There is a non zero chance iTTL that in 2023 European Russia Empire will view the most recent war to be fought on their soil to be the Crimean War. (Though in actuality, the bombings of Odessa and the fighting on the Ottoman Georgian border will actually be the last. (When *everyone* piles on the Ottomans in the 1940s)
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Ireland Unfree
"...the most critical gamble in the history of Ireland. Redmond knew, of course, that his health was failing, and that he had at best six months to live, possibly less if he kept up the rigors of his schedule at the Irish Convention. The forces against compromise "coalesce in the dark," he wrote ominously in a private letter to his oft-rival Dillon, "and if we do not seize the hour, they will surely in time overwhelm us."
John Redmond's most important speech of his life was thus given on January 4, 1918, as the Convention reopened. Holding up the signed document from Midleton outlining a substantial concession - that Westminster would devolve the powers of customs and excise to an Irish Parliament on the condition that this proposed Parliament did not levy customs in excess of Westminster's rates against any other member of the British Empire such as Canada or Australia, essentially cementing the soft version of the Federation - he announced his "unqualified support for this compromise" and suggested that the "time for Ireland is today." Key to Midleton's letter had been the note from Chamberlain personally that if "substantial agreement" was found (in other words, if most parties excluding Ulster found this arrangement workable) then Westminster would proceed apace to vote through such an act, though Redmond suspected, correctly, that Chamberlain would have to call an election on the question, as the time of his agreement with Barnes was fast running out and the Parliamentary numbers were too fragile to ram through this very radical Home Rule solution.
It is important to note here just how radical the New Year's Day Agreement, as it came to be known, was in contrast to even Home Rule bills from earlier proposals. The Irish would "evacuate" Westminster entirely, to be represented exclusively by the Irish Assembly, which would have a House of Commons of one hundred and sixty-five Members of the Assembly, and a Senate with sixty-four members elected to rotating ten-year fixed terms divorced from national elections, with each county represented by two members. Further, safeguards would be put in place for provincial and county authority; each county would have a strongly empowered local board in charge of roads and housing, and if a majority of Senators from one of the four provinces voted against an act of the Commons, that was sufficient to delay its passage by a period of a year, in which time it would be reintroduced to the Senate for an up-down vote; this was officially termed the "provincial courtesy" in Redmond's diaries, but it was widely understood to be a provision to mollify Ulster's concerns about being outnumbered and overrun by Southern nationalists, and thus in time came to be known colloquially - and ruefully - as the "Ulster Veto." [1]
What this meant was that, unlike early requests, Ireland would have no House of Lords that protected the almost uniformly Protestant Irish aristocracy with the same means that the British counterpart did; it meant that the highly emotional schools question, on which the Catholic hierarchy had been rigidly opposed to compromise, was punted to a future Irish Assembly to solve (a note which Ulster's representatives were quick to point out), and that on every fiscal question, the Nationalists and the moderate Southern Unionists had won out. Ireland would stay inside the British Empire, with the King as their sovereign and the privilege of the Lord Lieutenant as his viceroy rather than a mere Governor-General, such as in the Dominions; but there was no question that this was the maneuver that went beyond Grattanism and made Ireland a Dominion, rather than a co-Kingdom such as Austria and Hungary (news of frequent and worsening constitutional crises in Hungary throughout 1917 surely had an impact on Redmond's thinking here, even if there is no written evidence for it). [2]
Somehow, after nearly four years of bloodshed and sectarian hate in Ireland, the forces of compromise came together. Carson, splitting from Craig, viewed the protections of the Midleton Agreement as sufficient to protect Ulster interests and quietly supported the deal, confident that there would be no better arrangement for Ulster in the offing. [3] Samuel moved quickly in the afternoon of the 4th to take a preliminary vote on the question, and was pleasantly surprised [4] when it achieved near-unanimity from those present. The Irish Convention had done its job, even if much remained - it had produced a settlement for Ireland, by Irish representatives. The hour of an Irish Dominion governed by the Irish exclusively was nigh.
Of course, there was one critical step remaining - the passage of a Government of Ireland Act under the auspices produced by the Convention, and for that the onus now moved to Westminster and Austen Chamberlain, at exactly the moment when many Ulster Loyalists and Catholic nationalists began to sour on the agreement produced...."
- Ireland Unfree
[1] These provisions are of my own invention
[2] As Dan pointed out, but I was already working on this update and thus was able to weave his thoughts in
[3] This is actually true to OTL - Carson had come around to some level of openness around a compromise by the time of the Irish Convention and turned against it when it was clear Sinn Fein was firm on full and total republicanism and separation. With Sinn Fein just a Grattanist outfit here and Redmond/Devlin in control, and the considerable safeguards for Ulster built into this agreement, he is okay with it.
[4] Here is the key difference - the OTL Convention's chairman, Plunkett, adjourned for two weeks rather than take a vote on the deal on a day when everybody was ready to cut one. This gave Sinn Fein, nationalist bishops, and conservative Ulstermen the chance to start campaigning against it, and Redmond's health got a lot worse, and Devlin blew up the deal and Redmond decided not to break with Devlin. They were so, so close to an actual United Ireland in January of 1918.
John Redmond's most important speech of his life was thus given on January 4, 1918, as the Convention reopened. Holding up the signed document from Midleton outlining a substantial concession - that Westminster would devolve the powers of customs and excise to an Irish Parliament on the condition that this proposed Parliament did not levy customs in excess of Westminster's rates against any other member of the British Empire such as Canada or Australia, essentially cementing the soft version of the Federation - he announced his "unqualified support for this compromise" and suggested that the "time for Ireland is today." Key to Midleton's letter had been the note from Chamberlain personally that if "substantial agreement" was found (in other words, if most parties excluding Ulster found this arrangement workable) then Westminster would proceed apace to vote through such an act, though Redmond suspected, correctly, that Chamberlain would have to call an election on the question, as the time of his agreement with Barnes was fast running out and the Parliamentary numbers were too fragile to ram through this very radical Home Rule solution.
It is important to note here just how radical the New Year's Day Agreement, as it came to be known, was in contrast to even Home Rule bills from earlier proposals. The Irish would "evacuate" Westminster entirely, to be represented exclusively by the Irish Assembly, which would have a House of Commons of one hundred and sixty-five Members of the Assembly, and a Senate with sixty-four members elected to rotating ten-year fixed terms divorced from national elections, with each county represented by two members. Further, safeguards would be put in place for provincial and county authority; each county would have a strongly empowered local board in charge of roads and housing, and if a majority of Senators from one of the four provinces voted against an act of the Commons, that was sufficient to delay its passage by a period of a year, in which time it would be reintroduced to the Senate for an up-down vote; this was officially termed the "provincial courtesy" in Redmond's diaries, but it was widely understood to be a provision to mollify Ulster's concerns about being outnumbered and overrun by Southern nationalists, and thus in time came to be known colloquially - and ruefully - as the "Ulster Veto." [1]
What this meant was that, unlike early requests, Ireland would have no House of Lords that protected the almost uniformly Protestant Irish aristocracy with the same means that the British counterpart did; it meant that the highly emotional schools question, on which the Catholic hierarchy had been rigidly opposed to compromise, was punted to a future Irish Assembly to solve (a note which Ulster's representatives were quick to point out), and that on every fiscal question, the Nationalists and the moderate Southern Unionists had won out. Ireland would stay inside the British Empire, with the King as their sovereign and the privilege of the Lord Lieutenant as his viceroy rather than a mere Governor-General, such as in the Dominions; but there was no question that this was the maneuver that went beyond Grattanism and made Ireland a Dominion, rather than a co-Kingdom such as Austria and Hungary (news of frequent and worsening constitutional crises in Hungary throughout 1917 surely had an impact on Redmond's thinking here, even if there is no written evidence for it). [2]
Somehow, after nearly four years of bloodshed and sectarian hate in Ireland, the forces of compromise came together. Carson, splitting from Craig, viewed the protections of the Midleton Agreement as sufficient to protect Ulster interests and quietly supported the deal, confident that there would be no better arrangement for Ulster in the offing. [3] Samuel moved quickly in the afternoon of the 4th to take a preliminary vote on the question, and was pleasantly surprised [4] when it achieved near-unanimity from those present. The Irish Convention had done its job, even if much remained - it had produced a settlement for Ireland, by Irish representatives. The hour of an Irish Dominion governed by the Irish exclusively was nigh.
Of course, there was one critical step remaining - the passage of a Government of Ireland Act under the auspices produced by the Convention, and for that the onus now moved to Westminster and Austen Chamberlain, at exactly the moment when many Ulster Loyalists and Catholic nationalists began to sour on the agreement produced...."
- Ireland Unfree
[1] These provisions are of my own invention
[2] As Dan pointed out, but I was already working on this update and thus was able to weave his thoughts in
[3] This is actually true to OTL - Carson had come around to some level of openness around a compromise by the time of the Irish Convention and turned against it when it was clear Sinn Fein was firm on full and total republicanism and separation. With Sinn Fein just a Grattanist outfit here and Redmond/Devlin in control, and the considerable safeguards for Ulster built into this agreement, he is okay with it.
[4] Here is the key difference - the OTL Convention's chairman, Plunkett, adjourned for two weeks rather than take a vote on the deal on a day when everybody was ready to cut one. This gave Sinn Fein, nationalist bishops, and conservative Ulstermen the chance to start campaigning against it, and Redmond's health got a lot worse, and Devlin blew up the deal and Redmond decided not to break with Devlin. They were so, so close to an actual United Ireland in January of 1918.
Southeast Asia will definitely be a very important theater coming up
You're 100% correct, and I'm glad you posted this while I was writing my update so I could incorporate this thought into the narrative!
Perhaps
Totally nothing, this always works out well for everyone!
Indeed. I'm not totally pleased with my ideas on how it starts, though, so expect some foot-dragging over the next months (and my DMs are, as always, open)
I hope so too!
And I also hope that there is a way to make Duke of Clarence and his line into a hereditary Lord Lieutenant, because… why not?
(Also, I wonder what changes might happen in this timeline’s equivalent of the Crown, as I like to imagine a few flashback scenes with Duke of Clarence, or if he somehow lives to his nineties, an extremely grumpy, outliving both your brother and your nephew along with a lot more relatives I can not remember does not help someone’s mood at all, guy who is perhaps an unexpected emotional support to Queen/Princess Margaret, which you said you wanted to explore the reign of in somewhere in the timeline)
Giving the Orange Order their own special rule to potentially run the island via tyranny of the minority...what's the worst that could happen? 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️
Oh, think that there is going to have to be constitutional reform sooner than later. What's interesting is that the two-senators-per-county rule is so obviously inspired by the United States and really shows the influence of the Irish-American community on the Irish nationalist movement here. I bring this up, because the American infuence is so obvious that I doubt it will be long before some start pointing out the most obvious problem - that by giving one province or region the ability to shut down the government unless it gets its way that you are setting up a situation similar to the US prior to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Not entirely sure anyone in Ulster by the biggest hotheads would want a seperated North at this point - economically it would likely be devestating; but the analogy is there and it will draw buzz.
Not immediately, of course. I suspect that the euphoria of passing (once it does pass) will help paper over most of the difficulties for about a decade or two. But I'd think that by the 1940s at the latest, there will be calls remove the Ulster Veto. Mind you, as long as the rest of Ireland hasn't done its best to create a Catholic theocracy, then at least some of the worst fears of the Orangemen will be mollified and you might be moderates willing to go along with the majority.
And that's assuming that Orange control over the Province of Ulster is absolute anyway. I doubt that the Kingdom of Ireland is going to allow for the discriminatory voting laws which NI enacted in OTL, so we can be safe to assume that its one-man-one-vote (which was NOT how NI operated). Also, this province will contain the three counties which were excluded from NI in OTL due to their Catholic majority population - Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan. That means that on socio-religious bases, we likely have 6 Catholic-Nationalist Senators out of 18 total Senators fro Ulster, or 1/3.
Meanwhile, Tyone, Londonderry, Armagh and Fermanagh had substantial Catholic minorities (between 40-50 percent) and so, being able to pick up a few Senators from time to time isn't out of the question (you might even see a tradition develop of having a "Catholic Seat" and a "Protestant Seat" reserved in each of these three counties - such things have been known to happen in republican governments before to keep the peace. The example of Vermont comes to mind, when it was unofficially agreed that one Senate seat would be from East of the Green Mountains, one from the West, and the governorship would alternate). Really, this leaves Antrium and Down has the hotbed of Ulster Orangism - and between them they can only really be assured to collect 4 Senators between the two of them.
So there's every reason to believe - if we are assuming that Catholic = Nationalist and Protestant = Orangism (we really can't call it Unionism here anymore), that the Nationalists will hold a majority even within Ulster, or at least a very large minority. Meaning that if Orangism is going to want to exert its Ulster Veto, its actually going to have to moderate in such a way as to make sure that it isn't simply confined to Antrium and Down.
And this doesn't even bring into consideration that, as part of a United Ireland, Belfast is likely to benefit just as much as Dublin from internal migration from the countryside to the city - with many of those migrants being Catholic; further eroding the heart of Irish Orangism (though I suspect that will take decades. Perhaps not until the 1960s or 70s).
So, as bad at this may look at paper - it may be that Redmond knew what he was doing and let the Orangemen negotiate themselves into a trap of sorts.
Source: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/troubledgeogs/chap7.htm
I'd say the most important part of how it starts would be, much like OTL, to create a situation where everyone thinks they are in a good position, or conversely that their position will only worsen with time. For example, Germany's planning in OTL considered that Russia might be too industrialized to beat after 1920, while in France no one was certain on how long they could keep the Entente together.
For TTL I think this is more relevant to France and AH, since they are the side that evidently shouldn't be trying to pick a fight right now. A possible scenario could be an increasing willingness from Germany to intervene in internal AH affairs, both in cooperation with Hungarians and pan-Germanist groups in Cisleithania. The threat of Germany not only dismantling AH, but also annexing areas with some 10 million more odd Germans and puppeting the rest should throw France into a frenzy. Even if the odds are bad, the thinking would be something like "If we let Germany do this, they'll take 10 years to consolidate their hold on Eastern Europe and then turn to us". Pan-Germanist agitation would also be met with trepidation in France given that they still have Alsace-Lorraine.
I thinking the main branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg would be unlikely to want a hereditary cadet branch in Ireland - makes it way too close to being a unique kingdom of its own right, especially the Duke of Clarence is married to a French Catholic
The alternative of an Irish House of Lords would believe it or not be even worse!
This is excellent analysis.
I wouldn’t say Redmond knew what he was doing - more so that he was expedient, and also knew that an Irish Lords would be much worse for a post-Dominion IPP and be a much larger threat to constitutional cohesion.
Good points. France is definitely (especially?) paranoid about their deteriorating position in the Far East and seeing Austria show signs of crumbling may inspire them that they need to act while they actually have a reliable ally
France also got the gut punch of the colonial revolts.
By that, obviously France would try to limit Germany's position of in the world and potential gains one potential solution would be assimilation. If Germany gains 10+ Germans they simply must make 30 million more French men in the colonies! So no major war needed, obviously France will do it's best to limit Germany, maybe confront them a bit establish deterrence but a all or nothing war is not needed like the ''uncivilised'' Americas.
Unfortunately the revolts has taken the wind out of that stance and in fact made France's many colonies a source of anxiety if they could be maintained if the centre was under major threat, and in fact provide a argument for offense. By that if mainland France will be facing a lot more danger it's only natural the French military's boot on the colonies will slacken and the next revolts might be a lot worse. However if they move now while they still have firm control over the colonies and can drain them dry to aid both military build up and for the war then it's possible to retain them, both because of the prestige and Germany the one they regard as their main colonial threat will be in ruins.
By that, obviously France would try to limit Germany's position of in the world and potential gains one potential solution would be assimilation. If Germany gains 10+ Germans they simply must make 30 million more French men in the colonies! So no major war needed, obviously France will do it's best to limit Germany, maybe confront them a bit establish deterrence but a all or nothing war is not needed like the ''uncivilised'' Americas.
Unfortunately the revolts has taken the wind out of that stance and in fact made France's many colonies a source of anxiety if they could be maintained if the centre was under major threat, and in fact provide a argument for offense. By that if mainland France will be facing a lot more danger it's only natural the French military's boot on the colonies will slacken and the next revolts might be a lot worse. However if they move now while they still have firm control over the colonies and can drain them dry to aid both military build up and for the war then it's possible to retain them, both because of the prestige and Germany the one they regard as their main colonial threat will be in ruins.
In other words, France has no real good options
I enjoy the irony of it, most definitely!
Nah; they’re more or less where they would have been in OTL 1878, though they absorbed part of East Turkestan from China in 1901
Is Queen Elizabeth II going to be butterfied away? If so that would be interesting.
And thus the political problems of Ireland will once again distract the UK when most of the rest of Europe is about to go to war against itself.
If so, an entire generation of British would-be-conscripts might be spared, and that will have major implications further down the road - namely a much more combatitive attitude towards colonial independence movements.
If so, an entire generation of British would-be-conscripts might be spared, and that will have major implications further down the road - namely a much more combatitive attitude towards colonial independence movements.
Which ties into Bose’s India being authoritarian [e.g imposing Romanized Hindi as the national language ] and the overall theme of (mostly) later decolonization
@KingSweden24 can I create a romanization table
Last edited: