Chapter one examines the impacts of Irish nationalism in British centres during the Home Rule crisis, from the Irish Party’s Home Rule campaign to the Irish Volunteers’ preparations for civil war. It profiles the political languages and cultures of the ‘British’ Home Rule movement; examines the influence of extra-parliamentary crises - Ulster unionist, suffragist, trade unionist – on Irish nationalist identity in British centres; and assesses the militancy, and constitutional impacts, of advanced nationalist activism in metropolitan Britain by July 1914. Between 1912 and 1914, this chapter submits, the Irish Parliamentary Party presented ‘two faces’ of Home Rule - towards British political opinion and Irish nationalist opinion in Britain. John Redmond and the I.P.P., critically, were ‘representative’ of ‘British-Ireland’ and were embedded in the mainstream political cultures of Edwardian Britain on the eve of war. Irish activists in British cities, however, were radicalised by the extra-parliamentary representations of late Edwardian politics, straining the ideological coherence of, and popular adherence to, the I.P.P.’s proto-electoral strategy. The proliferation of Irish Volunteer units in British centres threatened to spark an Irish civil war on mainland Britain. The militarisation of Irish nationalism, in conclusion, constituted one of the ‘surface excitements’ of Edwardian Britain.

The introduction sets out the theoretical, methodological, and empirical basis for this study. This research explores the evolution of Irish nationalism in Britain through four thematic lenses: the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, the British Empire. Read collectively, these analytical frameworks can sharpen historical perspectives on the ideological development, communal function, and individual expression of Irish nationalism. To explore the history of the Irish in Britain between 1912 and 1922 is to interrogate a ‘crisis of (national) identity’ in terms of both ‘self’ and ‘other’. Original conceptual frameworks are supported by ‘new’ methodological approaches. Following the linguistic turn of the ‘new’ political history, this study explores representations of Irish nationalism in Britain in the ‘cultural’ spaces between ‘high politics’ and ‘history from below’: political platforms, texts, and languages. This study investigates the Irish Home Rule and republican movements using underutilised archival sources. The T.P. O’Connor papers, Art Ó Briain papers, and Catholic Herald newspaper series collectively establish a robust archival foundation by which to evaluate the significance of Irish nationalism in Britain during the Irish Revolution. The book is divided into five chapters which chronologically, and thematically, examine Irish nationalism in Britain between 1912 and 1922.