AT THE BEGINNING OF his 1918 election campaign, Graham made his first statement on Irish home rule for several years. He reminded his audience at the Town Hall in Bannockburn that he had stood on ‘a thousand platforms’ with Michael Davitt and Parnell, promoting Irish Home Rule, and he had been the only British MP to attend Parnell’s funeral. He also contended that it was wrong to suggest that Ireland had not done her duty in the recent conflict: ‘There were nearly half a million gallant Irishmen from Ireland, the United States, and the colonial dominions who had fought and bled for the common cause’; the question of Ireland’s status, which had been a disgrace to Britain for a hundred years should be settled quickly. Again, in this immediate post-war period, all of his political statements were predicated on his support for the war and Britain’s military might, which was a complete reversal of his previous position. Included in this was a threat to Sinn Fein, wherein they would be faced with that might if they threatened separation by force: ‘they could not have separation without bloodshed’. Like socialism’s manifestation in the new Soviet Russia, events in Ireland had, in Mackenzie’s words, prejudiced him against the Irish point of view.

As we have seen, Graham had not always criticised the use of political violence as a means of gaining freedom from what he regarded as tyranny, but now the late war and its aftermath seem to have changed not only his views of empire, but his justification of British actions against Irish Republican Army attacks. On 21 November 1920, a team of undercover British intelligence agents, living and working in Dublin, were murdered by Irish republicans, acts that had quickly been followed by British reprisals. Graham sent a letter to R. E. Muirhead deprecating these events, as if linking the aspirations of the recently reformed SHRA with the methods of the IRA. Muirhead did not reply until a month later (blaming his company’s stocktaking), assuring Graham that the SHRA also deprecated the killings on both sides, but reminding him of other acts of repression carried out by the British government in Ireland.