Independent Nationalist was a political title frequently used by Irish nationalists when contesting elections to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland not as members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the main, but certainly not always, such Independent Nationalist candidates were either the Healyite Nationalists, supporters of Timothy Michael Healy, or the O'Brienite Nationalists, supporters of William O'Brien.
Some others were elected as Independent Nationalists outside of the above groupings, such as Timothy Harrington (1900) & (1906), Joseph Nolan (1900), D. D. Sheehan (1906), Laurence Ginnell (1910), William Redmond and James Cosgrave (1923), Michael O'Neill (1951), John Hume (1969), Paddy O'Hanlon (1969) and Ivan Cooper (1969).
More recently Deirdre Anne Gates, a Hertfordshire County Councillor for South Oxhey sat as an Independent Nationalist after resigning from the BNP in August 2010, before joining the English Democrats in July 2011.
Famous quotes containing the words independent and/or nationalist:
“I have defeated them all.... I was left with some money to battle with the world when quite young, and at the present time have much to feel proud of.... The Lord gave me talent, and I know I have done good with it.... For my brains have made me quite independent and without the help of any man.”
—Harriet A. Brown, U.S. inventor and educator. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”
—Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)