Constitutional Nationalism and popular liberalism in Ireland

Abstract

I am not sure at all that the Parnellites elected next Autumn will hang together. The Labourers won't pull with them and though these are a weak body in Ireland they may be enough to form a New party in alliance with Landlords of a Liberal type. When, said Mr Parnell, it was conceded to us as one of the principles of the Irish Party that it was the right of the Irish people to be governed by the people, for the people and in accordance with the will of the majority of the people, we gladly recognised that that was our principle, and ‘upon that principle we cordially shake hands with you, and we wish long life to the Liberal Party in their career of self-Government for Ireland, and justice to the English people’. The roots of Irish ‘popular liberalism’ ‘Legislative and administrative decentralization is one Irish idea’, Reynolds's commented in 1888, ‘and the abolition of landlordism is another. We cannot advocate them as beneficial to Ireland without feeling that they have the strongest significance for ourselves.’ ‘Indeed,’ it concluded, ‘it is not the British Democracy that is absorbing the Irish – it is the Irish that is absorbing the British.’ Few scholars would be prepared to endorse such a view, but many would admit that there were at least parallels between constitutional nationalism and British radicalism.