The Irish Home Rule bills were bills introduced in the British House of Commons during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intended to grant self-government and national autonomy to the whole of Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and reverse parts of the Act of Union 1800. There were four such Home Rule bills. Of the two that passed the Parliament of the United Kingdom the Third Bill, enacted as the Home Rule Act 1914, was never implemented, while the Fourth Bill, enacted as the Government of Ireland Act 1920 established two separate Home Rule territories in Ireland, of which the one was implemented by the Parliament of Northern Ireland, but the second not implemented in the rest of Ireland. The bills were:
Historical background
Under the Act of Union 1800 the separate Kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain were merged on January 1, 1801, to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Throughout the 19th century Irish opposition to the Union was strong, occasionally erupting in violent insurrection. In the 1830s and 1840s attempts had been made under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell to repeal the Act of Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland, without breaking the connection with Great Britain. These attempts to achieve what was simply called repeal failed.
Until the 1870s, most Irish people elected as their Members of Parliament (MPs) Liberals and Conservatives who belonged to the main British political parties. The Conservatives, for example, won a majority in the 1859 general election in Ireland. A significant minority also voted for Unionists, who fiercely resisted any dilution of the Act of Union.
Different concepts
The term ”Home Rule”, first used in the 1860s, meant an Irish legislature with responsibility for domestic affairs. It was variously interpreted, from the 1870s was seen to be part of a federal system for the United Kingdom: a domestic Parliament for Ireland while the Imperial Parliament at Westminster would continue to have responsibility for Imperial affairs. The Republican concept as represented by the Fenians and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, strove to achieve total separation from Great Britain, if necessary by physical force, and complete autonomy for Ireland. For a while they were prepared to co-operate with Home Rulers under the "New Departure". Charles Stewart Parnell sought through the ‘constitutional movement’, as an interim measure a parliament in Dublin with limited legislative powers. Arthur Griffith envisaged a dual monarchy along Austro-Hungarian lines. For Unionists Home Rule meant a Dublin parliament dominated by the Catholic Church to the detriment of Ireland’s economic progress. In England the Liberal Party under W. E. Gladstone was fully committed to introducing Home Rule whereas the Conservatives tried to alleviate any need for it through ‘constructive unionism’, passing many acts of parliament beneficial to Ireland.
Struggle for Home Rule
In the 1870s a former Conservative barrister Isaac Butt who was instrumental in fostering links between Constitutional and Revolutionary nationalism through his representation of members of the Fenians Society in court, established a new moderate nationalist movement, the Irish Home Government Association, renamed the Home Rule League in 1873. Under it, Ireland would still remain part of the United Kingdom but would have limited self-government.
Some few years after his death a radical young Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell, turned the home rule movement, or the Irish Parliamentary Party as it became known, into a major constitutional political force. It came to dominate Irish politics, to the exclusion of the previous Liberal, Conservative and Unionist parties that had existed there. The party's growing electoral strength was first shown in the 1880 general election in Ireland, when it won 63 seats. By the 1885 general election in Ireland it had won 86 out of the 103 Irish seats.
Adversary Lords
Two attempts were made by Liberals under British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone to enact home rule bills. Gladstone, impressed by Parnell, had become personally committed to granting Irish home rule in 1885. With his famous Irish Home Rule speech Gladstone beseeched parliament to pass the Irish Government Bill 1886 and grant Home Rule to Ireland in honour rather than being compelled to one day in humiliation. His bill was defeated in the Commons by 30 votes.
Having sparked the formation of the Ulster Unionist Party in 1885 to oppose the threat of home rule, the bill caused Gladstone to temporarily lose power. Returned to power after the 1892 general election Gladstone, undaunted, made a second attempt to introduce Irish Home Rule following Parnell’s death with the Irish Government Bill 1893 which he controversially drafted in secret and thereby flawed. Eventually largely orchestrated through parliament on the Irish side by William O’Brien, only to be defeated in the Conservative's pro-unionist majority controlled House of Lords.
Home Rule in sight
Ten years followed in which the Conservatives were in power. The only concession towards self-determination came with the highly successful Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 virtually introducing "grass-roots" home rule. In the 1906 general election the Liberals returned an overall majority, but Irish home rule was not yet on their agenda until after the second 1910 general election when the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party under its leader John Redmond held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Prime Minister H. H. Asquith came to an understanding with Redmond, that if he supported his move to break the power of the Lords in order to have the finance bill passed, Asquith would then in return introduce a new Home Rule Bill. The Parliament Act forced the Lords to agree to a curtailment of their powers. Now their unlimited veto was replaced with a delaying one lasting only two years.
The Third Home Rule Bill introduced in 1912 was as in 1886 and 1893 ferociously opposed by Ulster unionists, for whom Home Rule was synonymous with Rome Rule as well as being indicative with economic decline. Edward Carson and James Craig leaders of the unionists, were instrumental in organising the Ulster Covenant against the "coercion of Ulster", at which time Carson reviewed Orange and Unionist volunteers in various parts of Ulster. These were united into a single body known as the Ulster Volunteers in January 1913 [1] . This was followed in the south by the formation of the Irish Volunteers to restrain Ulster. Both Nationalists and Republicans, except for the All-for-Ireland Party, brushed unionist concerns aside with "no concessions for Ulster", treating their threat as a bluff. The Act received Royal Assent and was placed on the statute books September 18 1914, but suspended for not later than the duration of World War I which had broken out in August. The widely held assumption at the time was that the war would be short lived.
Changed realities
The southern Irish Volunteers split into the larger National Volunteers and followed Redmond’s call to support the Allied war effort to free Europe from oppression and ensure the future implementation of home rule by voluntarily enlisting in Irish regiments of the 10th (Irish) Division or the 16th (Irish) Division of the New British Army. The men of the Ulster Volunteers join the 36th (Ulster) Division. During 1914-18 Irish regiments suffered severe losses.
A core element of the remaining Irish Volunteers who opposed the nationalist constitutional movement towards independence and the Irish support for the war effort, staged the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin. Initially widely condemned, the British government's mishandling of the aftermath of the Rising, including the rushed executions of its leaders by General Maxwell, led to a rise in popularity for an Irish republican movement named Sinn Féin, a small separatist party taken over by the rebellion's survivors. Britain made two futile attempts to implement Home Rule, first after the Rising then at the end of the 1917-18 Irish Convention. With the collapse of the allied front during the German Spring Offensive, Britain had a serious manpower shortage and in a fatal misconception the Cabinet agreed on 5. April to enact Home Rule immediately linked in a "dual policy" of extending conscription to Ireland. This signalled the end of a political era[2], which resulted in a public swing towards Sinn Féin and physical force separatism. All interest in Home Rule faded.
Home Rule enacted
After the end of the war in November 1918 Sinn Féin secured a majority of 73 Irish seats in the general election, twenty five of these seats taken uncontested. In January 1919 twenty-seven Sinn Féin MPs assembled in Dublin and proclaimed themselves unilaterally as an independent parliament of an Irish Republic, ignored by Britain. The Anglo-Irish War ensued.
Britain went ahead with its commitment to implement Home Rule by passing a new Fourth Home Rule Bill, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, largely shaped by the Walter Long Committee which followed findings contained in the report of the Irish Convention. Long, a firm unionist, felt free to shape Home Rule in Ulster's favour, and formalised dividing Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. The latter never functioned, but was replaced under the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Irish Free State which later evolved as the Republic of Ireland.
The Home Rule Parliament of Northern Ireland came into being in June 1921. At its inauguration, in Belfast City Hall, King George V made a famous appeal drafted by Prime Minister Lloyd George for Anglo-Irish and north–south reconciliation. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had provided for Northern Ireland's Parliament to opt out of the new Free State, which was a foregone conclusion. The Irish Civil War followed.
Home Rule had an after-life in Northern Ireland lasting up until 1970, when the Thirty Year Troubles erupted. The future of Home Rule lies in moratorium.
Notes
- ^ Stewart, A.T.Q., The Ulster Crisis, Resistance to Home Rule, 1912-14, p.70, Faber and Faber (1967) ISBN 0-571-08066-9
- ^ Jackson, Alvin Home Rule: An Irish History 1800—2000 Ch.9, pp.212-213, Phoenix Press (2003) ISBN 0-75381-767-5
External links
See also
Further reading
- Irish Government Bill 1893, available from the House of Lords Record Office
- Government of Ireland Act 1914, available from the House of Lords Record Office
- W. S. Rodner "Leaguers, Covenanters, Moderates: British Support for Ulster, 1913-14" pages 68-85 from Éire-Ireland, Volume 17, Issue #3, 1982.
- Loughlin, James Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882-1893, Dublin: (1986)
- Jeremy Smith "Bluff, Bluster and Brinkmanship: Andrew Bonar Law and the Third Home Rule Bill" pages 161-174 from Historical Journal, Volume 36, Issue #1, (1993)
- Thomas Hennessey, Dividing Ireland, World War 1 and Partition, (1998), ISBN 0-415-17420-1
- Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism,(2000 edition, first published 1972), ISBN 0-14-029165-2
- Alvin Jackson, HOME RULE, an Irish History 1800-2000, (2003), ISBN 0-7538-1767-5
- Geoffrey Lewis, Carson, the Man who divided Ireland (2005),ISBN 1-85285-454-5
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