Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics

Abstract

Abstract The grand theme of modern Irish history is the political outworking—in a liberal democratic era—of the Catholic majority resentment of historic forcible dispossession. This resentment existed alongside an acute present sense of alienation derived from being a Catholic minority marooned in a majority Protestant state. This book is an attempt to examine the unfolding of this grand theme through the lives of two great Irish political leaders: Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant of Ascendancy stock, who built the Irish party in the 1880s into a major force in British politics, and John Dillon, an upper-middle-class Catholic, who was to be the last leader of the Irish party in Westminster. This text deliberately sweeps from broad social issues—in particular the Irish land question—to fine detail of personal behaviour and insider gossip. Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell is an attempt to re-create the intense drama of these two political careers in a way which illuminates the personal idiosyncrasy of high-wire leadership as it attempts to cope with wider tides of popular emotion. This book also details the emergence of the doctrine of consent as it affected north-east Ulster.