The Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, 1900–18

Conor Mulvagh

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780719099267
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526100177
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The key to understanding the emergence of the independent Irish state lies in the history of Home Rule. This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) at Westminster during the years of John Redmond's chairmanship, 1900-18. The IPP were both the most powerful 'third party' and the most significant parliamentary challengers of the Union in the history of the United Kingdom up until the emergence of the Scottish National Party (SNP).

These years saw the apparent triumph of the Home Rule cause when the Government of Ireland Act was signed into law in September 1914 but this false dawn led to the demise and electoral destruction of the IPP in 1918 when the party lost all but six seats to the political heirs of the 1916 Rising: Sinn Féin.

1

The constitutional context

I … pledge myself that in the event of my election to parliament I will sit, act and vote with the Irish Parliamentary Party and if … I have not fulfilled the above pledge I hereby undertake forthwith to resign my seat.¹

In August 1884, at a candidate selection convention in Dungarvan, tradition holds that the Home Rule MP T.M. Healy drew up a pledge that would bind together Irish Nationalist members elected to the House of Commons. In 1885, the wording was improved as reflected in the form above and it became the ‘standard test’ for Nationalists at all elections.² The parliamentary discipline which the pledge engendered, combined with the charismatic and autocratic leadership of ‘the Chief’, Charles Stewart Parnell, made the party a force to be reckoned with in the House of Commons.³

The force of the party pledge was ‘moral rather than quasi-legal’. Nonetheless, it transformed a loose and voluntary party structure into an association based on rigid discipline. Just as the French political scientist Maurice Duverger observed how, during the nineteenth century, the European working class realised that ‘freedom was a collective conquest’,⁴ so too in Ireland was the moderate, patrician outlook of the old Home Rule movement purged and replaced when a broader-based and more radically inclined generation took power in the 1880s.⁵

Victorian Irish Nationalism: a benchmark for radicalism

Even before the pledge had been devised, the more advanced section of the Home Rule party had succeeded in bringing parliament to a standstill through the tactic of obstructionism. Piloted by Joseph Gillis Biggar, Home Rule MP for Cavan, the tactic proved so successful that the entire business of the Empire was virtually ground to a halt at the will of the Irish party in the late 1870s.⁶ From the mid-1870s through to the 1880s, the procedures of the House of Commons had to be drastically revised and the liberties of the individual member significantly curtailed in order to extract the House of Commons from the morass into which it had been dragged by Nationalist filibustering.⁷ The high-point of Irish nationalist achievement came in 1886 when Parnell’s party, holding the balance of power between the Tories and the Liberals in the Commons, extracted from Prime Minister William E. Gladstone the promise of a bill to provide for the home government of Ireland in exchange for support for his Liberal government.

While the introduction of this, the first Home Rule Bill, resulted in the splitting of the Liberal party and the consequent defeat of the bill in the Commons, concessions had been extracted, precedents had been set, and the efficacy of Irish Nationalist involvement in parliament had been vindicated.

For four years, a peaceful co-existence prevailed between the Liberals and the Irish party. In this ‘union of hearts’,⁸ Frank Callanan describes the unique relationship that prevailed between Irish Nationalism and British Liberalism as one in which ‘Gladstone was acclaimed in Ireland and Parnell lionised by English Liberals’.⁹ However, the free and uncomplicated union that followed the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill ended abruptly in 1890 when Gladstone insisted that Parnell could not remain as chairman of the Irish party following his identification as co-respondent in the O’Shea divorce case. Divisions surfaced, not merely on a moral question, but also on the deeply political question of the autonomy of parliamentary Nationalism from the Liberal party.¹⁰ The debacle ended with the schism of the IPP. On 6 December 1890, after days of intense and bitter debate, forty-four members of the parliamentary party, led by Justin McCarthy, walked out of Committee Room 15, leaving Parnell and his twenty-seven loyalists in their wake.¹¹

This event marked the beginning of a decade-long split that would see factions form within factions and the formerly united nationalist vote hopelessly split at the polls. Despite the internal divisions within parliamentary Nationalism, a favourable electoral equilibrium in the general election of 1892 led to the introduction of a second Home Rule Bill the following February.¹² However, this time, despite passing through the House of Commons, the bill was firmly rejected by the House of Lords which enjoyed a veto on legislation up to 1911.

By the end of the 1890s, Irish constitutional nationalism was split four ways. On the anti-Parnellite side, divisions existed between Healyites and McCarthyites/Dillonites and, among those keeping the flame of Parnellism burning, a fissure eventually emerged between the followers of T.C. Harrington and John Redmond. In 1898, William O’Brien went outside of these lines of demarcation to found the United Irish League (UIL): a grassroots, agrarian movement which originated in the west of Ireland but which rapidly mushroomed into a nationwide phenomenon. The league quickly turned its attention beyond the purely agrarian concerns of the west and set its efforts towards the restoration of ‘unity, organisation and direction to the politics of nationalist Ireland’.¹³

Fearing they would be universally swept away by the popular momentum generated by the UIL, the factions of the disunited Irish party rapidly began to work towards healing the split. On 1 February 1900, the party that had divided in Committee Room 15 stood in 1890 united once again with John Redmond, MP for Waterford city and leader of the Parnellite minority, as their new chairman. A compromise candidate in a party still governed by Healy’s original pledge, Redmond was to hold this post for eighteen years until his death in March 1918.

Leadership and discipline

The IPP, as a regional entity that attended parliament at Westminster with the expressed purpose of securing for Ireland the return of the legislative powers lost at the Act of Union, was a body in which discipline was highly prized and hierarchy was culturally engrained. Superficially, the Irish party stood united after 1900 but, in reality, complex undercurrents of differing forms of ideology and identity flowed under the unifying umbrella of constitutional nationalism. The aim of the present study is not to chart the sagas of internal dissidence that intermittently flared up among Irish constitutional nationalists from 1900 onwards. This has been done extensively in the cases of the most prominent and outspoken mavericks in the constitutional nationalist movement: T.M. Healy, William O’Brien, Laurence Ginnell, and early Sinn Féiners centring on C.J. Dolan.¹⁴ Instead, the intention here is to examine how, from the time of the Irish party’s reunification in 1900, Irish Nationalists did in fact ‘sit, act and vote’ together at Westminster. How cohesive were Irish Nationalists as a body in Westminster and, furthermore, how harmonious were the outlooks, ideologies, and tactical preferences of its leadership?

Although the reunited IPP saw several figures taking a role in policy steering in its early years, it will be especially important to examine the evolving relationships that existed between the four MPs – John Redmond; John Dillon; Joseph Devlin; and T.P. O’Connor – who would eventually exercise near total control over party policy. Personality, and clashes between these individuals, had a strong impact upon the direction and efficacy of party policy. Furthermore, the ideological and tactical divide between ‘conflict and conciliation’ – to borrow the title of Paul Bew’s examination of moderates and agitators within Irish nationalism – endured into the twentieth century.¹⁵

Conflict and conciliation became a line of demarcation between the two most influential figures within the party’s leadership: John Redmond and John Dillon. Redmond was a compromiser by nature. By contrast, John Dillon was self-consciously and unapologetically a hardliner, instinctively and temperamentally disinclined to find or occupy the middle ground. The history of Anglo-Irish relations from the 1922 treaty to the Good Friday Agreement and beyond has been marked by the divergence between these two philosophies within Irish camps. In the period under consideration here, it was no less relevant. The antagonistic relationship between compromise and ‘no surrender’ shaped the direction of official Nationalist policy in these years. Depending on the balance of power between Dillon and Redmond, one or other philosophy won out, dictating how the party would plot its course.

Parliamentary questions

In seeking to re-evaluate the IPP, different approaches to answering the same questions must be adopted. In analysing the party’s evolving policies and their effectiveness, an examination of leadership is essential. However, the collective behaviour of the party within parliament cannot be judged solely on rhetoric and intentions. To this end, a detailed quantitative study of the entire party’s activity and parliamentary contribution will complement the study of leadership here. This is essential in arriving at a more concrete and empirically grounded picture of how the IPP actually sat, acted, and voted while at Westminster.

This does not profess to be a complete or definitive examination of the behaviour of the parliamentary party. Two important and under-researched aspects of the Irish Nationalist experience at Westminster have been singled out; namely parliamentary questions and division voting. The mere enumeration of questions and votes can never be a definitive solution to the complex and multi-faceted subject of Irish Nationalist behaviour in the House of Commons. Quantitative methods only go so far and, at best, they offer a descriptive introduction to sets of sources that are too large to read and analyse in the traditional historical sense. However, in the case of the Irish party, such is the neglect of quantitative appr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The constitutional context
• 2 Towards the age of the tetrarchs
• 3 Leadership in a Liberal era, 1906–9
• 4 Dragging Ireland into the spotlight, pulling Ulster from the morass, 1910–14
• 5 Estrangements and realignments: leadership in wartime, 1914–16
• 6 Rising and falling: Easter 1916 to winter 1918
• 7 Obstruction or interrogation? The tactics of parliamentary questions
• 8 Unity in division: voting and whipping in the Irish party
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index