When Major Frederick Crawford went looking for a ship to smuggle German rifles into Ulster, he settled on an aging coastal steamer called the Clyde Valley and renamed her, for the run itself, the Mountjoy II — after the vessel that had broken the Siege of Derry in 1689 by ramming a boom across the River Foyle to bring relief to a starving Protestant garrison. Crawford was not being subtle. A Belfast-born former artillery officer who had spent 1913 watching customs officials seize one smuggled shipment after another, he wanted the Ulster Volunteer Force's arms to arrive under a name that already meant deliverance to the people receiving them, and he got his wish: on the night of April 24-25, 1914, roughly 25,000 rifles and between three and five million rounds of ammunition came ashore at Larne, Donaghadee, and Bangor, moved inland by what one historian called the first large-scale military use of the motor car, and vanished into UVF hands before the authorities had done more than watch it happen.
The state's inaction was not an oversight. It was downstream of something that had happened exactly a month earlier at the British Army's main camp in Ireland. On March 20, 1914, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Paget summoned senior officers at the Curragh, County Kildare, and told them plainly that operations against Ulster were imminent, that the province "would be in a blaze" within a day, and that any officer unwilling to take part would be dismissed. Brigadier General Hubert Gough, commanding the 3rd Cavalry Brigade — a man who described himself as "Irish by blood and upbringing" — polled his own officers and reported that the overwhelming majority would resign their commissions rather than march against the UVF. Roughly sixty officers across the Curragh made the same choice. Gough was summoned to London, and rather than being disciplined, he came away with a written assurance, signed by the Secretary of State for War and initialled by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that the Army would not be used to coerce Ulster into accepting Home Rule. The document was repudiated by the Prime Minister within days, but the men who had signed it were the ones forced to resign, not Gough. Whatever the paperwork said afterward, everyone in Ulster, and everyone in Larne harbor a month later, had already watched the British state discover it did not have an army willing to stop them.
Erskine Childers thought the imbalance needed answering, and he had the means to try. An English-born writer married to the American Mary "Molly" Osgood, Childers sailed his own yacht Asgard to a rendezvous off the Belgian coast on July 12, met a German tugboat, and took aboard roughly 900 secondhand Mauser rifles left over from the Franco-Prussian War, along with 29,000 rounds of ammunition — a fraction of what Crawford had landed at Larne, carried in a family sailboat rather than a chartered steamer, crewed by Childers, Molly, Mary Spring Rice, and two fishermen from Gola Island. The Asgard ran into the worst storm to hit the Irish Sea in years on the crossing and made it through anyway, reaching Howth harbor, just north of Dublin, on the morning of July 26, 1914.
The unloading took twenty minutes and drew a crowd, because it happened in broad daylight rather than under cover of night. A thousand armed Irish Volunteers marched the weapons back toward Dublin, and this time the state responded with everything it had declined to use at Larne: the Dublin Metropolitan Police's assistant commissioner declared the march an illegal assembly, and troops of the King's Own Scottish Borderers were sent to intercept it. The soldiers failed to catch the Volunteers at Clontarf, and on their return march along the quays, a jeering crowd gathered around them at Bachelors Walk. The soldiers opened fire and used their bayonets on an unarmed crowd that had not been part of the gun-running at all. Mrs. Duffy, James Brennan, and Patrick Quinn were killed outright; a fourth Dubliner died later of bayonet wounds. More than thirty others were wounded.
Twenty-five thousand rifles landed at Larne with the cooperation of local authorities and no resistance from the Crown. Nine hundred rifles landed at Howth and cost four Dublin civilians their lives within hours, for the offense of standing on a public street while soldiers marched past them in a bad mood. Nobody needed to write down the double standard for it to register; the numbers and the body count did that on their own, in the same summer, in the same country, under the same government.