Ireland can't really afford to go independent without the industrial north but by 1914 they had concluded they the north would be excluded in some way be it 6 or even 9 counties. Without the war, it would probably stay in the Empire and not go fully independent. 'Federalism' for the UK was being discussed in mid 1914 as Scotland was also looking at 'home rule'. New Zealand always had the option to join Australia and the North would probably have the same mechanism to re-unite with the South.
When the Liberals regained power in 1906, their majority was large enough that they did not need Nationalist votes and so could delay the fated appointment with Irish home rule. That changed in 1909, when the House of Lords vetoed Lloyd George’s so-called People’s Budget for taxing its members’ estates, and the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, called for a general election to be fought over the issue of stripping the veto from the unelected House of Lords. That election, and a second eleven months later, left the Liberals and Unionists tied, with 272 seats each. But the latter had received three hundred thousand more votes, one source of Unionist bitterness. Another was the “corrupt bargain” to remain in power that the Liberals struck with forty-two Labour and eighty-four Nationalist MPs, the latter regarded by Unionists as a “purely sectional interest [with] no right to impose their views on the kingdom as a whole.” The corrupt bargain was a myth to fire up the Unionist base. The Liberals could govern without Nationalists; there were enough Labour MPs to assure their majority, but Asquith & Co. were chary of depending on a party they competed with in England. As his price the Nationalist leader, John Redmond, obliged the Liberals to drain the cup. “I believe the current members of the Liberal Party are sincere,” he told a Limerick audience. “Whether they are or not we will make them … toe the line.” By the newly enacted Parliament Act, a bill that passed in three sessions of the House became law. Home rule passed in 1912; it passed again in 1913; and, as soon as the government submitted it, it would pass a final time by summer 1914.
Ten days after Sarajevo, Lloyd George assured his auditors at London’s Guildhall that “in the matter of external affairs, the sky has never been more perfectly blue.” As late as July 22, describing the recent course of Anglo-German relations, the chancellor said, “There is none of the snarling which we used to see.” Until the last days of July the headlines— MACHINE GUNS FOR ULSTER, 30,000 RIFLES AND 10,000 ROUNDS LAND IN BELFAST, 3000 TRAINED NURSES FOR ULSTER— heralded civil war.
“The damnable question” of Ireland had brought it to what the London Times called “one of the great crises in the history of the British race.” Up to the last days of July, the “Revolt in Ulster” received more coverage in 1914 than any other story in the world.The Times for July 28, which announced Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia, led with the headline SHOOTING IN BACHELOR’S WALK above a bulletin of the worst news yet from Ireland.
On July 4, 1914, the Military Members of the Army Council warned the British cabinet that there were two hundred thousand armed men in Ireland, and that if civil war broke out the entire Expeditionary Force, the Special Reserve, and the Territorial Army would be required to restore order. “If the whole of our Expeditionary Force were used in Ireland,” the Army Council concluded, “we should be quite incapable of meeting our obligations abroad.”
Concluding that democratic governance was about to be overturned in Ulster, Churchill ordered eight battleships based in Gibraltar and eight destroyers of the Fourth Flotilla in England to sail to the waters between Scotland and Ulster, “where they would be in proximity to the coasts of Ireland in case of serious disorders occurring.” In addition, he dispatched HMS Pathfinder and HMS Attentive to Belfast Louch with orders to defend “by every means” the eighty-five tons of ammunition at Carrickfergus Castle, held by only twenty soldiers. Indulging his penchant for verbal melodrama, Churchill told Sir John French, chief of the General Staff, that “if there were opposition to the movement of the troops, he would pour enough shot and shell into Belfast to reduce it to ruins in 24 hours.” The officers of the cruisers instead had lunch at Carson's estate at his invitation.
"If Ulstermen extend the hand of friendship, it will be clasped by Liberals and by their Nationalist countrymen in all good faith and in all good will; but if there is no wish for peace; if every concession that is made is spurned and exploited; if every effort to meet their views is only to be used as a means of breaking down Home Rule and of barring the way to the rest of Ireland; if the Government and Parliament of this great country and greater Empire are to be exposed to menace and brutality; if all the loose, wanton, and reckless chatter we have been forced to listen to these many months is in the end to disclose a sinister and revolutionary purpose; then I can only say to you, “Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof.”
-Winston Churchill, Bradford Speech March 14, 1914
The Liberals will probably really push for Home Rule just as they did put it on the Statute Books in Sept 1914. This will probably result in electoral suicide for them in the 1915 General Election.
