The Irish Home Rule movement was a political movement that campaigned for self-government in Ireland within the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1921. The cause was championed by the vast majority of Irish Catholics, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and even the British Liberal Party (which passed a series of Home Rule Bills from 1886 to 1912), while it was opposed by the Protestant Ulster Scots and most of the Anglo-Irish, who were represented by the Irish Unionist Alliance. The Home Rule movement succeeded in achieving a 1913 bill which promised the creation of a devolved Irish Parliament, but the implementation of the bill was delayed due to World War I's outbreak in 1914. The 1916 Easter Rising led to militant Irish republicanism surpassing the pro-union and moderate Home Rule movement as the main Irish nationalist movement, and a fourth and final home rule bill in 1921 created separate parliaments for Northern Ireland and southern Ireland (ruled by the Irish Free State).
Background[]
Ireland had always seemed alien to England in a way that Scotland had not, however strong its enmity. It persisted with a foreign religion and culture despite the best efforts of British administrators, Protestant clerics, and armies. Nine years of fighting in Queen Elizabeth I of England's reign subdued the Irish without reconciling them to their subjection; the Plantation of Ulster was at best only a partial success. Oliver Cromwell crushed the Irish, but he could not make them renounce their rebellious ways, a fact that became clear in the Succession Wars of the late-17th century.
A wholesale rebellion in 1798 was ruthlessly put down. The Act of Union of 1800 established Ireland's official status as one of the four nations of the United Kingdom. Far from providing an answer, though, the new arrangement called into question the integrity of the British state - the very phrase "the Irish Question" dates from this time. Any idea the Irish may have had of belonging to Britain - except in the sense of being a colonial possession - was destroyed by their experiences during the Great Famine of the 1840s.
History[]
Ireland was still trying to recover after the overwhelming experience of the potato famine in the 1840s. The old problems remained unresolved, yet the people were in no position to organize. The campaign for Catholic emancipation launched by Daniel O'Connell, a noted Irish lawyer and political leader, had from 1805 changed an elite preoccupation into a mass-movement. Once emancipation was achieved in 1829, the next step was to agitate for the repeal of the Act of Union of 1800. Britain sent a battleship to counter O'Connell's "monster meeting" near the coast at Clontarf in 1843. As so often in Irish nationalist history, British overreaction fed unrest.
A violent alternative[]
O'Connell's peaceful strategies and limited demands increased Irish impatience. He saw a self-governing Ireland as remaining under the British monarchy. A more radical Young Ireland alliance was established in 1842, and in 1847 an avowedly violent Irish Confederation broke away from that. Its leader, Protestant landowner and MP William Smith O'Brien, was fired by the revolutionary ferment sweeping Europe in 1848, but his uprising ended in fiasco.
The Fenians[]
Flag of the Fenian Brotherhood
A decade on, Young Ireland veterans re-formed as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), behind James Stephens in Ireland and John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny in New York. The IRB is now generally known as the Fenian Brotherhood, the name taken by its American arm. It referred to the Fianna, a warband of the legendary Finn McCool, a hunter-warrior from Irish mythology. The Fenians included Irish-American troops demobilized after the American Civil War in the United States. In a raid on Canada (May-June 1866), they briefly captured Fort Erie, defeating the Canadians at the Battle of Ridgeway.
In Britain and Ireland, however, the authorities quickly swung into action, arresting most of the rebels. Those still free felt their hand forced, so they mounted a hastily conceived Fenian Rising on 4-5 March 1867. The action invited a draconian British response. Five men were hanged over a policeman's accidental killing. Although the Fenians failed militarily, their movement injected a new radicalism into mainstream nationalism - and a new urgency into the British establishment's response.
Home Rule[]
The 1870s saw O'Connell's Repeal campaign reinvented by Isaac Butt, his former opponent and a Protestant; his "Home Government" slogan was soon changed to a snappier-sounding call for "Home Rule". An admirer of Britain, Butt preferred devolution - with the Irish Parliament responsible for domestic affairs and Westminster handling bigger issues such as foreign policy and defense. In 1875, Home Rule candidate Charles Stewart Parnell was elected to Parliament, where his flamboyant filibustering and points of order amused the press and public as much as they irritated the government.
Such constitutional discussions did not appeal to an impoverished peasantry. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone's Liberal government passed a Land Act in 1870 to address their problems, but the situation remained intolerable. From 1879, the Land League - set up by former Fenian Michael Davitt - campaigned for fairer tenancy agreements. Parnell was made the League's first president. He had the unique ability to charm the political classes while reaching out to the downtrodden. Even neutrals saw the mismatch between the League's prosaic aims and the popular enthusiasm it awakened. It attracted radical elements and, at a local level, tenants angry at the conduct of (often absentee) landlords and agents. Tenants took the law into their own hands during a long period of unrest that became known as the Land Wars. In 1881, Gladstone's government passed a Second Land Act, which made things marginally better.
Parnell proved adept in walking the tricky tightrope between constitutionalism and radicalism. Even so, he was arrested and taken to Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol that year. From prison he negotiated the Kilmainham Treaty. Agreed with Gladstone on 2 May 1882, it regulated rent-arrears for tenant farmers. Parnell received a hero's reception upon leaving jail and the campaign went on.
Fall of Parnell[]
Just a few days later, however, the Irish Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Undersecretary T.H. Burke were knifed to death in Dublin's Phoenix Park. This single action of an IRB splinter group, The Invincibles, created an outrage, giving new impetus to the constitutional movement and the growing partnership between Parnell and Gladstone. The Home Rule campaign grew rapidly. Gladstone introduced a bill in 1886, though this was defeated in the House of Commons and he lost the general election he called in response.
Political scandal[]
Parnell's reputation was badly damaged by the following year's purported "revelations". In 1887, The Times published a letter in which Parnell exrpessed sympathy with the Phoenix Park murderers - a cynical smear, but not easily shaken off. He was still, however, working towards Home Rule with Gladstone, and his popularity in Ireland was at its height when news broke of his long-standing relationship with a married woman. Parnell's credibility was shot, as far as his supporters were concerned. Parnell died a broken, marginalized figure in 1891, aged 45. Gladstone went on alone, trying again with the Irish Government Bill of 1893. This made it through the Commons before being thrown out by the House of Lords.
Aftermath[]
UVF militants in 1912
The "Irish Question" had still to be answered. And, sadly, much more blood had still to be shed. The stronger the Nationalist impulse, the more resolute the Unionist reaction. While Republicans fought for freedom, Protestants in Ulster opposed Home Rule; their freedom could only be guaranteed in the context of the United Kingdom, they insisted. Thousands of them went to the trenches of World War I, laying down their lives for the Britain they felt was theirs. The compromises made to accommodate Ulster's Protestants came back to haunt Britain - and the Irish Free State (and later Republic) - most seriously in the Troubles of the late 20th century.