thumb|right|A 100th anniversary flag commemorating the gun running flying in [[Glenarm.]]

The Larne gun-running was a major gun smuggling operation organised in April 1914 in Ireland by Major Frederick H. Crawford and Captain Wilfrid Spender for the Ulster Unionist Council to equip the Ulster Volunteer Force. On 30 March 1914 Winston Churchill made his feelings clear on the possibility of an armed rebellion in Ulster: "We have been confronted with an avowed conspiracy to defy Parliament and the law, leaving a great army practising preparations for rebellion and for the setting up of a provisional Government, which would be an outrage against the realm and the Empire."

UVF membership grew to around 90,000 members, led by retired officers of the British Army, with the organisation under the charge of Lieutenant-General Sir George Richardson KCB, a veteran of the Afghan Wars.

In early June 1913, around seven thousand rifles being stored by Crawford in a disused inn in Hammersmith were seized by police. The inn was being rented out to Crawford by a brother-in-law of staunch Unionist Sir William Bull, 1st Baronet. In early February 1914, Crawford met with Edward Carson (the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party 1910–1921) in his home in London; Carson said "I'll see you through this business even if I should go to prison for it. You are the bravest man I have ever met."

The Larne gun-running put the gun back into Irish politics. The Irish Volunteers had been working on their own plan to acquire weapons, and the success at Larne heightened nationalist suspicions that the authorities were acquiescent towards unionist militants in Ulster.

The Irish Volunteers arranged their own gun-running operation in July 1914, transporting the guns on a private yacht and unloading in daylight at the harbour, in front of a crowd. The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), aided by troops of the 2nd King's Own Scottish Borderers, tried unsuccessfully to confiscate the weapons.

Further reading

  • Bowman, Timothy. Carson's Army: The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1910--22 (Manchester UP, 2007).
  • Bowman, Timothy. "The Ulster Volunteers 1913-1914: Force or Farce?." History Ireland 10.1 (2002): 43-47.
  • Crawford, Frederick. Guns for Ulster, Belfast: Graham & Heslip, 1947.
  • Jackson, Alvin. "The Larne Gun Running of 1914." History Ireland 1.1 (1993): 35-38.
  • History of the 1912 UVF
  • History of the YCV
  • CAIN - University of Ulster Conflict Archive
  • Last of the Iron Boats (A short history of the SS Clyde valley)

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