Between 1845 and 1849 Ireland was struck by famine. A potato blight destroyed its crops: the population was reduced by a quarter as 2 million people either died or emigrated to places such as America to start new lives. In 1846 a letter by a Cork magistrate was published in The Times. He described what he had seen in the village of Skibbereen:
… the scenes were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of … six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner … in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe … The same morning the police opened a house … which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found, lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by rats.
The plantation of Ulster
Britain treated Ireland as a colony. After the Irish rebellion was suppressed in the early years of the reign of James I, it set about the business of colonisation in a ruthlessly well-organised way. Six Ulster colonies were divided up and given to government supporters on condition that they settled them with Protestant English and Scottish immigrants. The people who received the land were families who had opposed Hugh O’Neill, the principal leader of the revolt against the British, or British government officials. The established Church and Trinity College, Dublin were also granted estates. So were wealthy companies: the Corporation of London received the town of Derry – and promptly added the prefix ‘London’ to its name. Derry and Armagh were planted with English settlers; Tyrone and Donegal were planted with Scottish; and Fermanagh and Cavan were opened up to both.
The Plantation of Ulster not only enforced a complete change of land ownership, it introduced a social revolution as families arrived from Scotland and England to farm their new possessions. By the late 1630s about 40,000 settlers had arrived in Ulster. But despite the large numbers of new arrivals they remained in a minority, often resented and viewed with suspicion. The plantation would never succeed in its purpose of trying to turn Ireland into a compliant offshoot of Britain.
It seemed to many people in Ireland as if their country, owned by absentee landlords and ruled by a government that had no knowledge of its problems, had been abandoned to its fate. The cause of independence, born out of resentment, was now imbued with hatred.
Gladstone had already carried out some Irish reforms by the time he presented his Home Rule Bill in 1886. In his first administration between 1868 and 1874 he had disestablished the Irish Church, abolishing the taxes people had to pay to a Church they did not believe in and redistributing much of its wealth to the Poor Law Board to provide relief for the impoverished. He had also tried to improve conditions for Irish tenant farmers by introducing legislation to protect them against being charged excessive rents by their landlords, but this had not been particularly effective. Home Rule was a far bigger step and one where Gladstone, among British politicians, was very much on his own. The Irish Parliamentary Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant Anglo-Irishman converted to the cause of Irish independence, had been campaigning for self-government since the 1870s, and helped convince Gladstone of the need to do something. Parnell did not much like the bill Gladstone proposed – in his view it did not go far enough – but he decided to support it because it seemed to be better than nothing. It gave Ireland its own assembly through which it could legislate on its own affairs, but matters of foreign policy and trade would continue to reside with Britain whose Lord Lieutenant retained executive power. It was more devolution than Home Rule – but for the time in which it was presented it was still radical. Gladstone, by now seventy-six years old, defended it in one of the greatest speeches of his long career: ‘Go into the length and breadth of the world, ransack the literature of all countries, find, if you can, a single voice, a single book … in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation.’ Finishing with a passionate flourish, he declared: ‘Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this bill.’ History is what it is: it does not allow for hindsight. But anyone surveying Britain’s relations with Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day and then reading Gladstone’s words in defence of Home Rule would be forgiven for sighing ‘If only’, or wondering ‘What if?’
‘find, if you can, a single voice, a single book … in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation’
Gladstone’s bill was rejected by thirty votes. In the election that followed his government was defeated. He came back to power in 1892 when once again he brought a Home Rule Bill before Parliament. This time he won a majority in the House of Commons, but the House of Lords threw it out. Gladstone was by this time eighty-three. In 1894 he retired from politics and died four years later. Parnell, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, died in 1891: his health deteriorated after he was forced out of power following a scandal in which he was cited as corespondent in a divorce case. Home Rule had lost its boldest and most energetic evangelists. Caution tempered by misgiving was now its guide: the result for Britain and Ireland was disastrous.
The Liberals were in government again from 1906 until the outbreak of the First World War. They did not possess the same vision for Home Rule as Gladstone but they were grateful for the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party in their battle with the Conservative House of Lords. In 1911 they brought forward a Home Rule Bill very similar to the one Gladstone had proposed eighteen years before. This time it was not just Conservative opposition they faced. The Ulster Protestants, led by Sir Edward Carson, set their face against any notion of separation from Britain. Carson was a leading lawyer who had prosecuted Oscar Wilde in 1895 with, in Wilde’s phrase, ‘all the added bitterness of an old friend’. (The two men had been at Trinity College, Dublin together.) Carson led Protestant opposition to Home Rule. In 1912 he organised the signing of the ‘Ulster Covenant’ by half a million men and women, which declared they would ‘use all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland’. All means necessary appeared to include force: Carson founded a militia group called the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912.
The Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, dithered and then compromised. As war began in Europe in 1914 a Home Rule Bill received royal assent – but with two significant amendments. The first was that Ulster was to be temporarily excluded from the agreement: its final position was to be decided at a later stage. The second – and in the end most significant – was that the whole bill was not to be enacted for at least a year when the confident politicians of early twentieth-century Britain expected the war to be over. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, encouraged Irishmen to join Britain and its allies in the fight against Germany. There was not long to wait before Ireland would be free and the war would be won.
While Britain’s warlike optimism died in the trenches of the Western Front, Ireland’s dreams of peace were killed on the streets of Dublin. At Easter 1916, a group of Irish republicans staged a rebellion against British rule. It was suppressed and its leaders executed, but an armed struggle against British occupation had begun. In 1921 the British government agreed to the creation of an Irish Free State, but the six counties of Northern Ireland were allowed to secede and remain part of the United Kingdom. Ireland had been partitioned and divided along sectarian lines. This was something which all those who had fought for Home Rule, both Catholic and Protestant, and many of the Ulstermen who had opposed it, including Edward Carson, had never wanted and never envisaged.
Today, in 2008, a power-sharing assembly with devolved powers administers the affairs of Northern Ireland. After thirty years of dissension and bloodshed peace has returned to Ulster.
The Good Friday Agreement 1998
Attempts to end ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland have had