Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  The unionist interpretation was quite extensive between the fall of Gladstone’s 1886 government and the start of World War I. The basic argument was that there were too many instances in Irish history when it could be shown that the country was not able to govern itself for a Home Rule scheme to work. The unionist A.V. Dicey’s main argument as put forward in England’s Case Against Home Rule (1886) was that the specific plans for Home Rule were flawed, and that no matter how much they might be seen as the first step towards full independence, they were not. ‘Any plan of Home Rule whatever implies that there are spheres of national life in which Ireland is not to act with the freedom of an independent State’, Dicey argued. This unionist interpretation of the potential damage of Home Rule was certainly the dominant one in British public opinion until the early years of the twentieth century.

  The unionist interpretation of Home Rule was countered by liberal and nationalist interpretations. And these interpretations have been the dominant ones until very recently. The liberal interpretation was generally the work of the British historians and began with John Morley’s biography of British Prime Minister Gladstone, published in 1903. Morley had been a contemporary of Gladstone, and a strong believer in his liberalism. For Morley, Gladstone’s taking up of the Home Rule cause was symbolic of the liberal idea that justice was to be based on humanitarianism and humanitarian motives. Not only were Gladstone’s efforts morally just, according to Morley, they were heroic. ‘Few are the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics,’ he wrote, ‘but this was one’. Morley’s interpretation was very influential throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century. The corollary to Morley’s view of Gladstone as the morally righteous politician pursuing a just cause was that it was the unionists who wrecked Home Rule and that this wrecking was the cause of the partition of Ireland and the subsequent Troubles in the North. This view was held by four important historians, whose works have been very influential and were found on university reading lists for decades. George Dangerfield wrote that the unionists who killed Home Rule were also responsible for the end of liberal values and liberal progress in England by the time of the First World War. His Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) and The Damnable Question (1977), argued that unionists and the Conservatives who supported them were responsible for not only the lack of a solution to the Irish question and the subsequent violence in Northern Ireland, but for the end of the liberal century and liberal progress. R.C.K. Ensor was the second liberal historian to have a large impact on Home Rule. He had been a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the Anglo-Irish war (see chapter seven), and had been horrified by the brutality of it, especially the atrocities committed by the British. His textbook, England 1870–1914 (1936), which was to become standard reading for students, made the argument that Gladstone’s Home Rule plans would have solved the Irish problem and prevented this bloodshed. J.L. Hammond’s Gladstone and the Irish Nation (1938), argued that Home Rule was the greatest tragedy in modern British history, and that the fact that ‘more than half the nation’ supported Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill of 1893, yet the government was unable to pass it due to unionist pressure, would haunt the British people ‘on the day of Judgement’. In other words, the defeat of Home Rule was the biggest missed opportunity in modern British history. Nicholas Mansergh continued with this interpretation. He argued in Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution (1940) that only the Famine was a greater tragedy than Home Rule’s lost opportunity.

  The nationalist interpretation of Home Rule is somewhat similar to the liberal interpretation, in that it has argued that Home Rule was to be the first step towards independence, and was a tragic missed opportunity. The first major exponent of this interpretation was R. Barry O’Brien, who was very close to a major figure in the Home Rule movement – Parnell. He was with Parnell during 1890–1 and wrote first-hand accounts of the politics of the period. He also published a two-volume biography of Parnell in 1898. According to O’Brien, Parnell was the key figure in the Home Rule struggle; he had ‘brought Ireland within sight of the Promised Land’, and had laid the groundwork for independence – ‘the triumph of the national cause awaits other times, and another man’. O’Brien’s argument and his emphasis on Parnell shows the major difference between the liberal interpretation and the nationalist interpretation. To liberal historians, Home Rule was in Gladstone’s hands and its failure not only affected Ireland, but British politics also. In the nationalist interpretation, Parnell was the central figure, and it was his imagination and political power that drove Home Rule as far as it went. Gladstone was not forgotten in the nationalist interpretation, it is just that the focus of attention is on Irish Home Rule efforts.

  After 1922 and the founding of the Irish Free State (see chapter eight), the nationalist interpretation of Home Rule underwent a slight change. While Home Rule may have seemed the best possible avenue for self-determination to contemporaries at the time, the post-1922 generation of nationalist historians argued that, even if it had been granted, it would not have fulfilled Ireland’s national needs and aspirations. T.A. Jackson was the most prominent exponent of this idea. In his Ireland Her Own (1947), he argued that Parnell was the only one who could have transformed Home Rule eventually into a meaningful movement for independence. Later Irish Home Rulers, such as John Redmond (see chapter six) were categorized as being willing stooges of the British, who were mainly interested in quelling disturbance, not granting Irish independence.

  Along with other aspects of Irish history, Home Rule history underwent a revision during the mid-twentieth century. F.S.L. Lyons argued in his Ireland Since the Famine (1971) that the nationalist view of Home Rule as a movement for a completely separate (and Catholic) Ireland is too simple. Home Rule ideas and the agitations for it were more diverse and complex than that, Lyons argued, and it was not at all clear that Home Rule would have formed the type of Ireland that twentieth-century nationalists desired. Roy Foster took this argument further, both in his 1976 biography of Parnell and in his Modern Ireland (1989). Foster showed the detail of differing Home Rule opinions and the background of Home Rulers, as well as the difficulties in reaching a consensus on Home Rule.

  Some British historians, notably Michael Hurst, David Hamer, A.B. Cooke and John Vincent, began to broaden the interpretation of Home Rule, calling into question the motivations of leading British politicians at the time. Their main argument was that both the British politicians such as Gladstone who fought for Home Rule, and those who opposed it, such as Joseph Chamberlain (the liberal unionist) were more concerned with their own positions within British politics than they were with Irish affairs. Cooke and Vincent, in their Governing Passion (1974), argued that Gladstone and his cabinet were more interested in Home Rule as a party problem and as a way to gain support and remain in power than they were in Irish reform. They claimed that Gladstone used Home Rule as a way to thwart the increasing popularity of Chamberlain (who was younger and a potential rival for the Liberal leadership). Hamer made similar arguments in his biography of John Morley (1968). Hamer claimed that although Gladstone believed that Home Rule was the solution to the Irish problem, his motivation came primarily from a desire, ironically, to keep the Liberal party together. The party had been suffering from other, unrelated internal problems, and Gladstone thought that Home Rule was enough of a liberal justice issue to unite the party and forestall a split. Michael Hurst, in his Joseph Chamberlain and the Liberal Reunion (1967), argued that Chamberlain had similar ideas in mind, and that he never wanted to heal any split in the Liberal party, but used his opposition to Home Rule to bolster his own political position. Much of the most current work on Home Rule has also concentrated on its impact on British rather than on Irish politics. Terry Jenkins and Colin Matthew have revived the British liberal interpretation, focusing on Gladstone and what they see as his genuine belief in Home Rule as a viable solution. (See T.A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery, and the Liberal Party 1874–1885, 1987; and H.C.G. Matthew,
Gladstone 1875–1898, 1995.) William Lubenow has also written a careful and detailed analysis of parliamentary behaviour on Home Rule, in Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: the British House of Commons in 1886 (1988).

  This recent trend has finally been changed with the appearance of Alan O’Day’s excellent Irish Home Rule 1867–1921 (1998). It provides the first truly detailed analysis of the different Home Rule proposals, but, more importantly, contains a fresh interpretation. O’Day’s main argument is that the old idea that Home Rulers comprised a spectrum from constitutionalists (like Butt) to revolutionaries (such as Davitt) misses the stronger conclusion that within the nationalist movement there were two distinct groups – those who sought Home Rule on moral justice grounds, and those who sought it on material grounds (that is, thought that Ireland’s economic future required Home Rule). Finally, like some of the nationalist interpretations, O’Day argues that the failure of Home Rule showed ‘the limitations of parliamentarianism, the shortcoming of British responses and a fossilised Irish party’. This would become very important in the minds of the nationalist revolutionaries of the next generation. Most recently, Alvin Jackson’s Home Rule: An Irish History (2003) makes the argument that Home Rule is vital to the understanding of both Irish and British politics from roughly 1880 to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Domestic control of Ireland, in its various proposed forms, has been the major issue between the two countries since the English conquest, but it was the crucial 1880–1920 period that united some important Irish and British politicians in the same goal. But that goal, of course, was bedeviled by different ideas of inclusion and political control within Britain and Ireland, particularly those held by unionists. These various ideas about how Ireland should be governed, and forces that backed those ideas, came to blows early in the new century, as the next chapter shows.

  SEVEN

  Nationalism, Unionism and Irish Identity, 1891–1922

  This chapter is about conflicting ideas of who should govern Ireland, how it should be governed and what it meant to be Irish in the years between the death of Parnell in 1891 and the partition of Ireland in 1921 (which created the Irish Free State and a separate Northern Ireland retained under British control). There are political and revolutionary aspects to this period, but also social and cultural ones, with an attempt to assert certain types of Irishness during what has been called the ‘Gaelic Revival’. Social and economic change was also important during this period, and many of the political and cultural events discussed here were affected by them. There were further government land reforms, but emigration regained its former rapid pace. Rural and urban life also changed. In short, fewer people on the land and a greater percentage in towns allowed for a degree of modernization (although Ireland lagged behind most of Europe in living standards).

  LAND REFORMS CONTINUE

  1891 saw the founding of the Congested Districts Board, which attempted to solve the long-running economic problems in western counties, specifically with powers to divide or combine farms in an effort to reduce overcrowding on individual plots. In 1898, local government was reformed and placed on a fully elected basis. In 1899, the Department of Agriculture was established to help farmers learn about advanced agricultural techniques and improvements. The land reforms that the British government had implemented between 1870 and 1900 had allowed over sixty thousand tenants to purchase the land they worked. The 1903 Wyndham Land Act went even further, and by the beginning of the First World War, over sixty percent of farms were being worked by their owners, and between 1903 and 1922, eleven million acres of land had been sold to tenants under the provisions of the Land Acts. Between 1881 and 1915, the British goverment paid out £86.1 million in order for the Land Acts to accomplish their goals. Farmers benefited most, and some labourers saw an increased standard of living (though by no means a great improvement). In the north-east, land reforms worked a little differently because landlords there did not have the same burdens of overcrowding and other land problems as existed in other parts of the country. This meant that the landlord class in the north-east held on to much of its land, and since many landlords were strong unionists, unionism began the twentieth century with a very solid landed base there.

  This is not to say, however, that all agricultural workers benefited equally from the Land Acts. Since they were designed mainly to allow farmers to buy the land they had previously rented, agricultural labourers did not gain many benefits from the Acts. There was a good deal of bitterness about this, which flared up in violence between 1906 and 1909, when some labourers (mainly in Meath, Westmeath, Galway, Roscommon and Clare) attacked the livestock of ‘graziers’ (farmers who rented large tracts of land to graze cattle). They scattered herds, boycotted graziers and caused damage to property. This ‘Ranch War’ highlighted the fact that the divisions within Irish agricultural life were not just between the landlords and those who rented or worked the land. But the agitation petered out when it became obvious that no effective support would come from the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the United Irish League (founded in 1898 by William O’Brien to demand the redistribution of ranch lands to small farmers) proved ineffective because it had become dominated by politicians and, ironically, graziers themselves.

  RURAL AND URBAN LIFE

  Social conditions in rural and urban areas also underwent great change in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. About four million people emigrated between 1850 and 1914, three million to the United States and one million to Britain. This was largely due to the lure of more work and higher wages in these other countries, rather than the more desperate flight from over-population, starvation and disease that stimulated Famine emigration. Not surprisingly, emigration was highest in those counties which depended heavily on agriculture, and where there were very few alternatives to farm work. Unlike previous emigrations, however, this period saw nearly as many women leave Ireland as men. On farms, there was an increasing tendency for one child to inherit the land, rather than it being divided amongst all the family’s children. Along with emigration depleting the number of eligible partners, this inheritance practice helped create an increase in the number of people who never married. If he had not inherited land, it was difficult for a man to support a wife and children (as well as not appearing an attractive prospect in a growing system of arranged marriages, called ‘matches’). In 1841, ten percent of men between ages 45 and 54 had never married. This increased to twenty-seven percent by 1911.

  There were other important social changes in rural areas during this period. Education was on the increase, with more children attending school. Literacy rates rose as a consequence. Newspapers and other literature were gradually finding a wider distribution. Rural people could control their finances better when banks began to build more branches in rural towns. The number of retail shops increased, and a greater amount of clothing and household goods came from shops rather than being made at home. The railway network was extended. Work roles in rural areas also changed from the 1860s onwards, especially for women. Women began to be less directly involved in physical farm work. This was partly because the nature of farmwork had changed (and so required fewer hands), but also because the financial conditions of many farmers had improved to the point where they were eager to see their wives adopt more fitting (i.e. genteel) work inside the home. This was part of a growing sense of the differences in prosperity between farmers, as well as ideas of social improvement. Moderate farmers tried to become like richer farmers not only in income but in manners and family work habits.

  Ireland was still mainly a rural country in this period, but there were important changes in towns and cities as well. In the first place, the percentage of those living in towns doubled between the Famine and the First World War (although the overall town and city population fell owing to emigration). Towns and cities also grew in importance as economic and administrative centres. There was, however, mixed economic prosperity in urban areas. Competit
ion with more powerful British firms led to a decline in Irish industry in the 1870s. Dublin and Cork saw the percentage of workers involved in industry fall by almost half between the Famine and the First World War. But retailers gradually were able to offer customers more mass-produced (and usually cheaper) goods, and their profits were healthier than those in industry. Belfast was somewhat exceptional in this period in that, although its traditional primary industry, linen production, was decreasing, it was being replaced by shipbuilding and engineering. Living conditions were generally better than in Dublin, but they still lagged behind those in Britain and most of Europe. But in Belfast the bulk of industry was in Protestant and unionist control. North-eastern Ireland was being divided along economic, religious and political lines that the rest of the country generally did not witness. For the most part, the ownership and management of industry and retailing was Protestant (and increasingly unionist), while the bulk of Catholics were employed in low-wage jobs. Trade unions were more able to organize in Belfast than in Dublin, although sectarianism prevented a broad-based labour movement. In Dublin, the importance of Home Rule over-shadowed attempts at unionization.

  GAELIC REVIVAL

  One of the effects of the death of Parnell and the continuing failure of the Home Rule movement was that some Irish people looked for other avenues to express what they thought of as Irish identity. This took many forms, but three distinct ones stand out: a new Irish literary movement, the revival and promotion of the Irish language and the organization of traditional Irish games and sports.