IRISH HISTORY SINCE 1850
2. An Gorta Mór
3. The Land League
4. Parnell and Home Rule
5. Unionism
6. The Cultural Revival
7. Home Rule
8. The Easter Rebellion
9. The War of Independence
10. The Free State: '20s
11. The Free State: '30s
12. The Troubles: '60s & '70s
13. The Troubles: '80s & '90s
14. The Celtic Tiger
15. Death of the Tiger
16. Sources
Parnell and Home Rule
The Irish, although wanting their own parliament, still understood the value — economic and political — of staying in the British Empire. Home Rulers wanted a parliament in Dublin for which the Irish people would elect the MPs and that would have power over all aspects of running Ireland except for imperial and foreign matters, which would still be decided at the British parliament in Westminster. Home Rulers wanted Ireland to remain a part of the British Empire but the Irish would have the final say in how Ireland was run. Demands for complete separation only became popular in the period after the First World War.
leader of the Home Rule Movement
Charles Stewart Parnell was important to Ireland because he made the Home Rule movement a reality rather than an aspiration. Without Parnell's inspirational leadership it's doubtful that the Irish would have been able to voice their demands so effectively. He was, like O'Connell before him, one of the great leaders of constitutional Irish nationalism.
Parnell was born a Protestant to a large landowning family in Wicklow. His family was wealthy, and many of his male relatives, including his father, had served as MPs in the Westminster parliament. Parnell followed their footsteps when, in 1875, he was elected MP for Meath as a supporter of Home Rule.
In the 1870s entry into a political career was still restricted on the basis of class and wealth. Not just anyone could stand to be an MP or vote, and certainly no women. Parnell was the perfect model of a Victorian MP: rich, of the right class, and with no clear career path.
At the time of his election the Irish Home Rule party was led by Isaac Butt. While committed to the cause of Irish independence, Butt was also a believer in the political traditions of Westminster and played by the rules. But Parnell believed that the Home Rulers were unlikely to get what they wanted because the Liberal and Conservative parties were disinterested in Ireland. Also, no matter how many seats the Home Rulers won in Ireland, it was unlikely that they would ever be in a position of power.
In an attempt to draw attention to the Irish cause, Parnell decided to make life difficult for everybody else. Rather than working with the parliamentary system, he decided to disrupt it. The policy of obstructing parliamentary business by making long speeches and adding countless amendments and procedural questions to laws that were going through the House of Commons did have a history, but Parnell was a master of it. He droned on for hours in debates, making one last for 26 hours, and managed to bring everything to a grinding halt. Obstruction intensely irritated the government but made Parnell popular in his party and brought him wide acclaim in Ireland.
The home rulers weren't the only force in Ireland. Although Parnell concentrated on bringing about political change in Westminster, he also made alliances with more radical movements such as the Land League. The Land League was an important popular movement that wanted to reform the system of land ownership in Ireland and ensure that the Irish were able to own or rent land fairly.
Parnell also made an alliance with the Fenians, a more shadowy but equally important group. They were a revolutionary nationalist organization, funded and organized by Irish Americans. But what did they all want?
- Parnell and the Home Rulers wanted a separate parliament for Ireland, which would be based in Dublin, as well as continued parliamentary representation at Westminster where foreign and imperial matters would be decided.
- The people involved in the Land War wanted to end the abusive relationship between British-based absentee landlords and their Irish tenants. Rather than suffering from evictions and increased rents, those involved in the Land War wanted to see Irish people owning the land.
- The Fenians were driven by the spirit of previous rebellions against the British — Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and the Young Irelanders — and wanted to create an Irish Republic: a country totally free of British rule and one that left the Empire as well. To do this they believed that the use of violence, rather than strictly constitutional means, was acceptable.
If the Land League and the Fenians joined with the Home Rulers the combination would make a powerful and potentially troublesome mix. Parnell's success in parliament had come to the attention of both the Land League and the Fenians, and the Home Ruler was only too aware of the power and potential of land agitation and violent republicanism. An alliance was brought together that would both challenge and terrify the British as they sought to control the Irish situation.
In 1879 Parnell was elected the President of the Irish National Land League and although, as befitted a constitutional politician of the Victorian era, he was opposed to the use of violence in the pursuit of political goals, he understood that the land question was one that motivated Irish public opinion. Parnell actively joined public demonstrations by the Land League in 1880 and 1881, and was vociferous in his protests against evictions. In 1879 and into 1880 Parnell toured America in search of support for Home Rule. In doing so he engaged with Irish-American republicans, and won them over to supporting his campaign. While the alliance was never official, the Fenians were active in the more violent aspects of Land League activity, and brought a level of disorder to the Irish countryside.
By 1882 Parnell headed a three-way coalition: the Home Rulers in parliament were backed throughout the countryside by the populist activities of the Land League and this was underpinned by the threat of violence by the Fenians.
In April 1881, the Liberal government sought to undermine agitation in Ireland by creating a new tribunal, the Land Court, to fix fair rents and recognize tenants' rights. While it was a step in the right direction Parnell knew that it wasn't enough for his more radical Irish-American and Land League supporters. It was decided to test the new legislation, and demonstrations were held across Ireland opposing the idea — basically breaking the law by attending proscribed meetings. In the thick of the protests was Parnell, and the British, not understanding his need to be seen fighting for land rights alongside his supporters, were very upset. As far as they were concerned, he had been to a banned meeting and broken the law. So they arrested him.
Parnell was taken to Kilmainham Gaol on the outskirts of Dublin, where generations of political rebels had been held by the British. Throughout his six-month imprisonment, Parnell continued a dialogue with Prime Minister Gladstone. The aim was simple: to ensure that the land reforms were enacted, but with everyone's honor intact. Parnell demanded one last concession — that the government settled all outstanding rental arrears — and in return he would ensure that the level of land agitation and associated outrages would decline. A deal was done between the two men — called the Kilmainham Treaty — and Parnell released. While it didn't solve all Ireland's problems, the Treaty offered a significant step forward on the land debate and brought the two leaders to a closer understanding.
In the 1885 general election, the Home Rulers swept the board in Ireland. With the exception of unionist seats in Ulster and the University seats in Dublin, Parnell's men won everywhere. In all there were 86 Home Rule MPs. Best of all for Home Rulers, the Liberal party had not won a big enough majority throughout the United Kingdom, and were thus dependant on Parnell's votes at Westminster to get any legislation passed.
After some messy political activity during which Liberals and Conservatives took power — both refused to make a deal with Parnell — Gladstone knew he had no choice. If he wanted to form the government he would have to make a deal with Parnell's party. In February 1886 he went to see Queen Victoria, and told her that he wanted to introduce a Home Rule bill for Ireland. While the Irish were delighted, many members in Gladstone's party opposed the idea. In two successive votes, the House of Commons voted the proposed bill down. The Liberal government collapsed, and the Conservatives took over. They hated the whole Home Rule idea, and looked at other ways to win over the Irish without talking about independence. Parnell was left in a vacuum politically.
Parnell would eventually fall from grace because of his involvement in one of the great scandals of the Victorian age. His relationship with a married woman, and his appearance in the divorce courts, caused the Home Rule movement to fracture. It would take until 1900 before the Home Rule movement reunited under a single leader again.
Despite his political success and popularity, Parnell's personal life was far from straightforward. He became involved with an Essex girl, Katherine Wood. She had been born a year earlier than Parnell and came from a wealthy family with an upbringing that was typical for a woman of her time. When she was 22 she met a young hussar [a member of the light cavalry], William Henry O'Shea, and married him. In 1880 O'Shea entered politics. He won the Clare seat on behalf of the Home Rulers and went to work in parliament. For the sake of appearances, as their marriage was far from happy, Katherine supported her husband in his new career and attended many political functions. At one such gathering she met Parnell, and an affair began. Parnell and Katherine went on to have three children who, upsetting for O'Shea, looked just like their father.
In Victorian society such an open affair was, given Parnell's position, problematic. Although it seems that he had always been aware of the affair between Parnell and his wife, O'Shea decided in 1889 to start divorce proceedings. Given the celebrity status of those involved, the press and the public pored over every detail of the court case. Stories included the regular escape of Parnell from his trysts with Katherine down fire escapes, and a counter claim that O'Shea had committed adultery with Katherine's sister. The divorce was granted, but it was the end of Parnell.
Victorian society valued moral righteousness, and divorce, although legal, was seen as scandalous. Not only did the media focus in on his affair with Mrs. O'Shea, but such immoral behavior from a leading politician could not be condoned by Victorian Britain nor Catholic Ireland. Gladstone, a devoutly religious man, withdrew his support from Parnell on moral grounds, and the Irish party split. Neither did Parnell's behavior win him many friends in Catholic Ireland. Although he married Katherine in 1891, and remained popular with many — especially in Dublin — Parnell's career as leader of a united Home Rule party was over. He remained an MP until October 1891, when he died in Brighton. Katherine survived until 1921, but never again visited Ireland.
With Parnell gone, in body and in spirit, and a huge row left behind, the Home Rulers were in a mess. They continued to be split along the lines of the Parnell divorce case for the best part of a decade. It seems that they just couldn't move on. Accusation and counter-accusation dominated party debates, and rather than worrying about the big questions of Home Rule, or monitoring what the Conservatives were doing, the Home Rulers seemed content to just keep on fighting with each other. During this period the pro-Parnell wing of the party was led by John Redmond and the anti-Parnellites, in the form of the People's Rights Association, was led by T.M. Healy. The Parnell split had been bitter, and this remained the main point of contention between the two groups. They didn't actually disagree too much about the general direction of the Home Rule movement.
The period of the split was bitter, and many of the arguments advanced at the time now seem petty. In the midst of the feud the Home Rulers, although maintaining a degree of efficiency within parliament, lost coherence, and the party organization on the ground suffered. Even Gladstone's introduction of a second Home Rule Bill in 1893 didn't bring the party back together and, once again, the very thing that Ireland wished for was lost.
Although they were eventually brought back together in 1900, the wounds of the split would hamper the party into the twentieth century. The different sides remained suspicious of each other. When faced by the threats of a nationalist alternative in the form of Sinn Fein, and the belligerence of the unionists, the Home Rulers' inward-looking self-obsession was revealed. Parnell, it seemed, still dominated the party even from the grave. What kept nationalism going, at least in part, during the years of the split was the broader cultural movement that spread across Ireland during the 1880s and 1890s that made people feel Irish in a way that Home Rule politics had failed to do.
In the end, rather than giving the Irish what they wanted, the Conservatives decided that the way forward was to kill Home Rule with kindness. The Conservatives believed that if they could solve the whole land question the Irish would settle down to peaceful and productive lives, would forget about Home Rule, and would be content with effectively being British. They argued that most small farmers weren't actually concerned with the national question, but had been convinced by unscrupulous nationalist politicians that the constitutional status of the country was somehow linked to their economic well-being. Solve the national question and land reform would follow, the Home Rulers had argued. The Conservatives turned this on its head, and argued that small farmers, left to their own devices and farming their own land, wouldn't care who ruled Ireland.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Conservative policy in Ireland, it is clear that in the last decade of the nineteenth and first years of the twentieth century, the party introduced the most far-reaching land reforms in Ireland ever undertaken. Under Arthur Balfour in the 1890s, the Conservative government began buying huge tracts of land from large landowners, and redistributed it to the Irish under the terms of a long-running but affordable loan. So while the Irish were in debt to the British government for decades to come, at least they did, for the first time ever, own their individual plot of land. The Land Purchase Act of 1903 meant that 317,000 smallholdings were transferred into the hands of the Irish farmers.
While the Conservatives didn't move the Home Rule issue forward one inch — if anything they forgot about it — they reformed Ireland. In doing so they didn't actually kill demands for Irish independence, but they did remove some of the angst and aggravation that had accompanied the issue of land ownership that had dominated the post-famine decades.