INDEPTH: NORTHERN IRELAND
Home Rule
Gary Katz, CBC News Online | Updated December 8, 2004
In 1800, after yet another Irish rebellion, British Prime Minister William Pitt decided that the solution to the Irish problem lay in abolishing the Irish Parliament completely and incorporating Ireland into a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He also wanted full rights for Catholics but opposition within England was too great. It took until 1829 before the Catholic Emancipation Act passed through Parliament, reversing hundreds of years of restrictions on Catholic rights. But reversing the effects of those restrictions was even more difficult than reversing the laws.
With Irishmen in the British Parliament, the "Irish Question" became a current issue. The Irish Catholics were at a severe disadvantage in their own land. English and Scottish Protestants lorded over Irish tenants. You would have thought Irish poverty could get no worse. You'd have been wrong.
At mid-century, the main source of food in Ireland was destroyed. Years of potato blight from 1845-49 led to the Great Potato Famine. A million people starved, a million and a half emigrated, most of them to the U.S. The population of Ireland dropped by a third. The only advantage to Ireland to come out of this most terrible natural disaster was that emigrated Irish formed the Fenian Movement (from Fianna Eireann, mythic Irish Warriors) and worked for Irish independence from afar.
There was a small victory in 1869 when the British prime minister, William Gladstone, ended the official status of the Protestant Church of Ireland, and during the 1870s the drive for Irish "Home Rule" picked up steam. In the north of the country, in the counties of the province of Ulster, Protestants became nervous.
Finally, in 1914, Home Rule was enacted (though Ulster was to be excepted for six years), just in time for the First World War to cause it to be suspended. Civil war seemed a possibility. In Ulster the Protestants formed a militia. In the rest of the country the Catholics did the same.
Two Poems by W.B. Yeats
In September 1913 the Irish poet William Butler Yeats chastises his countrymen for their lack of nationalist passion.
In Easter 1916 he changes his tune.
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In 1916, with The Great War still raging, the Irish Republican Brotherhood staged a rebellion against Britain on Easter Monday. Though the uprising was limited to Dublin and ultimately failed, the leaders were executed, giving the event an emotional value of enormous proportion and in 1918 the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein ("we, ourselves") party won an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections. Instead of reporting to Parliament in England they declared an Irish Republic. The British outlawed them. The Irish Republican Army was formed, grew increasingly violent. The British sent troops, the hated Black and Tans.
In 1920 a new Home Rule bill tried again to reach a compromise: separate parliaments, one for Protestant Ulster, one for the rest of Ireland. In January 1922, after much protest from Catholic Ireland, The Irish Free State, minus six of the nine counties of Ulster, became a Dominion within the British Empire with its capital in Dublin.
In 1937, under the nationalist (and survivor of the Easter Rising) Eamon de Valera, Ireland ended Great Britain's sovereignty and in 1949 left the Commonwealth completely, fruitlessly demanding the return of the Ulster counties. The partition question – the re-unification question – has never been settled.
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