Issues and Arguments
At the beginning of December 1909, Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom. Since 1801, the islandâs elected representatives had sat in the House of Commons at Westminster, while Irish peers sat in the House of Lords. Many Irish people served in the British Army or as imperial administrators. By 1922, there were two parliaments in Ireland. The Irish Free State was a dominion of the British Empire, governing twenty-six of the islandâs thirty-two counties. The remaining six comprised Northern Ireland, which remained a part of the United Kingdom with a regional parliament. In 1912, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George denounced a proposal to divide the island, or âtear up Ireland into little bits.â1 As Prime Minister seven years later, he introduced legislation to do just that.
These radical changes in Irelandâs political statusâthe end of the Union with Britain and partitioning the island into two statesâraise several historical questions. How did political leadersâ mindsets change so dramatically to accommodate both Irish self-government and partition? How did political actors arrive at the settlement that emerged by 1922? Why did they prioritize certain ideas and discard others? How did the priorities of Irish nationalists, unionists, and British politicians influence the settlement? How did politicians express their ideals, and rationalize compromises of them?
Scholarly analyses of British-Irish relations vary widely, but there are a few identifiable trends. In Ireland, works employing an overtly positive view of movements for Irish independence tend to portray British influences as negative and are sometimes described as ânationalist.â Scholars north and south dedicated themselves to âscientificâ historical analysis as early as the 1930s, intent on questioning received wisdom. Incorporating a section titled âHistorical Revisionsâ in their new journal, Irish Historical Studies, provided a name for this academic circle. Distancing history from nationalism seemed to gain new urgency in the late 1960s, as Northern Ireland was convulsed by the violence known as The Troubles. In 1977, T. W. Moody blamed nationalist teleology for inspiring republican paramilitaries and described revisionists as engaged in a âmental war of liberation from servitude to the myth.â2
A milder theme among historians identifying as revisionists is the necessity of Irish people taking responsibility for their history. This emphasis is understandable, but preoccupation with undermining nationalist myths contributed to neglect of other traditions. Irish unionism was not subjected to the same level of scrutiny.3 Outside influences, particularly from Britain, were often under-analyzed or portrayed as benign. Works by âsecond-generationâ revisionists from the 1970s onward are sometimes used to legitimate the status quo, including partition and the constitutional evolution from Free State to Republic. John Regan calls this a âstatistâ approach, one that reinforces both the southern and northern polities. John Hutchinson points out that revisionists who make Ireland their category of analysis inevitably imbibe nationalistic assumptions.4 The terms ânationalistâ and ârevisionistâ never described distinct or rigid schools, but tendencies within historical writing, and neither entirely displaced one another. Individual historians can rarely be placed solely into one category, unless they take either moniker upon themselves. Some scholars have been described as both. Many academics encouraged âpost-revisionistâ considerations of Irelandâs past from the 1990s, denoting explorations of under-served historical topics and constant reinvestigation of prior certainties.5
Efforts to combat teleological Irish histories paralleled similar developments in Britain. Herbert Butterfieldâs The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) rejects the British past as a narrative of progress emphasizing expanding liberty and triumphal Protestantism. J. G. A. Pocockâs call for a ânewâ British history in the early 1970s coincided roughly with second-generation revisionism. Academic studies of the whole United Kingdom and âfour nations historyâ reflect efforts to develop modes of analysis embracing the entire modern state rather than always examining its constituent parts.6 Scholars often incorporate Ireland into investigations of modern âBritishnessâ and the Empire. Growth in imperial history has made the field more diverse and complex, though there is still a dearth of studies regarding how British party politics impacted people outside the metropole.7 Some scholars argue the British Empire was a fundamentally positive engine of progress. Jeremy Black calls such views âpresentistâ and âneo-Whiggish,â though he describes other imperial histories as hypercritical.8 These ideas reflect similar analyses of British influence in Ireland.
Scholars sometimes interpret Irelandâs departure from the Union (but continued inclusion in the Empire), with the âtwo-state solutionâ achieved by partition, as inevitable and positive developments in Anglo-Irish relations. Components of this argument include the idea the British government was sure to grant a modest measure of Irish self-government, known as home rule, contingent on partitioning part of the northern province of Ulster.9 The role of British politics in Irish self-government has not been analyzed as thoroughly as might be expected, given that the United Kingdom included both islands for most of the period under examination. Works incorporating British political parties as factors in Irish self-government and partition tend to describe their roles as merely identifying groups deserving of âself-determinationâ and working to implement those wishes.10
This book makes three major claims. First, the form of Irish self-government was changeable and contingent upon prevailing political circumstances. Far from being inevitable at any point during the prolonged crisis, the two major facets of the Irish settlementâpartition and the islandâs relationship to the British Empireâwere negotiable throughout the period. The form of Irish self-government that eventually emerged was not always even the likeliest option.
Second, British party politics played a decisive role in shaping the settlement. After the Union, constitutional Irish politics depended on developments at Westminster, and the question of self-government altered the British political landscape in significant ways. From the 1880s, demands for Irish self-government were embodied in the phrase âhome rule.â In 1885, Charles Stewart Parnellâs Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) won 85 of Irelandâs 103 seats at Westminster and 1 in Britain, justifying his claim that most Irish people demanded self-government. Home rule became practical politics later that year, as Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone announced his âconversionâ to the principle. His First Home Rule Bill (1886) was defeated in the House of Commons. A second effort in 1893 passed the lower chamber but failed in the Lords.
Gladstoneâs pro-home rule stance split Britainâs Liberal Party. Social reformer Joseph Chamberlain broke with Gladstone during the first home rule crisis, and his supporters became known as Liberal Unionists. The Conservative Party also opposed home rule, despite their leadersâ consideration of the idea before Gladstone declared in favor.11 They often cooperated with Liberal Unionists, and in 1909 the two merged to form the âConservative and Unionist Party.â Irish Conservatives won eighteen seats in 1885, all but two of them in Ulster, which contained about 73.9 percent of the islandâs Protestant population.12 The proportion of Irish home rulers and Unionists in Parliament varied little after 1885. Apart from Trinity College Dublin and occasionally South Dublin, Irish unionistsâ parliamentary strength lay entirely in Ulster. This virtual political stasis and the overwhelming majority of British as opposed to Irish seats at Westminster ensured voters in the âpredominant partnerâ would determine the governance of the âsister island.â
Though home ruleâs importance declined after 1893, Irish questions remained entrenched in parliamentary politics. Nationalists derided British influences in Ireland but often relied on them to advance shared goals. Irish unionists sometimesâthough not alwaysâwelcomed intervention, portraying British institutions as providing a mediating space between hostile Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist populations. Drawing on imagery of the 1689 relief of Londonderry, F. S. L. Lyons calls the Irish Protestant ethos, âthe myth of siege, but it was no less the myth of deliverance from siege.â13 Unionists expected their deliverance from home rule to come, as relief had come to Londonderry, from Britain. For their part, most Britons believed they had a right to a decisive voice in Irish governance, and successive governments exercised that prerogative.
My third major point is the Irish settlement was based on neither democratic practice nor the principle of self-determination. Political scientists imply that British politicians equated âself-determinationâ with âself-government.â14 By this definition, granting self-government to one part of Ireland in which nationalists were the majority, and to another in which unionists predominated, ensured self-determination for the islandâs largest political traditions. However, Lloyd George defined self-determination as government by âconsent of the governed.â15 He likely used this phrase to please U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, but there were implications ...