Responses to Gladstonian home rule and land reform

Abstract

As reactions to yet another initiative on Northern Ireland underlined the durability of traditional perspectives on both sides of the border, it was understandable that there should have been some nostalgic re-examination in the Irish media of the might-have-been of Gladstone’s first home rule initiative of a hundred years ago. Centenaries increasingly stimulate historians and publishers into action also, but the two major new studies of the home-rule ‘episode’ from Gill and Macmillan take a pessimistic, even jaundiced view of the 1886 scheme as unworkable, and incapable of satisfying Irish nationalists, much less unionists. Despite its precipitation of a major political realignment in British politics and its confirmation of Irish political polarisation, the crisis of 1885-6 has received relatively little attention from historians. In Britain, the only major study since Hammond’s romanticGladstone and the Irish nationhas been the decidedly anti-romantic and detailed dissection of the web of party intrigue and political calculation and infighting involved in Cooke and Vincent’sThe governing passion.