irish republicanism. From the 1790s,
the ideology of Irish resistance had evolved from Catholic Jacobitism and unrequited
monarchism into a much deadlier French revolutionary-inspired secularist republicanism,
somewhat anti-clerical in character and all the more dangerous for having been pioneered by
2
renegade Presbyterian dissenters and Anglicans. As the British Empire expanded, Irish
republicanism, along with a contrary Irish loyalism, followed it to its farthest frontiers.
7
The
Canadian insurgent, Louis Riel, was inspired to incorporate a shamrock on his rebel flag by
his Irish-born lieutenant, William O’Donoghue. In 1868, an Irish law clerk attempted to
assassinate Prince Alfred on a visit to Sydney, Australia. In 1875, Alfred Aylward, the leader
of the Black Flag Rebellion on the diamond fields of Kimberley in the Cape Colony, was an
Irish republican. While Irish Fenians attempted an invasion of Canada in 1866, another Irish
republican, Thomas Francis Meagher –“Of the Sword”- governed Montana on the still ill-
defined frontier of Prince Rupert’s Land. Meagher, together with John Mitchell, another
Fenian, illustrated the global reach of Irish republicanism, both having been confined in Van
Dieman’s Land, before escaping to America with their Anglophobia undimmed. For those
deemed to be traitors or informers to their cause there was no mercy. Thomas D’Arcy
McGee, an Irish republican gun runner who later became a constitutional monarchist and
founder of the Dominion of Canada, met his end in 1868 by an assassin’s bullet in an Ottawa
street, `the dog’s death that he deserved’, declared Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the inveterate
leader of American fenianism.
8
In 1883, James Carey paid the price for informing on his
comrades, who had assassinated the Irish Chief Secretary and Under Secretary, when he was
shot by an Irishman on board ship off the coast of the Cape Colony. For the remainder of the
century, Irish-American Fenians plotted further attacks on Canada and the fomentation of
uprisings in British India, as well as actively supporting the Boers against the British. In
1881, at a time of acute crises in Egypt, Ireland and the Transvaal, the New York Times
reported that `500 wild Irishmen, well armed with four gatling guns’, were heading to
Mozambique to assist the Boers.
9
This proved to be a false alarm, but in 1899-1902, Ireland
was electrified by the South African War, with Catholic bonfires in Belfast celebrating Boer
victories and jingoistic crowds celebrating imperial triumphs. Roy Foster has highlighted `the
galvanic effect of the Boer War – in this area as in others nearly as crucial an event for Irish
nationalism as the death of Parnell’.
10
The action of the Irish brigades fighting for the Boers
were keenly followed, while at home advanced nationalists, led by Arthur Griffith, a
journalist who had lived in South Africa, were inspired by Boer resistance. An Irish
Transvaal Committee became a defining measure of nationalism, later evolving into the
nucleus of the Sinn Fein movement, in 1905.
11
Meanwhile, Irish and, especially, Ulster,
unionism took on a more avowedly and stridently imperialist character. Nationalism – or,
more specifically, sympathy for Boer republicans – rather than religion, thus divided Irish
3
society. This is why mostly Catholic Irish nationalists could support Afrikaner Calvinist
republicans against a Protestant but monarchist Empire.
12
The South African War continued to cast a long shadow in the Edwardian era
[MF1]
.
The Irish parliamentary party, fractured by the fall of Parnell, reunited under John Redmond
largely as a result of the conflict, while unionists would long hold nationalist solidarity the
Boers as symptomatic of Irish betrayal. In 1903, the death sentence for high treason, later
commuted, on Arthur Lynch, commander of the Second Irish Transvaal Brigade, kept the
conflict in view; all the more so because the case was prosecuted by the celebrated Irish
lawyer and nemesis of Oscar Wilde, Edward Carson, who had defended Leander Starr
Jameson for his eponymous raid into the Transvaal.
13
The Chinese labour scandal, which
contributed to the landslide victory of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals in 1906,
also found an echo in Ireland.
14
The new Liberal government soon appeared to represent a
new direction in imperial policy, however, away from the centralising and aggressive strategy
of the Unionists and towards a more conciliatory approach sympathetic to the nationalisms
within the Empire, whether near, in the form of Irish, Scottish, Welsh identities, or far, in the
case of the Boers.
15
The architect of the change in policy in South Africa, Lord Selborne, the British High
Commissioner, had not been sanguine about either the Boers or the Irish. `Personally, I like
[the Boers] … he wrote to Baron Northcote, the Governor-General of Australia:
They have got very good natural manners, they are very hospitable, very plausible,
apparently very frank. This makes them like the Irishmen, very pleasant to meet as
friends, but when you do business with them, particularly political business, you must
use a very long spoon.
16
This transformation was soon evident in the restoration of responsible government to the
Transvaal and Orange River Colony in 1907, widely lauded as a `magnanimous gesture’.
[MF2]
This strategy, in turn, lead many to believe over the succeeding decade that a similar
change might be effected in Anglo-Irish politics.
17
In that year, elections were held in both
territories. The new Transvaal government included General Louis Botha and General Jan
Christian Smuts. Botha had fought the British until the bitter end
[MF3]
, before surrendering
under terms at the Treaty of Vereeniging, while Smuts, equally resolute, precociously clever
and widely regarded as one of the cleverest law students to graduate from Cambridge,
became his trusted lieutenant. Botha was seen as charismatic and warm-hearted, while the
4
cerebral Smuts was well-connected and highly respected in metropolitan society. `History
writes the word “Reconciliation” over all her quarrels, he told the British governor, Lord
Milner, in 1905.
18
The new Orange River Colony cabinet included General J. B. M. Hertzog,
a republican-minded lawyer-turned-commandant, and General Christiaan de Wet, who had
been one of the most effective guerrilla commandants and a most bitter of Boer bitter-enders.
Hertzog and de Wet, however, became increasingly alienated from the conciliatory policies
of Botha and Smuts, whom they regarded as too subservient to the British – indeed, as Boer
poachers turned imperial gatekeepers. Botha’s new-found loyalty to the British connection
appeared to be encapsulated in his presentation on behalf of the Transvaal Government of the
Cullinan Diamond to King Edward VII on the occasion of his 66th birthday. The leadership of
Botha and Smuts proved crucial in meetings of the South African Convention, which met in
1908-09 and led to the creation of the Union of South Africa as a British dominion in 1910.
Among British Liberals something of a cult developed around the duarchy of Botha and
Smuts as exemplary embodiments of this new and `enlightened’ imperial policy. They were
the Old Testament figures of David and Jonathan come to life; they were the George
Washington and Alexander Hamilton of a new South Africa; they were heroic warrior
enemies turned statesmen. Like the patrician of classical Rome, Cincinnatus, who had
reluctantly left his plough to defend the virtues of the republic, the two generals now
appeared to stand between imperial order and secessionist anarchy, represented by the
increasingly republicanism of generals Hertzog, de Wet and other recalcitrants.
19
It is only
against this background of a divided Afrikanerdom, between `moderate’ advocates of a
`benign’ imperialism and unreconcilable republicans, that the apparent significance of South
Africa for Anglo-Irish politics can be understood.
Sir Robert Ensor (1877-1958) was a leading English writer and journalist of the first
half of the twentieth century. As a leader writer for the Manchester Guardian in 1900-05 and
later as a journalist with the Daily News and Daily Chronicle, he was in a prime position to
observe and record British politics in the Edwardian decade. In his best-selling and
magisterial England, 1870-1914, he describes the wider impact of the South African post-war
settlement, and the restoration of responsible government in the Transvaal and Orange River
Colony in particular on the Liberal Party thus:
About [Irish home rule] the liberals had been comparatively apathetic in 1906, but
quite a new feeling had come to pervade their ranks since the brilliant success of [Sir
Henry] Campbell-Bannerman’s policy in bestowing self-government on the
5
Transvaal. Their slogan now was “to make Redmond the Irish Botha”. And, indeed,
[Redmond] had many qualities for the part; he led a united party…; his dignified
eloquence expressed a generous and conciliatory temper; and unlike Parnell, he had,
apart from the Irish grievance, a warm admiration for England and Englishmen. Had
their hand been extended to him as it was to the Boer leader, he would have grasped it
in the same spirit.
20
Newspapers were not slow to seize on this parallel during the Liberal Government’s
introduction of an Irish Councils Bill which proposed devolution that was short of home rule
in May 1907. The Irish Freeman’s Journal highlighted a speech given by Campbell-
Bannerman on Ireland to the Manchester Liberal Federation and his references to `the most
significant political event of last year – the establishment of complete self-government to the
Transvaal’. There had never been in the history of their country `a finer example [or]…a
grander achievement’. He went on to ask whether there was not a country closer to home
where a similar solution might be applied. Turning to Ireland, he referred to the Irish
Councils Bill as the beginning of `a little tiny, humble effort’ to concede `administrative
power to the Irish people’. He dismissed the Unionist opposition to the bill on the grounds
that it would be the thin end of a home rule wedge:
The Empire is in danger, of course, not so much on account the Bill as because of
another and wider scheme, which it is thought would be dangerous, and which would,
just imagine, give the people of Ireland almost as much control over their own affairs
as the people of the Transvaal now enjoy.
Responding to Campbell-Bannerman, Winston Churchill, the Under-Secretary for the
Colonies (and responsible, inter alia, for South Africa), declared that `British Statecraft
would prove capable of making the Irish people real partners in the Empire’.
21
Meanwhile
[MF4]
, the Freeman’s Journal, an important leader of and vehicle for nationalist
opinion, opined that Churchill, a rising star in the Liberal Government as President of the
Board of Trade, might prove to be a useful ally in the campaign for home rule, due to his
direct experience of South Africa, where trust had been crucial in ending `hopeless
dissensions [and] bloody struggles’, even though he narrowly lost a by-election in
Manchester, where he was supported by the Irish party despite clerical hostility. The paper
nonetheless continued to advocate an application of South African conciliatory methods in
Ireland.
22
6
With the sudden retirement of Campbell-Bannerman in the following year,
[MF5]
Redmond used the Transvaal and Botha parallel in his efforts to keep his successor
Herbert Asquith’s attention focused on Home Rule, reminding opponents that Botha had also
been regarded as `disloyal’ until self-government was conceded to him. Canada, Australia
and the Transvaal were alike regarded as disloyal when their rights were being eroded by the
imperial government. `All we ask from you’, he asserted, `is this – that what you have done
for the Frenchmen in Quebec, what you have done for the Dutchmen in the Transvaal, you
will now do for Irishmen in Ireland…’
23
This appeal reflected Redmond’s ambiguous
position, as both heir to Parnell and ally of the Liberal government which offered the only
prospect of Home Rule. The Botha analogy enabled him to skirt around the anti-British
sentiment that had marked Parnell’s speeches, while avoiding complete integration in the
Liberal Party. `Our stake in the Empire is too large for us to be detached from it’, he told the
Freeman’s Journal: `We Irish have peopled the waste places of Greater Britain. Our roots are
Imperial as well as national
[MF6]
.’
24
Significantly, Botha was believed to have a poignant Irish
connection through his wife, Annie Emmet, who claimed to be a kinswoman of the executed
patriot, Robert Emmet, a connection much publicised by Michael Davitt, the Irish Land
League leader and enthusiastic pro-Boer.
25
He was believed to be a personal friend of John
Dillon, Redmond’s senior colleague.
26
Moreover, Redmond knew that many of his supporters
revered in Botha and the Boers those idealised characteristics they most admired in
themselves: `a rural, agricultural and deeply religious people’.
27
If only these sentiments
could be harnessed to the cause of Irish self-government.
[MF7]
Redmond’s Botha strategy, therefore, seemed to strengthen
[MF8]
his continuing
leverage with the Liberal government, while outmanoeuvring more radical nationalist opinion
at home. The 1911 Imperial Conference of colonial premiers offered a further opportunity to
raise his profile as both leader of the Irish nation and potential imperial statesman. His
parliamentary party hosted a banquet at Westminster on the fringes of the conference, when
the speeches of various colonial statesmen in support of home rule were recalled. Such a
policy seemed fruitful with the appearance following the conference at the Investiture of the
Prince of Wales of General Botha, the only colonial statesman thus to be invited and another
symbol of a changed attitude towards Boer, Welsh and – potentially – Irish nationality.
28
The South African analogy also began to attract the attention of journalists. These
included Erskine Childers, who recalled from the time of his service in the City Imperial
Volunteers in the South African War an encounter with soldiers of the Royal Munster
7
Fusiliers, who struck him as `loyal, keen and simple soldiers’. He went on to argue in The
Framework of Home Rule (1911) that `the whole history of South Africa bears a close
relationship to the history of Ireland’, which would be solved by self-government within the
Empire, even if he would later fatefully revise this opinion.
29
Lionel Curtis of the Milner
Kindergarten and J. L. Garvin, editor of The Observer, also began to take a keen interest.
30
Events in Ireland, however, began greatly to frustrate these developments, with ripple
effects across the Empire. In 1912, the Liberal government introduced a home rule bill for
Ireland, which offered limited devolution. Attempts to produce a federal `Home Rule All
Round’ solution to dilute the impact of Irish failed. Unionists in Ireland, especially in Ulster,
as well as in Britain, where they were led in parliament by the Ulster-descended Andrew
Bonar Law, threatened to resist home rule, if necessary, by force, and they were supported in
this by loyalists from Toronto and Calgary to Melbourne and Auckland. Among those who
rallied to the Ulster cause were `the bard of Empire’, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Starr Jameson `of
the Raid’ and Lord Milner, the former South African High Commissioner, who saw in the
Ulstermen yet another band of desperate uitlanders in danger of metropolitan abandonment
and betrayal, so much so that he considered subverting the discipline of the British Army in
order to prevent home rule.
31
Among the leaders of the Ulstermen were veterans of the South
African War such as Sir James Craig, whom the conflict had `recruited [into] a freemasonry
of military-minded Irish Unionists who emerged from their wartime experiences with a
revivified imperial zeal and aggression’.
32
The crisis added another dimension to the South
African analogy. If Redmond was, potentially, an `Irish Botha’, and generals Hertzog and de
Wet the equivalents of more advanced Irish nationalists, Irish and Ulster loyalists also found
a parallel in the English-speaking settlers of southern and eastern Africa. As MacKenzie has
noted: `The Rhodesian analogy with Ireland was frequently made’: in 1914, the British South
Africa Company’s solicitor, warned, referring to a scheme to include Southern Rhodesia in
an Afrikaner-dominated South Africa: `God forbid … that we should have to say “Rhodesia
will fight and Rhodesia will be right” but if there is any attempt made to put this country
under the keel of the Union of South Africa you will know what to do.’
33
Tom Casement, the
brother of the humanitarian-turned-rebel, Sir Roger Casement, who would be executed
following the rising in 1916, highlighted his sense of crisis to Smuts: `It is a great pity you
and general Botha are not in power [in Ireland]. I think Carson & Co would now be on the
water.’
34
8
The Irish troubles were thus provided what Jack Gallagher described as `a kind of
intersection between the problems of empire and the problems of domestic British politics’,
and this would be graphically illustrated by the events of the Great War and its aftermath.
35
Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914, on the day that Unionist members quit the House of
Commons in protest against the passage of the Home Rule bill, Redmond held up before
parliament the example of reconciliation provided by South Africa:
The whole world has been struck by the spectacle of unity in the Empire – from India,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and last, not least, from South Africa and Ireland.
No one can have read unmoved the magnificent speeches of General Botha and
General Smuts. Just as Botha and Smuts have been able to say … that the concession
of free institutions to South Africa has changed the men who but 10, or a little more,
years were your bitter enemies in the field to you loyal comrades and fellow-citizens
in the Empire, just as can I truthfully say to you … that Ireland has been transformed
from … “the broken arm of England” into one of the strongest bulwarks of the
Empire.
36
Wartime events conspired to keep the South African parallel at the fore of the Irish Question.
Several months later, while thousands of Irish nationalists joined the British Army at
Redmond’s behest, Dillon, was somewhat less enthusiastic in his support for the war effort,
but he nevertheless highlighted the seemingly positive example of South Africa:
General Botha is [now] one of the most honoured men in the whole of the British
Empire. He is the sole trust of England in South Africa, and if they had not trusted
him they would have been cleared out of South Africa …. [four?] How could the
English people [have] dare[d] to [go to war] with South Africa enslaved and Ireland
denied her freedom? [She] could only do so because she has firmly set aside the
policy of the Tory Party and has given liberty to South Africa and placed the Irish
Home Rule Act on the Statute Book.
37
Dillon’s optimism proved to be misplaced, however, especially in South Africa, for on the
outbreak of war, General Christiaan de Wet sensed that Britain’s difficulty was South
Africa’s opportunity to sever the imperial connection. Brigadier-General Christiaan Beyers,
of like mind, resigned his commission as commander of the Union Defence Force and was
mortally wounded soon afterwards. The rebellion was subsequently suppressed by generals
Botha and Smuts, decisively acting against their former comrades in support of the imperial
9
war effort.
38
Many poor and disaffected whites had rallied to the insurgents, threatening for a
time a strategically vital region of the Empire.
39
Redmond was keenly aware of the
significance of this rebellion, reminding the House of Commons that Botha too had had to
face serious `racial [white] animosity’ between Boers and Britons in South Africa where
Botha `had to face his Sein [sic] Feiners’. `I honestly believe in my own heart’, Redmond
said, `that … Botha’s difficulties were in reality small compared with the difficulties that my
colleagues and I had to face in Ireland’, where, at the outbreak of war, unlike Botha
[MF9]
, a
home rule administration had not been created.
40
No less aware of the strategic opportunity provided by England’s difficulty was
Patrick Pearse, a poet and cultural nationalist who, impatient with British failure to enact
home rule, now advocated more violent action and would become the leader of the uprising
in 1916. `Whenever England goes on her mission of Empire, we meet and we strike at her’:
he warned: `Yesterday it was on the South African veldt, tomorrow it may be on the streets of
Dublin’.
41
He had also noted how, reputedly, Cecil Rhodes had smuggled guns inside pianos
into Johannesburg in preparation for the Jameson Raid.
42
James Connolly, the Irish
syndicalist and socialist leader had also believed that `the Boers [had] pricked the bubble of
England’s fighting reputation’, but regretted this `missed chance’ to throw off the imperial
yoke in 1899-1902.
43
Almost of the key planners of a rebellion had been ardent pro-Boers,
including Sean MacDiarmada, who kept a greyhound called `Kruger’. Sir Roger Casement,
the celebrated humanitarian and former British consul in Mozambique had once praised the
British granting of self-government to the Boers, now advocated a rebellion with German
assistance and he welcomed news of the 1914 rebellion in South Africa.
44
Major John
MacBride, the former commander of the Irish Transvaal Brigade, lent his support to an
insurgency.
45
In 1916, the Easter Rising, which took Redmond and the Irish parliamentary
party largely by surprised occurred for internal reasons, but South African echoes were
present. Articles in the Irish Volunteer journal had been emphasising the strategy and exploits
of the General de Wet. Although in the event a more static conflict confined to Dublin
followed, many of the insurgents wore Boer-style headgear known as `Cronje hats’ and
adopted the Boer rank of Commandant (still preserved in today’s regular Irish Army). The
socialist Citizen Army had been trained by Jack White, a veteran of the South African War
and a renegade son of Field Marshal Sir George White, who defended Ladysmith.
The executions which followed the crushing of the Rising also brought South Africa
to mind. MacBride was executed for no other reason, it would seem, than the fact that he had
10
led one of the Irish brigades in 1899-1902. Pleas for clemency drew on the precedent of the
Afrikaner rebellion of 1914, when the Prime Minister, Louis Botha, spared all but one of the
rebels (who had been his former comrades). On 29 April, while Dublin was still in
insurrection, Redmond received a telegram from Botha expressing his `heartfelt sympathy’
for the Irish leader and expressing his regret `that a small section in Ireland are jeopardising a
great cause’.
46
Redmond, who condemned the Easter Rising, observed that Botha was facing
similar problems with extreme nationalists who were keen to take advantage of British
wartime difficulties to secure a separatist republic. On 10 May, in the House of Commons, he
called on the Prime Minister, Asquith, to follow Botha’s example and halt the executions
immediately. His deputy, Dillon, pointed out that Botha had only executed one of the
ringleaders of the Afrikaner rebels, Jopie Fourie, while General Sir John Maxwell had
executed over a dozen.
47
However, when a friend suggested to James Connolly, the badly-
wounded socialist leader of the rising, that the British would never shoot him, he responded,
`Remember Scheepers’, in reference to the Cape rebel, Gideon Scheepers, whom the British
had helped recover from his wounds before executing him in 1902.
48
Newspapers throughout
Ireland were also keenly aware of the contrasting policies of Botha and Maxwell.
49
The
Catholic Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick, hitherto regarded as politically conservative,
wrote to Maxwell contrasting the harsh measures meted out to the Easter insurgent with the
lenience shown to the Jameson Raiders in 1896, `When a number of buccaneers invaded a
friendly state and fought the forces of a lawful government’.
50
Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of
The Times and a former member of Milner’s `Kindergarten’, believed that Redmond and
Dillon were in a far weaker position than they were before the rising, one that was not unlike
that of Botha and Smuts, but the latter were `far bigger and more dominant men’.
51
As John MacKenzie has observed, from at least the 1880s, Scottish nationalists
followed the development of federalism and dominion status with considerable interest and
`the application of imperial placebos to the metropolitan body politic’.
52
Now it was the turn
of the British government to attempt to apply such a placebo. Following his succession to the
Prime Ministership in December 1916, David Lloyd George sought to diffuse the Irish crisis
which was having an impact on debates about conscription in Canada and Australia. While
Redmond’s parliamentary party was being eclipsed by the separatist Sinn Fein Party, Lloyd
George called a constitutional convention drawn from a cross section of Irish society and
explicitly modelled on the South African Convention of 1908-09 that had led to the creation
of the Union as a dominion. The dominions of Canada and South Africa had respectively, it
11
seemed, reconciled francophones and Afrikaners with anglophone loyalists.
53
Thus it was
thought that a similar bicultural arrangement between Irish Catholics and Protestants,
nationalists and unionists, might succeed. It was widely assumed that either Louis Botha or
Jan Christian Smuts, who was a member of the Imperial War Cabinet and took an increasing
interest in Irish affairs, might chair the Convention. Sir Francis Hopwood, Baron
Southborough, a former Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, and Walter Long, the
Colonial Secretary from 1916 to 1919 and a leading Unionist, recalled the success of the
South African Convention in reconciling Boer and Briton in South Africa. This precedent, as
Nicholas Mansergh has noted, `loomed so large in the minds of most Liberals and some
Unionist leaders’.
54
Sir Leander Starr Jameson was briefly considered for the post of Chief
Secretary for Ireland following the Easter Rising, despite his reckless eponymous “Raid” of
1895-6 and anti-home rule intrigues with Milner and Carson in 1912-14. He was invited to
Ireland in 1917 by Lord Dunraven, a keen advocate of federalism, to advise on a political
settlement, having been seen to redeem himself as an advocate of Boer-British reconciliation
during his term as premier of the Cape Colony in 1904-08 and subsequently as leader of the
South African Unionist Party.
55
The idea of an Irish Convention drawn from a wide cross-
section of Irish society developed from a conversation between John Redmond and the
Marquess of Crewe, who as Colonial Secretary in 1908-10 had overseen the South African
Convention, following a state banquet in May 1917 in honour of Smuts, as a member of the
Imperial War Cabinet. It was widely suggested that either Botha or Smuts – who in the same
year was awarded an honorary LLD by an imperially-minded Trinity College Dublin – would
act as chairman.
56
In the event, it was chaired by Sir Horace Plunkett, an Irish Unionist
reformer, a founder of the cooperative movement who was a sometime correspondent of
Rhodes, Smuts and John Xavier Merriman, a former premier of the Cape Colony, who took a
keen interest in Irish affairs.
57
Plunkett went on to found the Irish Dominion League and he
was so encouraged by the success of the South African Convention that he hoped that a
momentous Irish agreement might be signed at his villa between the Dublin Mountains and
the sea, the verandah of which he had modelled, several years earlier, on the stoep of Cecil
Rhodes’s homestead at Groote Schuur.
58
The Irish Convention failed, however, and the political initiative was now passing to
physical force rather than constitutional strand of Irish nationalism, which within a few years
would literally engulf Plunkett’s constitutional dream house in flames. When guerrilla
warfare developed in 1919-21, a succession of British commanders could draw on extensive
12
South African military if not political experience. General Sir John Maxwell, who suppressed
the Easter Rising, had been Military Governor of Pretoria and the Western Transvaal in 1900-
02. General Sir Nevil Macready, commander-in-chief during the insurgency of 1919-21, had
been Provost Marshal in Port Elizabeth in 1901. In 1918-20, Field Marshal Lord French, who
had led operations against Cape rebels in 1901, took a keen interest in the extension of
martial law across the country. Overseeing the Irish revolution in the wider context of crises
in Egypt and India was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General
Staff, and another veteran of the South African War, who advocated a policy of aggressive, if
professional, military containment. Even more belligerent was Hugh Tudor, a former
divisional adjutant in South Africa, who raised the Auxiliary Division, a gendarmerie of ex-
officers whose commanders included Frank Crozier, another South African old hand.
59
Advanced nationalists who advocated a violent break with Britain had been inspired
by the small but symbolically significant Irish Transvaal Brigades. Many of the later
published memoirs of and interviews with veterans of the War of Independence (1919-21)
highlight the exemplary influence of the Boers in their secessionist formation, when `Boer
fever’ had appeared to grip the countryside. As one of many guerrilla fighters recalled from
his childhood in rural Cork:
The stories of, and the discussions on, the Boer War never ended without a reference
to Ireland. Small wonder. The handful of farmers who stood up against an empire and
humiliated it set an example for the oppressed and downtrodden of the world. The
example was not lost on the militant-minded in our own country. My uncle was one of
these and it was from him that I first heard of the only sure way to shake off the
foreign oppressor.
60
By the summer of 1921, the guerrilla struggle led by Michael Collins, nicknamed “the
Irish de Wet” due to his admiration for the Boer general’s strategy, had reached a stalemate.
61
Since Botha had died unexpectedly in 1919, leading British and Irish politicians urged the
intervention of Smuts, who had been warning about the poisoning impact of the Irish problem
on British relations with the USA and the dominions. Smuts was already regarded as a maker
of the twentieth century, having been entrusted with secret wartime negotiations with
Hungary, and with the foundation of the Royal Air Force, as well as playing a leading role in
drawing up the Charter of the League of Nations, in which so many Irish people were to place
their trust. While President Woodrow Wilson declined to become involved in the Irish crisis,
13
Smuts’s mediation elevated it to an international level of importance.
62
Moreover, South
African-Irish activists had been disproportionately influential in the diaspora and South
Africa was prominent in Irish diplomatic initiatives.
63
`No living statement would be more
acceptable to the majority of the Irish people than yourself’, Plunkett assured Smuts for he
seemed singularly equipped to intervene.
64
Not only had he once fought to the end against the
British, but he had longstanding Irish friendships, including Alice Stopford Green, George
Russell (`AE’) and Colonel Maurice Moore, the brother of the writer, George Moore, and
Dail Eireann’s emissary to South Africa.
65
Smuts was kept closely informed by the growing
violence in the country by Casement, Moore and Fr T. Ryan, an Irish missionary priest.
Smuts was acutely aware of the `poisonous’ impact of Irish affairs on both Anglo-American
and Anglo-dominion relations, for Irish issues were also having an impact in his own
subcontinent.
66
Speaking in Pretoria in February 1920, he used the Irish insurgency to
counter Afrikaner nationalist arguments for a republic by pointing out the example of Ireland
and warning that such a demand would get them – as in Ireland - `tanks and aeroplanes and
an army of occupation’.
67
Later that year an energetic, pro-Hertzog Irish Republican
Association of South Africa emerged, elements of which fought Smuts’s government in the
1922 Rand uprising.
68
Moreover, as MacKenzie has noted, the Irish crisis was also intruding
once more in Rhodesia and in Kenya. Kenyan settlers explicitly borrowed the tactics of
Ulster loyalist direct action against home rule and Smuts’s perceived sympathy with Irish
nationalism was proving to be a political liability among those Rhodesian settlers he was
attempting to woo into the Union of South Africa.
69
Returning to Britain for the 1921 Imperial Conference, Smuts thinly-veiled criticisms
of Britain’s Irish policy
[MF10]
earned the contempt of William Massey, New Zealand’s Ulster-
born and avowedly loyalist prime minister, but Smuts nevertheless played a key role in
intervening in helping to redraft the speech of George V for the opening of the first Northern
Ireland parliament, in order to make it sound more conciliatory and it was widely credited in
creating an atmosphere conducive to a truce.
70
Casement again sought his help as an
intermediary, while the king’s secretary told him: `His majesty is impressed with the belief
that you
[MF11]
of all men will be able to induce [the nationalist leader and President of the
Dail] Mr de Valera to be reasonable and to agree to a settlement.’
71
He arrived incognito in
Dublin where he attempted at length but unsuccessfully to convince de Valera to accept
dominion status
[MF12]
, since he argued that the British would never accept a republic which
Sinn Fein demanded. De Valera was impressed by Smuts and `considered him the cleverest
14
of all the leaders he met in that period, not excluding Lloyd George.
72
Relations between
them soured, however, with the unannounced publication of their correspondence, including
his description of the Irish delegates as `small men’.
73
Nevertheless, his intervention, both in
the king’s speech in Belfast and in his visit to Dublin, had helped to pave the way for
negotiations.
The constitutional status offered by Lloyd George to Ireland was similar to that of the
Dominion of Canada, but the negotiations leading to such a settlement were very different.
As Nicholas Mansergh has noted, the South African War provided the British with their sole
precedent for reconciling republican guerrillas.
74
Arthur Griffith, who succeeded de Valera
as President of the Dail, had been a journalist in South Africa in the 1890s, and drew on the
South African precedent of the Simonstown naval base in the negotiations regarding the use
of Irish port facilities. He and General Michael Collins, charged with carrying out the Treaty,
came to be regarded by Churchill as another heroic duarchy which might prove to be allied,
not unlike Botha and Smuts; if not a triumvirate, counting the youthful if ill-fated
Commonwealth statesman and associate of Hertzog: Kevin O’Higgins, `a figure out of
antiquity cast in bronze’.
75
The name, “Irish Free State”, was coined by Lloyd George, based
on that of the Orange Free State, in order to provide a compromise term which fell short of a
republic but did not over-emphasise the monarchical aspect of the new Irish dominion. As in
1902 and 1914 in South Africa, recalcitrant republicans and bitter-enders would not accept a
settlement and were willing to fight their former comrades if necessary, Thus Ireland erupted
into a fratricidal civil war, more bitter in many ways that waged against the British. `Alles sal
regkom’ (`things will work out all right’), Churchill, now Colonial Secretary, assured Collins,
now commanding the Free State army, quoting the words of the Boer leader, President Brand,
he had heard after the South African War.
76
The settlement proved divisive, however, with
pro- and anti-Treaty factions dividing and erupting into a civil war in which brother fought
brother, mirroring the divisions of Afrikaners following the Boer War. Collins, who was
influenced by Alfred O’Rahilly and H. Duncan Hall, regularly cited the South African
settlement of 1910 in support of the Treaty.
77
In 1921, he wrote to General de Wet, his hero,
assuring him of his respect. `You were right to accept the Treaty’, de Wet advised him:
`Freedom will enable you to become strong and to organise yourselves.’
78
A year later,
however, Collins was killed in an ambush by irregular forces. `We have lost our young Louis
Botha’, Casement lamented to Smuts.
79
Ireland now sorely needed statesmanship and
15
moderate leadership, `one hour of Botha’, to solve the crisis, opined Lionel Curtis, who had
been involved in the Treaty negotiations.
80
Collins’s death marked a tragic end to the Louis Botha analogy, but the Anglo-Irish
settlement continued to be framed by South African experience. Judge Feetham of the South
African Supreme Court, and formerly of Milner’s Kindergarten, fatefully chaired the
Boundary Commission which defined the Irish border. In the 1920s and early 1930s the Irish
Free State and the Union of South Africa formed what Vincent Massey, the Canadian High
Commissioner in London, called `a fellowship of disaffection’. These years were marked by
cooperation in securing the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of
1931. South Africa, although the least Irish and least Catholic of the dominions, was the one
with which Irish nationalists felt the greatest affinity.
81
The Union was the least monarchical
of the dominions and it contained the most republicans. Irish nationalists warmed to
Afrikaners who disdained imperial titles and who, almost alone in the Commonwealth,
included, like themselves, not a few guerrilla commandants-turned-parliamentarians.
Moreover, like Ireland, politics in South Africa was fractured along similar lines, between
those who had fought their republican former comrades in support of the imperial connection
embodied in a divisive treaty, as well as the presence of financially powerful loyalists
profoundly attached to imperial symbols and fearful of their minority position within the
white electorate. The state visit to Dublin in 1930 of General J.B.M. Hertzog was marked by
considerable mutual admiration and nostalgia for the days when they were guerrilla
comrades-in-arms.
82
Despite Ireland becoming an absentee member of the Commonwealth after De
Valera’s ascendancy in 1932 and the declaration of a republic in 1949, there continued to be
South African influences in Anglo-Irish relations. In the 1930s, Afrikaner nationalists took a
keen interest in Irish attitudes to the Commonwealth, believing that `Ireland might point the
way’ for them, heightening British fears of South African neutrality in 1939, following the
Irish example. Smuts, meanwhile, continued to warn that if Ireland hived off from the
Commonwealth, South Africa would be sure to follow.
83
The sentimental aspect of the
relationship lasted until the end of the 1950s, when the Irish Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, while
regretting the fact that Ireland was now forced to take the South African government to task
over its apartheid policies, stated nonetheless that they had enjoyed a `long relationship
marked by mutual sympathy’.
84
16
The Commonwealth dimension to the Irish question has not entirely died. Following
the cessation of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
team included Judge Sir Edward Sommers of New Zealand and Judge John Toohey of
Australia. The Disarmament Commission was chaired by the Canadian General, John de
Chastelain
[MF13]
. A former Canadian Supreme Court Justice, Peter Cory, was asked to inquire
into several controversial murders. Another member of the Commission was Cyril
Ramaphosa, a leader of the African National Congress, who had the somewhat unlikely task
of being taken incognito and blindfolded along the farm tracks of counties Leitrim,
Monaghan and Louth to ensure that the weapons of the Provisional IRA had been put
`beyond use’.
85
Thus `The separate strands of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English influences and
responses run through empire in highly illuminating way’, as John MacKenzie has astutely
written: `The identities of the four nations were themselves modified in the process and, in
the twenty-first century, still show marks of that imperial experience’.
86
The dominion
dimensions of the Anglo-Irish settlement would appear amply to justify this observation.
17
1
Enrico Dal Lago, Roisin Healy and Gearoid Barry, `Globalising the Easter Rising: 1916 and the Challenge to
Empires’, in Enrico Dal Lago, Roisin Healy and Gearoid Barry (eds), 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial
Moment (London, 2018).
2
David Brundage, `Lala Lajpat, Indian Nationalism and the Irish Revolution: The View from New York, 1914-
1920’, and Stephen McQuillan, `”Revolutionaries, Renegades and Refugees”: Anti-British Allegiances in the
Context of World War I’, in Dal Lago, Healy and Barry (eds), 1916 in Global Context; James McConnell, The Irish
Parliamentary Party and the Home Rule Crisis ( Dublin, 2013), 246-7.
3
Deryck Schreuder, `Locality and Metropolis in the British Empire: A Note on Some Connections between the
British North America Act (1887) and Gladstone’s First Home Rule Bill (1886)’, in J.A. Benyon et al. (eds),
Studies in Local History: Essays in Honour of Winifrid Maxwell (Cape Town, 1976), 48-58.
4
Elaine Byrne, `Irish Home Rule: stepping stone to imperial federation?’, History Ireland, 20, 1 (2012); G. P.
Taylor, `Cecil Rhodes and the second Home Rule bill’, Historical Journal, 14 (1971); James McConnel and
Matthew Kelly, `Devolution, federalism and imperial circuity: Ireland. South Africa and India’, in Duncan Tanner
et.al. (eds), Debating nationhood and governance in Britain, 1885-1939: Perspectives from the four nations
(Manchester, 2006), 172-6; Alan E. O’Day, `Federalism, Home Rule and Self-Government Ideas of Irish
Nationalism in the Age of Isaac Butt and Parnell’, in Andrea Bosco and Alex May (eds), The Round Table, the
Empire/Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy (London, 1997).
5
John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine, `Introduction’, in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds), Scotland
and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), 5.
6
John MacKenzie, `Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English worlds? The historiography of a four-nations approach to
the history of the British Empire’, in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds), Race, nation and empire:
Making histories, 1750 to the present (Manchester, 2010), 133.
7
Niall Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867-1900
(Cambridge, 2015); M. J. Kelly, `Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s’, Past &
Present, 204 (2009), 127-54; H. V. Brasted, `Irish Nationalism and the British Empire in the Late-Nineteenth
Century’, in Oliver McDonagh, W. F. Mandle and Pauric Travers (eds), Irish Culture and Nationalism, 1750-
1950, New York, 1983, 83-103; Scott W. See, `”A Colonial Hybrid”: Nineteenth-Century Loyalism as Articulated
by the Orange Order in the Maritime Provinces of British North America’, in Allan Blackstock and Frank
O’Gorman (eds), Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775-1914 (Woodbridge, 2014), 181-200.
8
David Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Vol. 2 (Montreal, 2011), 189.
9
D. M. Schreuder, Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and Colonial `Home Rule’ 1880-85 (London,
1969), 152.
10
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (London, 1989), 448.
11
Donal McCracken, Forgotten Protest: Ireland and the Anglo-Boer War (Belfast, 2003); Senia Paseta,
`Nationalist and unionist responses to two royal visits: 1900 and 1903’, Irish Historical Studies, 32, 124 (1999),
488-504.
12
Alvin Jackson, `Irish Unionists and the Empire, 1880-1920’, in Keith Jeffery (ed.), `An Irish Empire’?: Aspects
of Ireland and the British Empire Manchester, 1997), 132.
13
H. M. Hyde, Carson: The Life of Sir Edward Carson, Baron Carson of Duncairn (London, 1953), 176-7.
14
Emmet O’Connor, `William Walker, Irish labour and “Chinese Slavery” in South Africa, 1904-6’, Irish
Historical Studies, 37, 145 (2010), 48-60.
15
John Ellis, `Reconciling the Celt: National Identity, Empire and the 1911 Investiture of the Prince of Wales’,
Journal of British Studies, 37, 4 (1998), 391-418.
16
Quoted in Kent Fedorowich, `The weak link in the imperial chain: South Africa, the Round Table and World
War One’, in Bosco and May (eds), The Round Table, 137.
17
Nicholas Mansergh, South Africa 1906-61: The Price of Magnanimity (London, 1962), 97, 99; Ronald Hyam,
`”The Magnanimous Gesture”: The Liberal Government, Smuts and Conciliation’, in Ronald Hyam and Ged
Martin (eds), Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London, 1975), 169; Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at
the Colonial Office, 1905-1908 (London, 1968), 55, 113, 165, 183; Pat Walsh, The Rise and Fall of Imperial
Ireland (Belfast, 2003), 132-45.
18
18
Antony Lentin, General Smuts (London, 2010), v.
19
Patrick Kirkland, `Alexander Hamilton and the Early Roman Republic in Edwardian imperial Thought’, Britain
and the World, 12, 1 (2019); Donal Lowry, `”The Boers were the beginning of the end”?: The wider impact of
the South African War’, in Donal Lowry (ed.), The South African War Reappraised (Manchester, 2000), 207.
20
R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1936), 418-19.
21
Freeman’s Journal, 10 May 1907.
22
Ibid., 25 April 1908.
23
Ibid., 31 March 1908.
24
Ibid., 16 May 1908.
25
Michael Davitt, The Boer Fight for Freedom (New York, 1902), 546.
26
Des Ryan, `The Munster Fusiliers in the South African War, 1899-1902, Part III’, Old Limerick Journal, 36
(1999), 13.
27
Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton, 2012), 143.
28
McConnell, The Irish Parliamentary Party, 263; Ellis, `Reconciling the Celt’, 416-17.
29
Erskine Childers, The Framework of Home Rule (London, 1911), 120.
30
G. K. Peatling, British opinion and Irish self-government, 1865-1925: From Unionism to liberal
Commonwealth ((Dublin, 2001).
31
A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London, 1969 ); Robert McLaughlin, Irish Canadian Conflict and the
Struggle for Irish Independence, 1912-1925 (Toronto, 2013), 25-51, 80-108.
32
Alvin Jackson, `Irish Unionists and the Empire’, 132.
33
John MacKenzie, `Responsible Government’, Rhodesian History, IX (1978), 34. See also Ian Henderson,
`White populism in Southern Rhodesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (1972), 393; Donal
Lowry, `Ulster resistance and loyalist rebellion in the Empire’, in Jeffery (ed.), `An Irish Empire’?, 193-95.
34
State Archives, Pretoria. Smuts papers, A1//196/24, Tom Casement to Smuts, 21 February 1914. See also
Gerald Shaw, `The Casement Brothers, Ireland and South Africa’, Southern African-Irish Studies, 4, 1 (2012), 15-
24.
35
John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2004 edn), 98.
36
Joseph P. Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, 1912-1918 (Syracuse, 2004), 168.
37
Freeman’s Journal, 8 March 1915.
38
Sandra Swart, `”A Boer and His Gun and His Wife Are Three Things Always Together”: Republican Masculinity
and the 1914 Rebellion’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, 4,(1998), 737–51.
39
Bill Nasson, `Piet on peat: the Irish romance of Afrikaner anti-imperialism’, in Robert J. Blyth and Keith
Jeffery (eds), The British Empire and its Contested Pasts (Dublin, 2009), 266-67.
40
Thomas Hennessey, Dividing Ireland. World War I and Partition (London, 1998), 113-14.
41
P. MacAonghusa (ed.), Quotations from P. H. Pearse (Cork, 1979), 10; Gert van der Westhuizen, `A distant
mirror: Ireland and the Anglo-Boer War’, in Ian Liebenberg, Gert van der Westhuizen and Mariaan Roos (eds),
A Century is a Short Time: New Perspectives on the Anglo-Boer War (Pretoria, 2005), 301.
42
Joost Augusteijn, `Patrick Pearse and Ireland’s position in the empire’, in Blyth and Jeffery (eds), The British
Empire, 239.
43
Worker’s Republic, 18 November 1899’, quoted in James Connolly, Collected Works, 2 (Dublin, 1988), 29.
44
Keith Jeffery, 1916: A Global History (London, 2015), 218.
45
Brian Feeney, Sean MacDiarmada (2014), 27, 70; Angus Mitchell, Roger Casement (Dublin, 2013), 191; Donal
Fallon, John MacBride (Dublin, 2015), passim.
46
Donal Fallon, 16 Lives: John MacBride (Dublin, 2015), 253;
47
Dermot Meleady, John Redmond: The National Leader (Dublin, 2013), 372; Denis Gwynn, The Life of John
Redmond (London, 1932), 482.
48
Donal P. McCracken, `”Fenians and Dutch Carpetbaggers”: Irish and Afrikaner Nationalisms, 1877-1930’,
Eire-Ireland, 29, 3 (1994), 117.
49
Hennessey, Dividing Ireland, 141-42.
50
Deirdre McMahon, `Ireland and the Empire-Commonwealth’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm Roger Louis (eds),
The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 141.
51
Deirdre McMahon, `Ireland, the Empire and the Commonwealth’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the
British Empire (Oxford, 2003), 201.
19
52
John MacKenzie, `General Introduction’, in Keith Jeffery (ed.), `An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the
British Empire (Manchester, 1996), vii.
53
G. W. Martin, `The Canadian analogy in South African Union’, South African Historical Journal, 8 (1976), 40-
59.
54
Nicholas Mansergh, Nationalism and Independence (Cork, 1997), 79.
56
R. B. McDowell, The Irish Convention, 1917-8 (London, 1970), 76, 101-2; John Kendle, Walter Long, Ireland,
and the Union, 1905-20 (Dun Laoghaire, 1992), 50, 140; Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London,
1932), 384, 532; F.S.L. Lyons, John Dillon (London, 1968), 415-16.
57
Margaret Digby, Horace Plunkett: An Anglo-American Irishman (Oxford, 1949); 217, 239-40; South African
Library, Merriman Papers: Plunkett to Merriman, 22 October 1917, Merriman to Plunkett, 28 July 1917, 12
December, 1917, 19 February 1925, 2 April 1925.; University of Oxford, Plunkett Foundation, Plunkett Papers:
Southborough to Plunkett, 31 July 1918, Plunkett to Merriman, 22 October 1917; Seventy Years Young:
Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall ([1937] Dublin, 1991), 313-14.
58
Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy (London, 1987), 144-5.
59
Donal Lowry, `”The World’s No Bigger than a Kraal”: The South African War and International Opinion in the
First Age of “Globalization”’, in David Omissi and Andrew Thompson (eds), The Impact of the South African
War (Basingstoke, 2002), 279-81.
60
Micheal O’Suilleabhain, Where Mountainy Men Have Sown: War and Peace in Rebel Cork in the Turbulent
Years 1916-21 (Tralee, 1965), 22. See also Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom (Dublin [1924], (1991), 22;
James Malone (trans. Patrick J. Twohig), Blood on the Flag (Ballincollig, 1996), 3; Sean Moylan in his Own
Words: His Memoir of the War of Independence (Millstreet, 2004), 13; Michael Hopkinson (ed.), Frank
Henderson’s Easter Rising (Cork, 1998), 22; Kenneth Griffith and Timothy O’Grady, Curious Journey: An Oral
History of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution (Cork, 1998), 11, 12, 100, 197, 228-9; Adhamhnan O’Suilleabhain,
Domhnall ua Buachalla: Rebellious Nationalist, Reluctant Governor (Dublin, 2015), 5, 52..
61
Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins (Dubin, 1991 edn), 13, 54.
62
Arthur Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dail Eireann 1919-22 (Dublin, 1995), 258-9.
63
T. K. Daniel, `The scholars and the saboteurs: The wrecking of a South African scheme’ Paris, 1922’, Southern
African-Irish Studies, I (1991), 162-75; Ciaran Reilly, `”The Magna Hibernia”: Irish Diplomatic Missions to South
Africa, 1921’, South African Historical Journal, 67, 3 (2015), 255-70.
64
Jan Christian Smuts [jnr].Jan Christian Smuts (London, 1952), 251-2; Plunket to Smuts, 8 June 1921, in Jean
van der Poel (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Papers, Vol.5, 85-8; State Archives, Pretoria, Smuts Papers,
A1/208/211A, Plunkett to Smuts, 8 June 1921.
65
W. K. Hancock, Smuts, Vol.1, The Sanguine Years, 1870-1919 (Cambridge; Sarah Gertrude Millin, General
Smuts (London, 1936), 292; Margery Forester, Michael Collins: The Lost Leader (Dublin, 1989), 112.
66
State Archives, Pretoria, Smuts Papers, A1/198/66, Casement to Smuts, 4 August 1916; A1/207/23,
Casement to Smuts, 21 November 1920; A1/208/223-5, T. Ryan OMI to Smuts, 29 March, 10 June, 2 December
1921; National Library of Ireland, Maurice Moore papers, ms.10581; Daithi O’Corrain, `”A most public spirited
and unselfish man’: the career and contribution of Colonel Maurice Moore, 1854-1939’, Studia Hibernica, 40
(2014), 118-25.
67
G. D. Scholtz, Hertzog en Smuts en die Britse ryk (Cape Town, 1975), 78.
68
Jeremy Krikler, White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (Manchester, 2005), 58,
176, 247, 255.
69
MacKenzie, `Responsible Government’, 40; Lowry, `Loyalist rebellion’, 196-8.
70
Geoffrey W. Rice, `How Irish was New Zealand’s Ulster-born prime minister Bill Massey?, in Brad Patterson
(ed.), Ulster-New Zealand Migration and Cultural Transfers (Dublin, 2006), 259; Deborah Lavin, From Empire to
International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford, 1995), 184-5.
71
State Archives, Pretoria, Smuts papers, A1/208/237A, Lord Stamfordham to Smuts, 1 July 1921.
72
Frank Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal (London, 1935), 76.
73
W. K Hancock, Smuts Vol. 2: The Fields of Force, 1919-1950 (Cambridge, 1967), 56-61;
74
Nicholas Mansergh, The Unresolved Question: The Anglo-Irish Settlement and its Undoing, 1910-72 (London,
1994), 34, 82, 103; Lord Longford and Thomas P. O’ Neill, Eamon de Valera (London, 1970), 130, 135; Thomas
Jones, Whitehall Diaries, Vol I, Ireland 1918-25 (London, 1971), 120-25, 130-2, 140.
75
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, 1929), 347, 349.
20
76
Churchill, The World Crisis, 336,
77
Michael Collins, The Path to Freedom (Dublin, 1922), 89; Alfred O’Rahilly, The Case for the Treaty (Dublin,
c.1922); H. Duncan Hall, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London, 1920); David Harkness, `Britain and
the Independence of the Dominions: The 1921 Crossroads’, in T. W Moody (ed.), Nationality and the Pursuit of
National Independence (Belfast, 1978), 158.
78
Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers, 1877-1902 (Johannesburg, 1989), 169.
79
State Archives, Pretoria, Smuts papers, A1/208/43, Casement to Smuts, 24 May 1923;
80
Peatling, British opinion, 163.
81
See David Harkness, The Restless Dominion: The Irish Free State and the British Commonwealth of Nations,
1921-31 (Dublin, 1969); Deirdre McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-Irish Relations in the 1930s
(London, 1984): Paul Canning, British Policy Towards Ireland, 1921-41 (London, 1985).
82
`Arrival of General Hertzog’, Irish Times, 1 November 1930.
83
Donal Lowry, `The captive dominion: imperial realities behind Irish diplomacy’, Irish Historical Studies, 36,
142 (2008), 202-226.
84
Donal Lowry, `A Long Relationship marked by mutual sympathy’, Irish Times, 21 April 1991.
85
Donal Lowry, `”Ireland shows the way”: Irish-South African relations and the British Empire/Commonwealth’,
Southern African Irish Studies, 3 (1996), 89-135.
86
John MacKenzie, General Editor’s Introduction’, in Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and empire: Indo-Irish radical
connections, 1919-64 (Manchester, 2008), ix.
