Nationalism and the Irish Party

Abstract

John Redmond's Irish party went from dominating nationalist politics to electoral oblivion within four years, from 1914–18. Given the speed and extent of the party's collapse, it has generally been seen as so decayed as to make its death inevitable, while also fundamentally out of touch with the ‘new’ nationalism which succeeded it. This book is a detailed study of the party and provincial nationalist opinion in the last years of the Union with Britain, before the world war and the Easter Rising transformed Irish politics. It focuses on five counties in Ireland — Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo, and Westmeath, and in particular on the local newspaper press in those counties. Far from being ‘rotten’, the Irish party was representative of nationalist opinion and capable of self-renewal, but Irish nationalism was also suffused with an intensity of grievance and a fierce Anglophobia which came to the fore, first in the paramilitary mobilisation of the Home Rule crisis and then under the stresses of the First World War. Though the party was sufficiently disciplined to remain loyal to its leader, Redmond, who epitomised nationalist moderation, it did so at the cost of slumping cohesion, enthusiasm and activity, leaving it unable to withstand the shocks with which it would soon be assailed. Redmond's project, the peaceful attainment of Home Rule, simply could not be realised.