The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (35 page)

Gladstone’s public pronouncements throughout that electric political spring were listened to with fervent attention in both Britain and Ireland. He had shifted his ground markedly, from a position of reluctance to outright acceptance of the notion of Home Rule, for reasons that were both pragmatic and philosophical. And, having made this shift, he embraced his new cause fully, announcing explicitly a preference that Belfast’s Protestants embrace the Irish identity that had so marked the city’s character in the eighteenth century. To the Ulster political establishment such a plain statement came as a profound shock – and in response a series of pro-Union demonstrations gathered pace, culminating in February 1886 in a ‘monster meeting’ at Belfast’s Ulster Hall. The Tory politician Randolph Churchill had been enlisted as the rally’s chief speaker: his career was now on the wane, but at Belfast he gave a speech of masterful subtlety. He had watched the careers of O’Connell and Parnell: and as they before him had done, so now Churchill verged on – but did not quite touch – illegality, conjuring the spectre of widespread civil unrest and disorder if Protestant demands for exclusion from any Home Rule settlement were not met. Resolving that the ‘Orange card’ was the one to play, he urged the Protestant population of Ulster to prepare so that Home Rule did not come upon them ‘like a thief in the night’. The response was deafening.

The Ulster Hall meeting would emerge as a key turning point in Irish history: the moment in which Ulster unionism coalesced as a political force. Later, Churchill would coin the phrase ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ that dominated politics in the northeast of Ireland for generations to come. It was all a far cry from the scene in Belfast less than a century earlier, when the Presbyterian middle class had listened with approval and excitement to Wolfe Tone’s calls for revolution in Ireland. Now Presbyterian culture in general had in a matter of decades become staunchly unionist and monarchist, the exhortations of ‘
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
’ abruptly and startlingly replaced by ‘God Save the Queen’.

There were many reasons for this conversion. In part, such fervent opposition to Home Rule pivoted on urgent economic imperatives. Belfast in the closing years of the nineteenth century had become a boom town, home to a proliferation of businesses from tobacco to ship-building: and Ulster Protestants wanted to remain an intrinsic element in the world’s superpower. Belfast had also become a centre of scientific inquiry, hosting visits from eminent figures such as Charles Darwin; the Queen’s College in the south of the city was rapidly establishing a reputation for progressive thinking in the natural sciences – a state of affairs that scandalized elements of Catholic Ireland. The development of a scientific base in Belfast – the thinking went – would be placed in jeopardy if Home Rule led to a parliament in Dublin in thrall to a host of clerics.

At the heart of the debate, however, lay religion and sectarian fears. Belfast was more than ever now a city run by and for Protestants: sectarianism was increasingly fundamental to the city’s character, with members of the Catholic minority edged out of lucrative jobs in factories and shipyards. At the same time, the uneven development of Irish capitalism had created an ever-widening economic and cultural division between the northeast of Ireland and the remainder of the country. Ulster’s commercial prowess appeared all the greater when viewed relative to the economy of the rest of Ireland – and this, in the minds of an Ulster Presbyterian establishment contemptuous of the apparent backwardness they saw further south and west, was no coincidence. Gladstone’s response to this gathering debate, however, was not comforting: he argued that he could no longer stand up to the will of the Irish majority – and Protestant opinion in Ulster began its shift from bursting confidence into a state of siege.

As it turned out, that first Home Rule bill of April 1886 failed to pass. The period had seen British imperial hegemony threatened on a number of fronts, with rising nationalist sentiment in Egypt, continued strife on the northwestern frontier of the Raj and the unsatisfactory result of the First Boer War (1880–1) all contributing to a sense that the might of the Empire was under threat. Autonomy for Ireland could not be countenanced by many – including ninety-three members of Gladstone’s own Liberal Party: Gladstone’s three-and-a-half-hour speech in support of the bill could not win them over, and in June 1886 they joined the Tories in voting it out. Gladstone’s infant government fell as a result: another general election in July resulted in a crushing defeat for the Liberals, who were replaced by a Tory administration unsympathetic, as always, to the very notion of Irish self-government. Yet for Parnell this was only a temporary reversal of fortune: he spent the next few years consolidating his position in Ireland, calculating the political arithmetic at Westminster and consulting with Gladstone on the best way of resurrecting the issue of Home Rule. There seemed every possibility that, after the next election, Parnell would once again assume the role of political kingmaker. Instead, however, Parnell’s world was about to come crashing down around him.

On Christmas Eve 1889, Parnell was publicly served with papers naming him in a divorce case. Since 1880, he had been having a relationship with Katharine O’Shea, the well-connected English wife of one of his own MPs: when in England, Parnell had lived with O’Shea and in the course of these nine years had fathered three children with her. Throughout this period the O’Sheas had lived separate lives; it is evident that Captain William O’Shea had used his wife’s circumstances to further his own political career; and clear too that, in political circles, the Parnell–O’Shea relationship was common knowledge. Now that the facts were public knowledge, however, the situation became a scandal with the potential to rock politics to its core. Gladstone had himself used Katharine O’Shea as an intermediary in the past – but now he let it be known that he would resign the leadership of the Liberal Party if Parnell was not removed from his post. Gladstone, indeed, had little option in this matter: his own political base would melt beneath him if he did not take a moral stand on the issue. Thus the Irish party faced a stark choice: to support Parnell and abandon the imminent prospect of Home Rule – or abandon Parnell himself, their ‘uncrowned King’.

The matter was to be decided in a series of meetings in Committee Room 15 in the Palace of Westminster, beginning on 1 December 1890. At stake was whether Parnell could pull off the biggest coup of his career. For six days he defended himself: ‘My position,’ he told his critics, ‘has been granted to me, not because I am the mere leader of the parliamentary party, but because I am the leader of the Irish nation.’
⁷
Yet Parnell could not now depend on the support of his party. This was in part as a result of his own temperament: he had always held himself aloof from his supporters; and had instead run the organization as he saw fit. In his dealings with colleagues, he tended to be dictatorial and not infrequently arrogant; and party candidates – selection processes notwithstanding – tended to be hand-picked by Parnell himself.

In the course of that long year, moreover, the details of Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea had been raked over and his political enemies had taken the opportunity to smear his reputation. Socially conservative Ireland had watched in shock and dismay as the drama unfolded – and it was evident that Parnell’s political fate was sealed, not least because on 3 December the country’s Catholic bishops issued a statement condemning him. The long series of meetings ended in an apparent lack of conclusion: the anti-Parnell faction – the majority – withdrew from proceedings, an act that spelled the end of his leadership of the party.

Parnell himself refused to accept this conclusion, and in the first months of 1891 toured Ireland relentlessly in an attempt to rebuild support. At this time, too, he and Katharine O’Shea were married, the ceremony taking place in June at a registry office near Brighton: ‘I and my wife are perfectly happy,’ he said. ‘As for myself I can truly say I am now enjoying greater happiness than I have ever experienced in the whole of my previous life.’
⁸
The marriage was deeply offensive to mainstream Catholic opinion (‘Charles Stewart Parnell has divorced himself from holy Ireland’).
⁹
In Ireland, Parnell’s speeches were met with vituperation or icy silence, and his new wife was condemned as ‘debased and shameless’.
¹⁰
A series of by-elections in counties Kilkenny, Sligo and Carlow were won by the anti-Parnell faction; but the approaching general election would perhaps give Parnell the chance to demonstrate that his following in Dublin had held strong in the face of the scandal, thereby providing the opportunity to reunite the entire party under his leadership. In fact his position was wholly lost, and Parnell would not survive to see the election: the frantic pace of his life had taken its toll, and his vitality had been steadily undermined by kidney disease and other health problems. He died of heart failure at Brighton on 6 October 1891.

Could Parnell have brought about Home Rule? It is, in truth, difficult to imagine how this could have been achieved: irrespective of the arithmetic in the House of Commons, the forces ranged against the measure would always have been daunting. The House of Lords was firmly in opposition, and at this time there was no parliamentary mechanism to neutralize its veto. Large sections of the Liberal Party remained hostile to the very notion of Home Rule; so too were the Tories and the unionists of Ulster. Following Parnell’s downfall, however, the Belfast political establishment breathed a sigh of relief at what appeared to be a lucky escape; nationalists had, by contrast, been given a glimpse of a promised land only to have the prospect whisked away. For the poet William Butler Yeats, the loss of such a man was a calamity: he came to represent the nobility, integrity, reserve and self-control of a leader overcome by a horrid barbarism; a noble stag, as he later implied in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, pulled down to his death by the ‘hysterical passion’ of the Irish hounds.
¹¹
In
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, James Joyce too displayed a sort of acute Parnellite melancholia: the lost leader was again a victim of the Irish, who were ‘an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter’.
¹²

The delicately calibrated movement Parnell had built with such care was now rent asunder; and, although this rupture would in time be patched over, the party would never capture hearts and minds as it had done under his leadership. A weary Gladstone, who had become prime minister for the last time in 1892, did indeed introduce another Home Rule bill in the following summer, but in the full and certain knowledge that it would be thrown out once more. He retired at last in 1894; and his successor as Liberal leader, Lord Rosebery, showed himself to be wholly uninterested in dealing with the now shattered Irish party. The Conservatives, under Lord Salisbury, took power once more in 1895: their attitude to Irish agitation remained chilly, although they were pragmatic enough to attempt to alleviate discontent through a policy of ‘constructive unionism’. Home Rule would be killed by kindness, by which was meant ‘killing it with money’: additional land reform measures were passed; and money was invested in the depressed west of Ireland in the form of new railways, harbours and other infrastructural projects.
¹³
And in the meantime, the ghost of another idea was beginning to circulate: that of dividing Ireland in some as yet undetermined fashion, and allowing the unionist-dominated northeast of the island to secede.

As a long century drew to its close, hopes of Home Rule had been dashed – and yet the question of Ireland’s future had certainly not been laid to rest. This future, for many in Ireland, was rather more nuanced than had ever been allowed for by either Parnell or Butt or indeed O’Connell, each of whom had been impelled by a vision of self-government and political autonomy that paid scant attention to the broader state of Irish culture. Some, of course, could take pride in the solid range of national cultural institutions now established in central Dublin: these included the National Library, which moved into its new Kildare Street premises in 1890; and the National Gallery, an imposing fixture on Merrion Square since 1864. The Royal Irish Academy and Royal Dublin Society, meanwhile, had been steadily amassing a collection of priceless objects in gold and silver that had been lost for centuries and these, together with booty gathered abroad by Irish soldiers and collectors, formed the core of a new Museum of Science and Art (later the National Museum). Some of the objects contained in such collections – the Tara Brooch, for example, and the Ardagh Chalice, rediscovered in 1850 and 1868 respectively – certainly fed into the notion of an ancient Irish nation. For the most part, however, this activity was cool, orderly and rational, lending weight to the notion of the city as a national capital, and of the Irish nation as being in peaceful and eternal communion with Britain.

The monument to Daniel O’Connell unveiled on Dublin’s Sackville Street in 1882, however, told a rather different story: the Liberator himself was accompanied by representations of Hibernia, Patriotism, Fidelity, Eloquence and Courage. These were distinctly arresting ideas, and they appealed to a restive element in Irish society: that evolving constituency of educated middle-class Catholics – schoolteachers, small farmers and civil and public servants – who were conscious of their Irish identity and anxious to do something to conserve and energize it. The Irish language was continuing its slow – many felt, terminal – decline, and many nationalists believed that Ireland as a whole was in danger of losing its cultural identity. To these observers, the parliamentary process in general and post-Parnell Irish party in particular held no allure; instead, they sought a cultural revolution.