Edward Carson

Extract from RIA Dictonary of Irish Biography by

In February 1910 Carson was invited to assume the chairmanship of the Irish unionist parliamentary party, a position that gave him some claims to lead the wider Irish unionist movement. ... Though it could scarcely have been predicted in February 1910, Carson's new role placed him at the head of the campaign against the third home rule bill. He was a central figure in all the different aspects of Ulster unionist strategy: he was the key speaker at momentous public demonstrations such as that at Craigavon House in September 1911 (when he was first introduced to his loyalist following) or at the Balmoral show grounds in April 1912 (a meeting described as the ‘marriage’ between toryism and unionist Ulster). He was the centrepiece of the speaking tour that culminated in Ulster Day (28 September 1912), when just under half a million men and women signed a covenant pledging to use ‘all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a home rule parliament in Dublin’. He was also the generalissimo in charge of the unionists’ parliamentary and high political assault on the home rule bill. In January 1913 he proposed the exclusion of the nine counties of Ulster from the operation of the bill. In December 1913 and January 1914 he met Asquith privately in order to chart the prospects for a settlement. In July 1914, on the eve of the great war, he attended the Buckingham Palace conference, where he argued for the permanent exclusion of six counties from the home rule bill.

He was an Irish unionist, who supported the constitutional union between Great Britain and all of Ireland; but he was also an essentially pragmatic politician who by October 1913 (if not earlier) had come to realise that southern unionism was a forlorn hope. Given that an all-Ireland unionism was impracticable, Carson was interested in the notion of a broad federal settlement whereby the constituent territories of the United Kingdom might be given assemblies. Ireland would of course be included in this grand scheme, although the north would of necessity remain bound to the imperial parliament: Carson saw this connection as probably no more than a temporary arrangement. But while such a sweeping constitutional revision interested a few unionist intellectuals and others, it failed to win a wider popularity in 1913–14. Carson threw out some feelers on the issue in May 1914, but was rebuffed by his own supporters: he was forced back on to the expedient of exclusion, firstly in a nine-county formulation, and later in a six-county scheme. Nine-county exclusion, or partition, originally interested Carson because it appeared to represent an effective means of undermining the entire home rule project; later he seems to have been convinced that it offered the best means of guaranteeing both Ulster unionist rights and wider issues of justice; he also seems to have been convinced that it offered the best avenue towards an equitable scheme of reunification. But neither the liberals nor the Irish nationalists were ever likely to endorse the proposal; and more significantly – from Carson's perspective – the unionists of eastern Ulster were (notwithstanding the pledges of the Solemn League and Covenant) relatively unconcerned about the minority unionist communities beyond the heartland of the movement. From the autumn of 1913 it became clear to Carson that the six counties provided the best political vantage-ground upon which to make a stand.