The Story of Ireland

by Neil Hegarty

  This was an age of ever-broader parliamentary representation: in 1867, the minority Tory government’s reform bill had extended the franchise to the majority of householders – and in the process had revolutionized the political landscape. So while Gladstone saw the Irish Question as a moral issue to be settled once and for all, he could also perceive the political dividends that might flow from including Ireland’s Catholics in a Liberal-led political movement: in the upcoming election, the fragile Tory administration might be swept away by Irish votes. As a result, his public pronouncements now began to imply that Ireland could henceforth expect much in the way of political attention: if the Liberals were elected to office, he promised, the country’s various issues would be addressed. This was a carefully vague commitment: it remained to be seen what it might actually mean in practice, and whether his words would amount to much more than lip service. Besides, fundamental change in Ireland was not a gift that only the British could bestow; Irish MPs might also have a crucial role to play in fighting for it.

  Whatever his motives and intentions, Gladstone understood that Catholic approval might be purchased in one relatively easy step. He had voted against the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland as recently as 1865, considering that the time was not right for such action – but now he promised this very measure if he came to power. The privileged status of the established Church had long irked Catholic opinion, and it was a wise move in other ways too: a month after the executions in Manchester, a Fenian bomb had exploded at Clerkenwell in London’s East End, killing twelve and injuring over a hundred. Karl Marx, living in exile in London, was exasperated: the bombing, he said, was ‘a very stupid thing. The London masses, who have shown great sympathy for Ireland, will be made wild by it…. One can not expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of the Fenian emissaries.’1 And indeed, the event led to reprisals, such as attacks on Irish neighbourhoods. In cold political terms, however, it paid a certain dividend, giving rise to fears that the Fenian threat could never be wholly contained in Britain itself; and as a result, it focused attention on the state of Ireland and how it might be improved so as to quieten its mutinous inhabitants. Gladstone could now point authoritatively to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland as a necessary move that would eliminate the Fenian threat while not in fact interfering much with the status quo.* ‘So long as that establishment lives,’ he said, ‘painful and bitter memories of Ascendancy can never be effaced.’2

  The canny Gladstone also knew that the proposed legislation in Ireland would appeal greatly to his own natural nonconformist constituency in Britain, which would see disestablishment as one in the eye for the Church of England. And so it proved to be. In the general election of November 1868, a grand coalition of Liberals and nonconformists in Britain and Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland propelled Gladstone into office for the first time, with a majority of 110 over his opponents. ‘The Almighty,’ Gladstone wrote in his diary, ‘seems to sustain and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself to be.’3 The disestablishment bill came before the Commons in March 1869 and was passed by the summer. Its effect was not only to sever the connections between the Church of Ireland and the state, but also to remove both the annual subsidy that the Presbyterians had enjoyed and the annual grant awarded to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth – though all three Churches received compensation to cushion these financial blows.*

  Other measures introduced by Gladstone included the release under amnesty of a number of Fenian prisoners – a symbolically important move, though not nearly enough to satisfy many in Ireland. A movement led by the Protestant barrister Isaac Butt set out ostensibly to make a political issue of the amnesty situation. Butt, a former Orangeman, was intellectual, respectful, careful, uncharismatic, dour and unexciting – in short, lacking in many of the qualities that appealed in Irish political circles. He could not, however, be accused of being ineffective. He was instrumental, for example, in the organization of mass political rallies in support of extended Fenian amnesties; the largest of these, at Dublin in October 1869, was attended by over a hundred thousand people. Naturally, Gladstone could not be seen to bow to opinion in this way; and Butt’s movement seemed to have steered itself into a dead end. In reality, however, he and his supporters had rather larger issues on their agenda: their engagement with the amnesty issue had more to do with introducing a new presence in the Irish political landscape, and in the most public way possible. Butt’s ultimate aim was to create a new politics: eighty years after the passing of the Act of Union, he wanted to raise the prospect of Home Rule in Ireland: legislative independence under the Crown.

  Butt had a delicate balancing act to perform if his movement was to achieve anything at all. The most pressing political and social issue continued to be not constitutional change, but land reform and tenants’ rights. In spite of the steep demographic decline which had accompanied the Famine, the small tenant farmer (usually with a large family to feed) remained a significant presence on the Irish social scene; the potato remained the crop of choice; and a poor harvest could still spell misery for the Irish peasantry. There was, to be sure, a little less pressure now on the land’s ability to feed the people; and a run of good harvests had eased matters further. Moreover, a new de facto deal involving the ownership of the land had evolved since 1849: tenants could now pass their lands on to their nominated heirs as if they actually held title. Yet the fact remained that they did not: a tiny elite continued to own the vast majority of the land in Ireland, and brutal evictions were commonplace if a tenant farmer fell into arrears. Before he took power in 1868, Gladstone had been well aware of this state of affairs: he had already floated the possibility of land reform in Ireland – and the natural result was that the tenant class fully expected action on this matter to follow the disestablishment legislation.

  Butt himself was doubtful as to the political consequences of land reform: he wished, for one thing, to see Ireland’s farmers on his side and not on that of Gladstone, as they assuredly would be if the prime minister delivered on reform. He wanted the landlord class on his side too, as part of a national coalition seeking Home Rule; and he feared the prospect of an embittered rump of angry former landowners well disposed neither to him nor to anyone else. Yet political realities ensured that he could not possibly come out against the prospect of reform: as a result, he was a founding member of the Irish Tenant League, which met for the first time in County Tipperary in September 1869. Gladstone’s land reform bill came to the Commons in February of the following year, but in Ireland it was perceived to be too modest in content. The de facto inheritance situation was now given force of law, but there was no measure compelling landowners to sell their land to their tenants, as had been demanded; nor were there measures to deal with that over-riding grievance, the absence of security of tenure. It satisfied nobody, in other words, although it did serve to underscore the sense that a measure of agitation in Ireland could produce a measure of reform at Westminster.

  Butt now set about his greater agenda. He published Home Government for Ireland: Irish Federalism, Its Meaning, Its Objects and Its Hopes, which portrayed a federal United Kingdom, with Ireland governing itself under a common Crown. Butt’s argument was partly – and cannily – couched in language designed to appeal to British sentiment: the Reform Bill of 1832, he suggested, had peeled British and Irish interests apart; there was no longer a united establishment that straddled the two countries. Instead, Ireland was now sending to Westminster a large body of members who were proving to be a deeply disruptive and distorting presence in the House of Commons: they were disturbing the balance of power at Westminster and it would be better, therefore, to remove them from the political equation and let them go their own way into a newly constituted parliament at Dublin.

  In Ireland itself, meanwhile, Butt’s desire to forge a national movement resulted in the formation of the Home Government Association at Dublin in May 1
870. He succeeded in luring to the inaugural meeting a series of establishment figures, including landowners, dons from nearby Trinity College and a number of newspaper owners – all Protestant and all vexed with Gladstone and his reforms. Butt’s idea of a big tent, however, was inherently unstable: he was asking for these disaffected figures to make a vast leap – from irritation with the new status quo directly into the uncharted waters of Home Rule. For many of them, recent events implied that a self-governing Ireland would be a cold house for Protestants of whatever hue. Moreover, these gentlemen were fully aware of the surge of popular Protestant disaffection now ongoing in Ulster, and in Belfast and its environs in particular: Orange activity remained high, evangelism was fervently active, and sectarianism in general – that particular hallmark of life in Ulster for over two hundred years – was alive and well. In such a context, Butt’s notion of a national force with room for all faiths began to seem fantastical.

  The Home Rule faction in Ireland, then, rapidly took on a Catholic hue, and disaffection with the government led in March 1873 to the defection of those Liberal members of parliament who had been elected to Irish constituencies on the Gladstone ticket in 1868. A powerful electoral alliance was now disintegrating and the Liberal government was hobbled, limping on until the next general election a year later. In 1872 the secret ballot (another Gladstone innovation) had been introduced for all elections in the United Kingdom, meaning that for the first time votes in Ireland (for example) could be cast by tenant farmers without fear of reprisals from their landlords. The results of the 1874 election were a crushing blow for Gladstone’s Liberals, who lost fifty-nine of their Irish seats to Butt’s Home Rulers. (The exception was in Ulster, where the Liberals scored some modest successes.) The Home Rule faction could do little in the short term – the composition of the House of Commons and the majority now held by Disraeli’s Tories meant that the Irish members could exert no leverage at this time. A year later, however, an electoral vacancy in County Meath would provide an opportunity to bring new energy to the task at hand.

  Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) was a Protestant landowner with some thousands of acres at Avondale in County Wicklow and a positively heady mix in his ancestry. His paternal grandfather had been of the firm opinion that the Ascendancy, of which he was of course himself a member, was doomed unless it engaged fully with the great mass of the people of Ireland; the family tradition was thus to champion the country’s ability to govern its own destiny. Parnell’s mother was American: her father, Commodore Charles Stewart (or ‘Old Ironsides’) had engaged the British and captured two of their ships in a naval battle during the war of 1812. Parnell’s schooling, however, had been impeccably English – although he had been suspended from Cambridge for brawling and had never completed his degree – and he adhered to a mild Anglicanism. He possessed the rare ability to be all things to all people, a gift that would be put to the test when he took up his seat in the Commons in 1875: for his task was to walk that most tensely strung of tightropes, charming the militants without actually offering any commitment while at the same time unifying Irish constitutional politics behind the common cause of Home Rule. He was a truly formidable character; not since the era of Daniel O’Connell had such an iconic figure entered Irish politics.

  Parnell’s maiden speech in the Commons was notable. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England? Ireland was not a geographical fragment but a nation.’4 In spite of this rousing beginning, however, his initial impact on the stagnant political scene at Westminster was negligible. Disraeli’s government had fine-tuned its tactic of employing parliamentary rules and procedure as a means to run unwelcome Irish bills into the sand. Measure after measure was killed off in this way; and, in combination with Butt’s uncharismatic leadership, the sense was growing rapidly that the Home Rule Party could not hope to achieve much if anything at Westminster. But in the following year Parnell once more began to attract the attention of the media with a powerful intervention in defence of the Manchester Martyrs, who had been referred to in the chamber by the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Michael Beach, as murderers. Soon, Parnell and his allies recognized that a creative deployment of Commons procedures was not a Tory monopoly but could be used by all sides – and they set to their task with a will.

  In the course of the parliamentary session of 1877, this element within the Home Rule faction began to obstruct the work of the House, by introducing amendment after amendment, by talking out bills crucial to the government and by turning their collective backs to the established Westminster procedures. Such tactics may not have been original, but Parnell’s faction now began to apply them to parliamentary business in general, as opposed to that part of it concerning Ireland alone – and the work of the House was paralysed. This campaign of obstruction began in July and August with the South African Confederation Bill – a moment that marked the beginning of an unlikely relationship between the politics of Ireland and southern Africa that would later have profound implications. Not everyone in the party was at this time pleased with such a strategy – Butt certainly was not – but the obstructionist faction forged ahead regardless. Before too long, Parnell was being considered the real leader of the Irish group in the Commons – and inevitably his increasing stature, powerful public performances and confrontational style led to growing tension with Butt. As anger mounted in the Commons chamber and out of it, Butt continued to cling grimly to the gentlemen’s model of politics that esteemed civility above all else. The inevitable result was a split between the two factions. Butt would die in 1879: although his own political journey had been considerable, his legacy would be overshadowed thoroughly by the story of Parnell.

  For now, however, Parnell and his allies had to deal with a range of political dangers: a split party, in which their majority could not yet be assured; the still-bubbling land issue, which offered both political dangers and opportunities; and a renewed attempt by Gladstone’s Liberals to connect with Irish voters as a means of re-creating the potent electoral alliance that had brought the party to power in 1868. Gladstone himself – now in opposition and restive – had visited Ireland in the cool, damp summer of 1877 in order to reconnoitre the country and his own political prospects there. He had sailed for Holyhead again in the autumn, carrying with him a sense that Ireland was relatively prosperous and settled, even if the potato yield of that year was poor; certainly the country would be able to weather a single bad year.

  But the disappointing harvest of 1877 was only the beginning of a run of bad years, and agricultural prices continued to fall as vast reaches of the American and Canadian prairies continued to be opened to intensive cereal cultivation, adding to the plight of those hard-pressed small Irish farmers who relied on their cash crops. A vast charitable effort swung into action in order to head off widespread famine: a lecture tour of the United States undertaken by Parnell early in 1880 ensured publicity for the plight of Ireland and generated substantial relief funds; the US government dispatched a supply ship, which docked at Queenstown in the spring of 1880; and ships of the Royal Navy landed relief supplies along the west coast. Significantly, a flood of remittances from Irish-Americans also poured into the country, underscoring again the significant alteration in the relationship between Ireland and the world in the years since the Famine of the 1840s.

  The issue of land regulation now became a crisis, for the situation in the fields had left many tenant farmers in rent arrears and liable as a result to be evicted from their homes. The response was a sharp increase in agrarian disturbance in the west, where social distress was greatest. Fenian activists assessed the situation, to see if the makings of a further revolt were present; Parnell also travelled west to address mutinous tenants at Westport in County Mayo. Gradually militancy – the beginning of what would become known as the Land War – spread across the remainder of Connacht and further afield. The National Land League of Mayo was established in August 1879, forerunner of the Nati
onal Land League, founded in October and backed by a range of respectable figures, including clerics and wealthy farmers. Parnell was one such, participating on the understanding that he would act only within the law. For many other members of the new league, however, this structure was promising: it was a constitutional carapace that sheltered a Fenian presence, and it represented the beginning of a potential national revolution.

  Central to the foundation of the organization was Michael Davitt, who like Parnell cut a compelling figure on the contemporary national stage. The social backgrounds of the two men could hardly have been more different: while Parnell had grown up in comfortable and wealthy surroundings, Davitt had been born in Mayo in 1846 to parents who were poor, though with a degree of education. As a small child the consequences of the Famine had driven the family to contemplate entering the local workhouse before instead choosing migration to northern England. The result was a new life in the midst of a tightly knit Irish community in the industrial heart of Lancashire; it was here that Davitt acquired the accent that remained with him throughout his life. Here too he became steeped in working-class politics at a time when the condition of this class was having an ever-greater impact on the wider public consciousness. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and many other such literary portrayals appeared in these years to testify to this growing attention.