Irish Home Rule Research Articles

No Surrender from down under: The Australian Anti‐Irish Home Rule Movement, 1911–14

As the third Irish Home Rule crisis grew more threatening from 1911 onwards, Ulster Unionists began searching for allies across the British Empire, including in Australia. This article highlights the role and influence of the Australian anti‐Home Rule movement from 1911 to 1914, investigating why the Loyal Orange Institution in Australia published resolutions sympathetic to the Unionist cause. The article also investigates who the supporters were, who donated thousands of pounds in aid, or who enlisted in an Australian Ulster volunteer contingent. Most importantly, it considers how widespread and organised these Ulster sympathisers were, particularly by 1914 when they produced an anti‐Home Rule petition.

“We’re with You, Dear Ireland”: Negotiations of Irishness and Transnational Support for Irish Home Rule and Independence on US Sheet Music Covers, 1858–1921

“We’re with You, Dear Ireland”: Negotiations of Irishness and Transnational Support for Irish Home Rule and Independence on US Sheet Music Covers, 1858–1921

‘Liberal disaffection such as has not been seen in Scotland’: Home Rule, Political Organisation and the Liberal Party in 1886

The Liberal party dominated nineteenth century Scottish political life, but the Irish Home Rule crisis of 1886 inflicted damage from which it would never fully recover. This article draws on the author’s study of the hundreds of constituency meetings at which the Irish question was discussed in the spring of 1886, the volume and intensity of which heightened and maintained the sense of crisis outside parliament, raised awareness of the policy locally and helped identify its supporters and opponents. These meetings are indicative of the imperative Scottish Liberals felt to discuss Home Rule and declare opinion thereon, and of the conflicting interpretations which emerged of what such opinion meant, what it was worth and who it represented. The crisis arrived at a time of intense Liberal disagreement over the purpose of party organisation and its relationship to ‘Scottish opinion’, and revealed both a remarkable degree of division within local party associations and a lively debating culture within the constituencies. Examining the relationship between Home Rule and party organisation prompts questions about the cohesion and coherence of ‘Liberal Scotland’ at both local and national levels. This article reveals the conditional character of party loyalty on Home Rule and the depth and breadth of the split in Scotland.

The Ulster Women's Declaration and the Passion of Women in the Campaign against Home Rule, c.1886–1912*

AbstractOn Ulster Day, 28 September 1912, Unionist leaders orchestrated the mass signing of the Ulster Covenant and the Women's Declaration against Irish home rule. These were highly emotive documents and the ‘passion’ expressed by women contrasted with the men, as the Covenant implied a pact with God while the Women's Declaration promised to support their male counterparts. The Declaration, with 234,046 signatures, was one of the largest petitions ever organised by Irish (and British women) in this period and expressed the desire of many Ulsterwomen to defend their identities as Unionists and Protestants. This article breaks new ground by examining the Declaration as a form of petitioning culture. It will analyse Unionist women's petitioning through the lens of ‘passion’ and argue that petitioning offered women a way to express their feelings on this important issue. This will be done by analysing the Declaration and the Unionist women's earlier petitioning campaigns to reveal what motivated Unionist women to protest and their political practice. Another perspective is provided by the contemporary criticisms of the Declaration made by suffrage activists. This shows that while ‘passion’ could mobilise women, it could also cause friction. This article will also consider the gendered coverage of Ulsterwomen's political participation by the press. Overall, this article reappraises the political activism of Ulsterwomen from the perspective of petitioning and the power of ideological passion in politics.

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

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The Spirit of Ulster in the Cape of Good Hope: The South African Anti-Irish Home Rule Movement, 1910–1914

ABSTRACT As the third Irish Home Rule crisis intensified, Ulster Unionists began searching for allies across the British Empire, including in South Africa. This article highlights the important role and influence of the South African anti-Home Rule movement from 1910 to 1914. It investigates a number of questions: Why did the Loyal Orange Institution publish sympathy resolutions? Who were the benefactors who donated funds to the Ulster Defence Fund or enlisted in a South African Ulster volunteer contingent? Most importantly, how widespread or organised were these Ulster sympathisers? This article uses extensive British, Irish, and South African newspaper archives, including the Belfast Weekly News that provides unique information on the Grand Orange Lodge of British South Africa and rare photography.

Edinburgh's Local Liberal Party and the Political Crises of 1885–6*

AbstractThis article examines Edinburgh's Liberal politics in the wake of the 1884–5 electoral reforms and the introduction of the Irish home rule debate. The objective is to uncover local nuances of this transitional period of Liberal politics. The Third Reform Act and the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885 fractured the local Liberal Party as Liberals fought to control the newly established single‐member districts’ associations. Advanced Liberals gained control over the associations and endorsed parliamentary candidates holding advanced views on the leading questions in the 1885 election. In three districts, unofficial Liberals stood and won against endorsed Liberals. Consequently, after the election the local Liberal associations in each of these districts split creating rival associations. This allows for unique insight into the effects of Irish home rule on Liberal politics as the associations were largely divided along partisan lines. Ultimately this study shows that the ideological stance of Liberals was not the determining factor of support or opposition to Irish home rule and that Gladstone's Irish question created a more united Party in Edinburgh.

Thomas Sinclair and the Political Representation of Presbyteria 1892–1912

AbstractThomas Sinclair was a Belfast merchant who exercised a crucial influence on the formation of Ulster Unionism in the period 1886–1912. He had been a leading Presbyterian Liberal; but on Gladstone's conversion to Irish home rule became president of the Liberal Unionists, and worked over the next decades to secure the alliance of Presbyterian Liberals and Conservatives to resist home rule. This article will consider the extent to which a Presbyterian Liberal element remained within this unionist alliance by examining a series of elections, in which former Liberals challenged the policy of Thomas Sinclair and the unionist candidates he backed. It will focus on two pressure groups, the Presbyterian Unionist Voters Association (PUVA) and the Russellites, on the links between them, and on the role of one‐time Liberal Unionist MP, T.W. Russell.

Irish liberty and British democracy: the third Irish home rule crisis, 1909–14. By James Doherty. Pp. 308. Cork: Cork University Press. 2019. €39.

Irish liberty and British democracy: the third Irish home rule crisis, 1909–14. By James Doherty. Pp. 308. Cork: Cork University Press. 2019. €39.

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

Antipodal Ireland and Tasmanian Underworlds: John Mitchel and William Moore Ferrar

The Central Highlands of Tasmania is an unlikely antipodes of Irish writing, but it is a region that has complex representations by exiled and immigrant Irish writers. The picturesque landscape of the Highlands in the Young Irelander John Mitchel’s Jail Journal (1856) is well known; less well known is the writing of William Moore Ferrar, born in Dublin in 1823 and who emigrated to New South Wales, then Van Diemen’s Land, as a free settler in 1843. His novel Artabanzanus: The Demon of the Great Lake: An Allegorical Romance of Tasmania: Arranged from the Diary of the Late Oliver Ubertus (1896) represents a vision of an ideal surface world and a hellish underground. Dedicated to Arthur James Balfour, and dramatising the issue of Irish home rule, Ferrar’s novel is an eccentric but multi-faceted instance of the Irish-Tasmanian imaginary. Â

Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...

JamesDohertyIrish liberty, British democracy: The third Irish Home Rule crisis, 1909–1914. Cork: Cork University Press, 2019. 320 pp. €39.00 (hbk).

Nations and NationalismVolume 27, Issue 3 p. 911-912 BOOK REVIEW Doherty, James Irish liberty, British democracy: The third Irish Home Rule crisis, 1909–1914. Cork: Cork University Press, 2019. 320 pp. €39.00 (hbk). Emily Jones, University of Manchester, Manchester, UKSearch for more papers by this author Emily Jones, University of Manchester, Manchester, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 June 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12693Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume27, Issue3July 2021Pages 911-912 RelatedInformation

James Doherty, Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909-1914

The decade of centenaries celebrated in Ireland since 2012 has led to the publication of many new scholarly works re-examining the Home Rule crisis of 1912-1914, the Irish Parliamentary Party and the figure of John Redmond. James Doherty’s Irish Liberty, British Democracy is part of this still ongoing effort to shed new light on Irish political history and Anglo-Irish relations. The book goes back on the period which opened with the constitutional crisis triggered by the House of Lords’ rejec...

Historical revisit: Mythistory and the making of Ireland: Alice Stopford Green's undoing

AbstractThe publication in 1908 of The making of Ireland and its undoing, 1200–1600 by the London-based Irish historian, Alice Stopford Green, provoked a controversy that reveals much about the deepening political tensions at the heart of historical practice in the decade before 1916. Stopford Green took a deliberately controversial approach to the rewriting of medieval Ireland that triggered a bombardment of both positive and negative reactions. Supporters of Irish home rule applauded the work for its innovative analysis and contemporary relevance. But the book elicited a flurry of exasperation from a united front of ‘history men’, who dismissed Stopford Green and her work as ‘political’ and largely fictitious. Anticipating the reaction from a profession that was predominantly sympathetic to a unionist interpretation, Stopford Green had a well-prepared plan that harnessed both her gender and her transnational networks of influence to maximise the dissemination of her radical reimagining of the late medieval Gaelic world. By understanding these deeper strategies of defiance, Alice Stopford Green's history might be reclaimed as a key intervention in the structuring of both Ireland's national tradition and collective consciousness in preparation for independence.

James Doherty Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909-14 (review)

Reviews James Doherty, Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909–14 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 320 pages. What a pleasure it is to read a book on the Third Home Rule Bill which places it firmly in the politics of the state – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – in which it was by far the most important political issue in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. This is in stark contrast to the current ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorations in Ireland, where the Third Home Rule Bill is portrayed as the beginnings of an ascent which, barring a few serious stumbles such as partition and civil war, leads inevitably and inexorably to the sunny uplands of Irish self-determination – an Irish nationalist version of the Whig interpretation of history. The struggle for Irish Home Rule in this period was a metaphor for the transformation of the United Kingdom into a fully-fledged democracy. To most British democrats, which included Liberal Party members, backbench Liberal MPs and the Labour Party, the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill was the test of whether the 1911 Parliament Act had, through emasculating the powers of the non-elected House of Lords, been successful. Viewed from this perspective, Irish Home Rule was the litmus test of Britain’s democratisation, far surpassing in importance other contemporary issues besettingAsquith’s Liberal government, such as women’s suffrage, industrial unrest and the naval race with Germany. Successful Home Rule legislation for Ireland would both symbolically and actually prove that the entire United Kingdom had made the transformation into democracy. The book is revelatory in many ways. The similarities between the structures and tensions of the Liberal Party and the Irish Party are remarkable. Both were loose coalitions and the strains and tensions inside both parties were at times at breaking point. The British Liberal Party and Liberal government were dominated by liberals who were not necessarily democrats. Men like Asquith, Haldane and Grey believed in liberty, but had substantial reservations about equality. They were leading a party which, by now, was heavily influenced by the philosophy of New Liberalism, that required the state to take a far more pro-active role in promoting a new era of equality and democracy. These social democrats were firm in their belief Studies • volume 109 • number 435 336 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews that the passage of the Third Home Rule Bill was totemic of their drive to democratise Britain and both Liberal Party members and backbenchers saw the Irish Party and their demands as advancing democracy throughout the entire United Kingdom. Even many Nonconformist Liberals, dubious about Irish Home Rule and its perceived threat of the resurgence of a rampant Roman Catholicism, were swayed by appeals to their reason, sense of justice and religious liberty, and these usually trumped any reservations they may have otherwise had. The New Liberals, now the majority in the party, regarded Home Rule as the battering ram for democratisation, even though they recognised that it took up valuable parliamentary time which could have been used for social reform. The author argues that by 1914 Asquith was under no illusion that defying radical Liberals, Irish nationalists and Labour on Home Rule would lead to the shattering of his party. The recipient of all this support from the radical wing of British politics – the Irish Party – was even more a broad church than the Liberal Party. For a start, the Irish Parliamentary Party was hardly a party. It was racked by residual rivalry and hostility dating back to the Parnell era, particularly between John Dillon, T M Healy and William O’ Brien. The Irish Party’s political dominance in Ireland arose practically in default of effective alternative movements. It was led by John Redmond, an imperialist at heart like so many others in the Irish Party, to whom there was no incompatibility between Irish nationality and imperial patriotism. These Irish nationalists wanted a self-governing Ireland to play a prominent role in the affairs of the Empire along the lines of the white settler dominions such as Canada and Australia. Rather than lead to the break...

Engaging the liberal state: Cardinal Manning and Irish home rule

In the course of his long career (1865–1892) as Archbishop of Westminster and head of England’s Catholic Church, Henry Edward Manning articulated a position on the engagement of voluntary religious organizations like the Church with the liberal state, now understood, at least in the British context, as religiously neutral and responsive to public opinion through increasingly democratic forms of government and mediated through political parties. The greatest test and illustration of this position was his involvement in Irish Home Rule, where he deferred to the Irish hierarchy in their support of Charles Stuart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party against his own inclinations and the immediate interests of the Catholic population in England. Manning’s position was in sharp contrast to that of Pope Leo XIII, who negotiated directly with Otto von Bismarck, and over the heads of the hierarchy and Germany’s Catholic Centre Party, to end the Kulturkampf. Thus Manning worked out amodus vivendifor the Church in relation to the liberal, democratic state that anticipates in many ways the practice of the Church in politics today.

A ‘Triumph of Federalism’? The German Empire in Debates on Irish Home Rule before the First World War

In March 1911, John Redmond published a newspaper article praising the German Empire as ‘the most convincing proof of the triumph of federalism’. While foreign and colonial analogies – ranging from Canada and the United States to Switzerland and Austria-Hungary – had been a regular feature in debates on Irish Home Rule since the 1870s, Redmond’s whole-hearted expression of admiration for constitutional arrangements in Imperial Germany came as a surprise to many contemporaries. Yet it bears witness to a renewed interest in German federalism among Irish nationalists following the granting of ‘Home Rule’ to Alsace-Lorraine in 1911, a development that generated regular comparisons with Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom during the Home Rule crisis of 1912-1914. By exploring the frequent and contested parallels drawn between Ireland (or in some cases Ulster) and Alsace-Lorraine by both unionists and nationalists during this period, this article not only highlights the ambiguities and complexities of Irish views of Germany on the eve of the First World War but also reveals the multiple ways in which the debate on Home Rule, and on federalism within the United Kingdom more generally, were influenced by wider European developments during this period of rising domestic and international tension.

Comparing Isaac Butt and John Redmond

John Redmond is traditionally associated with Charles Stewart Parnell, whom he replaced at the head of the small Parnellite faction following the split of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1890. More recently Redmond has been compared to Edward Carson in an attempt to highlight that, despite being political opponents, both men also shared much in common. Redmond might have succeeded Parnell as one of the senior figures of the Irish Home Rule movement and yet historians concur that he ‘did not resemble his erstwhile hero and mentor […] either in his power or in his style of leadership’. Beyond the question of leadership and political clout, it may also be suggested that Parnell was not the only figure that played an influence in shaping Redmond’s ideas and discourse. In a 2014 paper, Colin Reid contended that ‘[w]hile the Parnellite strand of John Redmond’s political leanings has received considerable attention in recent years, his Buttite inheritance remains to be explored by historians, shaping as it did his conciliatory rhetoric, imperial sensibilities and openness to a federalist solution’. Our proposed paper intends to further explore this suggestion and compare Isaac Butt and John Redmond. Personal lives, historiography and the questions of Home Rule, federalism and empire will be focused upon.