Thought, Power sharing for all Ireland Home rule

I wonder if there is any way the a deal could have been done with Unionists where by there would be Home rule for all Ireland but there would be power sharing with guarnateed presence of Unionists in the Home rule administration?
 
the idea of power sharing hadn't really been thought up at the time, and even today in Northern Ireland only works because its a 50/50, some kind of long bloody civil war in Ireland with mass terrorism on both sides might drive a power sharing home-rule, maybe with Unionists only voting rolls in the south to boost their numbers in the south to make it a more even split
 
The big problem with an all-Ireland deal is the demographics - the famous retort to Unionists opposing a freer Ireland was the "the tail doesn't wag the dog".

If there's a brutal civil war, I could see Unionists getting priveldges but a permanent seat in government would be incredibly unpopular amongst the Catholic majority.
 
That's a very sensible and logical idea which is exactly why no one in Ireland of that time would have agreed to it! ;)

You have to remember that the Unionists were opposed to Home Rule on principle, they even voted against the 1920 Government of Ireland Act that was the subsequent basis for Stormont. Unionist opposition to HR was based on a number of factors, most obviously there was the fear of "Rome Rule" and being subsumed into a culture that they found completely alien, this wasn't just paranoia, there was an increasingly influential element in Irish Nationalism that followed the ideas of people like David Moran who wrote you had to be both Gaelic and Catholic in order to be "truly" Irish, not that the Unionists were any exemplars of tolerance but this is something that Irish Nationalists to this day have never been able to grasp.

The other big reason why the Unionists were so hostile to HR was economic, they feared loss of access to Imperial markets through tariffs that the Irish Parliament would impose. The IPP just saw Ulster as a cash cow and if it wasn't included in the Parliament's jurisdiction then there was no point having it. So Unionists saw little to gain from Home Rule.

Perhaps if William O'Brien's All for Ireland League who favoured a more conciliatory attitude to Unionist concerns had been dominant in Nationalism then something like this could have agreed.
 
They were offered it, more or less. Appointments to the Irish Second Chamber it was understood were going to be slanted towards minority communities. Beyond that, even in 1918 the Unionists got ~25% of the vote. Under any proportional system, a Unionist Party which kept itself together would have a great deal of influence on policy, much like the Bloc Quebecois in Canada.

The counter argument of course is that, for all the high-faluting language, Ireland after 1922 did lapse very much into the hands of the Catholic Church. But then, the Ireland of 1922 and the Ireland of 1914 are two very different things.
 

Cook

Banned
But then, the Ireland of 1922 and the Ireland of 1914 are two very different things.

The same can correctly be said of all of Europe and most of the world; the dead of Flanders really were the flower of what was then called Christian Civilisation. The overwhelming confidence that everything could be done died in the trenches of the Western Front.
 
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