Emmanuel Destenay has produced two works, in rapid succession, which are of considerable importance for those trying to understand the Irish Revolution. His first book, based on his Ph.D. thesis awarded by the Sorbonne, enters what has been a rather heated historiographical debate concerning the fate of Irishmen who served in the British army during the First World War and returned to Ireland in 1919. Previous work, by Peter Hart and Jane Leonard, has portrayed such veterans as a victim group during the Irish Revolution. Destenay’s work is an important corrective to this, especially if read in conjunction with Paul Taylor, Heroes or traitors? Experiences of southern Irish soldiers returning from the Great War 1919–1939 (Liverpool, 2015). Taylor, basing his research on extensive use of pension and housing records held in The National Archives, Kew, concluded that the experience of Irish ex-servicemen varied considerably and that they did not form an easily identifiable victim group. Indeed, in terms of pensions and state housing provision, they did rather better than their counterparts in Great Britain. Destenay reaches broadly similar conclusions to Taylor but, crucially, his work extends the archival sources used by making very effective use of the vast amount of material held in the Bureau of Military History witness statements, which were not available to Taylor. Destenay’s study also has important comments to make about the role of ex-servicemen in loyalist forces raised in the new Northern Ireland state, particularly in the Ulster Special Constabulary. He also has more detailed evidence on Great War veterans who served in the I.R.A. in 1919–23 and in the Irish Free State Army, providing some interesting thoughts on the extent to which they provided professional training and leadership in these forces.
Destenay’s second work is a more original but also a more confused study. This is clear from the title, which covers a number of disparate themes and does little to highlight the importance of the French language sources, which Destenay, a native Frenchman, uses to considerable effect in his book. One does, indeed, wonder if this was a publisher’s title, aimed to satisfy as many separate search terms as possible. The core contention of this work is that the Easter Rising of 1916 should not be viewed as a turning point in Irish history, with the fear of conscription into the British army being the major issue that mobilised radical nationalist opinion.
This is, of course, not as radical a break with existing historiography as Dr Destenay would have us believe. Indeed, the major failing of this book is the lack of engagement with a wide number of books by, amongst others, Paul Bew, David Fitzpatrick, Alvin Jackson, James McConnel, Patrick Maume, Dermot Meleady, Conor Mulvagh and Michael Wheatley, which have considered the decline of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the failure of John Redmond’s pro-British war policy. None of these works identifies the Easter Rising as the sole turning point. Instead, what has emerged from these studies is a very nuanced view of the Irish Parliamentary Party embarking on a pro-war policy with which a significant element, perhaps the majority, of its party activists were unhappy from the start. The volunteer split of 1914, the failure of John Redmond to join the coalition government in 1915 and the failure to achieve any form of home rule either in the Lloyd George talks of 1916 or in the Irish Convention of 1917-18 are all viewed as the nails in the coffin of the Irish Parliamentary Party, along with the Easter Rising of 1916 and conscription crisis of 1918.
The real strength of Destenay’s second book is its discussion of the views of a number of French diplomats based in Dublin, London and Washington on the Irish question. These men demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of Irish affairs and were frustrated by what they saw as the ineptitude of British policy in attempting to bolster the Allied war effort. For example, Alfred Blanche, the consul-general in Dublin from November 1917, believed that any attempt to introduce conscription would re-energise Sinn Féin and that a sensible settlement to the Irish question would require the immediate introduction of Home Rule with the exclusion of some Ulster counties. More of a focus on these diplomats’ reports would have been welcome. Indeed, one was left wondering what their sources of information were. Did Dublin Castle officials hold briefings of some sort; was there any formal or informal relationship with senior officers of the Dublin Metropolitan Police or the Royal Irish Constabulary; did the War Office provide any details on their concerns about how conscription might be implemented in Ireland?
The coverage of the conscription crisis of April 1918 itself is more limited than the remit of the book might suggest, largely being confined to chapter 6. This provides a very effective overview of the crisis and there is considerable discussion of the use of conscription in Sinn Féin propaganda in the by-elections and general election of 1918 in the following chapter. However, the image of Irish domestic opinion completely endorsing Sinn Féin, at least outside the Unionist heartlands of Ulster, does need to be tempered. An effective British propaganda campaign, launched in the summer of 1918, meant that recruitment to the British armed forces, which had been in decline since the spring of 1915, suddenly improved. In addition, the peculiarities of the British first-past-the-post system meant that the defeat of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918 was not quite as absolute as its final tally of M.P.s suggested.
It seems a little odd that a work which emphasises the importance of the conscription crisis of 1918 in shaping nationalist opinion has so little comment on the last attempt to introduce conscription into Ireland — namely, the Militia Ballot Act of 1793. Important works by Thomas Bartlett, Henry McAnally and Ivan Nelson have considered the widespread anti-militia riots of 1793, which seem to have acted as a recruiting ground for the radical Defender movement. While Destenay acknowledges the ‘scare’ in some of the press about the supposed re-introduction of the Militia Ballot Act in 1914, there is no discussion of the popular memory of these events or the extent to which Sinn Féin support of 1918 potentially mapped on to areas which had seen rioting in 1793. Destenay also does not outline the way in which the British conscription system of 1916–19 worked and the inherent difficulties which would have resulted in any attempt to import it into Ireland. Indeed, there often seems to be the assumption that men in Great Britain meekly acquiesced in conscription. While surviving records make it impossible to determine an exact figure, at least 700,000 men in Great Britain identified as potential conscripts were able to receive exemption from Military Service Tribunals; this is discussed in detail in an important work by James McDermott. The Military Service Tribunals themselves were organs of local government, relying on voluntary effort from councillors, businessmen and trades unionists to hear appeals. It was surely clear to many contemporaries that finding anyone to sit on such tribunals in Ireland would be impossible in most areas and that any tribunals which did meet would be so swamped with appeals that they could process conscripts only very slowly.
Overall, Emmanuel Destenay has provided two important and thought-provoking books which make effective use of archival materials that have, to date, been under-utilised. Perhaps the main lesson that academic historians should take away from reading them is that one should not try to rush the difficult second book.
