Parnell and The Home Rule
The second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by a complex interplay of political and economic factors which contributed towards the exacerbation of religious differences. The most important of these was the struggle for land and for the rights of tenants. A coherent Nationalist movement with modest aims began to emerge, operating within British parliamentary democracy. Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91 ), a Protestant who was elected to Westminster in 1875 and became leader of the Home Rule Party two years later, was the tenants' champion. He insisted that only the establishment of an Irish parliament in Dublin could be responsive to the needs of the people and, to that end, consistently disrupted the business of the British House of Commons. Parnell also organized the Irish peasantry in defiance of particularly offensive landlords, adding a new word to the English language when the first such target was a Captain Boycott. A breakthrough seemed to be approaching when Parnell won the support of the Prime Minister, Gladstone, but the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin in 1882 again hardened English opinion against the Irish. Three Home Rule Bills were defeated in the space of ten years; instead the Prevention of Crimes Act (temporarily) abolished trial by jury and increased police powers. The transparent honesty of Parnell's denials of complicity in the murders for a while served to boost his career, but public opinion finally swung against him in 1890, when he was cited in the divorce case of his colleague Captain O'Shea. The attitude of many Irish Protestants to the agitation for Home Rule was summed up by the equation "Home Rule = Rome Rule"; such a threat was enough to unite the Anglican (broadly speaking, conservative gentry) and Presbyterian (liberal tradesmen) communities. These were certainly the people who were doing best from a modest boom in Ireland's economic fortunes, with Ulster, and specifically Belfast, having been the main beneficiary when the Industrial Revolution finally arrived in the country. Large-scale industrialization , in export industries such as shipbuilding, linen manufacture and engineering, gave the region an additional dependence on the British connection, while the fact that these industries were firmly under Protestant ownership increased social tensions. The end of the nineteenth century saw a burst of activity aimed at the revival of interest in all aspects of Irish culture and identity. Ostensibly non-political organizations such as the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association were founded to promote Irish language, music and traditional sports, and these inevitably tended to attract the support of politically minded Nationalists. As well as those who sought to encourage the use of Irish, a body of writers, with W.B. Yeats in the forefront, embarked on an attempt to create a national literature in English. In 1898, Arthur Griffith, a printer in Dublin, founded a newspaper called the United Irishman , in which he expounded the philosophy of Sinn Fein , meaning "We, Ourselves". His was a non-violent and essentially capitalist vision, arguing that the Irish MPs should simply abandon Westminster and set up their own parliament in Dublin, where, with or without the permission of the British, they would be able to govern Ireland by virtue of their unassailable moral authority. Such political freedom was a prerequisite for Ireland to achieve significant economic development. Sinn Fein incorporated itself into a political party in 1905. Meanwhile, socialist analyses of the situation in Ireland were appearing in the Workers' Republic , the newspaper of James Connolly's Irish Socialist Republican Party, pointing out that Ireland's frail prosperity rested on a basis of malnutrition, bad housing and social deprivation.
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