The Cambridge Union and Ireland, 1815-1914 (review)

Abstract

If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, one might say that Ireland was lost in the debating clubs of Oxbridge. Ged Martin's Cambridge Union and Ireland, 1815-1914 is a fascinating account of the long career of the Irish question across successive cohorts of Cambridge student debaters, their sometimes worried faculty overseers, and their distinguished visitors from the Victorian and Edwardian political world. Multiple contexts— institutional, generational, political—lend the book a far wider significance than its rather straightforward title may suggest. Whether it was support for Catholic emancipation years before the demand became practical politics, or a belated endorsement of Irish home rule before the First World War, the Cambridge Union's engagement with Ireland intersects in intriguing ways with much more familiar parliamentary and party-political imbroglios such as Robert Peel's by-election defeat at Oxford in 1829 and William Gladstone's dramatic conversion to home rule in 1886.