All-for-Ireland League

Founded by William O'Brien MP, it generated a new national movement to achieve agreement between the different parties concerned on the historically difficult aim of Home Rule for the whole of Ireland.

The AFIL established itself as a separate non-sectarian party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, binding a group of independent nationalists MPs to pursue a broader concept of Irish nationalism, a consensus of political brotherhood and reconciliation among all Irishmen, primarily to win Unionist consent to an All-Ireland parliamentary settlement.

[5] AOH members represented deeply sectarian pseudo Gaelic-Catholic-nationalism of a Ribbon tradition, their Ulster Protestant counterpart the Orange Order.

In 1907, Devlin was able to assure John Redmond, the Irish Party leader, that a planned meeting of the UIL would be well attended because he would be able to get more than 400 AOH delegates to fill the hall.

The convention was obviously loaded against O'Brien when delegates suspected of supporting him were excluded at the entrance and assaulted in "probably the stormiest meeting ever held by constitutional nationalists".

[10] When he attempted to speak O'Brien was howled down by various contingents of Belfast Hibernians and midland cattle-drivers, their presence pre-organised by Devlin's AOH organisation.

Others targeted were members of the Young Ireland Branch, Frank Cruise O'Brien and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, who called Devlin a brainless bludgeoner.

[13] Regarding himself as having been driven from the party by Hibernian hooligans,[8] O'Brien's subsequent move was to officially constitute his new movement, the "All-for-Ireland League", its embryonic origins – the successful Land Conference of 1902, which he launched at a public rally in Kanturk[14] in March 1909.

Control of the fledgling AFIL passed to a Provisional Committee led by D. D. Sheehan (MP) as Honorary Secretary, its foremost task to promote the League's principles and to hold O'Brien's seat in Cork at the inevitable by-election until his return.

From Italy O'Brien looked to an alliance with Arthur Griffith's moderate Sinn Féin movement through emissaries James Brady (a Dublin solicitor), John Shawe-Taylor and Tim Healy.

Nationalist and Unionists were called upon to recognise the unwisdom of perpetuating a suicidal strife which sacrificed them to religious bigotry and the political exigencies of English partie.

A Central London branch was founded by Dr J. G. Fitzgerald (MP) as chairman, suggesting some disenchantment with his former Parnellite colleagues including John Redmond.

[27]Throughout the summer and autumn of 1910 the growth in strength of the AFIL continued in areas previously dominated by the UIL, which gave rise to considerable conflict.

AFIL supporters retaliated with equally aggressive street fighting, at times RIC police forces being called upon in several towns to disperse rioting crowds.

O'Brien felt as if he were under siege from clerical forces and wrote despondently "We have to deal with a confederacy of the priests of this country to strangle the AFIL and to strike down its standard-bearers".

Member for Cork, seeing the benefits of the Acts as they resulted in Ireland, has rightly adhered to it, and to every promise he made at the time, and largely because of that he is now driven outside the Irish Party.

[38] In the course of the final two readings of the Bill in 1913 and 1914, O'Brien and his AFIL colleagues fought untiringly in the spirit of their electoral mandate for a non-sectarian solution to the "Irish question" and were adamant that through co-operation on specific matters of common interest to build and win Unionist confidence, goodwill and consent,[39] and that there should be no limit to the concessions offered to Ulster to have it participate in an All-Ireland parliament.

In January 1914 both O'Brien in his Cork Free Press and D. D. Sheehan in the London Daily Express simultaneously published a list of concessions they ascertained as acceptable to Ulster, enabling its participation in a Dublin parliament.

O'Brien perceived it as an opportunity for all Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic alike to unite and serve together in the long-term interest of attaining independent Irish self-government.

Despite his trenchant views up to 1914, on 13 June 1916 the AFIL's main opponent Joe Devlin chaired an AOH Convention in Dublin that approved the proposed partition of Ireland by 475 votes to 265.

[49] Following the Easter Rising the Government's attempt in July 1916 to have Redmond and Carson agree on immediately introducing Home Rule, failed.

The new Prime Minister Lloyd George proposed in May 1917, in what was a fifth attempt to implement Home Rule, that an Irish Convention, composed of representative Irishmen from all parties, should assemble to deliberate upon the best means of governing their country.

Lloyd George appealed to O'Brien to attend, but under the circumstances both he and Healy declined, despite the fact that for thirteen years he had been calling for a conference of all parties to settle the Irish question.

At stake in the bitterly fought by-election was not just one of the 105 seats in the House of Commons, the great issue was William O'Brien's AFIL versus John Redmond's Irish Party.

At its height the AFIL withdrew from Westminster while making a final damning anti-conscription speech, joining forces with the Irish Party, Sinn Féin and Labour in mass protest demonstrations in Dublin.

Although the act was never put into force its crisis caused an unprecedented rise in popularity for Sinn Féin, destroying all interest in Home Rule and constitutional nationalism.

Towards the end of 1918, as a consequence that both the Irish Party and Britain failed to introduce Home Rule and maintain an undivided Ireland, and as it became evident that constitutional political concepts for attaining independent All-Ireland self-government were being displaced by a path of militant physical-force, the AFIL MPs recognised the futility of contesting the December general election—O'Brien in an address to the election: We cannot subscribe to a programme of armed resistance in the field, or even of permanent withdrawal from Westminster; but to the spirit of Sinn Féin, as distinct from its abstract programme, the great mass of independent single-minded Irishmen have been won over, and accordingly they ought now to have a full and sympathetic trial for enforcing the Irish nation's right of self-determination.

It failed in these aims because most Nationalists underestimated the intensity of Unionist resistance to Home Rule[56] and particularly due to the strong distrust influential Catholic clergy had towards the League.

O'Brien's oft quoted policy of 'the three Cs' is too readily dismissed by historians eager to hasten from the turbulent 1910 elections to events beyond the Home Rule crisis of 1912–14.

A scrutiny of the social background and outlook of those nationalists and unionists who supported the AFIL during a vibrant period of modern Irish history could provide further insight into their cohesive interests, sympathies and traditions.