Home Rule, Irish

Home Rule, Irish, term given to the political movement which sought legislative independence for Ireland from the 1860s. Organizations such as the Home Government Association founded in 1870 and succeeded by the Home Rule League in 1873 hoped to secure a federal settlement for the United Kingdom with an Irish parliament responsible for domestic matters but deferring to the British parliament at Westminster on imperial matters. Led by Issac Butt, the Home Rule movement won 56 seats in the general election of 1874 and when its MPs attended Westminster they formed a diverse but distinct Irish party.

Butt's leadership was weak, and he was succeeded by William Shaw in 1879, and Charles Stewart Parnell in 1880. Parnell created a dynamic and cohesive party at Westminster, while in Ireland he joined the issue of home rule to land reform. At the 1885 General Election the Irish Parliamentary party led by Parnell secured 86 seats and supported William Gladstone's liberal government who introduced the First Home Rule bill. This was defeated in the House of Commons on June 8, 1886. A Second Home Rule bill was introduced by Gladstone in 1892, and though successful in the House of Commons it was rejected by the unionist-dominated House of Lords. The Third Home Rule bill was introduced on April 11, 1912 by the Liberal prime minister Asquith. Although the bill was passed by the House of Commons in January 1913, and eventually put on the Statute Book, the House of Lords used its veto to delay its enactment for two years. Negotiations took place between John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary party, and Sir Edward Carson, leader of the Unionist party, over the implementation of a home rule settlement for Ireland and the issue of partition for Ulster and its continuation within the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. By the outbreak of World War I, no settlement had been reached, and on the insistence of Asquith both parties agreed to suspend the implementation of the act until the war was over.

The situation in Ireland changed fundamentally during World War I. Militant republican nationalists staged a rebellion in Dublin during Easter Week 1916. Consequently, the revolutionary Sinn Féin movement which the rebellion inspired became a mass popular movement against British rule and undermined the constitutional politics of the Irish Parliamentary party which was practically wiped out in the 1918 General Election. David Lloyd George's government, in an attempt to find a peaceful solution to demands for Irish self-determination, passed in 1920 the Government of Ireland act in the middle of the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). This legislation amounted to the Fourth Home Rule act and created two home rule parliaments: one in Belfast with jurisdiction over the six counties of north-eastern Ireland; and one in Dublin with jurisdiction over the other 26 counties in southern Ireland. The 1920 act was ignored in southern Ireland and was superseded by the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), which established an independent Irish Free State in December 1922.