Politics
Before 1890, Irish Catholics opposed Henry Parkes, the main liberal leader, and free trade, since both represented Protestant, English landholding and wealthy business interests. In the great strike of 1890 Cardinal Moran, the head of the church, was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were critical of labor throughout the decade. After 1900, Catholics joined the Labor Party because its stress on equality and social welfare appealed to people who were workers and small farmers. In the 1910 elections Labor gained in areas where the concentration of Catholics was above average, and the number of Catholics in Labor's parliamentary ranks rose.
Read more about this topic: Irish Australian
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)