United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland - The Campaign For Irish "home Rule" and The British Response

The Campaign For Irish "home Rule" and The British Response

Irish demands ranged from the "repeal" of O'Connell, the "federal scheme" of William Sharman Crawford (actually devolution, not federalism as such), to the "home rule" of Issac Butt. Despite the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852, Ireland was not any closer to "home rule" by mid-century with rebellions being easily crushed by the British state in 1848 and 1867.

O'Connell's moderate parliamentary campaign was blocked by the limited scope of the franchise in Ireland. The wider the frachise was expanded, the better anti-Union parties were able to do in Ireland. Running on a platform that advocated something like self-rule that have been given to Canada under the British North America Act, 1867, the Home Rulers won a majority of both county and borough seats in Ireland in 1874.. By 1882, leadership of the Irish Home Rule movement had passed to Charles Stewart Parnell of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

A wider franchise also changed the ideological mix among non-Irish MPs, making them more receptive to Irish demands. The 1885 election resulted in a "hung parliament" in which the Irish Parliamentary Party holding the balance of power (parliamentary). They initially supported the Conservatives in a minority government, but when news leaked that Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone was considering Home Rule, they ousted the Conservatives and brought the Liberals to office.

Galdstone's First Home Rule Bill was closely modelled on the self-government given to British settler colonies, starting with the Act of Union of 1840 (also called the "Canada Act"), and especially the British North America Act, 1867'.Cite error: A set of tags are missing the closing ; see the help page. Gladstone's proposals did not go as far as Irish nationalist opinion desired, but were too radical for unionists in both Ireland and Great Britain: his First Home Rule Bill was defeated in the House of Commons following a split in his own party. Gladstone took the issue to the people in the 1886 election, but the Unionists (Conservatives plus Liberal dissenters) held a majority over the Home Rule coalition (Liberals and Irish nationalists). Significantly, pro-Home Rule parties won majorities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but not in England, where most seats were contested.

With the Conservatives opposed to Home Rule, it slipped from the mainstream of British politics once they came into power in the 1890s. However, the Conservative government also felt that the demands for Home Rule were essentially materialist in origin, and that to improve conditions in Ireland would satisfy opinion there; this has been described as "killing home rule with kindness". Reforms passed as a result included the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 and the Wyndham Land Act.

Before the 1892 election, Parnell was caught in one of the "one of the most celebrated sex scandals of the century" which caused Gladstone to disavow him, and splitting the Irish Parliamentary Party. Nevertheless, the 1892 election gave the pro-Home Rule forces a narrow majority, and again the Liberals had done better in Scotland and Wales than in England. Gladstone introduced a Second Home Rule Bill in 1893, which this time would have kept Irish MPs in the British parliament, but it was defeated (as was expected) in the Conservative-dominated House of Lords.

Outside of constitutional change, the British state tried other methods to placate Ireland. Between 1868 and 1908: spending on Ireland was generally increased, huge tracts of land were purchased from landlords and redistributed to smallholders, local government was democratised, and the franchise widely extended. The ending of so many social and economic grievances did not end Irish disenchantment, however. What this did accomplish was a simplification of the issues. No longer could British governments fool themselves into thinking that something other than satisfying Irish demands for national recognition and self-determination would answer the Irish question.

Some Britons were beginning to be able to accept Irish nationalism as legitimate. British liberal support for home rule rested on the premise that the Irish people had withdrawn their consent to be governed by the United Kingdom by electing the Nationalists to repeated majorities, and the popular consent was a basic prerequisite for morally legitimate government. In other words, for liberals it was immoral to hold the Irish in the Union against their will.

The competing idea among unionists was that it was impossible to give Ireland independence or it would be used as base from which Continental powers could attack Britain. Writing much later, after Irish independence, Winston Churchill stated that this this idea had taken on the status of dogma and had fossilized in British minds longer after it had ceased to have any basis in fact and that only the "large outside shock" of the First World War had changed this.

The Liberals regained power in 1905. Following a confrontation with the House of Lords over the "People's Budget", a wider constitutional conflict developed, resulting in two general elections during 1910 and the passage of the Parliament Act 1911. The 1910 elections saw the Liberals lose seats in the Commons, necessitating the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party (now led by John Redmond). The Irish party expected their support to be repaid by the introduction of Home Rule, which with the removal of the House of Lords' veto power by the Parliament Act became a clear possibility for the first time.

The Third Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912, provoked increasingly bitter opposition from Unionists, particularly those in Ulster. The Bill finally passed into law as the Government of Ireland Act 1914 a few weeks after the start of the First World War, but its implementation was simultaneously suspended for the duration of the war. The situation in Ireland had deteriorated severely, with both unionist Ulster Volunteers and nationalist Irish Volunteers openly drilling, and with both groups having imported arms. The war exacerbated tensions further, with unionists urging loyalty to the King by volunteering in the British Army, but with nationalists much more ambivalent about a war that was seen by many as Britain's and not Ireland's fight.

The 1916 Easter Rising in favour of an independent Irish Republic was suppressed without great difficulty by the British, but the severe measures taken by them in its aftermath further alienated nationalist opinion. An attempt to introduce a modified form of Home Rule was made by the Prime Minister Lloyd George in 1917 when he called together all parties within Ireland to an Irish Convention; however, after six months the Convention failed to reach agreement on the important question of whether Ulster was to be under the authority of any new Dublin parliament. The European situation with the threat of conscription (which had been operating in Great Britain but had not yet been introduced into Ireland) changed the political climate further, such that in the 1918 general election, the Irish Party lost most of its seats to the more radical Sinn Féin party.