NUI MAYNOOTH Ollscoil na hÉlreann MA Nuad Imperial precedents in the Home Rule Debates, 1867-1914 by Conor Neville THESIS FOR THE DEGREE OF MLITT DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH Supervisor of Research: Prof. Jacqueline Hill February, 2011 Imperial precedents in the Home Rule Debates, 1867-1914 by Conor Neville 2011 THESIS FOR THE DEGREE OF MLITT DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH Contents Acknowledgements iii Abbreviations iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Taking their cues from 1867: Isaac Butt and Home Rule in the 1870s 16 Chapter 2: Tailoring their arguments: The Home Rule party 1885-1893 60 Chapter 3: The Redmondite era: Colonial analogies during the Home Rule crisis 110 Conclusion 151 Bibliography 160 ii Acknowledgements I wish to thank both the staff and students of the NUI Maynooth History department. I would like, in particular, to record my gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Jacqueline Hill for her wise advice and her careful and forensic eye for detail at all times. I also wish to thank the courteous staff in the libraries which I frequented in NUI Maynooth, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the National Libraiy of Ireland, the National Archives, and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. I want to acknowledge in particular the help of Dr. Colin Reid, who alerted me to the especially revelatory Irish Press Agency pamphlets in the National Library of Ireland. Conor Neville, 27 Jan. 2011 iil Abbreviations A. F. I. L. All For Ireland League B. N. A. British North America F. J. Freeman’s Journal H. G. A. Home Government Association LI. Irish Independent I. R. B. Irish Republican Brotherhood M. P. Member of Parliament N. L. I. National Library of Ireland P. R. 0. N. I. Public Records Office of Northern Ireland U. I. L. United Irish League iv Introduction The cause of Home Rule was the primary focus of mainstream Irish nationalism from the mid-1870s until the Irish parliamentary party’s electoral collapse at the 1918 general election. The Home Rule movement’s predecessor as the dominant force in Irish nationalism was Daniel O’Connell’s repeal movement of the 1830s and 40s, which was the only prior coherent, constitutional nationalist movement to impinge on House of Commons business in a significant manner. During the 1850s and 1860s, constitutional nationalist agitation was greatly muted, and the repeal tendency within Irish politics was generally subsumed within the Liberal party. The Fenian movement, founded in 1865, which advocated total separation from Britain, officially ignored and forbade constitutional methods. The Home Rule movement, essentially inaugurated as the Home Government Association by Isaac Butt in 1870, emerged into Irish politics in this context. Throughout its lifetime, the Irish parliamentary party harnessed many different arguments when attempting to instil, within the British constitution, the vague ideal of Irish Home Rule. There were many strands in the Home Rule debate. There was much bewailing the arbitrary and corrupt Act of Union of 1801, and the decrepit state of Irish industry and commerce in the nineteenth century. There was also much harking back to Grattan’s parliament and the supposed glorious prosperity that was a feature of Ireland at the time of that institutions existence. Home Rulers were also preoccupied with various European precedents and analogies, most notably the Austro-Hungarian solution, which was a favourite of Arthur Griffith and the Sinn Féin movement. Jennifer Regan Lefebvre, in her recent study of Quaker Home Ruler, Alfred Webb, said of Home Rule arguments, ‘Dozens of pamphlets, newspaper articles and speeches, from both pro- and anti-home rule camps relied on 1 examples from international affairs. These included the status of self-government in Canada, Australia, Poland, Austro-Hungary, South Africa, Italy, France and the United States.’1 In this thesis, the extent to which Home Rulers harnessed the examples of self-government within the British empire is analysed, most particularly how Home Rulers used the granting of responsible government to the major colonies of Canada, Australia and South Africa, in formulating their arguments for Home Rule. This thesis examines how imperially alert were the broad tranche of Home Rulers throughout the period. Particular attention is paid to the traditionally less heralded Home Rule M. P. s, the ordinary rank-and-file members of the parliamentary party. The study also examines the views of influential figures within Irish nationalism that were never elected to parliament on a Home Rule platform. Veteran repealers and former Young Ireland agitators, such William Daunt O’Neill and Charles Gavan Duffy, for instance, frequently played a large role in the shaping of nationalist opinion on these issues, frequently counselling the leadership of the parliamentary party throughout the 1870s and 80s. The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in 1921, copper-fastened Ireland’s dominion status and asserted that Ireland was now officially the constitutional equivalent of Canada. The Treaty declared that the new Irish Free State’s relationship to Britain was to be as ‘that of the Dominion of Canada, and the law, practice, and constitutional usage governing the relationship of the crown or the representative of the crown and of the imperial parliament to the dominion of Canada shall govern their relationship to the Irish Free State.’2 Many Irish republicans reacted with dismay to this conclusion, with even those who endorsed the deal doing so with some weariness. It was considered an anti-climax, yet it offered Ireland far more autonomy than had been granted by prime minister Herbert Asquith’s 1912 Government of Ireland bill nine years earlier. Asquith’s bill had been almost unanimously 1 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan nationalism in the Victorian empire: Ireland, India and the politics of Alfred Webb (Cambridge, 2009), pp 132-3. 2Ged Martin, ‘The Irish Free State and the evolution of the commonwealth, 1921-49’ in Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin, Reappraisals in British imperial history (London, 1975), pp 201-25. 2 endorsed by Irish nationalist opinion when it first appeared. Michael Collins and others sought to harness the example of Canada when defending the Treaty. The fact of Canadian and South African independence is something real and solid, and will grow in reality and force as time goes on. Judged by that touchstone, the relations between Ireland and Britain will have a certainty of freedom and equality which cannot be interfered with.3 Responsible government had been granted to most of the British North American colonies in the 1840s and the Australian colonies in the 1840s and 50s. When introducing the first Home Rule bill to the House of Commons, Gladstone quoted Charles Gavan Duffy, the former Young Ireland revolutionary and later premier of Victoria, ‘When it was determined to confer Home Rule on Canada, Canada was in the precise temper attributed to Ireland. She did not get Home Rule because she is loyal and friendly, but she is loyal and friendly because she got Home Rule.’4 After a protracted conflict over the governance of the South African colonies, the four states that eventually entered the South African union were granted responsible government at differing stages, ranging from the early 1870s until the early 1900s. Historians such as W. D. McIntyre, Ged Martin and Ronald Hyam have adequately charted the development of responsible government in the colonies. This thesis examines how such thinking featured in the minds of rank-and-file Home Rule M. P. s, when set alongside other issues and concerns. It analyses to what extent they leant on these arguments in putting forth their case for Home Rule, and the context in which they were inclined to raise imperial dimension of the Home Rule argument. The abstract and somewhat irrational vagaries of simple nationalist sentiment are a critical part of any nationalist movement. Former Home Rule M. P. for North Tyrone, and founder of the Young Ireland branch of the United Irish League, Tom Kettle, in a highly sophisticated article, entitled ‘The obviousness of Home Rule’, declared that nationalist sentiment was a pure abstraction and that arguments made in support of it, or arguments 3 Jason Rnirck, Imagining Ireland’s independence: the debates over the Anglo-Irish treaty o f 1921 (Maryland, 2006) p. 133. 4Hansard 3, ccciii, 585 (10 May, 1886). 3 made in order to discredit it, were beside the point.5 He argued that acceptance of the ‘fact of nationality’ must be a basic starting point for any future considerations. Michael Wheatley in his book, Nationalism and the Irish party: provincial Ireland 1910-16, has argued that abrasive, sentimental and tribal rhetoric was far more prominent than the moderate, conciliatory, imperially aware mantras that John Redmond, and a select few others such as Sir Walter Nugent and Thomas Scanlon, frequently trotted out.6 ‘Emotional Fenianism’ was a common trait among Home Rule parliamentarians. Historian James McConnel has indicated that, at any one time, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of Home Rule M. P. s were former Fenians.7 Nostalgia for Grattan’s parliament also loomed large in the minds of many Home Rulers. Daniel O’Connell’s repeal movement of the 1830s and 40s held as its aim the re­ establishment of Grattan’s parliament, based in College Green between 1782 and 1800. The rhetoric of the Pamellite era was brimming with references to ‘our ancient parliament’, and sentimental talk of the ‘restoration to Ireland of her native parliament’, in spite of the fact that the founder of the Home Rule movement, Isaac Butt had deliberately distanced himself from this line of thought. The Pamellites, and O’Connell’s repeal movement, evidently did not want to see the re-institution of Grattan’s parliament in every particular, complete with its exclusion of Catholics and its lack of executive power.