Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush

1 Kilmichael in Context British rule in Ireland, which commenced during the Great War and burgeoned into a full-blown insurgency after the Armistice, was rooted in a pre-war home rule crisis.

The ‘Irish Question’ bedevilled British and Irish politics throughout the nineteenth century, and between 1912 and 1914 brought both islands to the brink of civil war. After the constitutional crisis over the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ and the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, the House of Lords no longer had the power to veto home rule legislation permanently. This engendered a wider crisis in Ireland. Ulster Unionists and their Conserva­ tive allies resorted to brinkmanship and extra-parliamentary agitation to prevent a measure which would make Irish Protestants a minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic polity and, they feared, weaken the very Empire.1 Thousands of anti-home rule monster meetings and rallies, petitions and canvassing across Britain and Ireland culminated in the September 1912 mass signing of the Ulster Covenant and, in January 1913, the creation of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).2 Radical nationalists responded by founding the Irish Volunteers on 25 November 1913, as a pro-home rule militia.

At the forefront of unionist resistance was Edward Carson, MP for Trinity College and leader of the Irish Unionists in parliament, and James Craig, a Unionist MP for East Down.3 Although facing what was effectively a threatened coup d’état, Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, made no move against them. Even more ominously, when British officers stationed at the Curragh Camp in Kildare let it be known in March 1914 that they The radical nationalist revolt against