However, the Parliament did not address the grievances of the Catholic majority, ‘that large and respectable class, the men of no property’ as their champion Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant lawyer, termed them. Nor were the problems of the Presbyterians solved. Accordingly, imbued with the idea of uniting ‘Catholic Protestant and Dissenter’, Tone became one of the leading spirits in founding and promoting another corps of Volunteers, the United Irishmen. This was largely led by Protestant idealists, the best known of whom was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, scion of a great Irish, and also a great European family. Tone did not believe in enshrining ‘Kings, Lords and Commons’ in the United Irishmen’s republican charter, but in breaking ‘the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils’. He gave force to his argument that the best time to attempt such a break was when England was preoccupied with a foreign war by enlisting the aid of French forces in breaking the said evil connection.
Unfortunately for the vision of the United Irishmen, the French fleet was delayed by bureaucracy and bad weather, and the policies of the authorities goaded the rebels into a premature and ill-organised revolt in 1798. Hostile troops were billeted on the people. Militias indulged in rape, torture and murder. Joseph Holt, a Protestant Wicklow farmer who became a general in the United Irishmen’s army, left a description of the incident which influenced him to take up arms. Attending a fair in Newtownmountkennedy, County Wicklow he was5 ‘sickened to witness Ancient Britons cutting the haunches and thighs off the young women for wearing green stuff petticoats’. A few Catholic United Irishmen replied in kind; for example, a Protestant church containing women and children sheltering from the rebellion was burned to the ground at Scullabogue in County Wexford, and a British army equipped with cannon and muskets thus received added incentives to slaughter opponents armed mainly with weapons such as pikes and scythes. As Thomas Pakenham has noted:6 ‘In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 people, peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenceless women and children…were cut down or blown away like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the cannon’.
Tone and Fitzgerald both died of their wounds in jail, Tone cutting his own throat so as to cheat the hangman. The Presbyterians fared so badly at the hands of the authorities that never again would they contemplate any large-scale alliance with the Catholics, and ‘the men of no property’ sank even deeper into poverty and despair.
In addition to ‘Orange’, Irish political nomenclature acquired the term ‘Unionist’ in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. The British used the uprising as an excuse to suppress Grattan’s parliament and return Irish decision-taking to Westminster. As Cooke, the Under Secretary of the time, wrote in 1799:7
By giving the Irish a hundred members in an Assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be impotent to operate upon that Assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority…The Union is the only means of preventing Ireland from becoming too great and too powerful.
Accordingly, an Act of Union was passed in 1800 giving legislative assent to this policy. The members of the Irish Parliament were persuaded to support the Act by inducements and pressures of all sorts, including peerages and huge bribes. The Act of Union had the effect it was intended to have. It deprived Ireland of real political power and in addition had the collateral effect of destroying the briefly flowering artistic, economic and political life of Dublin. London became the place to go for the ambitious and the energetic, the builder, the printer, the lawyer. With them departed the initiative factor and much of the energy of Irish life. The country sank into a slough of decay, mismanagement and absentee landlordism. At best, the Great Famine of the 1840s was both the inevitable and the most glaring example of the policy of depriving the Irish of the ability to address their own problems. At worst, it was an experiment in social engineering that furthered the strategic objectives of the Act of Union. Far from ‘becoming too great and too powerful’ Ireland lost one million of her population to starvation and a further million to emigration. Much of this emigration went to America where the Irish Catholic swamped the Presbyterian tradition and ultimately came to have a marked influence on developments in Ireland.
With the obliteration of the Irish Parliament there vanished whatever hope it contained for peaceful, evolutionary accommodation for Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, and inter alia, through such growth, a naturally more harmonious relationship between Ireland and England. What did remain, however, in the minds of Irish Republicans, was Wolfe Tone’s philosophy of breaking the relationship by striking at England when she was involved with a foreign enemy.
One of the forces which contributed greatly to both the enshrining of this belief and the bloodshed of 1798 was the Orange Order. The Order was founded after a vicious clash over land between Protestant ‘Peep o Day Boys’ (christened for their custom of vanishing at first light back to their homes after a night of anti-Catholic activity) and Catholic Defenders near Dan Winters’ Inn in Loughall, County Armagh in the north of Ireland. The Winter home8 today stands as an apt symbol of Orangism. It is neat, small-scale in design, respectable looking and has a violent background. Nowhere in Ireland were relations between Catholic and Protestant as bitter as in the north-eastern province of Ulster where Lowland Scottish Protestant settlers, known as ‘planters’, had been given most of the land formerly held by Catholics during the reign of James I. Many of these came from the English-Scottish border area and arrived in Ireland well versed in the arts of ‘reiving’, that is cattle-rustling, and in dealing with hostile neighbours. Along with their ruthlessness, Presbyterianism, canniness and pawky humour, they also developed a particular concept of loyalty based on the old Scottish ‘banding’ tradition. They would be loyal to the leader who was loyal to them. Thus, despite their fiercely proclaimed loyalty to the British Crown, there was a strong element of conditionality in that loyalty, a conditionality that would be seen in full flower in the years preceding the 1916 Rising, and it might be remarked, with equal vividness throughout the contemporary ‘Troubles’.
No Irish organisation proclaimed its loyalty as loudly as did the Orangemen, who took their political hue from the Protestant William of Orange who defeated the Catholic King James II (Seamus a Caca, James the Shite, as the Catholic Irish termed him for his cowardice) at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July, 1690. Symptomatic of the complexities of the Ulster issue, the battle was actually fought on 1 July under the old calendar, and the cause of King William was championed by the pope who wished to check the ambitions of King Louis of France who sponsored James II. To this day, however, the Orangemen conveniently overlook the papal contribution to the creation of their icon. Although it contained a strain of virulent anti-Catholicism, the Order had and has a substantial fraternal and benevolent component.
But, and it was a very big but indeed, it also served both as a militia and a bonding organisation for militant Protestantism, spreading to England in 1807 where the Tories, especially around Liverpool, used the movement against the Liberals. Later it would develop in America manifesting itself in such movements as the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan. The Order also proved useful to employers as a device for keeping Protestant and Catholic workers from uniting for better wages and conditions.
Throughout the nineteenth century a number of unconstitutional efforts at redressing Catholic grievances were attempted, mainly led by Irish Protestants. Robert Emmet paid for his fleeting insurrection on a public scaffold; the Young Irelanders of 1848 scarcely achieved an insurrection at all and were easily suppressed and deported to Australia and Tasmania. The largely Catholic Fenian movement seemingly achieved little in the 1860s, but, as we shall see, left a potent legacy. The greatest constitutional leader of Catholic Ireland in the nineteenth century, Daniel O’Connell, secured emancipation for his co-religionists in 1829, but died a broken man as the famine raged amidst the ruins, and indeed the consequences of the failure of his agitation for Repeal of the Union. Then in the 1870s a new
movement9 and a new policy grew up amongst Irish parliamentarians at Westminster. Led by Isaac Butt who was yet another Protestant and father of the Home Rule movement, founder of the Irish Home Rule League and a lawyer, Irish MPs attempted to obtain their objectives through obstruction, by delaying English Bills in retaliation for the English destruction of their legislative proposals for an amelioration of Irish conditions. The initiative attracted publicity and wrath in equal measure, but after a decade appeared to be a policy of activity without movement. In the ten years from 1870 to 1880 a total of twenty-eight bills aimed at improving Irish conditions fell angrily and uselessly on the floor of the House of Commons, like unpaid bills in the letter box of a bankrupt. To the Conservatives and Unionists the bribes paid to secure the passage of the Act of Union seemed to be money well spent.
Nevertheless by 1886, when Randolph Churchill played the Orange Card, the prospects for Home Rule had improved. True famine threatened once more in Ireland. There was uproar throughout the land as tenants refused to pay unjust rents and were evicted. Some enlightened Protestant thinkers in England had come to see justice in the Irish demand for an end to the Act of Union and the introduction of some measure of Home Rule. Chief amongst them was William Ewart Gladstone. While campaigning for Home Rule in Liverpool on 28 June, 1886 he said of the Act:
There is no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man. We used the whole civil government of Ireland as an engine of wholesale corruption…we obtained that Union against the sense of every class of the Community, by wholesale bribery and unblushing intimidation.
Gladstone was not acting solely for altruistic reasons. In Ireland the Land League, led by Michael Davitt, was agitating against landlordism and for equitable rents. The result was a series of coercive acts, agrarian outrage and a state of ebullition in rural areas where ‘boycotting’ was rife. The term derived from a Captain Boycott, against whom the practice was first used. Landlords who refused to reduce their rents were ostracised, or ‘boycotted’, neither being spoken to, served in shops, nor assisted in farm operations such as harvesting. Farmers who took land from which a tenant had been evicted were also ‘boycotted’. The evicted tenants were assisted by money collected from Irish Catholics in America. But the threat of a return to famine conditions hung over the Irish countryside throughout this period and was a contributory factor to the desperation with which the peasantry waged the Land War, as it was known.
But above all, in the parliamentary war the Irish Party had a new leader, the Protestant Wicklow landowner Charles Stewart Parnell. He still pursued Butt’s policy of obstruction, but more tellingly Parnell had moulded the Irish Parliamentary Party into a formidable political machine which he used for or against either the Liberals or the Conservatives as the occasion demanded. In 1886 the Liberals needed Parnell’s votes to stay in power. Apart from Davitt and Parnell, a third potent body, the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Fenian Movement, the embodiment of the Irish physical force tradition, also supported Parnell’s policy. In what became known as the New Departure, the Fenians sheathed the sword and joined with the Land League in backing the Home Rule demand. In these circumstances, Home Rule appeared a certainty.
But Tory opponents of Nationalist demands did not limit themselves to merely playing the Orange Card. The papal one was played also. While attempting to maintain Protestant hegemony in Ireland, an attempt was made to enlist the pope against the Irish Catholics. It was partially successful in that it did provoke a papal response, but this rebounded on the Vatican. Pope Leo XII issued a ‘papal rescript’ in 1887 condemning boycotting which was badly received by the Irish, boycotters and parliamentarians alike.
The Tories then directed their attack not at a movement but a man – Parnell. As yet another Irish Coercion Act wended its way through the House of Commons in 1887, The Times newspaper, the organ of the Establishment, was induced to print forged letters purporting to show that Parnell was in favour of the Phoenix Park murders which had claimed the lives of a chief secretary and lord lieutenant (Cavendish and Burke), both of whom were sympathetic towards Home Rule. The letters were subsequently proved to be forgeries and the forger, one Richard Piggot, committed suicide. But before this drama played out, the Coercion Act, one of more than fifty passed since the Act of Union, passed into law leaving Ireland virtually under a state of martial law and at the tender mercies of Chief Secretary Arthur Balfour, whose ‘carrot and stick’ policies caused him to be remembered in Ireland as ‘bloody Balfour’. The aim of Balfour’s policy was to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, in other words, taking steps to reform the land issue by creating a peasant proprietorship, at the same time quelling agrarian and political disturbances with a heavy hand.
Parnell weathered the forgery storm, but fell when the political onslaught on him entered the sexual arena. Captain William O’Shea sued his wife Kitty for divorce in 1889, citing Parnell as co-respondent. O’Shea had tolerated the liaison for several years, having lived apart from his wife during that time in the hopes of getting his hands on her fortune when a wealthy aunt of Kitty’s died. But the money was left in such a way that O’Shea could not touch it and in 1889 he filed a suit for divorce which he offered to drop if he were paid £20,000 in settlement. Whether he was encouraged by the Conservatives, in particular Joseph Chamberlain, is to this day a debatable point. In the event Kitty could not raise the £20,000, the divorce case provided lurid reading and Gladstone, dependent on his non-Conformist constituency, had to declare that so long as Parnell remained leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Home Rule could not be carried.
Instead of making a tactical retreat into the wilderness for a few years and then resuming the reins at a more propitious moment, Parnell’s pride drove him to fight to remain leader. The Irish Party split into pro- and anti-Parnell factions and the strain of the in-fighting killed Parnell who died, four months after marrying Kitty, in October 1891. The Home Rule movement did not die with him but it entered a coma that was to last for approximately twenty years.
Under the leadership of John Redmond, the Irish Party’s wounds were eventually healed. Patient and temperate in method and approach, Redmond had been a loyal follower of Parnell. He was from Wexford, and was MP for New Ross and later Waterford. He was also an able debater and a master of parliamentary procedure. By 1912, conditions had altered to allow the introduction of a third Home Rule Bill. Once more the Liberals were in power, and once more the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was dependent on the Irish MPs. Both Asquith and his friend Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, were intellectually convinced that Home Rule was the correct policy for Ireland. The House of Lords was no longer the bulwark against Home Rule that it had been in earlier contests. As a result of the Parliament Act of 1911, Bills that passed the Commons in three consecutive sessions automatically became law whatever their lordships felt. With the disappearance of the Lords’ veto it seemed that this time surely the measure must pass, particularly as the measure itself was something of a legislative mouse when compared with the mountain of discontent it had stirred up. It conceded only a very limited degree of autonomy – under the Crown – to the bi-cameral Parliament that it proposed to establish in Dublin, and reserved important powers such as defence and taxation to Westminster.
Pressure for reform of the land system culminating in the Wyndham Act of 1903 had finally created a peasant proprietorship and largely taken the Land issue out of the political equation. The southern Unionist community had lost much of its economic and political clout as many of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy landlords had been bought out, and a relatively prosperous Catholic lower middle class had come into being.
But appearances were deceptive both in England and Ireland. In Ireland the pattern of economic and political development had diverged between the north-east and the rest of the country as the nineteenth century progressed. The overwhelming majority in the country was Catholic, but in the north-east, Protestants formed more than half the population. Ec
onomically, this section was far better off than the Catholic region. An influx of Picardy refugees gave the linen industry a boost after 1700. Both benefited from the introduction of power-spinning and weaving, and shipbuilding began in Belfast halfway through the century. All this made for the formation of capital and in Belfast in particular, something of a population explosion occurred in the wake of the new jobs. The population of 37,000 in 1821 had grown to 349,000 in 1901.
By the turn of the century it would not be altogether inaccurate to think of industrialised Ireland as lying largely in what are now referred to by Nationalists as the Six Counties: Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone, and the rest consisting mainly of a large farm and Guinness’s Brewery in Dublin. Industrialisation, being Protestant-financed and controlled, did not merely heighten the north-east’s differences from the rest of the country; they made Belfast part of an economic unit centred on British cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Belfast looked to and traded with these areas and thought in terms of building up northern cities like Derry and Portadown rather than investing in Dublin. Belfast became the magnet not only for Protestants but also for many impoverished Catholics seeking jobs that the Protestants had created.
The contest for jobs was thus superimposed on older conflicts arising from the Plantation, heightening the anxieties of the descendants of the British and Protestant settlers in Ulster who saw themselves very much as settlers do in any part of the world who live on land taken from an indigenous people: constantly in danger of being swept away by a vengeful tide of the dispossessed.
1916- the Easter Rising Page 2