Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  Some Fenians, such as Patrick Egan and John O’Connor Power, came to the conclusion that Home Rule was an acceptable first step towards independence and joined Butt’s parliamentary campaign. (Butt had been an MP from 1852 to 1865. He was also elected for Limerick from 1871 until 1879.) At the general election of 1874, Butt’s Home Rule party won over half of the seats for Irish members. Between 1871 and 1880, Butt and his party pushed the Home Rule cause in parliament, but neither Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservatives nor William Gladstone’s Liberals were interested in allying themselves with the Irish Party. Since Butt refused to use anything but constitutional and moderate means, there never seemed to be a sense of urgency about the Home Rule question, and each of the main parties in the House of Commons could afford to ignore it. Butt, however, had difficulties in leading his party. He generally thought of them as independent men who held the idea of Home Rule in common. The idea that he needed to form a well-disciplined party would have seemed radical to him. Butt retained his respect for the British constitution, and his ideas about Ireland retaining a place at the centre of the Empire, even though they were not shared by some of the more radical members of his party. This meant that he was not willing to breach the standards and codes of accepted parliamentary practice. Also, his popular appeal in Ireland was limited to those who shared his mild constitutional views. On the one hand, therefore, he could not put sufficient pressure on the House of Commons to pay attention to Home Rule, and on the other he did not have the depth of support in Ireland to force Home Rule up the British political agenda.

  This gradually made a number of Butt’s followers very impatient. They thought that moderation had failed and that it was time for more direct action. Two important members of Butt’s party, Joseph Gillis Biggar (1828–90) and John O’Connor Power (1848–1919), thought that the best way to get the attention of the other parties in the House of Commons was to obstruct parliamentary business using ancient procedural methods. In 1875, Biggar and Power were joined by Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91). Parnell was born into a Protestant landlord family, educated at Cambridge University, and became MP for Meath in 1875. Parnell took quickly to the policy of obstruction, which alienated him from Isaac Butt and other moderate members of the Home Rule Party. There was a struggle for the leadership of the Home Rule Party between 1877 and 1879, partly because of these differing views on tactics, but also because Parnell and many of the younger men in the party were impatient with what they saw as Butt’s slow pace. One of the main problems was that Butt was generally opposed to obstruction of parliamentary business, except in extreme cases. There were times, however, when Butt pushed the Home Rule case right to the edge of obstruction, but then did not follow it through. This frustrated Parnell and Biggar and their followers. In early 1877, therefore, Parnell and Biggar started obstructing parliamentary business on their own. While this did not advance the parliamentary cause of Home Rule, it did attract a great deal of attention, and the Irish nationalist press were able to play on the theme of a few heroic Irish MPs battling against the might of the rest of the British House of Commons. Parnell was able to use this popularity to become president of the Home Rule Confederation in late August 1877. The division between Parnell and Butt (and the two strains of Home Rule tactics they represented) helped build Fenian support for the obstructionists. By late 1877, however, it was clear that Parnell and his fellow obstructionists would gain control of the Home Rule Party in the House of Commons as well.

  THE RISE OF PARNELL

  Butt died in May 1879, and another constitutionalist, William Shaw (1823–95), took over the leadership of the Home Rule League, although there had been much support for the election of Parnell. Parnell, however, formally took over the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party at the 1880 election. He built up relations with Clan na Gael [clan nah gale], the Irish-American revolutionary group who were allied with the Fenians. They insisted that the land question and the national question be linked. Parnell had seen that the election in Ireland was fought on the land issue, and so when the new parliament convened in 1880, he was the head of a now more militant Irish Parliamentary Party. During the LandWar (see chapter five), Parnell provided effective leadership, often acting as a go-between for the British government and Land League radicals.

  After the passage of Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881, Parnell tried to steer Irish reformers more strictly towards a Home Rule policy. With the ending of the Land War of 1879–82, Parnell wanted the national movement to concentrate on the question of Home Rule. The Land League was, therefore, replaced by the National League, which became a political organization based on constituency groups and organized other such groups for the purpose of raising money, having candidates elected and supporting MPs in office. This was a tremendous organizing effort, and the party became quite disciplined.

  The mid-1880s were the highpoint of support for Home Rule within Ireland. In 1884, the Catholic Church publicly backed the movement (in exchange for the Irish Party’s support for Catholic educational reforms). In the election of 1885, Parnell urged Irish voters in Britain to vote against the Liberals, in punishment for dragging their feet on Home Rule. The Liberals gained more seats than any other party, but Parnell’s party had enough seats, if they voted with the Conservatives, to eliminate the Liberal majority on any measure. The election of late 1885 was a triumph for Parnell. Home rulers won every seat in Ireland except for those in eastern Ulster and the Dublin University seat. In Great Britain, the Liberals gained power again under Gladstone, who saw the electoral result in Ireland as a clear expression of the people’s wish for Home Rule. On 17 December 1885, Gladstone came out in favour of Home Rule. When he formed his government in early 1886, he decided that Home Rule was going to be a central policy. On 8 April 1886, Gladstone presented a Home Rule bill based on Butt’s ideas and on the colonial practice followed in Canada. Under the bill’s provisions, Dublin was to have its own parliament consisting of two chambers and to be in charge of domestic Irish affairs. The British parliament in London would retain control of imperial affairs, foreign relations, the military, currency and major taxation. Gladstone presented his bill to the House of Commons using the language of historic justice for Ireland and Home Rule as a pragmatic solution to a continuing problem. The details of the bill were criticized, however, by most nationalists because they did not see it as a lasting settlement. Conservatives in the British parliament thought Home Rule would mean the break-up of the Union, and eventually the empire, as well as betraying the loyal Protestants who wished to remain more directly linked with Britain. They also worried that the Irish MPs who would be retained in the British parliament would have too much say over British affairs. This was because, under Gladstone’s plan, Ireland was still to pay imperial taxes, and so would have to be granted Irish MPs to sit in the British parliament. Gladstone replied that the upper chamber of the new Irish parliament would solve the problem of Protestant loyalists. Since that chamber was to be based on property, it would naturally be full of Protestant landowners, and would safeguard their minority rights. He thought that the militant loyalists and Orangemen would see that Home Rule would grant them more direct control over their interests. It was not only the Conservatives who opposed the bill, however. A large number of Liberals were also against it. Many of them were unionists at heart and genuinely believed in the benefits of the Union. These Liberal Unionists were from both the aristocratic section of the party (led by Lord Hartington, 1803–1908) and the radical section (led by Joseph Chamberlain, 1836–1914). With this combined opposition, Gladstone’s bill was defeated by 341 to 311 votes in the House of Commons on 8 June 1886, with 93 Liberals voting against Gladstone. Even if it had passed the Commons, it would have certainly been thrown out by the House of Lords.

  This defeat put Parnell in a difficult parliamentary position. Until this point, his party could hold the Liberal government to ransom by threatening to vote with the Conservatives. Once a significant section of
Liberals had deserted Gladstone over Home Rule, however, Parnell’s threat became meaningless. Rebellious liberals posed a greater danger to Gladstone than Parnell’s party could. This rejection of such a major part of Liberal government policy meant that Gladstone had to call an election for 1886. It was fought on the issue of Home Rule, but was a massive defeat for Gladstone, and Lord Salisbury’s Conservatives came to power. The Home Rule movement, however, retained much support in Britain and intensified in Ireland. There was a change in attitude amongst many nationalists, who were increasingly willing to try constitutional methods in the House of Commons. This gradually meant that the Irish Parliamentary Party became more closely allied with the Home Rule Liberals. Gladstone continued to campaign for Home Rule, and gathered many supporters during the late 1880s.

  All this raised more opposition to Home Rule, and the issue captured broad national attention in Britain as well as Ireland. The Times newspaper, a generally establishment, Conservative and Unionist paper, tried to tar the Home Rule movement with the brush of crime. With nationalist demonstrations going on in Ireland, and in the wake of the Phoenix Park murders (see chapter five), The Times ran a series of stories entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’ from March to December 1887. These stories were based on a series of letters which The Times claimed Parnell had written, linking him to the Phoenix Park murders and terrorism generally. In an editorial, The Times claimed that Gladstone was unwittingly allied with ‘the worst of criminals, with agents and instruments of murder-conspiracies’. Parnell denounced the letters, refuted their authorship in the House of Commons and demanded an investigation by the government. Salisbury’s government, however, decided to investigate the charges against Parnell rather than the authenticity of the letters. This had the effect of implying that the Irish Parliamentary Party was linked to terrorists. The investigation backfired, however, and it was proved that the letters were forged by a disaffected Irish nationalist. This revelation was a tremendous boost to Parnell and to Gladstone’s efforts to make Home Rule acceptable to the British public. It helped Home Rulers appear as forward-thinking reformers rather than as a front for terrorism. Opinion in favour of Parnell and the Liberals improved, and The Times’s credibility was seriously damaged.

  PARNELL’S FALL

  Parnell’s political respectability was restored by 1889, but his personal life was soon to be his undoing, and would seriously damage his Irish Parliamentary Party. Parnell had been having an affair with the wife of a member of his party, Captain O’Shea (1840–1905), and had been living with her in south-east London since 1886. This meant that he spent less time in the House of Commons, and even less time in Ireland. Parnell’s period of lax attendance to the Home Rule cause meant that he did not take an active part in the second phase of the Land War, the ‘Plan of Campaign’. Although the 1881 Land Act had granted the Three Fs, agricultural depression continued to plague Irish farmers, particularly in the south and west.

  William O’Brien implemented the Plan, which basically said that distressed farmers would offer landlords what they thought was a reasonable rent. If a higher rent was demanded and eviction threatened, the amount that the farmers had offered would be placed in a fund to help all farmers who might be thrown off the land. The National League bolstered the funds when needed. This worked initially, but the Plan could not hold up under the pressure of landlord resistance and of the new Irish chief secretary Arthur Balfour’s support for landlords on the one hand and small concessions to farmers on the other. Balfour was trying to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’. Although the Plan of Campaign was largely a failure, it did signal to many landowners that the landlord system could not survive much longer. Parnell, though preoccupied, gave the Plan a minor degree of support, but not so much that its failure could be blamed on him. Meanwhile, the affair with Katherine O’Shea (1945–1921) had been going on since 1880, largely with Captain O’Shea’s knowledge. The Captain probably used the affair as a way to become close to Parnell and further his own political career. He was also important as a political intermediary in getting Parnell out of jail during the Land War. But he did not vote for Home Rule in 1886 and resigned his seat. O’Shea did not wish to divorce his wife because he hoped to profit from the will of one of her aunts. When this proved in 1889 to be a false hope, O’Shea started divorce proceedings against his wife, and named Parnell as her lover in the case on 24 December 1889. Initially it looked as if the case would fail or that Parnell could successfully defend himself. But since the affair had been so well known in political circles, the divorce case soon became a public scandal when it came to trial in November 1890. O’Shea won his case and there was an outcry against Parnell amongst British nonconformists (non-Anglican Protestants), who had been strong supporters of Gladstone.

  Reaction in Ireland was also one of shock, particularly amongst Catholics. Parnell was re-elected leader of his party on 25 November 1890, but there was a fairly quick backlash against him, even amongst some of his parliamentary supporters. At a party meeting during the first week in December, forty-five Irish MPs withdrew their support for Parnell, leaving him with twenty-eight followers. The split in his party became permanent, and an anti-Parnellite candidate won a by-election in late December 1890, symbolizing the ability of the Home Rule movement to win without him. Throughout 1891, the Irish Parliamentary Party struggled against itself. Parnellites and anti-Parnellites both claimed to be the true Home Rulers. Parnell married Katherine O’Shea in June 1891, but died on 6 October, after campaigning in another by-election. He was buried in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin on 11 October. Although his fall is often described as tragic, many Irish people saw Parnell as continuing a nationalist tradition which began with O’Connell, progressed through Butt, and was symbolized in Parnell himself. But the split in his parliamentary party continued and made it difficult for further Irish reforms to be enacted.

  Gladstone continued his Home Rule efforts, and in the election of 1892 his Liberals won a majority and he returned to power. He presented another Home Rule bill in 1893, which passed the House of Commons on 2 September but was defeated in the House of Lords a week later. Home Rule would continue as an issue until the First World War, but this will be discussed in the next chapter.

  CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST OPPOSITION TO HOME RULE

  The Home Rule period saw an increasingly strong line being drawn between the north-east and the rest of the country. This was caused by several important factors. One of the most important was that the British government opened up the electoral franchise in the whole of the United Kingdom in 1884 and 1885 to include much of the working class. In Ireland this meant that a far greater percentage of Catholics could vote than before, and that electoral power was slipping away from the propertied and merchant classes (which were mainly Protestant). This further meant that those unionists who opposed Home Rule were now generally in a majority only where the overall electoral majority was Protestant (which usually also meant it was unionist). The north-east was the only area that had such an electoral make-up. Although there were a great many unionists in the south of Ireland, they no longer had enough electoral power to make their votes count in electing members of parliament. Unionism, therefore, became a political force confined to Ulster in the north-east. Further, the fear of ‘Rome Rule’ meant that many Irish Conservatives and Protestants (such as Orangemen, Protestant landowners, and Ulster industrialists) found themselves bound together in opposition to Home Rule as they had never been before. There had been disagreements between these groups in the past, but they now realized that they needed to form a more united opposition to Home Rule.

  Groups such as the Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union were formed in 1886 when Gladstone proposed his first Home Rule bill. Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–95), a leading British Conservative, took up the case of Ulster refusal of Home Rule. He did this at least partly to advance his own career, but he did spend a good deal of time in Ulster giving rousing speeches in defence of the Union. The Irish Unionist Par
ty was founded in 1886, under the leadership of Colonel Edward Saunderson (1837–1906) who organized military drilling and even acquired uniforms for unionists to display as defiance to any potential Home Rule proposal. But organized unionism only prospered while Home Rule bills were being pushed in the Commons. In 1886 and 1893, unionists presented a united, and impressive, opposition to Gladstone’s Home Rule bills. But when these failed and the split in the Liberal Party became obviously serious and permanent, that unity fell apart, and most unionists returned to concentrating on local affairs and renewing old quarrels, such as that between landlord and farmer. To most nationalists in the south of Ireland, political unionism in the north-east seemed to be a strange, and transient, expression of Protestant insecurity. Although Parnell paid some attention to the growing organization of unionists, most of the other members of his party either ignored it or dismissed it as being run by reactionaries who could not sustain popular support. This misunderstanding of the depth of attachment to the Union would have serious effects on the next two decades of Irish history.

  INTERPRETATIONS

  There are four main strains of interpretation of Home Rule: unionist, liberal, nationalist and revisionist. They differ on the background of the Home Rule movement, the motives of its main supporters, the reasons why it failed and whether it would have been a feasible solution to the main problems in Ireland.