History of Ireland (1801-1922)
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From 1801 to 1922 the whole island of Ireland formed a constituent part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK). For almost all of this period Ireland was ruled directly by the UK Parliament in London.
The nineteenth century saw considerable economic difficulties for Ireland, including the Great Famine of the 1840s. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign for Irish home rule, followed by the eclipse of moderate nationalism by militant separatism.
In 1922, following the War of Independence, twenty-six southern and western counties of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom as the Irish Free State. Six counties in the northeast, which became Northern Ireland remained within the United Kingdom.
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Act of Union
In 1800 the Irish Parliament and the Parliament of Great Britain passed the Act of Union which, in 1801, abolished the Irish legislature, and merged the Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of Great Britain to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. After one failed attempt, the passage of the act in the Irish parliament was finally achieved, albeit with the mass bribery of members of both houses, who were awarded British and United Kingdom peerages and other "encouragements".
Part of the Union's attraction for many Irish Catholics was the promised abolition of the remaining Penal Laws then in force (which discriminated against Roman Catholics), and the granting of Catholic Emancipation. However King George III blocked emancipation, arguing that to grant it would break his coronation oath to defend the Anglican church. A campaign under lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell led to the conceding of Catholic emancipation in 1829, thus allowing Catholics to sit in parliament. O'Connell then mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union and the restoration of Irish self-government.
Economic problems in the 19th century, The Famine
Ireland underwent major highs and lows economically during the nineteenth century; from economic booms during the Napoleonic Wars and in the late nineteenth century (when it experienced a surge in economic growth unmatched until the 'Celtic Tiger' boom of the 1990s), to severe economic downturns and a series of famines, the latest threatening in 1879. The worst of these was the Great Famine of 1846-1848, in which about one million people died and another million were forced to emigrate.
Ireland's economic problems were in part the result of the small size of Irish landholdings. In particular, both the law and social tradition provided for subdivision of land, with all sons inheriting equal shares in a farm, meaning that farms became so small that only one crop, potatoes, could be grown in sufficient amounts to feed a family. Furthermore many estates, from whom the small farmers rented, were poorly run by absentee landlords and in many cases heavily mortgaged.
When potato blight hit the island in 1846, much of the rural population was left without food. Unfortunately at this time British politicians such as the Prime Minister Robert Peel were wedded to a strict laissez-faire economic policy, which argued against state intervention of any sort. While enormous sums were raised by private individuals and charities (Native Americans sent supplies, while Queen Victoria personally gave the equivalent in modern money of €70,000) British government inaction (or at least inadequate action) led to a problem becoming a catastrophe; the class of cottiers or farm labourers was virtually wiped out.
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The famine spawned the first mass wave of Irish emigration to the United States. There was also a large amount of emigration to England, Scotland, Canada, and Australia. This had the long term consequence of creating a large and influential Irish diaspora, particularly in the United States, whose members supported and financed the Irish independence movement. In 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB, also known as the Fenians) was founded as a secret society dedicated to armed rebellion against the British. The organisation was formed simultaneously in New York and was known as Clan na Gael, which several times invaded the British colony of Canada. However support for Irish republicanism, in the face of harsh laws against sedition, was minimal in Ireland in the period; as late as the 1860s, mass meetings of constitutional nationalists ended with the singing of "God Save the Queen" while royal visits often drew cheering crowds.
Land Agitation
In the wake of the famine, many thousands of Irish peasant farmers and labourers either died or left the country. Those who remained waged a long campaign for better rights for tenant farmers and ultimately for land re-distribution. This period, known as the "land war" in Ireland, had a nationalist as well as a social element. The reason for this was that the land-owning class in Ireland had, since the 17th century Plantations of Ireland been composed of Protestant settlers, originally from England, who had a British identity. The Irish (Roman Catholic) population widely believed that the land had been unjustly taken from their ancestors and given to this Protestant Ascendancy during the English conquest of the country.
The Irish Land League, was formed to defend the interests of tenant farmers, at first demanding the "Three F's" - Fair rent, Free sale and Fixity of tenure. Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, such as Michael Davitt, were prominent among the leadership of this movement. When they saw its potential for popular mobilisation, nationalist leaders such as Charles Stuart Parnell also became involved.
The most effective tactic of the land league was the boycott (the word originates in Ireland in this period), where unpopular landlords were ostracised by the local community. Grassroots Land League members used violence against landlords and their property; attempted evictions of tenant farmers regularly turned into armed confrontations. Under the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Ireland was put under coercion- a form of martial law - to contain the violence. Parnell, Davitt and the other leaders of the Land League were temporarily imprisoned - being held responsible for the violence.
Ultimately, the land question was settled through successive Irish Land Acts by British governments – beginning with that of William Gladstone, which first gave extensive rights to tenant farmers and later purchased the tenant's plots of land from their landlords for them. This created a very large class of small property owners in the Irish countryside, and dissipated the power of the old Anglo-Irish landed class. However it did not end support for Irish nationalism, as British governments had hoped. See also Irish Land Commission.
Home rule movement
Until the 1870s most Irish people elected as their Members of Parliament (MPs) Liberals and Conservatives who belonged to the main British political parties, with the Conservatives, for example, winning a majority in the 1859 general election in Ireland. A significant minority also elected Unionists, who resisted fiercely any dilution of the Act of Union. In the 1870s a former Conservative barrister and Orangeman turned nationalist campaigner, Isaac Butt, established a new moderate nationalist movement, the Home Rule League. After his death, William Shaw and in particular a radical young Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell, turned the home rule movement, or the Irish Parliamentary Party as it became known, into a major political force. It came to dominate Irish politics, to the exclusion of the previous Liberal, Conservative and Unionist parties that had existed there. The party's growing electoral strength was first shown in the 1880 general election in Ireland, when it won 63 seats (2 MPs later defected to the Liberals). By the 1885 general election in Ireland it had captured 86 seats (including one in the heavily Irish-populated English city of Liverpool). Parnell's movement proved to be a broad one, from conservative landowners to the Land League.
Parnell's movement also campaigned for the right of Ireland to govern herself as a region within the United Kingdom, in contrast to O'Connell who had wanted a complete repeal of the Act of Union. Two home rule bills (in 1886 and 1893) were introduced by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, but neither became law. The issue divided Ireland: a significant minority of Unionists (largely though by no means exclusively based in Ulster), opposed home rule, fearing that a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholics and nationalists would discriminate against them and would impose tariffs on trade with Britain. (Whilst most of Ireland was primarily agricultural, north-east Ulster was the location of almost all the island's heavy industry and would have been affected by any tariff barriers imposed).
In 1892, the Parnell divorce scandal split the movement, when it became public that Parnell, popularly acclaimed as the 'Uncrowned King of Ireland', had for many years been living with the wife of one of his fellow MPs, Mrs. Kitty O'Shea. When the scandal broke, religious non-conformists in Britain, who were the backbone of the pro-Home Rule Liberal Party, forced its leader W. E. Gladstone to abandon support for the Irish cause as long as Parnell remained leader of the IPP. Parnell was subsequently disposed and died in 1891. But the Party and the country remained split between pro- and anti-Parnellites, who fought each other in elections, until reunited under John Redmond in 1899.
In 1912, with the Irish Parliamentary Party at its zenith, a new third Home Rule Bill was introduced, passing its first reading in the House of Commons but again being defeated in the House of Lords (as with the bill of 1893). However, by this time, the House of Lords had lost its power to veto legislation and could only delay the bill for two years. During these two years the threat of civil war hung over the island of Ireland, with the creation of the Unionist Ulster Volunteer Force to resist Home Rule and of their nationalist counterparts the Irish Volunteers to support Home Rule. These two groups armed themselves by importing thousands of rifles and rounds of ammunition from Imperial Germany and often drilled openly.
In 1914 the Imperial House of Commons finally passed the Third Home Rule Act 1914 but, on the sudden outbreak of the First World War in August, the Act was suspended with a view to being implemented in 1915, at the end of what was expected to be a short war. The UVF and most of the National Volunteers joined their respective Divisions of the British army, the 36th (Ulster) Division, the 10th (Irish) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division in their thousands and suffered crippling losses in the trenches. Each side believed that, after the war, Britain would favour their respective goals of remaining fully part of the United Kingdom or becoming a self-governing Ireland within a looser union under the Crown.
Until 1918, the Irish Parliamentary Party remained the dominant Irish party. But from the early 1900s, a radical fringe among Home Rulers became associated with militant republicanism, particularly Irish-American republicanism.
Culture
The Culture of Ireland went under a massive change in the course of the 19th century. After the Famine, the Irish Language went into steep decline. This process was started in the 1820s, when the first National Schools were set up in country. These had the advantage of encouraging literacy, but classes were provided only in English and the speaking of Irish was firmly discouraged. However, before the 1840s, Irish was still the majority language in the country and numerically (given the rise in population) may have had more speakers than ever before. The Famine devastated the Irish speaking areas of the country, which tended also to be rural and poor. As well as causing the deaths of thousands of Irish speakers, the famine also led to sustained and widespread emigration from the Irish-speaking south and west of the country. By 1900, for the first time in perhaps two millennia, Irish was no longer the majority language in Ireland and in fact continued to decline in importance. By the time of Irish independence, the Gaeltachts had shrunk to small areas along the western seaboard.
In reaction, to this, Irish nationalists began a "Gaelic revival" in the late 19th century, hoping to revive the Irish language and Irish literature and sports. While social organisations such as the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association were very successful in attracting members, most of their activists were English speakers and the movement did not halt the decline of the Irish language.
Militant separatism
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In 1916, a small band of republican rebels staged an attempted rebellion, called the "Easter Rising", under Padraig Pearse and James Connolly. Initially their acts were widely condemned in nationalist Ireland, much of which had sons fighting in the British army at the urging of Irish Parliamentary leadership. Indeed major newspapers such as the Irish Independent and local authorities openly called for the execution of Pearse and the Rising's leadership. However the government's handling of the aftermath, and the execution of rebels and others in stages, ultimately led to widespread public sympathy for the rebels.
The government and the Irish media wrongly blamed Sinn Féin, then a small monarchist political party with little popular support, for the rebellion, even though in reality it had not been involved. Nonetheless Rising survivors, notably Eamon de Valera, returning from imprisonment in Britain joined the party in great numbers, radicalised its programme and took control of its leadership.
Until 1917, Sinn Féin, under its founder Arthur Griffith, had campaigned for a form of government championed first by O'Connell, namely that Ireland would become independent as a dual monarchy with Britain, under a shared king. Such a system operated under Austria-Hungary, where the same monarch, King Charles IV reigned separately in both Austria and Hungary. Indeed Griffith in his book, The Resurrection of Hungary, modelled his ideas on the manner in which Hungary had forced Austria to create a dual monarchy linking both states.
Faced with an impending split between its monarchists and republicans, a compromise was brokered at the 1917 Ard Fheis (party conference) whereby the party would campaign to create a republic, then let the people decide if they wanted a monarchy or republic, subject to the proviso that if they wanted a king, they could not choose someone from Britain's Royal Family (during the Rising, Pearse had suggested having Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany's youngest son, Prince Joachim as King of Ireland).
Throughout 1917 and 1918, Sinn Féin and the Irish Parliamentary Party fought a bitter and rather inconclusive electoral battle; each won some by-elections and lost others. The scales were finally tipped Sinn Féin's way when the government, which ironically had received vast number of soldiers from Ireland, tried to impose conscription on the island. An infuriated public turned against Britain over the Conscription Crisis. Even the Irish Parliamentary Party was forced to withdraw its MPs from the British Parliament in Westminster.
In the December 1918 general election, Sinn Féin won 73 out of 105 seats, many of which were uncontested. Sinn Féin's new MPs refused to sit in the British House of Commons. Instead they assembled as 'TDs' in the Mansion House in Dublin and established Dáil Éireann (a revolutionary Irish parliament). They proclaimed an Irish Republic and attempted to establish a system of government.
War of Independence (1919-1921)
Main article: Irish War of Independence
For three years, from 1919 to 1921, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the army of the Irish Republic, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British army and paramilitary police units known as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Division. Both sides engaged in brutal acts; the Black and Tans deliberately burned entire towns and tortured civilians. The IRA killed many civilians it believed to be aiding or giving information to the British (Munster was particularly violent), as well as burning historic homes in retaliation for the government policy (similar to present-day Israel's) of destroying the homes of republicans, suspected or actual. This clash came to be known as the War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War.
In the background, Britain remained committed to implementing self-government for Ireland in accordance with the (temporarily suspended) Home Rule Act 1914. The British Cabinet drew up a committee to deal with this, the Long Committee. This largely followed Unionist MP recommendations, since Dáil MPs boycotting Westminster had no say or input. These deliberations resulted in a new Fourth Home Rule Act (known as the Government of Ireland Act 1920) being enacted primarily in the interest of Ulster Unionists. The Act granted (separate) Home Rule to the northeastern-most six counties of Ulster within the United Kingdom and partitioned Ireland according to their wishes into two semi-autonomous regions: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, co-ordinated by a Council of Ireland. Upon Royal Assent, the Northern Ireland parliament came into being. The institutions of Southern Ireland, however, were boycotted by nationalists and so never became functional.
In July 1921, a cease-fire was agreed and negotiations between delegations of the Irish and British sides produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Under the treaty, southern and western Ireland was to be given a form of dominion status, modelled on the Dominion of Canada. This in excess of what was initially offered to Parnell, and somewhat more than that which the Irish Parliamentary Party's constitutional 'step by step' towards full freedom approach, had already achieved. Northern Ireland was given the right, immediately availed of, to opt out of the new Irish Free State and an Irish Boundary Commission was to be established to work out the final details of the border. Initially, Northern Ireland comprised the north-east six counties of Ulster, while the remaining twenty-six formed the Free State: the Boundary Commission declined to make any change to this arrangement.
Civil War (1922-1923)
Main article: Irish Civil War
The Dáil narrowly passed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. Under the leadership of Michael Collins and W.T. Cosgrave, it set about establishing the Irish Free State, with the IRA becoming a national, fully re-organised army and a new police force, the Civic Guard (quickly renamed as the Garda Síochána) replacing one of Ireland's two police forces, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The second, the Dublin Metropolitan Police merged some years later with the Gardaí.
However a minority led by Éamon de Valera opposed the treaty, on the grounds that it did not create a fully independent republic, that it imposed the controversial Dominion Oath of Allegiance (to the Irish Free State) and Fidelity (to the King) on Irish parliamentarians and that it accepted the partition of the island. De Valera led his supporters out of the Dáil and, after a lapse of six months in which the IRA also split, a bloody civil war between pro and anti-treaty sides followed, only coming to an end in 1923. The civil war cost more lives than the Anglo-Irish War that preceded it and left divisions that are still felt strongly in Irish politics today.
Population changes (1801-1921)
| year | population |
|---|---|
| 1801 | 5.2 |
| 1811 | 6.0 |
| 1821 | 6.8 |
| 1831 | 7.8 |
| 1841 | 8.2 |
| 1851 | 6.9 |
| 1861 | 5.8 |
| 1871 | 5.4 |
| 1881 | 5.2 |
| 1891 | 4.7 |
| 1901 | 4.5 |
| 1911 | 4.4 |
| 1921 | 4.4 |
(Figures are from Tacitus.nu)
See also
- History of Ireland
- History of the United Kingdom
- Timeline of Irish history
- History of the Republic of Ireland
- History of Northern Ireland
