‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’

In December 1868 the leader of the Liberal Party, William Ewart Gladstone, was engaged in his favourite form of relaxation – chopping down trees on his estate. A messenger arrived to tell him that Queen Victoria had asked him to form a government. ‘Very significant’, he said, and then resting on his axe, declared with great passion: 'My mission is to pacify Ireland.'

Gladstone had long been troubled by foreign criticism of the way that Britain governed Ireland. As a young man he had written to his wife: 'Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west, that coming storm… Ireland forces upon us these great social and great religious questions – God grant that we may have courage – to look them in the face.'

Gladstone had been strongly moved by the desperate courage of the Fenian Brotherhood and by the defiance in the dock of the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, the three Fenians condemned to the scaffold in 1867. Now he was Prime Minister – he promised ‘justice for Ireland’, but did he know how to provide that justice?

Gladstone began in 1869 by knocking away one of the principal pillars of the Union: he disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland. He considered it unjust that a church with only 700,000 adherents out of a population of five and three-quarter million should continue to get state support. Above all, disestablishment removed the tithe, the hated enforced contribution made by farmers of all religions to the state church.

Next, Gladstone put through a Land Act in 1870. The main purpose was to make the ‘Ulster custom’, which compensated tenants for improvements made to their holdings, enforceable by law. Actually, the Act was not much use and proved a solicitor’s nightmare – but at least Gladstone had established the principle that Parliament should do something to protect tenants as well as uphold the rights of landed property.

Almost certainly the most valuable measure for Ireland in these years was the introduction of secret ballot in all elections in 1872. No more could landlords, landlords’ agents and employers look over the shoulders of voters to see where they placed their X-mark on ballot papers. At last those enfranchised could cast their votes as they wished without fear of eviction or retaliation.

Secret ballot was first put to the test in the general election of 1874. The results had dramatic consequences for both British and Irish politics. Liberal representation in Ireland received a deadly blow from which it never recovered. The Liberals had largely been displaced by 59 MPs who described themselves as ‘Home Rulers’.

Isaac Butt was the unlikely leader of a new movement seeking the restoration of a Dublin Parliament. Son of a Co Donegal clergyman, Butt was for a time a Professor of Political Economy, an Orange Tory Dublin councillor, a Conservative MP and a barrister. His opinions changed and his brilliant defence of Young Ireland and Fenian prisoners won him the respect of a wide range of Irish nationalists.

On 19th May 1870, in a Dublin hotel, the Home Government Association had been formed to demand, in Butt’s words ‘full control over our domestic affairs’.

Since the Famine and the death of Daniel O’Connell in 1847, Irish politics had been pretty unexciting. Attempts in the 1850s and 1860s to create a robust independent Irish party, to champion the rights of tenant farmers in particular, had proved disappointing.

For nearly a quarter of a century the issue of repeal of the Act of Union had been all but dead. Now it was revived by an uneasy alliance of disgruntled Liberals and Conservatives, former repealers, and Fenians searching for an alternative to futile revolution. Seeking support for a Catholic university, members of the hierarchy, after some hesitation, also gave their support to the Association.

Any feeling of elation at their success in the 1874 election soon deserted the Home Rule MPs. On the eve of the election the Belfast News Letter had declared: 'Home rule is simple Rome rule, and, if home rule were accomplished tomorrow, before that day week Rome rule would be evident.'

It was a view firmly believed by the great majority of Irish Protestants. They did not hesitate to express their implacable opposition to a Dublin parliament. In any case, the same election put Gladstone out of office.

Benjamin Disraeli now headed a Conservative government more interested in imperial adventure than in Ireland’s problems. Isaac Butt’s polite attempts in the House of Commons to get Ireland back on the agenda got nowhere.

Then on 22nd April 1875 a tall and bearded young man, a Protestant landlord from Co Wicklow, made his first appearance in the Commons. Returned as a Home Ruler in a by-election in Co Meath, Charles Stewart Parnell would soon transform the Irish political landscape.