University College Cork, Ireland
This essay argues that the Irish question proved a dominant problem in British politics across the long nineteenth century. It charts this process by focusing on the ways that the Irish question was imagined, paying particular attention to the issues of international security, poverty, and politics. The essay also suggests that the effects of the Irish question were not one-way. Ireland was not simply shaped by British politics, but instead played an important role in moulding British political culture throughout the period of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Introduction
The nineteenth century was the age of ‘questions’. The European historian Holly Case has noted that the rise of ‘the x question’ in the nineteenth century was the result of an enlarged and politicised reading public, an increased voting polity, and a variety of international events that played out in public discourse. The ‘question’ posed was not a question per se, but rather a problem to be solved, with a view to some future resolution addressing ‘a gap between a universal ideal and a particular reality’ that threatened the present (Case 2018, 3). Often, the way commentators framed the problem led to the way they conceptualised a solution. Thus, rather than being an expression of genuine curiosity to inquire, questions were rhetorical devices to introduce specific political outcomes. This is a useful way to think of the ‘Irish question’, as it was often termed, over the course of the nineteenth century, especially so because, while the subject of the question (Ireland) did not change, the context of the problem and its threat to the United Kingdom certainly did: from the inclusion of Catholics in the nation’s polity; to the problem of poverty, land, and famine; to the rise of separatist national aspirations and the spectre of civil war.
There are two incontrovertible facts about Ireland from 1801 until 1921 that present something of a paradox: first, that Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and, second, that it was viewed and governed differently. One could argue that this is the root of the ‘Irish question’. John Stuart Mill opened his short book England and Ireland by observing that the question ‘What is to be done with Ireland?’ troubled the minds of government ‘once at least in every generation’ (Mill 1868, 3). Mill offered his own remedies, interesting in themselves, but it was the question he posed and the fact of its recurrence that may best capture the sentiment of British administrators towards ruling the island to their west: less an acknowledgement of a collective enterprise (a union), and more a riddle to be solved, a recipe to tinker with, or an equation to balance. Viewed from Westminster, Ireland presented a perennial security problem as politicians made assumptions about disaffected populations that might welcome foreign involvement. Possibly more problematic, however, was the fact that Ireland’s distinctive social, cultural, religious, and political identities chafed against British norms. Across the nineteenth century, these traditions ebbed, flowed, and evolved but proved durable enough to lead to partial separation and the island’s partition in 1921. Thus, the Irish question in British politics was about what Britain needed to do to Ireland, or in Ireland, to address the population’s disaffection, which often threatened to find violent expression.
However, as much as British politics moulded Ireland, the Irish question also moulded British politics. Irish people elected Irish MPs to address Irish concerns (Hoppen 1984). Once in Parliament, Irish MPs were liable to express their opinion on all sorts of other problems. Depending on the issue, their willingness to act as a disciplined voting bloc, or the balance of power between the two main parties, Irish MPs could wield considerable influence, constraining political actions and shaping outcomes. As Eugenio Biagini has argued, the influx of large numbers of Irish immigrants to British cities, along with Irish MPs making up almost one-sixth of Westminster’s membership, meant that ‘Ireland was the pressing question of the day’ during the last quarter of the century (Biagini 2007, 2).
This essay argues that the Irish question, in its variegated forms and guises, played an important role in shaping British politics across the nineteenth century. The first sections explore the changing nature of the Irish question during the period by focusing on three issues that were central to British concerns about Ireland: security, nationalism, and poverty and land. The final section outlines some of the ways Ireland altered British political culture, a trend that continues to the present day despite the changed circumstances of the relationship.
Answering the Irish question: international security
Profound security concerns acted as midwife for the Act of Union, which was itself an answer to the Irish question. Prior to 1782, Britain held extensive control over Irish affairs politically, economically, and militarily. Although Ireland had its own Parliament that met at College Green in Dublin, run exclusively by members of the Established Church of Ireland (the Anglo-Irish), Westminster limited its political independence through measures such as the Declaratory Act of 1720 that ‘formally subordinated the parliament of Ireland, in theory a separate and distinct kingdom, to its [Westminster’s] authority’ (McBride 2009, 278). Ireland normally garrisoned large numbers of British troops in peacetime for internal security and to protect against foreign invasion. However, the American Revolution created a ‘desperation for manpower’ that necessitated the transfer of troops and a security threat that so-called Protestant ‘Patriots’ used to exact political and economic concessions for Ireland, including the repeal of the Declaratory Act and Westminster’s explicit renouncement of its claim to legislate for Ireland (Gillen 2016, 64–5). Thus, while the Anglo-Irish ruling elite in Dublin’s Parliament had gained confidence and a modicum of independence with the Constitution of 1782, flirtation by middle-class urban populations with political ideals finding expression in the French Revolution, coupled with increasing sectarian violence, led to mounting anxiety.
The Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, advocated ‘a cordial union among all the people of Ireland’ to counterbalance ‘the weight of English influence’ that inhibited Irish commercial development and political liberty (Madden 1842, 1: 136). The push for parliamentary reform and an adjustment to the British–Irish relationship evolved in proportion to the increasingly radical events in France, and the ability of the British government to undermine the aims of the United Irishmen. As the French declared war on Britain and Ireland in January 1793, British officials attempted to undermine Catholic identification with transnational radicalism by passing ‘relief’ measures, including the extension of voting rights to forty-shilling freeholders. In an effort to shore up Catholic support for the war effort, the government created (and armed) a Catholic rank-and-file militia to defend the island. Officials also targeted the United Irishmen, especially after it emerged that one of their leaders, Wolfe Tone, had pursued military intervention with French emissaries (Bartlett 2010, 209–11).
Historians have debated the point of conversion at which Wolfe Tone became a committed separatist (Gillen 2020). A letter in 1791 to his compatriot Thomas Russell included the observation that ‘the bane of Irish prosperity is the influence of England’, which Tone believed would proceed ‘while the connexion between the countries continues’ (Woods 1991, 66). Tone’s answer to the Irish question appeared to be a republic, although he would later amend his professed views to encompass a reformed British–Irish relationship when his correspondence came to the government’s attention. A failed landing of 14,000 French troops in Bantry Bay in December 1796, followed by the haphazard and violent Rebellion of 1798, would provide the justification from the British point of view for a political union between the countries. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger had lamented the ‘government of expedients’ that determined British administration in Ireland (Jackson 2011, 83). The sectarian rancour unleashed by the rebellion, which included state-sponsored terror even before its outbreak, convinced the Irish Protestant elite – the so-called Irish Ascendancy – of the necessity of union with Protestant Britain to protect them from being overrun by a Catholic majority, a process facilitated by financial inducement and the promise of sinecures. For the majority of Ireland’s population, Pitt’s assurances of Catholic Emancipation, and the subsequent end of Ascendancy, meant that many ‘welcomed the prospect of Union’ (Bartlett 2018, 3: 94).
The Union, of course, would prove a disappointment for politically aspirant Catholics when emancipation did not materialise, and as the Napoleonic Wars saddled Ireland with debt and proved financially burdensome (McCavery 2019). Nevertheless, the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland operated as the first answer to an Irish question that revolved around security fears. As K. T. Hoppen has argued, ‘[t]he Anglo-Irish union was about security, imperial ambition, and keeping Ireland (tolerably) quiet and the French at bay’ (Hoppen 2016, 11). As the United Kingdom’s geopolitical position altered across the nineteenth century, so did the fear that Ireland might be a means by which a foreign power might undermine British power at home or, worse still, unravel British imperial power abroad.
Answering the Irish question: power and politics
Insecurity took many forms, and as the Napoleonic Wars ended, emphasis shifted away from international threats towards social and political ones. Popular politics and poverty worked in tandem to pull subsequent Irish governments in various directions. Notwithstanding the longevity of formulations of the Irish question that revolved around land and poverty, they naturally intermingled with problems of power and politics. Building the governing edifice upon the unstable foundation of Protestant Ascendancy meant that government relied on a small minority of the country whose interests were at cross purposes with the majority of Ireland’s Catholic population. Rampant poverty and recurrent dearth only stoked class antagonism, which could then be harnessed to political ends. Daniel O’Connell, the Kerry-born son of a landowning Catholic family and a London-trained barrister, would emerge as the most able politician of his generation in harnessing Irish disaffection toward political outcomes that benefited a growing middle class.
The failure to extend Catholic Emancipation with the Act of Union led to disenchantment and despair among Catholics. O’Connell emerged in the post-union period as a man who through his force of personality and his vision for politics could revive Irish Catholics. In so doing, O’Connell helped to usher in a new period of politics in the United Kingdom and to reshape the contours of the nation. The means for revival was the Catholic Association, re-formed in 1823 with O’Connell at its head. Rather than trust politics to the elite, O’Connell transformed the movement into a popular one with his ‘penny rent’ in 1824, which collected small subscriptions from Ireland’s peasantry (primarily by utilising parish priests), provided them ‘membership’ in the organisation, and enveloped them into a movement from which they had been estranged (MacDonagh 1987). His rallying cry was one of self-assertion: that Irish Catholics had acted too long like slaves looking externally for liberation when their liberty would only be won through their actions. ‘We never, never, never got anything by conciliation’, O’Connell wrote to his political ally the Knight of Kerry in December 1826, before continuing ‘we must call things by their proper names – speak out boldly […] and rouse in Ireland a spirit of action’ (O’Connell 1972–80, 3: 283).
It was action, or the disciplined lack of action, that kept government officials awake at night. O’Connell’s ability to instil discipline in the Irish population – a population that British officials represented as inherently unruly – brought the implicit fear that O’Connell might transform tactics of moral suasion to physical force with the snap of his fingers (Owens 1997). This was a recurring threat in the age of O’Connell and made him a target of odium by the British establishment. His close association with ordinary people and his direct solicitation of their money were deemed unsavoury in a politics still dominated by aristocracy and wealth. Cartoonists like John Doyle (‘HB’) or those in Punch were merciless in their representation of O’Connell as a king of beggars perniciously profiting from an impoverished population (Foster 1993). When O’Connell ran for Parliament in the famous County Clare by-election of 1828, ultimately forcing the government to concede Catholic Emancipation, he did so with the support of voters willing to transgress the will of their landlord in favour of a higher political duty (Hinde 1992). Robert Peel observed that what was most terrifying about O’Connell’s election was how it had changed the Irish population from subjects of their landlords’ interest into political citizens. He wrote that the election marked ‘the peaceable and legitimate exercise of a franchise, according to the will and conscience of the holder’ which signified ‘a revolution in the electoral system of Ireland, the transfer of political power […] [which] had inspired the serf of Clare with the resolution of a freeman’ (Parker 1891, 2: 48, 50).
For all his personal and professional deficiencies, one product of O’Connell’s leadership was the growth of an assertiveness in Irish politics that found expression across the rest of the nineteenth century. Catholic Emancipation had not ‘spread general sunshine’ as politicians, such as the Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, hoped it might (Sanders 1889, 100). The effects of the Famine, which included over a million dead with another million forced into emigration, stood as an indictment against the Act of Union and framed Irish questions during the second half of the century. The age-old question of Irish independence – whether in the form of repeal of the Act of Union, some form of federalism, or the creation of an Irish republic – demanded an answer. The fear of another famine after multiple poor harvests in the late 1870s, coupled with the fusion of advanced nationalism with the land question (the ‘New Departure’), led to a national movement for tenants’ rights that tied together divergent groups – tenants, Irish nationalists, and the Catholic Church – against landlords and the British state (Clark 1979). This movement ultimately led to the ‘construction of [a] transcendent national identity’ based on moderate social demands rather than radical property redistribution and republicanism (Kane 2000, 246). The emergence of Charles Stewart Parnell, himself a landlord, as the leader of the Irish National Land League arguably foreclosed more egalitarian conclusions to the Irish Land War that might have benefited small tenant farmers and labourers. However, the end of the Land War, and the passage of the Land Act of 1881, meant a renewed focus on Irish constitutional questions – such as Home Rule – rather than economic and social ones. Parnell’s leadership brought with it the forging of a disciplined political party and ‘the centralisation of power within the constitutional nationalist movement’, a fact that would continue until the emergence of Sinn Féin and the violent republicanism of 1916–21 (Mulvagh 2018, 67).
Answering the Irish question: poverty and land
Considering the violent birth of the Irish state, and subsequent partition of the island, it is not surprising that the resolution of the ‘Irish question’ has often been understood chiefly as a political one. However, a political emphasis that looks solely to the creation of the Free State misses the preoccupation in the long nineteenth century with interrelated issues such as Irish poverty, land tenure, and improvement. While certainly not confined to Ireland, the language of improvement permeated nineteenth-century British discourse which intended not only to redress ‘a perceived rural backwardness and uncultivated nature’, but to solidify the Union itself (O’Connell 2019, 18). Furthermore, given the legacy of land confiscation and its relationship to religion and social status in Ireland, questions of land and poverty were inseparable from political ones. The way Irish people often attempted to resolve them – through violent individual and collective action – simply underscored to British policymakers the severity of the problem and the attention it demanded, which often elicited extreme government action.
Ireland experienced rapid population growth in the hundred years between the Famine of 1741 and the Great Famine of 1845–52. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, demographers estimate that the Irish population grew at a rate of 1.6 per cent per annum, which then slowed slightly from 1821 to 1841 to an average of 0.75 per cent and accounted for the emigration of an estimated 1.5 million people between 1815 and 1845 (Fitzgerald 2017). Ireland was an overwhelmingly agricultural society, and its farmers and landless labourers after 1815 did not see real wage increases like their counterparts in Britain with rising pressure on land resources. Instead, they experienced declining standards of living with regional variation (Ó Gráda & Mokyr 2006).
Contemporaries provided ample, though not always reliable, accounts of the problem of Irish poverty. The genre of travel writing grew markedly after 1820 as British authors travelled to Ireland to acquaint the British reading public not only with Ireland but ‘with the task of evaluating the extent of impoverishment’ (Ó Ciosáin 2014; James 2013, 24). As tourism brought travellers to areas of rugged natural beauty – especially the west of Ireland – they encountered the poverty of remote areas with marginal lands. Williams has argued that travel writers focused on specific aspects of Irish rural life, such as the state of dwellings, peasants’ clothing, their diet and customs, that offered ‘detailed and vivid pictures of privation’ to readers, and ‘inevitably summoned up images of the “savage” of Africa and North America’ (Williams 2008, 85–6). ‘The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown elsewhere’, wrote Gustave de Beaumont in 1839:
I will not undertake to describe all the circumstances and all the phases of Irish misery; from the condition of the poor farmer, who starves himself that his children may have something to eat, down to the labourer, who, less miserable but more degraded has recourse to mendicancy – from resigned indigence, which is silent in the midst of its sufferings, and sacrifices to that which revolts, and in its violence proceeds to crime.
There was no shortage of depictions of Ireland’s comparative poverty to the rest of Britain, a stark example of the distance between the ideal of a uniform socio-political state and the reality of differentiation between the two islands. While de Beaumont would go to great lengths to pin the blame for Irish poverty on British oppression over the centuries, which as a by-product cultivated a ‘bad aristocracy’, others identified Irish character deficiencies, or their devotion to a ‘slavish’ religion, as the underlying maladies (Romani 1997; de Nie 2004). These assumed characteristics, when coupled with the Union’s impulse to remake Irish social, political, and economic life on British standards, presented their own problem to be solved: ‘It is really marvellous’, wrote the anonymous pamphleteer ‘Mancuniensis’, ‘the Irish people, being so different from the inhabitants of Britain, in their prejudices, customs, and habits of life, – in civilization, centuries behind, – that these things should not be taken more into account in the making of laws for their government’ (Mancuniensis 1838, 16). Rather than providing a solution, therefore, the Union only raised further Irish questions in need of remedy.
Government officials also participated in this exercise of acquiring detailed qualitative accounts of Irish poverty, as well as the concomitant issues of housing, diet, agricultural practice, and crime. This data collection took the form of parliamentary select committees and royal commissions in an era where the state saw ‘scientifically-derived knowledge […] as a precondition of the rational reordering’ of governance (Eastwood 1989, p. 277). By the 1830s, the British had developed an elaborate system of surveilling Irish agrarian violence, which they labelled as ‘outrages’. The newly established police force – the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary created in 1836 – sent reports to Dublin Castle on every crime committed that constables believed deserved special consideration, which were categorised, tabulated, and recorded over time (Roszman 2018). Measuring Irish outrages became a means by which to debate the Irish question among the political parties at Westminster, where rises in agrarian violence served as an indictment of governing policies (Crossman 1996, 3–7). This tendency in British politics is evident across the majority of the nineteenth century – Irish violence, its perception among politicians, and its apparent causes helping to shape government responses.
Irish agrarian violence proved worrying for British governance in Ireland for two reasons: its frequency and its perceived meaning. Agrarian violence bubbled under the surface of rural life in pre-Famine Ireland, an endemic feature of social relations and one means by which to negotiate various social, economic, and religious animosities. Violence occasionally boiled over, especially during economic downturns, becoming more organised and regionalised. The Rockite rebellion of 1821–24 is a good example. The sharp economic downturn in agricultural prices between 1819 and 1821 squeezed Irish farmers across the social strata, which was further exacerbated by the failure of potato harvests in 1821 and 1822. What began as local resistance to the harsh measures of a land agent (Alexander Hoskins) to collect arrears on Lord Courtenay’s estate in County Limerick quickly transformed into an organised resistance against excessive rents, tithes to the (Protestant) Church of Ireland, and low wages that spread across much of the province of Munster, as well as parts of Leinster and Connacht. Targeted assassinations and beatings, night-time raids for arms, and a spree of incendiarism frightened social elites and government. In the eyes of Dublin Castle, the apparatus of ordinary law was ill-equipped to deal with the violence, as convictions remained low due to jury intimidation. Thus, the government turned to extreme coercive legislation embodied in the Insurrection Act (1822) that suspended civil liberties, imposed strict curfews, made a number of offences subject to the penalty of seven years’ transportation, and used specially impanelled courts without a jury of one’s peers (Donnelly 2009; Katsuta 2018). Depending on coercive legislation to solve the problem of Irish ‘outrages’ proved a recurring pattern across the nineteenth century, especially when agrarian movements pining for redress concerning their access to land threatened to upset private property rights, most prominently during the Land Wars (1879–82), the Plan of Campaign (1886–91) and United Irish League agitation (1900–03) (Clark 1979; Geary 1986; Campbell 2005).
For all the fear that the frequency of Irish outrages engendered, even more worrying was the perceived meaning in their perpetration. Agrarian secret societies meted out violence against those that transgressed a popularly conceived ‘code of laws, quite separate from that represented by government, magistrates, or police, and applied by the Irish countryman to his own kind and to anyone interfering with age-old custom’ (Gibbons 2004, 22–3). The future Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer George Cornewall Lewis, in an oft-cited book, suggested how Irish outrages mimicked the state’s legal apparatus, arguing that
the offenders undertake to carry into effect their wishes […] to give to their opinion the weight of the law of the state, by arming it with sanctions as painful as those employed by the criminal law […] The outrages in question are committed by the offenders as administrators of a law of opinion, generally prevalent among the class to which they belong.
Although the government often resorted to various forms of repression, outlawing public gatherings or imposing martial law, and thus treating Ireland as outside standard British constitutional norms, for many the answer lay in drawing Irish society closer to British norms, not further away. Sir Robert Peel, arguably the most knowledgeable British official of Ireland (though certainly not the most sympathetic), wrote in 1829:
The great object we must aim at is to establish some permanent protection of life and property, something that shall outlive one or two Sessions of Parliament, and lay the foundation for a better state of society hereafter. We shall do nothing effectual until that period shall arrive when the law – the ordinary established law – shall be regularly and peremptorily carried into execution, and we must be very careful, therefore, that if temporary remedies must be devised, they have no tendency to postpone that period […] by widening the differences and increasing the alienation and distrust that at present exist between the higher and lower classes of society.
Peel’s emphasis on permanence, of course, was built on the hope of an ever-modifying Irish social and economic order coming into closer alignment with Great Britain. For many concerned with the Irish question, the Great Famine (1845–52) seemed like the event that might allow for a fundamental transformation of Irish social and economic relations (Gray 1999). Those that believed God’s will was at work in the midst of the horrific human tragedy argued that Ireland’s transition would bring about ‘ultimate blessing and redemption […] a gateway to better things’ (Hoppen 2016, 146).
The Famine did not end the problem of Irish poverty and concurrent tensions in landlord–tenant relations, and the question proved a recurrent focus. First, the Famine failed to remake Irish society on British lines as some had hoped. The Encumbered Estates Act (1849) passed by the British government as an attempt to spur investment of British capital to purchase bankrupted estates led instead to purchases by Irish capital, as less than £3 million out of the total £20 million of investment came from Britain (Boyce 2005, 132–3). While agricultural prosperity increased for those that survived the effects of the Famine, these benefits were somewhat short-lived for tenants and unevenly distributed (Bew 1978, 25–33). The structural changes underway in pre-Famine Irish agriculture continued, and the value of pasture farming and livestock led to enlarged holdings. Landlords benefited most from the post-Famine agricultural recovery by collecting profits and calling in pre-Famine debts.
However, underneath this golden age for landlords were fundamental problems in the landholding system on which iterations of the Irish question continued to turn. Recurring agrarian violence continued to plague Ireland both in the immediacy of post-Famine life in the demands of the Tenant League, established in 1850, as well as during the 1860s and 1870s (Ó Luain 2019; Vaughan 1994). Crucially, the solutions proposed – such as securing Free Sale, Fixity of Tenure and Fair Rents (the so-called 3 Fs) – could not accommodate traditional British landholding practices, thus reinforcing an apparent paradox within the political union between the islands that the Famine had already tragically exposed. This tendency towards differentiation between Ireland and Great Britain ultimately led to the British state facilitating tenant land purchase schemes with the passage of the Wyndham Act (1903), a product of the agitation exerted by Irish tenant farmers of the United Irish League (Campbell 2005). While the state had ‘finally settled for a society of farmer-proprietors’ as the solution to the land question, they did so at a time when ‘the constitutional terms of the Union itself seemed on the verge of major revision’ – in other words, as political questions re-emerged as dominant (Ó Tuathaigh 2013, 11).
The Irish question’s influence on British politics
Somewhat underemphasised in the literature are the ways Ireland’s presence in the Imperial Parliament at Westminster had profound effects on it as an institution and on the main political parties’ characteristics. This influence took many forms, both structural and incidental. On a structural level, the presence of more than 100 Irish MPs meant the need to accommodate or incorporate their views. Occasionally, Irish MPs held the balance of power between the two main parties, thus shaping political outcomes, such as during O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs in the later 1830s, or when Parnell exacted Gladstone’s support for Home Rule as the result of the 1885 election (Macintyre 1965; McComerford 1989, 6: 63-4)). A nationalist party did not emerge in Ireland until after 1870 and therefore the Catholic-majority provinces of Connacht, Leinster, and Munster added to the Liberal Party’s strength while influencing government policy indirectly in Ireland in a manner ‘akin to that of Victorian women over husbands and fathers […] in terms of [the] domestic miseries that might ensure were they wholly thwarted, maltreated, or abandoned’ (MacDonagh 1989 5: liii). John Stuart Mill made similar arguments in favour of keeping the Act of Union by stressing that a ‘Pro-Catholic element’ in Parliament kept Great Britain ‘from being in the hands of the Anti-Catholic element still so strong in England and Scotland’ (Mill 1868, 31). Famously, Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule and the subsequent introduction of the first Home Rule Bill in 1886 fractured the Liberal Party, leading to the secession of the so-called Liberal Unionists, the reconfiguring of political alignments and the ‘transforming [of] the Conservative Party into the party of the Union’ (Bartlett 2010, 335). And, of course, it was not simply Irish nationalism that influenced British politics. At the beginning of the Home Rule Crisis (1909–14), the Conservative Party found itself roiled by internal divisions over the Irish question before their new leader, Andrew Bonar Law, hitched their party to a robust defence of unionism and in so doing ‘ignored the ideas of earnest and imaginative Conservative thinkers who formulated promising schemes for a negotiated settlement’ (Dangerfield 1935; Kennedy 2007, 572).
Personalities and their political convictions also influenced debate. During the 1830s and early 1840s, O’Connell presented petitions to end the slave trade, spoke out against the apprenticeship system in the West Indies and sought reform of the East India Company by serving on a select committee in 1832. He was recognised as a leading emancipationist and worked diligently in the 1840s against the expansion of American slavery, even though it cost him support domestically and abroad among a growing Irish American population (Bric 2016; Murphy 2016). On seemingly more mundane matters, like fiscal policy, historians have shown that Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom complicates narratives of bipartisan acceptance of the income tax as a pillar of Victorian political stability (Kanter 2012). Crucially, Irish action also extended to imperial questions. A distinct Irish anti-imperialism of ‘entrepreneurial political opportunism’ materialised that was driven by the ‘intensification of the British imperial enterprise during the era of the “scramble for Africa”’ on the one hand, and the growing agricultural crisis of the late 1870s on the other (Kelly 2009; Townend 2016, 236). The result for Parliament was the grinding down of its business through filibustering by Irish members on both imperial and Irish questions, which led to the eventual adoption of new procedural tactics limiting the role of individual MPs to stand in the way of the House, so as to ensure that matters flowed smoothly.
Finally, the Irish question in British politics could be that little bit of leaven that (depending on one’s politics) might solidify Britain’s place in the world or act as the agent of its undoing. Given Home Rule’s prominence in the political thought of constitutional nationalism and the programme of the British Liberal Party, it is an irony that its Irish roots lay in unionism. As Colin Reid has demonstrated, Isaac Butt advocated for federalism not as an Irish expression of distinctive nationalism but rather as a unionist-minded reform to strengthen the bonds of the United Kingdom as a whole (Reid 2014). By contrast, for revolutionaries, Ireland might serve as the harbinger of a communist utopia. ‘To hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association’, Karl Marx wrote to his compatriots in 1870, before continuing:
The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland […] to awaken a consciousness in the English workers that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition of their own social emancipation.
For the growing number of anti-imperialists within the ranks of Irish nationalism, there was a hope that Irish Home Rule would precipitate either imperial reform or collapse, as ‘Britain was vulnerable through her empire, and the empire was vulnerable through Ireland’ (Townend 2016, 238). The Home Rule Crisis brought to light the potential for political violence in any possible resolution of the Irish question. The smuggling of arms from Germany by both the Unionist Volunteer Force and the Irish Volunteers in 1914 raised the spectre of civil war in Ireland, but also reinforced how Ireland’s instability invited foreign influence and threatened the United Kingdom geopolitically. Although political leaders in Ireland and Great Britain hoped that fighting the Axis Powers in World War I might soften the intractability of differences among parties in Ireland (Fitzgerald 2018, 4: 224–5), it merely stalled the violent confrontation that was to come between Great Britain and Ireland, between Unionist and Nationalist, and between Republicans and more moderate nationalists. Although the Act of Union was irreparably altered with the partition of the island and Irish independence after 1921, it should come as little surprise that the Irish question never ceased being asked in British politics even as the terms of that question evolved away from the familiar themes of the nineteenth century.
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