John Dillon - Uncompromising Stand

Uncompromising Stand

With the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 Dillon accepted Redmond’s decision to follow Britain’s support of the Allied war effort, but he abstained from recruiting for the Irish divisions. The 1916 Rising took the Irish Party by surprise. He intervened with David Lloyd George to halt the 90 sentences of execution pronounced by "field court-martial" (in camera without defence or jury) under martial law by General Maxwell after he declared the rebellion “treason in time of war”.

Dillon insisted that if they went ahead they would "fill the whole country" with the same type of radicals, as opposed to imprisonment. This, he said would leave the radicals with as many supporters as could "fit in a single gaol cell". He attacked the Government in the House of Commons and declared that the rebels were "wrong", but had fought "a clean fight". His intervention resulted in a halt to the executions after the fifteenth, though it was apparent how unbridgeable the chasm in Anglo-Irish relations had become following the Rising. The secret manner of the trials and executions had changed public opinion into sympathy for the rebels.

He was involved in May 1916 with Lloyd George’s futile attempt to implement Home Rule after the Rising, which failed in July on the issue of the exclusion or not of Ulster. He declined a nomination to the Irish Convention on Home Rule in 1917. After Redmond's death on 6 March 1918, Dillon followed him as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. When the allied armies on the Western Front collapsed in the wake of the German Spring Offensive and decimated the 10th and 16th Irish divisions, the Government attempted a month later in desperation to extend conscription to Ireland, which Dillon opposed with tenacity and in protest withdrew all Irish Members from the House of Commons. The attempt to impose conscription jointly linked with implementing Home Rule disgusted the wider Irish public and resulted in an immediate swing of support to Sinn Féin which precipitated their election landslide after the war.

Dillon attempted to persuade the Government in July 1918 to implement Irish self-government by introducing a motion for self-determination in the Commons. He made clear in September that the goal of Home Rule could only be "the establishment of national self-government, including full and complete executive, legislative and fiscal power", and that national solidarity was essential. But he completely underestimated the need to offer provisions for Ulster concerns, a fatal misjudgement shared by most Nationalists and Republicans alike.

It was left to Dillon to fight a last campaign in the general election of December 1918. After a failure to reach a pact with Sinn Féin,his party was swept into oblivion. He was defeated in East Mayo by Éamon de Valera‘s 8975 votes to his 4514. Retiring from politics, Dillon was not spared witnessing the violent epoch of the Anglo-Irish War, the implementation of Home Rule in Northern Ireland, the ensuing Partition of Ireland endorsed by the Irish Free State and the resulting Irish Civil War.