The Alignment of Nationalist Politics: Self-Determination as Goal and Achievement

Abstract

The dominant view in Catholic Ireland by the 1890s was that Home Rule was necessary as quickly as possible if good governance was to be realised. The political field was dominated by political actors carrying nationalist messages. As time wore on, an equivalent nationalist political culture was created, though nationalism remained ambivalent about its ultimate goals. The success of nationalism meant that other political actors, the state and Protestant-Unionist counter-actors, adopted positions that were increasingly a response to it, varying between accommodation and repression in the one case to outright opposition in the other. Given its electoral power and growing institutional power — Catholics were increasingly prominent in the professions and they dominated local government by the end of the century — the state had to adjust. The Liberal Party’s conversion to the Home Rule agenda was one response, the Conservative strategy of ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’, the dominant strategy during the Conservative hegemony of the 1890s and the early twentieth century, was another. The cultural impact of nationalism was a creative product of the actor wings described in the last chapter, though the creativity was shared with other cultural producers such as intellectuals and journalists and conditioned by other forces such as shifts in international public opinion or electoral reform.