Curragh incident

The Curragh incident of 20 March 1914, sometimes known as the Curragh mutiny, occurred in the Curragh, County Kildare, Ireland. The Curragh Camp was then the main base for the British Army in Ireland, which at the time still formed part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland was scheduled to receive a measure of devolved government, which would include the northern province of Ulster, later in the year. The incident is important in 20th-century Irish history and is notable for being one of the few occasions since the English Civil War in which elements of the British military openly intervened in politics. It is widely thought of as a mutiny, though no orders actually given were disobeyed.

With Irish Home Rule due to become law in 1914, the British Cabinet contemplated some kind of military action against the unionist Ulster Volunteers who threatened to rebel against it. Many officers, especially those with Irish Protestant connections, of whom the most prominent was Hubert Gough, threatened to resign or accept dismissal rather than obey orders to conduct military operations against the unionists, and were privately encouraged from London by senior officers including Henry Wilson.

Although the Cabinet issued a document claiming that the issue had been a misunderstanding, Secretary of State for War J. E. B. Seely and Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Field Marshal Sir John French were forced to resign after amending it to promise that the British Army would not be used against the Ulster loyalists.

The event contributed both to unionist confidence and to the growing Irish nationalist movement, convincing Irish nationalists that they could not expect support from the British Army in Ireland.

In early 1912, the Liberal British government of H. H. Asquith had introduced the Third Home Rule Bill for Ireland, which proposed the creation of an autonomous Irish Parliament in Dublin. Unionists had objected to being under the jurisdiction of the proposed Dublin Parliament, and Ulster Unionists founded the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) paramilitary group in 1912, aided by a number of senior retired British officers, to fight if necessary against the British government and/or against a future Irish Home Rule government as proposed by the bill.

In September 1913, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), John French, had expressed his concerns to the government and to the King (who had also asked Asquith for his views) that the British Army, if ordered to act against the UVF, might split, with some serving officers even siding with the Ulster Unionists, given that many shared the same view of preserving and defending a Protestant British Empire and believed Home Rule for mainly Catholic Ireland would threaten it. Major-General Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations, was in regular contact with Opposition leaders (including Bonar Law) and with retired officers who supported the Volunteers.

To deal with the threat of violence from the UVF should the Home Rule Bill be passed in the British Parliament, Chief of the General Staff (CIGS) Field Marshal Sir John French and Secretary of State for War J. E. B. Seely summoned General Sir Arthur Paget, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, for talks at the War Office in October 1913. Paget's letter (19 October) suggests that he wanted "partial mobilisation" while Seely wrote to the Prime Minister (24 October) about the potential use of General Nevil Macready, who had experience of crowd control during the Tonypandy riots in 1910, and had been consulted by Birrell about the use of troops in the Belfast riots of 1912. In October 1913, Seely sent Macready to report on the police in Belfast and Dublin.

Intelligence reported that the UVF (now 100,000 strong) might be about to seize the ammunition at Carrickfergus Castle. Political negotiations were deadlocked as John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party was only willing to offer Ulster an opt-out from Home Rule for up to six years (i.e., until after the next general election), whereas the Ulster Unionists, led by Edward Carson, wanted a permanent opt-out. Asquith set up a five-man Cabinet Committee, chaired by Lord Crewe (who soon fell ill), and consisting of John Simon, Augustine Birrell (Chief Secretary for Ireland), Seely, and Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty). Churchill, who spoke at Bradford (14 March) to say that there were "worse things than bloodshed, even on an extended scale" and "Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof", and Seely appear to have been courting some kind of confrontation with the UVF.