The British Military Dilemma in Ireland: Occupation Politics, 1886-1914.

• Author: Garfield, Jed H.

The 1914 refusal by British troops to fire on Irish loyalists, known as the Curragh Mutiny, was the culmination of years of conflict and mistrust among the British military, the War Office in London and the British-supported bureaucracy at Dublin Castle. Elizabeth Muenger, in her detailed and well-researched book, The British Military Dilemma in Ireland: Occupation Politics, 1886-1914, attempts to explain the development of these tensions through an examination of the interrelationship of many social, political and security facets of the British military presence in Ireland.

Muenger contends that the Curragh incident was the result of a variety of broad factors, including the imperialistic bent of the British military, the intransigence of the deeply entrenched Dublin bureaucracy and the rapid social transformation occurring around the turn of the nineteenth century in both Britain and Ireland. Specifically, the author notes that there were four primary causes of the crisis. The first was the inclusion of Ulster under the home rule bill, a position vehemently opposed by the city's Protestant majority. Second was the question of whether the army would respond to an order to force a portion of the population to accept coercion from Great Britain: "The army was in the position of being the executors of what was at best an unpopular dictum, leveled at fellow Britons, whose only offense was living in Ulster." A third factor was Dublin Castle's mistrust of the military and the attendant lack of communication between the two groups. A final contribution to the crisis was the military's own suspicion of both the British Liberals, who had come to power in 1905, and the politicians at Dublin Castle.

The home rule bill, which permitted representation of the Irish in their own parliament - rather than in London, as had been the case since 1798 - was a hotly contested issue that would determine the ultimate political control of Ireland. The 1914 passage of the bill by the British House of Commons was critical to the military's role in Northern Ireland. The bill would likely push the Protestants, a minority group in Northern Ireland, to open conflict with the Catholics, thus involving the British military. Its passage forced the prime minister and the War Office in London to deal with aggressive and hostile Catholic Nationalist and Protestant Unionist populations who were receiving smuggled armaments from both Loyalist sympathizers in England and...