‘De-anglicising the Irish People’

Parnell’s creation, the Irish Parliamentary Party, remained shattered and demoralised in the years following the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893. John Dillon, elected leader of the anti-Parnellites in 1896, described the behaviour of two of his fellow MPs in 1898.

One of them '…appeared yesterday in a horrible state of intoxication and voted in the wrong lobby… ' and another '…has been drunk for several days and was in a most beastly condition while I was moving the adjournment yesterday… an increasing number of them are prepared to throw themselves into oceans of whiskey and into nothing else.'

Just two years later, however, in January 1900, the Irish Party reunited under the leadership of the Parnellite John Redmond. But as long as the Conservatives remained in office there could be no hope of a Dublin parliament.

Great grandson of Lord Edward FitzGerald, George Wyndham seemed to have inherited some of his forebear’s revolutionary zeal on taking office as Irish Chief Secretary in November 1900. Mafeking had been relieved in the South African War, the ‘Khaki’ election had been won and the time seemed right to demonstrate to all the benefits of the imperial connection to Ireland.

This was an island, Wyndham felt certain, best governed in the manner of a Crown Colony. He told his mother that Ireland was the ‘Cinderella’ of the Empire, ‘poor and hurt…but one of the first family’.

In a letter to a friend he outlined his hopes for the west of Ireland: 'if only we could turn the river of imperialism into this backwater spawned over by obscene reptiles: if one could change these anaemic children into full-blooded men! They are part of the Aryan race… “Ireland a nation”. Yes & ah! no.'

Wyndham declared his preference for ‘surgery to medicine’. And surgery he did apply…to the Ascendancy, the landlords of Ireland. Wyndham triumphed over his critics because, for once, nationalists and unionists found themselves in agreement.

On 2nd September 1902 the landowner Captain John Shawe-Taylor wrote to the press inviting landlord and tenant representatives to seek a final solution to the Irish land question. Lord Dunraven chaired a conference which gathered together unionists, including the Irish Unionist leader, Colonel Edward Saunderson, while John Redmond headed a delegation of nationalists.

All agreed to recommend that a massive scheme of land purchase be undertaken at once by the Government. To Wyndham’s delight a unanimous paean of praise for Dunraven’s report from nationalists, unionists and the British press forced the Government’s hand.

In 1903 Westminster passed Wyndham’s Land Bill. This encouraged landlords to sell entire estates, the immense sum being advanced to the tenants by the Treasury. Tenants were to pay back the government in annuities over 68 and a half years, sums paid back annually which actually were lower than the rents previously demanded.

The Land Purchase Act was an immediate success, though it took further legislation in 1909 to compel all landlords to sell. Landlords were glad to go. They no longer had the stomach to stand up to impudent and unruly tenants. Happy to pocket lump sums from the Treasury, they kept only their demesnes, many later managed by organisations such as the National Trust, An Taisce, the Irish Georgian Society and the K Club. Others cleared off immediately, never to return.

The land issue virtually dropped out of the Irish Question. In Revolutionary France they guillotined the aristocrats; in eastern Europe the landlords fled before the advancing Soviet armies in 1944 and 1945; in Mao’s China the landlords faced execution in their tens of thousands; in Ireland, landlords, clutching their cheques, disappeared in just a few years with hardly a murmur.

Wyndham despised Ulster Unionists. In 1904 he observed: 'My contact with the Ulster members is like catching an “itch” from park pests.'

In that year Wyndham alienated them completely. A plan to give Ireland devolution was being drafted in Dublin Castle. As an Irish Nationalist MP gleefully pointed out, devolution was simply the Latin word for Home Rule. Wyndham denied having seen the devolution proposals. He was lying. He resigned in the spring of 1905, to dissolve rapidly in alcohol thereafter.

Not only Wyndham’s career but also the Conservative policy of ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’ was in ruins. The majority of the Irish had no wish to embrace the imperial dream. They wanted to rule themselves.

The resilient strength of Irish national feeling found powerful expression in a lecture given in 1892 by Dr Douglas Hyde, entitled The Necessity for De-anglicising the Irish People. He declared: 'I wish to show you that in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality.'

His words were to have a powerful impact.