The Irish conservatives and home rule, 1869-73

Abstract

In May 1870 a number of gentlemen met in a Dublin hotel to consider the possibility of reviving the demand for a separate Irish legislature. Out ofthis meeting grew the Home Government Association, and ultimately the Home Rule League of Isaac Butt. A number of political developments had made it possible to revive an agitation which had lain dormant for twenty years; to one of these in particular has been ascribed much of the responsibility forthe founding of the new movement. ‘It may be doubted that there everwas a time since 1800 when Irish protestants as a body belieyed that Irish affairs could be better understood and cared for in a London legislature than in an Irish parliament’, wrote A. M. Sullivan in 1877; concern for their rights, privileges, and possessions as a minority in the midst of adangerous catholic majority, was the real reason why they supported the union system’. It was the contention of Sullivan and other writers on the period that the disestablishment of their church and the invasion of their position on the land by the reforming measures of the liberal administration of 1868 destroyed the compact of mutual self-interest between Irish protestantism and the British legislature, and that the movement which Butt founded in 1870 owed much of its strength to a recrudescence of Irish protestant nationalism. It is the purpose of this paper to subject this contention to a somewhat closer examination than it has hitherto undergone.