Chapter one examines the impacts of Irish nationalism in British centres during the Home Rule crisis, from the Irish Party’s Home Rule campaign to the Irish Volunteers’ preparations for civil war. It profiles the political languages and cultures of the ‘British’ Home Rule movement; examines the influence of extra-parliamentary crises - Ulster unionist, suffragist, trade unionist – on Irish nationalist identity in British centres; and assesses the militancy, and constitutional impacts, of advanced nationalist activism in metropolitan Britain by July 1914. Between 1912 and 1914, this chapter submits, the Irish Parliamentary Party presented ‘two faces’ of Home Rule - towards British political opinion and Irish nationalist opinion in Britain. John Redmond and the I.P.P., critically, were ‘representative’ of ‘British-Ireland’ and were embedded in the mainstream political cultures of Edwardian Britain on the eve of war. Irish activists in British cities, however, were radicalised by the extra-parliamentary representations of late Edwardian politics, straining the ideological coherence of, and popular adherence to, the I.P.P.’s proto-electoral strategy. The proliferation of Irish Volunteer units in British centres threatened to spark an Irish civil war on mainland Britain. The militarisation of Irish nationalism, in conclusion, constituted one of the ‘surface excitements’ of Edwardian Britain.

The American War led to still-greater agitation in Ireland, where a national movement arose seeking self-government and reform of the Irish Parliament. Whereas the British Parliament for centuries had possessed the right to veto Irish legislation, the Volunteer militia movement beginning in 1778 mobilized – at first nominally against the threat of Franco-Spanish invasion but quickly turned its attention to agitating for legislative independence. The measure would be achieved by the war’s end, while the Volunteers also sought religious integration off their forces and the expansion of Irish suffrage.

This chapter focusses on the efforts of Protestant advanced nationalists to bring about political change using extra-parliamentary methods. It demonstrates how Protestants who emerged from cultural activism remained within recognisable circles defined by religion. The first section describes the creation of the Irish Volunteers as a nationalist counterpoint to the Ulster Volunteers, and how this body came to be armed by a committee primarily composed of Protestants. The over-optimistic hopes of figures such as Roger Casement that the Irish Volunteers and the unionist Ulster Volunteers could be brought together on a common anti-British government platform is examined. The second section discusses labour and the Irish Citizen Army, whose leadership, at least initially, included several Protestants. The extent to which socialist leaders sought to fashion a nationalism that would appeal to working-class Protestants is discussed. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the strong link between Catholicism and advanced nationalism dated not from the 1916 Rising but from the formation of the Irish Volunteers in the years before.