Relatively few Irish emigrated intentionally to Australia or New Zealand, largely because the long journey was four times more expensive than passage to the United States, but those who went found a vast and sparsely populated land. They encountered some of the old English prejudices, but in a land where most of the people had arrived as prisoners, being Irish or Catholic was not a serious impediment to social advancement. Many Irish immigrants soon became wealthy through farming and wool production.
This outflow of people had a tremendous impact, both on Ireland and on the destination countries. By 1890, some 3 million Irish-born people lived in other countries. In Ireland, it meant that the remaining population had a better chance of getting by, but it also meant a degree of stagnation. By taking away the youngest and most vigorous members of the workforce, emigration deprived Ireland of the surplus manpower that could have fueled an industrial revolution. Instead, Irish muscles powered the factories of England and the United States.
Another impact of losing the young population was that it made revolution in Ireland unlikely. With its youngsters gone, the remaining population tended toward conservatism. While Ireland in the late nineteenth century certainly had its share of revolutionaries, one has to wonder what would have happened if all the angry young men running the political machines in Boston and New York had stayed home. It is noteworthy that Ireland’s final revolt against England happened during World War I, when ordinary emigration policies had been suspended.
The story of Irish emigration isn’t over. You’ll still frequently run into authentic Irish accents in the many pubs of Boston and New York. Thousands of young Irish men and women emigrate every year. The difference, however, is their reason for leaving. Today, Irish people emigrate for education, or for job relocations, or because they’ve always heard how much fun Boston is. The days of people leaving because of hunger and poverty are over.
77 { The Rebirth of Nationalism (Meanwhile, Back in Ireland . . . )
The Ireland that dragged itself out of the Great Hunger was changed forever. Lingering resentment began to take shape, leading to an organized political movement for independence. Eventually, the forces of Irish Nationalism won their independence but the violent path they chose has left scars to this day.
The Irish Nationalist movement rose out of the anger people felt about the famine and the continuing economic disparities of their island. It first manifested itself in agrarian secret societies — groups of farmers and laborers who secretly gathered in the countryside to enforce their own views of justice, usually against landowners and their agents. Groups like this had existed for over a century, but in the 1850s their campaigns of rural terrorism and economic sanctions became more aggressive and targeted specifically the English. The most powerful of these secret societies was the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), known commonly as the Fenians.
The principal mover behind the Fenians was James Stephens, a fiery orator with a gift for organization and a vague notion of an independent Irish nation. John O’Mahoney, the head of the powerful U.S. Fenian chapter, was his ally. Stephens and O’Mahoney built the Fenian Brotherhood into a secret, semi-revolutionary society with thousands of members. They founded the newspaper Irish People to express their desire for land reform and Irish independence.
Fenians in Ireland were mostly Catholic farmers and shopkeepers who had little political power. So the Fenian leaders decided that their greatest chance for success lay not in politics but in armed revolt, just like Wolfe Tone had envisioned in 1798. Working with O’Mahoney, Stephens actively recruited Irish-American Civil War veterans to come fight for Ireland.
In 1867 the Fenians took action. They didn’t have enough weapons to pose any real threat to British military power, but they hoped that an act of armed defiance would encourage the people to rise up against England. They launched several raids to steal weapons from police and coastguard stations; unfortunately for them, the people did not rally to their aid as they had hoped, and most of their fighters got caught. The English quickly broke up the Fenian military organization and imprisoned its leaders. They executed Fenian leaders William Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien on dubious legal grounds. These men became known as the Manchester Martyrs.
78 { The Home Rule Party
The Fenians kept (quietly) calling for armed revolt. But in the following decades the banner of Irish Nationalism moved away from the rifle and into the realm of politics.
After the famine, both Catholics and Protestants had begun to feel that the English could not rule their island effectively and justly. Although they had their own differences, an uneasy coalition of conservative Protestants and liberal Catholics got together and formed the Home Rule Party. This party got a bunch of its members into Parliament at the same time that a liberal, Prime Minister William Gladstone, was emerging as a giant in British politics.
Gladstone realized that Ireland’s complaints against England were justified and that England’s presence in Ireland was based on a tradition of injustice; at the same time, he felt that the Home Rulers were too radical. He tried to defuse the Home Rule movement by enacting landmark legislation to address Irish grievances — killing home rule with kindness. His first act, in 1868, declared that the Protestant Church of Ireland was no longer the official religion of the entire country. Most Irish loved this. The act was cheered in Dublin but condemned in Belfast, where the population was mostly Protestant.
Gladstone’s most important reforms were his Land Acts of 1870 and 1881. Before these acts, the average Irish farmer rented his farmland (usually from an English landowner) and lived in constant fear of eviction. The Land Acts granted these farmers protection against unreasonable rents and unfair evictions, and made it easier for them to buy land. Over time, the Land Acts greatly improved the lives of many farmers, and Gladstone’s strategy might well have defused the Home Rule movement, if not for the emergence of one of Ireland’s most charismatic leaders — Charles Stewart Parnell.
Parnell was handsome, impassioned, and articulate, and he took Parliament by storm. People didn’t know what to make of him; he was a wealthy Protestant landowner, but at the same time he supported the radical Nationalist politics of poor Catholic farmers. He entered Parliament in 1875 as the representative for County Meath. His confident oratory and uncompromising dedication to land reform instantly made him a leader of the Home Rule Party. When he felt that Irish issues were being ignored in Parliament, he recruited his fellow Irish MPs to obstruct parliamentary proceedings until his issues were heard.
Parnell was president of the Land League, a farmers’ organization that called for relief of exorbitant rents, more lenient eviction policies, and easier land ownership for small farmers. Gladstone’s Land Acts had made some progress on these fronts, but that progress was too slow for Parnell. His Land League insisted that farmers evicted from their property should hold their ground, and it tacitly condoned the use of boycotts and violence against landlords who took possession of an evicted tenant’s land. This period of rural intimidation and economic sanction became known as the Land War.
Gladstone didn’t approve of Parnell’s obstructionist policies and endorsement of Land League violence; he had Parnell arrested and thrown in Kilmainham Jail in 1881. Parnell continued to run his political machine from jail, and he achieved unprecedented popularity in Ireland for his defiance of the prime minister.
Both Parnell and Gladstone, however, realized that they needed to work together to achieve real reform. They carried on secret negotia- tions through two intermediaries, Captain Willie O’Shea and his wife, Katherine (Kitty). Gladstone and Parnell eventually reached a settlement called the Kilmainham Treaty, in which Parnell restrained Land League violence in exchange for his release and Gladstone’s cooperation on a more powerful Land Act.
In the 1885 election, Parnell’s Home Rulers took 85 of the 103 Irish seats in Parliament. It appeared that some form of constitutional solution to home rule was in sight. In 1886 Parnell a
nd Gladstone brought forth a Home Rule Bill to finally give Ireland a form of independence.
There was a big problem, though — the Protestants in the northern part of Ireland (Ulster) didn’t want home rule. The rise of the Home Rule Party called attention for the first time to a phenomenon that Irish Nationalists had traditionally ignored and would continue to ignore to their detriment — the loyalty of Ulster Unionists (those who wanted Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom). That’s why Protestants had founded the Orange Order during the time of Wolfe Tone. That’s also why they created the militant Ulster Defence Association after Gladstone disestablished the Protestant Church in Ireland in 1868.
The 1886 Home Rule Bill didn’t pass; it had too much opposition from Ulster and the British House of Lords, who still liked the idea of Ireland as part of the British Empire. Parnell regathered his forces and prepared to try again, but personal affairs suddenly intruded — Willie O’Shea divorced his wife, Kitty, and named Parnell as her lover. It was a huge scandal. Remember, the O’Sheas had served as Parnell’s intermediaries for the Kilmainham Treaty. The trial revealed that Parnell and Kitty had been carrying on a passionate affair since then. Captain O’Shea had known about the affair for years; Kitty had already had three children with Parnell.
The case shocked both liberal Englishmen and Catholic Irishmen. Gladstone ended his alliance with Parnell, fearing that his own party in England wouldn’t support him if he stuck with the Irishman. Parnell fell from power.
Parnell didn’t give up. He married Kitty O’Shea and began a fierce campaign to retake his position in the party. His charisma and political skill were such that he might have actually succeeded, but a fever killed him suddenly in 1891. Kitty was beside him when he died. With Parnell’s death, the Home Rule movement lost its momentum, and it didn’t truly regain it for another twenty-five years.
79 { A Celtic Revival
The Home Rule Party continued to press for a parliamentary solution, but without Parnell, it lacked the organization to push it through. The remaining members kept fighting with one another, which diffused their political power. Gladstone sponsored a second Home Rule Bill in 1893, but the same opposition from Conservatives and Ulster Unionists killed it. Ironically, the success of the very Land Acts and other liberal measures that the Home Rule Party had pushed for had taken the wind out of its sails. The state of civil rights and living conditions for the Irish people had significantly improved in recent years, so the need for home rule seemed less intense.
While political efforts at nationalism were stuck in a rut, arts and culture saw a huge surge of interest in all things Irish. The English traditionally thought of the Irish as uncouth barbarians, but a new generation of the Irish looked into their island’s past and proved the English wrong.
Intellectuals like William Butler Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and Lady Augusta Gregory called for the preservation and appreciation of Irish storytelling, Celtic art, and the fast-fading Irish language. Hyde founded the Gaelic League to promote the Irish language. By 1906 there were more than 900 branches, with more than 100,000 members. In 1903 Yeats and Gregory founded the Irish National Theatre at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and promoted the production of distinctively Irish plays.
Athletics were another focus of nationalist energy. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in 1884, promoted the distinctively Irish sports of Gaelic football and hurling.
In these expressions of Irish culture, many Irish people realized for the first time that they had a history and culture every bit as worthy as the English. While these movements had little direct political impact, they provided Irish people with an identity and a rallying point for their nationalist feelings.
Although the independence movement had entered a period of contented inaction, radical Nationalism hadn’t disappeared. The IRB (the group that organized the Fenian uprising) was still around, but its call for armed revolt seemed more and more like the talk of cranky old men.
The movement for an independent republic took a quiet step forward in 1905 when a publisher named Arthur Griffith founded a new political party called Sinn Féin, Irish for “ourselves alone.” Griffith promoted the Nationalist cause in a newspaper called the United Irishman, after Wolfe Tone’s old organization. Sinn Féin was a relatively small party throughout the prewar years, but it provided radicals and intellectuals with a place to discuss aggressive alternatives to the slow constitutional path to home rule.
80 { An Ireland Divided
Home rule made no progress in the Conservative-controlled Parliament of the first decade of the twentieth century. But when the Liberals swept back into power in 1910 behind Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, Ireland was at the top of their agenda. In 1912, Asquith brought forward the third Home Rule Bill, which reached further than any of its predecessors and enjoyed wide popularity among the Irish people.
There was one section of the Irish population, however, that still opposed home rule — the Ulster Protestants. Seeing the latest Home Rule Bill as the final step toward separation, the members of the Orange Order rose up against it. They organized the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a paramilitary group committed to defending Ulster’s union with England. The UVF began drilling and stockpiling weapons. By 1914 there were estimated to be more than 100,000 men ready to fight for the UVF.
In response, Nationalists in the south began their own paramilitary organization called the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers was initially organized by the remnants of the IRB, although its politics was generally closer to the moderates of the Home Rule Party. The Volunteers claimed to have more than 100,000 members as well, though it had fewer weapons than its rivals in the North.
The Ulster dilemma froze the Home Rule Bill in its tracks. Although the Liberals may have had sufficient votes to push the bill through, it was politically very awkward to push away a big group of loyal British subjects, especially when those subjects were threatening to fight to stay in. A favored solution to this problem was to grant home rule and then use the British army to enforce it in Ulster. This proposal faltered when the mutiny at the Curragh revealed that British army officers were opposed to fighting Ulster troops.
The second set of options revolved around some form of partition, in effect dividing Ireland into two states. There were nine counties in the traditional province of Ulster, but only six of them had large Protestant populations, and in 1910 only four of them had Protestant majorities. Unionists and Nationalists suggested different partition plans. Some supported having all of Ulster split off and stay with the United Kingdom, which might have facilitated reunification in the future. Others thought it would be better if only those counties with Protestant majorities broke away from the Irish nation. Both sides spent the next four years wrangling over various proposals, but none met the approval of both the Unionist and the Nationalist sides.
81 { World War I and the Easter Rebellion
In August 1914, outside events suddenly changed the whole debate. World War I was breaking out in Europe, and Parliament wanted to solve the Irish problem quickly so that it could concentrate on the coming war. John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rulers, offered the United Kingdom the use of the Irish Volunteers for home defense in exchange for a provisional acceptance of the Home Rule Bill, leaving aside the Ulster question for the time being. Asquith’s Parliament agreed, and the bill was put on the books with the proviso that it would not go into effect until a year had passed or the war was over. Both sides saw this as a way to move forward on the Ireland issue without coming to a final decision on Ulster.
The act was immediately received as a tremendous step forward for Ireland, and Nationalists felt free for the first time in decades to express British patriotism. Thousands of young men from all parts of Ireland came forward to serve in the war, including many members of the UVF and the Irish Volunteers. In the early days, morale was high.
As the war ground on, however, Irish opinions began to turn. Not only did the war delay the enactment of
home rule, but each month brought new lists of Irish casualties from the battlefields of Europe as well. The British military didn’t accept Redmond’s offer to use the Volunteers, nor did it arm them for home defense. It was rumored that the English draft would soon spread to Ireland. To make matters worse, a change in government put Ulster Unionist leaders in the British Cabinet, making Nationalists suspect that home rule might be delayed indefinitely. It was in this environment that the radicals in the IRB and Sinn Féin decided to make their move.
On April 24, 1916, Easter Monday, a group of armed Irish Volunteers moved into the General Post Office in Dublin and occupied the building. Patrick Pearse (or Pádraig MacPiarais), a schoolteacher and Sinn Féin activist, read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a statement declaring Ireland’s independence. Simultaneously, armed Volunteers took over other significant buildings throughout the city.
The uprising was a surprise for Unionists and Nationalists alike; with home rule already on the books, armed revolution seemed a little extreme. British troops were quickly sent into the city, and soon much of central Dublin was in flames. The Volunteers lacked either the arms or the organization to put up a real military resistance to the British army, and after a week the last of the rebels surrendered. The fighting killed 450, and afterward more than 1,000 Irish were sent to prisons in England.
At the time of the Easter Rebellion, most Irish people — even Nationalists — didn’t think violence was the answer to Ireland’s problems. Ensuing events, however, soon led to a change in opinions.
In May of 1916, the British army began executing leaders of the rebellion. They shot or hanged sixteen men. Most Irish thought that they had decided to execute the prisoners much too hastily and without fair trials. In addition, there were reports of bad treatment of imprisoned rebels. The British released the remaining prisoners by Christmas 1916, primarily as a gesture to help bring the United States into the war, but that did little to quiet emotions in Ireland.
The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland Page 14