The Rest Is History - 337: Ireland: Union, Famine and Parnell

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

At the start of the 19th century, the kingdoms of Britain and Ireland were officially 'united' with the Acts of Union. Historian Paul Rouse continues our sweep through the Anglo-Irish relationship, including the Great Famine and the political battles both for and against Home Rule. Tom, Dominic and Paul recorded this episode in the iconic General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country, these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and dissenter. These were my means. So those, Tom Holland, are the words of Wolf Tone, and last time on The Rest is History, when we were doing an epic sweep through the interwoven histories of Ireland, England and Britain, we were joined by Paul Rouse from University College Dublin.

And it's delightful for us, isn't it, that Paul is back and we're still in the GPO. We're still in the GPO, yes. In the centrepiece of the Easter Rising. So, Paul, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Thanks a million, Dom. I mean, for everybody else, you've been gone for three days. For us, I mean, it's actually three minutes this week episode but we ended last time with the 1798 rebellion wolf tone the interplay of republicanism romanticism

revolution and religion in irish society and the act of union so So Ireland is now part of, as a reaction to that failed uprising, Ireland is now part of a united kingdom of Britain and Ireland. And well, why doesn't it work? Or does it work actually in a way that we perhaps don't appreciate today? Well, there were a lot of attempts to make it work and a lot of really interesting and progressive things happened over the sweep of 120 years but ultimately there was a complete disconnect right at the heart of the active union which was this idea of catholic emancipation and that idea from the very beginning the promise that after the Act of Union Catholics would be allowed

to sit in the Parliament in Westminster and of course this was rejected and it was essentially rejected even though William Pitt supported it So it's the King is it? George III And this goes back to coronations

and his coronation oath and his disastrous coronation oath at his disastrous coronation, which we talked about, Dominic, where everyone was falling over and having breakfast and all kinds of shenanigans going on. But actually it has this very, very serious consequence that he refuses

to allow Catholic emancipation to go ahead. And he was unmoved on it and could not be moved on it. And it was only in the 1820s when Daniel O'Connell, one fascinating figure in Irish history, and we're here in the general post office, the GPO, the seat of Irish revolution. But the street that's outside it is now called O'Connell Street. So tell us about Daniel O'Connell is the liberator. Began, born in Kerry, right down in Carsevine, the furthest part away from here you could possibly be and not be wet. And he came to becipation. The idea, and he founded in 1823 a Catholic association based on the counties of Ireland where they collected things and organised.

Those counties which had been shired by the English and which are now such an important part of Irish administrative life still. And a huge part of people's identity in Ireland is a county identity. I am from Galway. Far more than in England.

I mean, it's not vaguely comparable. It really matters in Ireland, doesn't it? It really matters. It really matters. And it matters because of sporting allegiance in the Gaelic Athletic Association, but it matters as a basic thing of constituencies for which people are elected to parliament. It matters for local government all across the place. It is fundamental to identity for very many people in Ireland. So it was organised in that and there were showdowns through the 1820s,

but it ended ultimately when O'Connell, standing for a seat in County Clare and being elected as the MP for County Clare. But of course, then it was up to the government. Right, he can't take a seat.

He can't take a seat, can he? So eventually he sawed him down and in 1829, a Catholic Emancipation bill was passed through the House of Commons. And that is passed by the Duke of Wellington, who is Prime Minister. And the Duke of Wellington is also, in a sense, I mean, he is Irish. I mean, he notoriously said that just because he, you know, being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse. Which is not the strategy. Apparently he didn't say that, Tom.

Did he not say that? Apparently this is apocryphal. Is that right, Paul? Yeah, it's apocry he not say that apparently this is apocryphal is that right oh it is apocryphal okay so much about the duke of wellington is but so the duke of wellington is a fascinating example of an irishman who becomes synonymous with britain with british victory britain's greatest general oh and more than that tom he and we'll go there later i will show you the pitch one of the oldest cricket pitches in the world, where the first ever organized cricket match in Ireland was played between the gentlemen of Ireland and the military and the Duke of Wellington was playing in that game. And there was a monument. It gets up even higher in my head.

There was a monument at the space to the city and has been for centuries. And standing tall over its entrance is an obelisk, which is a massive monument to the Duke of Wellington, which was constructed in his honour. And while we're on the subject of monuments, just outside us here was the most famous monument in the city. I say was, because it was Horatio Nelson. Paul, for us, this is a very tragic story because nelson is very much a friend of the rest is history he's probably one of our

favorites i mean one of our two or three favorite historical characters yeah so tom in particular is pumped about nelson and it's a big deal for tom to come to a city that blew up the statue of Nelson. Let's get back to this O'Connell, the Liberator, the Duke of Wellington, the Iron Duke, the man who defeats Napoleon at Waterloo. Are we seeing two sides there of the Anglo-Irish relationship in the 19th century? What you see in Ireland across the whole of the 19th century is a country which is slowly, it's changing. It has people within it who are absolutely loyal to empire, who are extremely happy to be part of the United Kingdom. Including Catholics. A very certain class of Catholic ordinarily, but the broad suede of the population were rural and extremely poor. That will come to be of enormous significance later in the century.

A lot of them joined the British army. Yeah, there was huge Irish recruitment to the British army. And this is sometimes presented as evidence of being comfortable with an empire and evidence of identification increasingly with what is the army of the empire. But of course it's rooted often in poverty. Now there are people who join the army for adventure and for excitement or to get away from home or for all the many reasons why people do everything. It's very often very difficult to judge that, but there's epic poverty across rural Ireland and urban Ireland too.

And there's a certain... And Ireland at this point, so the early 19th century, has about half the population of Great Britain. Is that right? Yes. So the population of Ireland grew from about 3 million in 1750 to on the eve of the famine in 1845, it had risen to about 8.4 million. Yeah. And the famine, perhaps even more than Cromwell's invasion, is perhaps the kind of the darkest blot on the history of Anglo-Irish relations. You cannot talk or understand modern Ireland in any shape or form without understanding the famine. You must understand it from what it did in cultural terms, in economic terms.

Its political legacy is immense. And how it reshaped the population of the country. So can you just talk us through why it is so devastating? Why it has the impact that it does? And how culpable the British government is in the devastating effects that it has? Okay, and in talking about culpability, you have to be clear that what we're not trying to do here is project back standards and values from a new millennium onto the actions of a government in the middle of the 19th century.

We must enter that caveat at the beginning. But no, we judge them by the standards of the mid 19th century. Of the period. So the growth of population in Ireland to 8.4 million in 1845 is a massive explosion. And it's an explosion which is driven across the entirety of the West of Ireland and the Midlands and in rural areas by the subdivision of land

and by the spread and the use of the potato. So about one and a quarter million families were living on farms of fewer than five acres in land, which is exceptionally tiny, tiny, tiny, really small farms, not to call them farms. And these, these were farms and this really matters. These were farms, which were essentially taken and they were tenants of landlords of the 5,000 landlords, more or less, who are Anglo-Irish, are not always so because there are, we have to be very careful not to be absolute on that, but largely speaking, there are 5,000 families who own this land.

So by the 1840s, there are about 3 million people who depend on the potato for more than 90% of their calorific intake in any given year. By the way, the potato was not brought to Ireland by Sir Walter Raleigh. It's a product of the exchange of commerce and culture from Ireland and Spain and Britain and everything to do with that. Just say that in passing.

Blight descended on Europe and in Ireland, hit the potato crop of 1845. That crop lost about half of it was destroyed. extraordinary, just vivid accounts of the smell of rotting potatoes and of the absolute despair of people who put their hand into the soil to pull up a potato plant and to feel that disgusting squelch of rotten potato where it had died in the ground as the withering goes on. The impact then in 1846 was devastating. The entire crop failed. In 1847, there was some improvement, but there was so much limited seed potato available because of the previous two years that not as much had been sold and more was lost. So there's marginal recovery again in 1848, but it was only in 1849 that a normal crop of potatoes was harvested in Ireland. In the course of these four years, and we'll take a few months either side of it and years

either side of it, about 1 million people died of starvation, of illness. In a country that is the richest in the world. Yes. And about over a million people emigrated. Some emigrated to Liverpool, to that already developing Irish community in Liverpool, or that Irish community along Tottenham Court Road in London. Or some went on ships, later renamed coffin ships, to America and to Canada. They stopped at Grosse Ile or in Ellis Island, and these become extremely important places in Irish history. The Irish emigrants who go to America take with them the absolute conviction

that the British are responsible for this. Oh yeah, this really matters. You see it as a deliberate act of genocide. This really matters. So is that true? Well, you have to see what happened during the famine. So the prime ministers who held office during the famine were Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell.

So in the beginning, the government offered for reliance on the provision of employment through public work schemes in Ireland, the building roads, et cetera, the cost of which was to be split between local taxpayers and the central government. And at their height in the spring of 1847, there were about 700,000 people or one in 12 of the population were employed in these schemes. So there's no denying that.

It's kind of like workhouses are operating in England. And the workhouses come into this story in a minute. Then the public work schemes were displaced in 1847 by publicly financed soup kitchens. And these soup kitchens during 1847 were feeding 3 million daily, which is an enormous undertaking. But the government retreated from the provision of those by the October 1847. Every soup kitchen was gone and it was left to the workhouses. And is that because they can't afford it, they say? That was the logic. We're not spending money on this. But is this kind of ideological conviction that it will encourage welfarism? And this is where we get into it. This is where we

get into the weeds of to what extent there's culpability in all of this. So there is an understanding of the gravity of the crisis. And the gravity of the crisis is such that there are bodies such as the Quakers and there are charities who are sending money in arms and they do incredible work. And there is English people who send huge sums of money to help in this. It goes to America where there are Irish emigrants already there

because emigration to America was already enormous before the famine. And they are collecting money and the Choctaw Indians most famously made a donation of the equivalent

of about 5,000 pounds. It's the Choctaw Indians who had their own trail of tears from the 1830s. So they send money. So everybody understands through this,

through the reportage in the newspapers. Nobody can possibly say that they don't know. And the internal British correspondence flowing from Dublin Castle week after week over to England makes clear that there is an extraordinary crisis

which is leading to daily death on an epic scale across Ireland during these years. And two aspects of this, which really matters. The first is you have somebody like Charles Trevelyan, who is the chief of famine administrator in Ireland, who expresses desire that permanent good could come out of transient evil. And that's this idea of famine as an austerity measure. And I don't wish to use a trite modern analogy for it, but it's the idea of providence. Right. And the idea that it's Malthusian, basically,

that a famine will clear out a population to make it more sustainable. And he is the forebearer of Laura Trevelyan, BBC correspondent, who has now given money in reparations to people in the Caribbean because her family had plantations there. And she's talking about doing it with this. And features in one of the most popular Irish ballads, The Fields of Attenrae, where you stole Trevelyan's corn.

Yeah. So the young might see the born. So Trevelyan's corn was understood to be what was taken away. Now, it has to be said there were Irish farmers and Irish businessmen exporting food from Ireland during this thing. This is not a simple narrative and that matters too and must be said. But when it comes down to it, you have the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland writing to the British Prime Minister, Sir John Russell, to say in a letter very clearly, I do not think that there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the West of Ireland and coldly

persist in a policy of extermination. Now that is the leading British official in Ireland writing to the prime minister. But that thing about a policy of extermination suggests a, I mean, at the very least a genuine desire. I mean, extermination is a big word.

So the genuine desire among some English or british policymakers you know to pursue the line that you were just describing the idea that this is a necessary providential course that will you know i mean i don't know how they would have put it winnow out the wheat from the chaff or get rid of the dead wood or they would have used some equally kind of horrific expression or would they or are we being unfair i mean is this what they thought that's as baldly as you can see it written what i've just read out to you there back these ideas are current at the time this idea of malthusian ideas of population and what a population can be sustained on a place and what it means to a place to have a population and how much of that so in the last episode we were talking about the 17th century

and the the stereotypes and the anxieties and that cromwell's troopers took with them when they crossed the irish sea so how much of i mean i guess a lot of people would call it racist wouldn't they how much of that plays into this in other words the fact that the people who are suffering irish does that make the british government's response qualitatively different from if it had been in Yorkshire or in Wales or wherever? Well, I would say that within, to be frank about it, within the ruling classes of Britain at that time, there was a disdain for working people, which can be seen through some of the treatment through the industrial revolution, etc. However, the fact that it was in Ireland matters.

And it was separated by the sea. It's a different landmass. And there is centuries of just this idea that the Irish are not quite civilized or not civilized at all. And you can see it. It endures through the 19th century. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been going back reading newspapers before you guys came over and looking at Punch for example right so the cartoons

the cartoons in Punch and they bring you into a world of what can only be understood as popular representations of what the Irish were by the way those cartoons

I mean or images like that are still appearing in British tabloid newspapers in the 1970s when people are drawing Republican paramilitaries or something. They're drawing them in exactly the same way as Wild, Savage. Simeonized almost, isn't it? Simeon, exactly. Yeah, absolutely.

And it is extraordinary when you look back at it and it's jarring. Why there was a recent column by a cartoonist in the London Times, which again, just got a really bad reaction from here because it brought people back to that idea of the representations of the Irish in the British popular press. And it matters though, the famine matters, obviously. And the story of the famine isn't a million dead. It's the story of the famine is people dying on a ditch in the side of the road while they walk to Delphi Lodge looking for food. Yeah. Because they're starving and being turned away and dying on the way back. It's people being tossed over into the Atlantic Ocean where they die on a coffin ship on the way of cross. And it matters for political reasons because it created a community of Irish people who were abroad, who could not be reconciled to the idea of the United Kingdom.

And the scale of those numbers of emigration are extraordinary. You see, I had the impression that the aftermath of this coming on top of Cromwell and plantations and everything was that in the wake of the famine, that Irish nationalism was Republican, was virulently Anglophobic was absolutely committed to the overthrow of the union and that this was essentially the easter rising and then the the revolution was expressive of majority opinion in ireland in the wake of the famine and i was kind of amazed to discover that wasn't the case at all that actually the the republican nationalism that ends up founding independent ireland is a very very minority pursuit and that actually majority irish nationalism does accept the functioning of the union it wants home rule it wants a kind of a parliament but one that would

be subordinate to the westminster parliament in a weird way the famine leaves a massive political and cultural scar, and one that will never heal, I guess, or one that will never disappear anyway. But why doesn't it lead to greater political... Yeah, because I'm really surprised by that. But why actually is it so quiescent? Is it because the famine is so awful

that people are too exhausted to... Why isn't there a revolution, an uprising, massive political turbulence where you had chris clark on talking about the rebellions of 1848 there was a rebellion in dublin in 1848 by young irelanders a movement who drew on ideas of a newspaper called the nation and they drew on ideas that exact thing we were talking about earlier about republicanism and romanticism and ideas of ireland and nationality and art and culture and music. And it had no support. It was happening in the

middle of famine and partly that's it. So there is a huge dislocation in Ireland caused by the famine and which endures after the famine. Ireland is the only country in Western Europe, which continued to decline in population for a hundred years after the famine. Ireland is the only country in Western Europe which continued to decline in population for a hundred years after the famine. The rest of the population of Europe,

everywhere is exploding. Britain goes in the, what, from 10 million to 40 million in the 19th century. Ireland goes from 8 million to 4 million.

And it continues in free fall. Because of emigration? It's emigration. But just to repeat, I mean, that makes it all the more extraordinary, doesn't it? I agree. But you have to think about it.

How do you win a rebellion? How do you hold and stage and organize a rebellion that will defeat the largest empire the world has known, who have huge numbers of soldiers garrisoned here? And that is it to presume that you want rebellion, but there are people everywhere who live hand to mouth and who accommodate themselves to an environment in which they find themselves and must live. Well, isn't that the issue that if you're living hand to mouth, the thought of, you know, joining an armed rebellion is so potentially disruptive to your already embattled existence that you just think,

listen, I'm just going to crack on and make the best of it. Is that what it is? That there aren't enough? I think it's a bit of everything. I think it's a bit of everything. There is a revolutionary tradition which runs after 1847.

So to answer your question, there is an attempt to found an Irish Republican Brotherhood, sometimes called the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood in 1848. And it's founded in Dublin and New York because New York is the biggest Irish city in the world by the middle of the 19th century. And there are people all over the place there who all around the world, you know, 8 million people left Ireland between 1801 and 1921. That's an extraordinary

figure. But lots of them are going to Britain, right? Oh yeah, a lots of them are going to britain right oh yeah a lot and is that part of what's also going on is that actually the fact that irish people can move to britain because they are citizens of a single kingdom is kind of generating a sense of of the union being something more than just a kind of political expediency i mean is that also part of what's going on but But I think that's inevitable. It's this idea of these ties of kin and commerce, this kind of flow of culture, of education, of jobs, of money. There was a common market between Britain and Ireland from the 1820s onwards. And there was a displacement of Irish industry within that. And the reconstitution of the Irish agricultural experience, for example, and

Ireland was a profoundly rural country at this stage. Ireland wasn't industrializing the way Britain was. Yes, Belfast was, but the rest of the country was largely speaking, staying in rural areas. It was dependent on clearances from the land of people. So they could raise cattle who were then exported behind us as the river Liffey, 12 sailings a day, bringing live cattle across the Irish sea for slaughter and for sale in the expanding conurbations of the north of England and down into London. So Ireland became a country in which it was deeply dependent on the export trade for agricultural projects to England. So there's that tie as well. And you get

flows of emigration, money coming back. You still have people organizing though. 1858, they organized Republican Brotherhood. They staged a rebellion in 1867, which is a disaster. They were riddled by informers and it may as well not have happened. In the wake of that, they pass a resolution that they will await the decision of and seems to have acted as a kind of inhibiting factor on the actual plotting of revolution, this resolution for lots of the Irish Republican I'm not sure it had an inhibiting factor. I think it was the idea that you have to have a chance of success. Like 1867 was lost on an epic scale. It was so poor. Presumably one of the consequences of that is that they remain a kind of this tiny minority. And actually the energies of Irish people who are interested in politics goes into something very different, which is a drive for home rule. So I think we should take a break at this point.

And when we come back, let's talk about that, about how the process of home rule, the impact that it has not just on Ireland but on Britain as well. just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com gladstone spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the irish question unfortunately whenever he was getting warm the irish secretly changed the question so dominic you will recognize 1066 and all that 1066 and all that published in 1930 so tom i don't want to embarrass you but a few weeks ago when we were talking about this episode there was a sense of dread i think in the holland household because you had very foolishly the idea that home rule was a quite boring and dry topic but now in typical tom holland fashion all over it you've read up on it and you're full of excitement and it's a completely fascinating topic because of the seismic impact it

has on the whole of the united kingdom of great britain and ireland and paul you still with us run off uh out into the streets to look for scenes of cricket matches in the easter rising and so on talk us through the process by which Home Rule becomes the focus of Irish political energies in the second half of the 19th century. I suppose it begs the question, to what extent Irish people were accommodating themselves to empire, or to what extent the empire was so powerful and so ubiquitous in its culture, in the spread of its railways, in everything that flowed, to leave it in a way that you couldn't imagine an alternative reality, that this was Ireland's

reality and you should accommodate itself to it. But there is also a sense in which the empire is accommodating itself to Ireland because that passage that I quoted about Gladstone trying to solve the Irish question. I mean, Gladstone is the key figure here because he is the leader of the Liberal Party, which is the hegemonic party for much of this period. And he says, yeah, we accept Home Rule is a cause that we should be getting behind, clearly. But there's also a massive political dimension here, which is there is an Irish parliamentary party. So Ireland has a stake in the empire in a way that no other part of the empire has, right? It has a presence at

Westminster and I don't want to say a powerful lobby, but it has a group that can become powerful based on electoral dynamics. Oh, it's episodically powerful if it's organized in a particular way. It has to be organized and it has to be organized into a party. And that's what happened in the 1870s, where a Home Rule Association, which ultimately became the Irish Parliamentary Party, became the dominant force of the 100 MPs that were sent to the House of Commons in any given year. Now, the 100 MPs, but the way the populations were shifting, meant over-representation in reality of the Irish, but it gave them a presence in Parliament, if it so wished, to put on the agenda the idea of a Home Rule Parliament. So despite the fact that the empire is thriving, despite the fact

that there are these ideas that this is the richest country in the world, there are still a group of people who wish for a separate Parliament under a monarch. The idea of Home Rule that, say, Gladstone signs up to and backing, what would a Home rule have meant? Well, home rule meant a limited amount of powers, for example, not extensive powers of defence, not expensive powers of taxation. It shifted at different stages. You could not say it was independence or you could say it's a distant cousin, but you couldn't say a huge amount more than that. But it was considered by nationalists a stepping stone. Right. So it is seen as a stepping stone. It's not an end point.

It's a stepping stone. There's another thing that really matters. It's a stepping stone. But it also really matters that you can go a long way here to creating a problem for yourself if you imagine that there's a hard wall between revolutionary Irish separatists and the broad suede of the Irish Parliamentary Party, because that's not how it ended up. There are people in the Irish parliamentary party who are Fenians. And remain Fenians, and at different stages.

Now, they may age. That may temper the extent of their Fenianism or their desire for revolution. But it is real, and there's a shared space there which is not discreet. The image that the Home Rulers have of a parliament in Dublin, an Irish parliament, their own sense of a degree of self-determination, I mean a limited degree. From the outset, does that take into account that there are a lot of people in the north-eastern corner of Ireland who they know will be unhappy about this because they're Protestants? No, and I'm very cautious here about stepping on Dan Jackson's territory for later on, but it has been one of the great enduring failures

of Irish nationalism, which arguably is still the case, that there is an underestimate of just how profoundly Ulster Unionists and Loyalists rejected the idea of an independent

The passage from Wolf Tone, the famous passage that Dominic read at the beginning of this episode, makes reference to the fact that Catholics, Protestants and dissenters are all Irishmen and indeed women. And the passage from the proclamation that you read at the first episode by Patrick Pearce, likewise, massive emphasis on the fact that there will be no kind of sectarian character to this Irish Republic. So they're aware of the problem, but do they just think it's not a massive problem that just by uttering fine sounding sentiments, it will all be solved? It comes down to the impossibility of conceiving of Ireland as anything other than a united island.

Problems on the island have been created by the presence of the English stroke British that they have sowed dissent and if they leave, we'll be fine. Number one. Number two, it doesn't really matter if there's a section there who disagree. They're in a minority. Right. And we are the majority and numbers matter. So there we go. And there is no talk of partition on the island before the 1880s. Well, because first of all, you've got to pass home rule, right? So the process by which home rule comes to be brought to the Imperial Parliament in Westminster and then to be rejected. So talk us through that process.

To talk it through, you have to step out of Parliament and out of parliamentary politics and understand land in Ireland and understand that the land of Ireland was owned not by those who farmed it but by the landlords who made money from the rent that was being paid to them.

And who were building all these wonderful houses, stately homes. And we're still talking about maybe 5,000 people or 5,000 families. And you're looking then at a great swale of

often very poor people who were farming that land and who were unable to pay rent. And sometimes there were some evictions, but they desired to own their land. And from 1879 onwards, there was first of all, 1879 to 1881, there's what's called a land war led by an unbelievable figure called Michael Davitt, who wrote a brilliant book called The Fall of Feudalism in 1904, which tells the story of the creation of this Irish land leave. And this is the famous introduction of the word boycott, because there's Captain Boycott,

isn't there, who people refused to pay rents to him or whatever. And so that's where the word boycott comes from. It does. And it's remade. This is a story that's remade around Ireland where local landlords, and there were good landlords, again, in the cartoon version of Irish history, every landlord is evil. But there were good landlords who looked after the Republic, who gave alms during the famine, who were progressive in trying to create a system of agriculture on their lands. But there were others who were absentees. They just took their stuff with them to Westminster and gave nothing in return. And the other thing, I mean, the cartoon version is that the role of the Conservatives in this in Britain, the Tories, is unremittingly negative. But I was amazed to read that actually, what is it, the Wyndham Act of 1903 gave Irish tenant farmers better rights than tenant farmers had anywhere else in the UK. And that this is what a kind of part of a policy on the part of the Conservatives to basically shoot the nationalist foxes to kind of clear up the

grievances to kill the desire for home rule with kindness. Yeah, in that great cliche of Irish history, kill home rule with kindness. But the idea of land reform, the first land act is 1881. And the idea is that the country is ablaze and there are agrarian atrocities happening everywhere. There is murder, there is farms being and there are agrarian atrocities happening everywhere. There is murder. There is farms being set alight. There is anti-eviction campaigns going on. It happens again with the Planet Campaign in 1887 into 1888.

And you have a complete disconnect in the countryside. And what you have is, first of all, Gladstone converted to the idea of home rule as a way of fix the land question. And as part of that, we need to do something different in Ireland. Ireland is different. There's an acceptance that Ireland is different. It's not Wales and it's not Scotland and it's certainly not Northern England. So we must find a way to do this.

So Gladstone puts it onto the books and he tries in 1885 and then into 1886 and it's defeated in the House of Commons through the Tory party who lead a campaign against it and Liberal MPs don't walk with Gladstone. Well he splits his own party Splits his own party, exactly.

And you go on into the 1890s it's tried again and then this time it's passed by the House of Commons because the Liberals but it's blocked in the Lords. So just on the Lords for a second, just to explain that to our listeners. So obviously Westminster Parliament has two houses, the House of Lords, unelected peers. Now these are, I mean, I don't know what the proportion is, but these are by an absolutely overwhelming majority, conservative peers, not liberals.

There is always this issue of how much they will use their power to block the House of Commons. But of course, a lot of these people are landowners in Ireland, aren't they? So they have a dog in the fight. They have a vested interest. I mean, they're not just conservative peers. They are intensely conservative peers, many of them. Yes. And it matters in a different way, actually, when we come on to the opposition to Home Rule for Ireland after 1912, when that's all tied into the super tax of the rich, which is so much a part of post people's budget, British political culture and the divide extraordinary when you read those debates in the House of Commons, just how vitriolic those divides came. It begins in the 1880s with the idea of Home Rule for Ireland led by Charles Stuart Parnell,

his statue at the top of the street here. So it's O'Connell at one end and it's Charles Stuart Parnell at the far end with Nelson gone from the middle. But Parnell is what I, that's because Joyce was obsessed by him. He is the kind of the great leader of the uncrowned king of Ireland, the uncrowned king of Ireland, the Irish parliamentary party in Westminster and working cahoots with Gladstone and then he has this scandalous affair with, in Joyce, she's called Kitty O'Shea Catherine O'Shea. You can't call her Kitty O'Shea Tom, that's a terrible faux pas. Well I'm merely quoting Joyce there and Gladstone refuses

to work with him because he's an adulterer which is very Gladstonian behaviour. It is the story of Parnell and known as Parnell, called himself Parnell. There was a brilliant documentary on RT Radio where they talked to somebody who was a groundskeeper when Parnell was there. And he talked about how he called him Parnell. And it was a recording from the 20s, possibly the 30s. consultation got support and blurred that line between the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Parliamentary Party to present himself as the dominant figure in Irish politics

and got Gladstone to agree to Home Rule. By the way, amazing decade if you look at it, 1882, the two leading British officials in Ireland were murdered by Republicans when they walked in the Phoenix Park murders. Like a really shocking, leading to the creation of the special branch and that development in that part of policing. Number one. Number two, there were bombs sent into Downing Street later in the decade. So the revolutionaries are still there, even if some of them are part of the Home Rule movement. And so Parnell, there's a huge attempt to undermine Parnell as the decade moves on. So there are forgeries used to discredit him and claim that he was always a violent man, really, and that he's really a Fenian dressed up as a politician. a scandal which flows from Catherine O'Shea, whose husband, Captain O'Shea, was an Irish MP. And what it ignores, of course, is that this was something that had been going on throughout the

1880s. They were essentially living together. They had two daughters together. And it was only when there was a dispute over a bequest and the sharing of bequests between Catherine O'Shea and Captain O'Shea that it emerged into the public. And what you had immediately was the forces of people who opposed Home Rule. They could come straight into the middle and they split the party. And you have things like Archbishop Thomas Croke, the most important Catholic cleric in Ireland in the 19th century, describing Parnell as the measly runt who infected the litter. And you have the party split down the middle where you have some people who stay with Parnell, but the majority go against them. And he goes chasing this in an election campaign and he drives himself around the country and he drives himself basically to death.

And the fall of Parnell is kind of a salutary tale on the whole of religion and Irish politics. And his funeral though is one of the most extraordinary sights at the end of 19th century.

There's 2,000 men walking with hurleys, hurling sticks, the symbol of Irish nationalism, as well as being a sporting implement, draped in black crepe paper. It's one of those things that those images which is held and he's walked through and he's lamented as this figure. And in the world of Yeats, Tom, that you mentioned earlier, it leads in his view to a turning away from politics and a resurgence of an interest in culture, which ultimately leads him to ask, 30 or 40 years later,

did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot? So Paul, two Home Rule bills fail, and we're now into the 20th century. Home Rule is still kind of on the agenda, but you have a massive liberal landslide in 1906. So actually, the liberals are now back in, split themselves over Home Rule, opening the door to 20 years of Tory hegemony. Then the liberals are back in, but they don't need the Irish Parliamentary Party to do that. They've got a massive majority. So Home Rule, they don't really care about Home Rule. I mean, Asquith and co, they're not massively signed up to it as gladstone was i mean it's fascinating because of developments in british politics because they fall out with

the house of lords by the tories about their own economic and kind of social welfare plans they're regarded as revolutionaries by the tories the liberals there are two elections they lose their majority effectively now they're dependent on the Irish Parliamentary Party. And now Home Rule is back on the agenda with a vengeance. The dream scenario for the Irish Parliamentary Party is exactly this. The Liberals and the Conservatives are stuck on almost exactly the same number of seats after two elections. And there is the kingmaker in John Redmond, who was a Parnellite in the 1890s, stuck with him after the split, the Irish parliamentary party split, was divided for

10 years, reunited under Redmond. But the question is what they would do. Now, Redmond, Tom, you mentioned earlier the Wyndham Act, which on top of the 1903 and the 1909 Acts, are extraordinary gestures and attempts introducing compulsory purchase of landlord-held land in Ireland and making it be sold to the tenant farmers. It's redistributed by the Tories initially and then topped up by Augustine Burrell's driving of the alien rights.

And John Redden was essentially... So Augustine Burrell is the liberal representative in Dublin. Yes, he's the chief secretary, sits in the cabinet, comes over. And so this is where we get into John Redmond. So John Redmond is a fascinating figure. He's the head of the Irish parliamentary party. He's the man who's replaced Arnell and has been largely written out of Irish nationalist history. His statue is not on O'Connell Street,

despite the fact that he is the Home Rule leader who got the Act eventually onto the statute books, even if it didn't mean anything. And a kingmaker in British politics who's now being completely written out of British history. We talked about this in the first episode. I'm astonished that John Redmond is not part of the teaching that you got because of his seminal role

in allowing for the Parliament Act of 1911, which basically limited the amount of time that the House of Lords could stop a bill, which had huge implications for Homeworld. So talk us through that. I'll pick that. Just one thing on that. Just as I think I said to you before we were recording, in 18 years or so as a history-obsessed schoolboy,

I don't think I ever heard the words John Redmond or even saw them written down. I mean, he's just not part of the... This whole thing is not part of the this whole thing is not part of britain's story of itself is it tom at all i mean you could be really interested in history in britain and this would simply be a black hole as far as your consciousness is concerned although having said that i think that there is a sense that something ominous is brewing connected with irish politics in the years that build up to the Great War. I think there is that sense, but I think it's so complicated that I can't really get my head around it. I just know that things are heading towards a smash. We will be talking about this,

but England, not just Ireland, but England was being pulled to civil war by virtue of the crisis in Ireland and how that crisis was dealt with in England by British politicians and what they chose to do during these years is hugely important, not just for Ireland, but for Britain.

And some of the stuff that went on makes the shenanigans post-Brexit look utterly meaningless and irrelevant. The proroguing of parliament, the stuff in the judiciary, irrelevant. Yeah.

Besides the scale of the current mutiny to name but one thing and we'll come back to this so john redmond who is i mean he he dreams of home rule this is his chance he's been the leader post parnell and he and asquith the liberal prime minister so they go for the third home rule bill now complicating i mean such as thomas is a very complicated story. But because of the stuff about the budget in Britain and the fight over there, what's seen as the liberals' revolutionary kind of welfare state legislation, and because of the massive constitutional ructions around that,

the conservatives regard the liberals as a kind of revolutionary, almost illegitimate government. Andrew Bonalloy, the leader of the Conservative Party, regards the liberals as a kind of revolutionary, almost illegitimate government. Andrew Bonalloy, the leader of the Conservative Party, described a government which had won three elections, by the way, described them as a revolutionary committee which has seized by fraud upon despotic power. Yeah. And the despotic power here is that they basically, because the king has, it's hard to say he's sided with, he hasn't quite sided with the liberals, but in an attempt to find a compromise, they have. Oh, he did, Dominic.

I think you can say he did. He sided with the liberals. Because he gave, just so people understand, why would the House of Lords pass a law which would limit its powers of veto to three years rather than making it absolute? Why would they do that? And the only reason they did it was because Asquith received from the king from news that he would flood the House of Lords. Yeah, with liberal peers. With liberal peers. Therefore, conservative peers took the view, well, we better take this compromise or we lose power entirely.

So just to simplify it, so basically what's happened is that the House of Lords' veto power over Home Rule has been largely removed. So now, actually, Asquith and Redmond can dream, if dream is the right word, of a world in which an Irish Home Rule Bill will get through the House of Commons, the House of Lords will eventually approve it. And that then raises the issue of

there are actually people in Ireland who don't want the Home Rule Bill. Well, it's a deal. It's more than they can dream of it. They've done a deal. Whereas Redmond will support the Parliament Act. Redmond previously supported

the people's budget, even though it increased things like the cost of having drink licenses in Ireland and put a tax on drinking, etc., etc., which did not play well with the publicans of this island, who are fundamental to the Irish Parliamentary

Party around the place. And it introduced things like Social Welfare Act and old age pensions, which had a huge long-term cost for what Redmond thought would be an Irish exchequer. So he swallowed things he didn't want to support the Parliament Act in a deal that there would be a Home Rule Bill brought in in 1912, giving Home Rule to Ireland. But as I understand it, the bill is brought in in 1912. By the terms of this new Act, the government has to reintroduce the bill three times in exactly the same phrasing, and then it's passed. Then the House of Lords can no longer block it.

So by introducing it in 1912, they're basically saying it will be passed in 1915. It will become law in 1915. No, bring it in in 1912, April 1912. That. They're basically saying it will be passed in 1915. It will become law in 1915. No, bring it in in 1912, April 1912. That's the first way. It goes again in April 1913, but then it's April 1914. Okay. So now the possibility is there for Ireland at last to have home rule. The legislative mechanism has been, as it were, prepared.

But there are a group of people in Ireland who are, it's not just they don't want home rule, they are vehemently opposed to it and they are prepared to take up arms to fight against it. Oh, they're prepared to take up arms. And I know Dan is going to talk about the idea of this unity and the impact that the idea of home rule

had on British society. We in Ireland like to think it just affected Irish society, but of course it was a huge popular enthusiasm for empire and the prosperity of their society being based, rooted in this empire. And there were connections with people in Ulster and within Ulster, there were people who were prospering and they saw that prosperity and their

freedom as being intrinsically linked to the idea of remaining part of the United Kingdom. They could not countenance any measure that would change or dilute their position within the United Kingdom. And again, there was a failure on the Liberal behalf and an absolute failure in the Irish Parliamentary Party to understand just the depth of that feeling. And Paul, you mentioned these words earlier on, so it's not an exaggeration to talk of it. At this point in 1912, it's fair to say, is it,

that Britain and Ireland are heading plausibly towards civil war? Oh, it is some statement to say that events in Sarajevo actually were said by Herbert Asquith wrote that they were the luckiest thing that happened in his career. Great. So Tom, we'll be back next time, won't we? Not with Paul, but with a different guest, friend of the show, Dan Jackson, who will be talking about the Home Rule crisis, the implications in Britain, how close we came to civil war. And then Paul will be back to talk about the Easter Rising. So finally, how close we came to civil war. And then Paul will be back to talk about the Easter Rising. So finally, Tom, we'll get back to the proclamation

with which we began the first episode. So Paul, thank you so much. And we look forward to speaking to you very shortly about the Easter Rising. My pleasure. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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