Figure 1.- The United Irishmen influenced by the ideas of the French revolutions, were the principal group fomenting rebellion. It was painted in 1891 by which time Irish Home Rule had become a major issue in British politics. It is a classic depiction of a drummer boy. The British drummer boy is protecting a wounded comrad from Irish revolutionaries and has pierced the drum top so the rebels can't use it. Notice there is also an Irish drummer boy. The work was painted by Geore William Joy who was born in Ireland, but his outlook was British. This reflected his Protestant Huguenot bckground. Nothing demonstrates this more than his perhaps best known painting--'The King's drum shall never be beaten for rebels'. It depicted the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Joy has given the rebels a French look. We are not sure how accurate this was.

An Irish Parliament (Grattan's Parliament) sat briefly in Dublin (1782-1800). It was controlled by the Anglo-Irish Protestant Accendancy. The Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast (1791). They would be the organizung force behind the a serious Rebellion (1798). The Irish Uprising of 1798 was the result of the longstanding resentment over several centuries of the oppression of still Catholic Ireland by the British government and their Protestant Irish allies. The American Revolution had only a limited impact on Ireland. At the time few Catholic Irish, in contrast to the Ptotestn Scotts, had emigrated to lrgely Protestant America. The eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, however, inspired the the Irish. One result was the formation of the Society of United Irishmen (1791). This was at first, a liberal political organisation seeking Parliamentary reform and a cultural and nationalistic union of the Irish people. When after the execution of King Louis XVI, Britain declared war on Revolutionary France (1793). The Irish and British government decided to suppress the United Irishmen fearing a domestic civil war as transpired with the American Revolution. The United Irishmen were transformed into a militant underground movement and began to organize military operations with the goal of a republican democracy. Their 1798 Uprising failed. The British executed 34 of its key leaders and supporters, giving some idea of what would have occurred in America has Washington's Continentals failed. The English then promulgated the Act of Union of 1800. This brought Ireland completely under English control. It was also paradoxily the beginning of Ireland's independence movement. Daniel O'Connell led the independence movement in Parliament to end penal laws and legal discrimination against Catholics. Largely constitutional efforts aimed at gaining Home Rule were persued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Protestant stalwart, the Duke of Wellington as primeminister managed to achieve Catholic emancipation, but not home rule (1820s). The landless peasantry in Ireland managed tp eke out a precarious existence, depending primarily on potatos grown in small plots. The Potato Famine destroyed the lives of millions. (1840s). The Irish population to this day has not recovered. The Irish emigrated in the hundreds of thousands, establishing lives in America and other countries. The English response effectively ended their right to rule in Ireland. Rebellion swept Europe (1848). The Fenian Movement was one of the aspects of the 1848 Revolutions. The Fenians were not social reformers, but revolutinaries. Young Ireland launched an poorly organized uprising which the Britsh quickly quelled. William Gladstone became prime minister (1868). He sought to solve the Irish Question through Home Rule. Solving the Irish Question, however, was complicated by the Protestant majority in the north (Ulster) which objected to home rule in a majority Catholic Ireland. Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) (1905). Prime Minister Henry Asquith was still working on Irish Home Rule when World War I erupted. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched the Easter Rising in Dublin during World War I. English execution of the rebels generated considerable sympathy throughout Ireland.

Early Development

The process of home rule began almost from the beginning with the English Norman invasion (12th century). Home rule at this point meant rule by the English Norman lords themselves and not rule from England. English political control developed into economic and cultural oppression, but not at first religious oppresion. The Norman English invaders were also Catholic, although there were some differences between the English and Irish Church. First attempts to subjugate Ireland was made during the Elizabethan period anf by then relgious oppression became a factor. While English culture including languge made some inroads. The great bulk of the Irish remained staunchly Catholic. Unlike England and Scotih Lowlanders, the Irish remined untouched by the Reformation. The Catholic population became subject to increasingly strict anti-Catholic laws enacted by the Protestant Accendency and English Government. English rule divided the Irish in many ways. There was was the 1) the religious Catholic-Protestant divergence, 2) the linguistic Irish Gaelic-English speaking divergence, and 3) the ethnic divergence between native Irish and the English Protestant Ascendancy.

Protestant Nation

Some historians describe Ireland as a Protestant nation. Of course this was not because most of the population was Protestant. Except in the north, Ireland was strongly Catholic, probably something like 80 percent overall. Despite the Enbglish military victories and eizure of most of the land, the country remained largely Gaelicand Catholic. The Reformatioin did not touch the great majority of the Irish peasantry which remained stalwartly Catholic. The Catholic Church was the only Irish institution tht the English did not control. Inteestingly conflicts developed between the Protestabt accendancy and England/Britain. The English Parliament governed Ireland in its own inteest. When an Irish wool trade, for exmple, Parliament put a tariff on it. This adversely affected Irish labnowners, most of who were Protesrant. They did not, however, advicate Catholic emancipstion, knowing that they would lose control if Catholics were allowed to vote. The British of course were aware of this and knew that the Protestants could be counted on to support British rule no matter how unfairly Irelnd was treated.

Irish Parliament

An Irish Parliament (Grattan's Parliament) sat briefly in Dublin (1782-1800). It was controlled by the Anglo-Irish Protestant Accendancy. There was no Irish execurice, that role was played by the British Lord-lieutenant. This was the British monarch's personal representative in each county of the United Kingdom. The Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast (1791). They would be the organizung force behind the a serious Rebellion (1798). The Irish Uprising of 1798 was the result of the longstanding resentment over several centuries of the oppression of still Catholic Ireland by the British government and their Protestant Irish allies.

American and French Revolutions

The American Revolution had only a limited impact on Ireland. At the time few Catholic Irish, in contrast to the Prtotestant Scotts, had emigrated to largely Protestant America. The American Revolution did, however, impact the British who began to see the danger of losing Ireland just as they had lost the American colonies. The eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, however, inspired the Irish. The principles of the Revolution, 'Libert�, �galit�, fraternit�' appealed to the Irish. Britain was, however, drawn into the fight with first the Revolution and then Npoleopn Bonapart' empire. Catholic Ireland became a battklefield of thar conflict.

United Irishmen

One result was the formation of the Society of United Irishmen (1791). This was at first, a liberal political organisation seeking Parliamentary reform and a cultural and nationalistic union of the Irish people. When after the execution of King Louis XVI, Britain declred war on Revolutionary France (1793). The Irish and British government decided to suppress the United Irishmen fearing a domestic civil war as transpired with the American Revolution. The United Irishmen were transformed into a militant underground movement and began to organize military operations with the goal of a republican democracy. Their 1798 Uprising failed. The British executed 34 of its key leaders and supporters, giving some idea of what would have occurred in America has Washington's Continentals failed.

The Act of Union (1801)

The British Parliament (controlled by the Engkish) promulgated the Act of Union (1801). The Irish Rebellion of 1798 as Britian fought the French on multiple battlefields raised the Irish question in stark focus. It was a serious threat to British security. And the British Cabinet was fiorced to deal with it. Priome-minister William Pitt the Younger decided that the exiistence of an Irish Parlialment was a threat, even though dominated by Protestants. He saw that the best sollution was union. Union meant that the Irish Parliament was disbanded and Ireland woulkd be represented in the Parliament in Westminster. There would be 4 spiritual peers, 28 temporal peers, and 100 members of the House of Commons. This nmeant, however, that would be a minority and unable to effectively reopresent Ireland. And they would be all Protestants. Pitt insisted that union would strengthen the connection between the two countries and increase possibilities for Irish economic development. He also thought thst it would be easier to gain concessions for Roman Catholics, since they would be a minority in a United Kingdom. and not a threat to Irish Protestants. There was oppositiom to uniomn in the Irish Parliament. The British Government solved this problem by copious bribes. The Irish Parliament finallybvoted foe union (March 28, 1800). The Act of Union received royal assent (August 1, 1800). I came into effect (January 1, 1801). The monarchy became the king (or queen) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This brought Ireland completely under English control. It was also paradoxily the beginning of Ireland's independence movement. Daniel O'Connell led the independence movement in Parliament to end penal laws and legal discrimination against Catholics. Largely constitutional efforts aimed at gaining Home Rule were persued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Catholic Emancipation (1829)

Protestant stalwart, the Duke of Wellington as primeminister managed to achieve Catholic emancipation, but not home rule (1820s). Catholics could vote, but as there was no longer an Irish Parliament, had little influence in the British Parliament. Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829). It repealed the Test Act 1672 and the remaining Penal Laws which had been in force since the passing of the Disenfranchising Act of the Irish Parliament of 1728. Daniel O'Connell had pursued an active campaign that raised the threat of insurrection. The British leaders, beginning with the Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington and his important parlimentary supporter Robert Peel were opposed to emancipation, saw the need to compromise to avoid ihurection. Ireland was pacified for a time. The Act allowed Catholics to sit in the parliament at Westminster. O'Connell had won a seat in a by-election for Clare (1828) replacung a Protestant. The existing penal law prohibited the Catholic O'Connell to take his seat. Peel at the time was Home Secretary as was known as "Orange Peel" because of his support for the Orange (Protestant) position. Peel came to the opinion, 'though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger'. Fearing a rising in Ireland, Peel drew up the Catholic Relief Bill and guided it through the Commons. This left both the Lords and King George IV oppoing the measure. The Duke of Wellington through his immense stature into the issue. TheLords yieklded and he threatened to resign as Prime Minister if the King did not give Royal Assent.

Potato Famine

The landless peasantry in Ireland managed tp eke out a precarious existence, depending primarily on potatos grown in small plots. The Irish Potato Famine began with a blight of the potato crop. The Irish had come to depend on the potato as a mainstay of their diet. No other crop produced so much food per acre of land. The blight was devestating and spread with amazing speed. Within a year a bountiful crop was reduced to rotting fields. Vast expanses of Irish fields were ruined by black rot. It would have not been as bad if the Irish diet had been more diverse, but the poor Irish peasantry survived on the potato harvest. Potato crops accross Europe failed, but nowhere in Europe was the poopulation so dependant on the potato. Not only was the potato gone, but the crop failure caused the price of other food crops to soar, placing substitute foods beyond the purchasing power of the destitute Irish peasantry. The Irish peasantry were tennantv farmers who eked out a subsistaence existance with the potato not only found their food stocks roting, but were unable to pay their rents. Soon their British and Irish Protestant landlords were evicting them from their homes. Some of the Irish peasants out of desperation attempted to eat the rotting potatos. Whole villages were devestated by cholera and typhus. Parish priests desperately tried to tend to their congregtions and feed the starving. Inn some cases the dead went unburried. Many were burried without caskets. English relief efforts wre inadequated and even these wereec abandoned in the midst of the famine. Work houses because of inadequate nutrition and unsanitary conditions were death traps. The Irish famine has been seen by many as the greatest humanitarian disasaster of the 19th centuy. The Potato Famine destroyed the lives of millions. (1840s). This was in part because so many died and others forced emmigrate. Over 1 million are believed to have actually sucumbed to statvation and disease. But most tragic of all was that it was preventable. Throuhout the Famine, Irish, and English landowners were exporting food. One author points out that a quarter of the peers in the House of Lords owned land in Ireland and failed to act. [Wilson] As the 19th century moved on, independence became a possibility, but not an inevitability. The central development in the 19th century was the Irish Potalo Famine (1845-50). The reforms of the 19th century could have succeeded in integrating Ireland within the rest of the United Kingdom. This did not occur and the central reason was the Famine. The potato famine and more importantly the British reaction to the Famine resulted in a Holocaust of horendous proportions. After the Famine, Irish independence was inevitable. The Irish population to this day has not recovered. The Irish emigrated in the hundreds of thousands, establishing lives in America and other countries. The English response effectively ended their right to rule in Ireland.

Fenian Movement (1850s-60s)

The famine of the 1840s stirred discontent in Ireland against British rule. Rebellion swept Europe (1848). A revolutionary group, Young Ireland led by William Smith O'Brien, launched a poorly organized uprising which the Britsh easily defeated. Vast numbers of disdraught, often emaciated Irish men, women, and children fled Ireland and the famine. They emigrated to the United States, Australia, South America, and Canada, many board coffin ships. where they redoubled their agitation against England. John O'Mahony, one of those revolutionists driven abroad in 1848, was the organizer of the movement in the United States, and it was he who gave the society its name. The Fenian Movement was an outgrowth of the 1848 Revolutions. The Fenians were not social reformers, but revolutinaries. John O'Mahony coordinated the organization of a revolutionary society with fellow nationalist James Stephens. Stephens led the Irish organization. O'Mahony founded and led the American organization (1858). He named it the Fenian Brotherhood. The movement raised money, supplied equipment, and trained leaders to help the Irish Republican, or Revolutionary, Brotherhood uprising against Great Britain. Fenian membership rose to 250,000, and the movement established an "Irish Republic" in New York (1865). They issued bonds to finance its activities. The name derives from the ancient Irish Fenians, a professional military corps that roamed over ancient Ireland (3rd century AD). They served the high kings. They figure in the legends that developed around Finn mac Cumhail and Ossian.

Parlimentary Fight for Home Rule (1860s-1910s)

Liberal William Gladstone became British prime minister (1868). He sought to solve the Irish Question through Home Rule. Solving the Irish Question, however, was complicated by the Protestant minority the north (Ulster) which objected to home rule in a majority Catholic Ireland. Gladstone introduced the first Home Rule Bill in Parliament (1886). Gladstone Bill's bill, however, failed to pass the Commons. Even so, it had profound consequemnces in Ireland. Protestants mostly in the north began to worry about ae in which theu woulf be dominated by a Catholic majority. There was a resulting outburst of what was called Orangeism meaning Protestant unionism. The Conservative opposition made unionism and the preservation of the union of Great Britain and Ireland into a major political issue. Gladstone decided to make a second attempt at home rule. He managed during a brief Liberal interegnum to introduced a second Home Rule Bill which was also defeated (1893). When the Liberals finally returned to power, Gladstone was gone, but the Party still supported the idea of home rule (1905). Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) (1905). The Liberals in tne Commons did not, however, ma nage pass the Third Home Rule Bill untill several years latter (1912). It was rejected twice by the House of Lords. Aajor impediment was a prominent barrister and member of Parliament -- Edward Carson, Baron Carson of Duncairn. He strnuously resisted the incorporation of Ulsrer into a majority Catholic self-governing Ireland. Protestant opposition was not meerly parlinentarian. Orotestants swore oaths (the Solemn League and Covenant) and began to form and arm paramilitary militias. As the possibility of a home rule bill passing seemed a real possibility, civil war loomed in Ireland. It wa not a conflict with Britain, but between the Irish nationalists in the south and unionists in the north. The Commons passed the Home Rule Bill of 1912 for the third time just before the outbreak of World war I (1914). And this meant, because of the closely fought Parliament Act of 1911 pushed through by Prime Minister H.H. Asquith that ratification by the House of Lords was not needed. Asquith was still working on Irish Home Rule when World War I erupted. Asquith decided to postpone the operation of the Home Rule Act until after the War because of the potentially explosive consequences. And Asquith hinted that a some specuial provision would be made for Ulster.

Irish Land War (1879-82)

The Irish Land War (Cogadh na Talún) describes an extended period of agrarian agitation in Ireland. At the time this involved most of the population. the great bulk of the population lived in rural areas, often small hamlets. War is a little strong to describe it, but there were many confrontations between the mostly Catholic peasantry and the mostly Protestant land owners and establishment. Often called the Protestant Ascendancy, or simply the Ascendancy.) All of Ireland at the time was a continent part of the United Kingdom and the Land War was a factor n the struggle for Home rule in the Westminster Parliament. The Land War is generally dated from 1879. Many of the features of the Land War, but it also needs to be seen in the context of the "Long Depression" which affected the World economy (1870s-90s). A major impact was on rent yields and landlord-tenant relations across Europe (1870s-1890s.) t the time much of the rural peasantry did not own their land. there were, however, significant impacts in the United States where most farmers did own their land (1873 Panic and 1893 Panic). The Irish Land War usually refers to the initial and most intense period of agrarian agitation (1879-82). The result was tragic evictions with hard pressed tenants (often called cottagers) and their famines thrown out of their cottage homes with no where to go. There were outbreaks well into the 20th century until the establishment of the Irish Free State, meaning de facto independence of the southern counties (1923). The land question and the evictions has played an important role in building support for home rule and eventually independence. Later periods of notable agitation included the Plan of Campaign (1886-91) and the Ranch War (1906-09). [McLaughlin, p. 89.] The Irish Land War was set off by the larger economic depressions (called 'Panics' in America). Land owners pressed for cash began rising rents on their tenants, often debts the tenants could not pay, leading to evictions. The Irish National Land League and its successors (the Irish National League and the United Irish League) supported the tenants, resulting in the agitation. Their larger goal was home rule, but their immediate goal was secure and fair rent, free sale, and more secure tenant tenure, but ultimately peasant ownership of the land worked. Various countries (including the British Government) adopted a series of Land Acts that over time granted many of the tenant activists' demands. William O'Brien in Ireland played a key role in Ireland. He helped organize the 1902 Land Conference which led to the most progressive social legislation in Ireland since Act of Union (1801). The Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903 involved buying up large estates so the tenants could purchase the land. The result was that at the out break of the Land War , the Catholic peasantry owned only about 3 percent of the Land. Eventually this situation was reversed with the peasantry possessing some 97 percent of the land. [Bew, p. 568.]

Sources

Bew, Paul. Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

McLaughlin, Eoin. "Competing forms of cooperation: Land League: Land War and cooperation in Ireland, 1879 to 1914," Agricultural History Review Vol. 3 (2015), pp. 81-112.

Created: 6:02 AM 9/26/2012
Last updated: 5:47 PM 12/24/2018