Chapter three measures the political influences of ‘new’ and ‘old’ Irish nationalisms in Britain from the aftermath of the 1916 Rising to the aftermath of the 1918 general election. It profiles the political languages and cultures of ‘Irish-Ireland’ nationalism in British centres: Gaelic League-Sinn Féin-I.S.D.L.; charts the decline of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s British political influence; and evaluates the impact of the 1918 Representation of the People Act on Irish political representation in Britain. While advanced Irish nationalist associations were central to the organisation of relief campaigns for interned rebels in British centres, the 1916 Rising, this chapter submits, did not fundamentally change Irish nationalist politics in Britain. Conflicted over Redmond’s earlier refusal to join the British Cabinet, the Irish Party was instead debilitated by the absence of political leadership, and a post-war political manifesto, in Britain. While the Irish Party in Ireland was decisively defeated by Sinn Féin at the 1918 general election, the Irish Party in Britain was effectively displaced by the Labour Party. The ‘victory’ of Sinn Féin in Britain was predicated less on the democratic legitimacy of Dáil Éireann and more on its recognisable post-war mandate: an Irish Self-Determination League.

This chapter focusses on the largely separate development of a network of Protestant nationalists in Ulster. It shows how an older generation of activists, notably Alice Milligan and Francis Joseph Bigger, sought to inculcate nationalist sentiment in younger Protestants. It traces the development of a mostly Belfast-based network, from their beginnings in various cultural nationalist groups, including the Ulster Literary Theatre, towards their adoption of a nationalist ideology, largely under the influence of the young Quaker nationalist Bulmer Hobson. This chapter also discusses the unusual development of the Independent Orange Order, whose leadership adopted a home rule ideology, and some of whom later defected to republicanism. It also assesses the efforts of Hobson and Denis McCullough to revive the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ulster; and Hobson’s efforts, by means of the Dungannon Clubs, to promote republicanism among northern Protestants. The chapter closes with a discussion of the manner in which pressure from unionist co-religionists resulted in the breaking up of the Belfast group of Protestant nationalists, and their dispersal throughout Britain and southern Ireland.

This chapter discusses the Easter Rising of 1916 and its aftermath. The rebellion had a largely Catholic cast, which has produced a belief that Catholicism and republicanism are connected. This chapter traces the experiences of those Protestants, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, who rebelled in 1916. It also discusses those Protestant nationalists who did not take part but who observed the rebellion. This chapter discusses religious conversion and the Rising, and shows that the majority of Protestant rebels did not convert to Catholicism. Many Protestant rebels first realised the increasingly Catholic nature of their movement while held in internment camps in Britain. The final section assesses the occasionally negative reactions of Protestant republicans to this realisation.