Robert Erskine Childers - Home Rule

Home Rule

The violent suppression of the Easter Rising had dismayed Childers and a Westminster bill to extend military conscription to Ireland, leading to the Conscription Crisis of 1918, angered him further: he described the proposal as "insane and criminal". In March 1919, after a severe attack of influenza, his doctors ordered rest in the country. Glendalough was the obvious choice and he joined his cousin Robert Barton there. Barton, however, had thrown in his lot with Sinn Féin and he introduced Childers to the underground military leader Michael Collins, who in turn introduced him to Éamon de Valera, the President of Sinn Féin. Influenced by these figures, and other uncompromising nationalists who regularly stayed at Glendalough, he finally came to believe that his moderate "dominion" proposal would not serve. At the end of his convalescence Childers returned to Molly at the Chelsea flat, but a month later he received an invitation to meet the Sinn Féin leadership in Dublin. Anticipating an offer of a major rôle, Childers hurried to Dublin but, apart from Collins, he found the Nationalist leadership wary, or even hostile. Arthur Griffith, in particular, looked on him as at best a renegade and traitor to Britain, or at worst as a British spy. The task they gave him was to join the unofficial Irish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. This unpromising undertaking, as Childers saw it, was intended to advance the cause of Irish self-rule by reminding the various official representatives of the ideals of freedom over which Britain had gone to war. In this they were totally unsuccessful, and Childers returned once again to London. Anxious to be at the centre of events he rented a house in Dublin, but Molly was reluctant to join him: mindful of her sons' education, and believing that she and her husband could best serve the cause by influencing opinion in London, only with resignation did she eventually give up their London home of fifteen years to settle in Dublin, at the end of 1919.

In 1919 Childers was made Director of Publicity for the First Irish Parliament. In 1920 Childers published Military Rule in Ireland, a strong attack on British policy. At the 1921 elections, he was elected (unopposed) to the Second Dáil as Sinn Féin member for the Kildare–Wicklow constituency, and published the pamphlet Is Ireland a Danger to England?, which attacked the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. He became editor of the Irish Bulletin after the arrest of Desmond FitzGerald. He stood as an anti-Treaty Sinn Féin candidate at the 1922 general election but lost his seat.