Traditions of Violence in the Irish National Movement

Abstract

The dynamiting of a prison in the London borough of Clerkenwell in December 1867 and the assassinations in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in May 1882 were among the most spectacular acts of political violence committed in the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century.1 The bomb explosion in London, intended to free imprisoned Irish nationalists, killed twelve people and injured more than a hundred. In Phoenix Park both the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, a relation of Gladstone’s, and his deputy were murdered. Both events brought home to a shocked British public the existence of organisations within the Irish national movement, which, in the pursuit of their political objectives, were prepared to use violence and terror against people and property. Along with organisations seeking to agitate for the repeal of the Act of Union of 1801 or for Home Rule for Ireland by political and legal means, these groups represented the other end of the political spectrum and constituted an essential element of nineteent-century Irish nationalism.