Irish Nationalism

Irish Nationalism, in general, the struggle for national freedom in Ireland against the domination of England (latterly Great Britain). This struggle lasted for 750 years, from the time of the invasion of 1170 to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, which brought independence to 26 of its 32 counties.

England's involvement with Ireland began with Henry II, who crossed to Ireland with a strong army in 1171 to subdue one of his own barons, Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Pembroke had married the daughter of the Irish king of Leinster and had succeeded him to the throne. Thereafter, Ireland was conquered piecemeal by Norman barons who introduced their system of feudalism and common law. All over Ireland, resurgence against the invading English was endemic, and only contained by the fact that the Irish were unable to unite their forces.

After the Black Death in 1348, which halved the population, Ireland ceased to be a prosperous source of revenue to the occupiers, and English landlords took to absenteeism. By the 15th century, the area of Ireland under effective English rule had shrunk to a strip of territory between Dublin and Dundalk (the Pale). This situation was changed by the arrival of an English army dispatched by Henry VII under the command of Sir Edward Poynings. Poynings, as Lord Lieutenant, enacted a law which subordinated all acts of the Irish Parliament to the approval of the king and his council in England, and it was this which determined the relations between the two countries until the 1800 legislative union. Subsequently, following the rebellion of the Earl of Kildare, Henry VIII sent another army to subjugate Ireland; this took six years of bitter fighting, successfully concluded when Henry was given the title of King (as opposed to Lord) of Ireland by the Irish Parliament in 1541.

The problem of religion now arose, with England's repudiation of papal authority; the Irish objected strongly to the abolition of the Mass under Edward VI, and before long a new rebellion in Munster (this time involving Spanish troops) had to be put down (1569-1583). During the reign of Elizabeth I, Irish tenants were displaced by English settlers, and independent Connaught was steadily Anglicized. Finally, a nationalist revolt in Ulster under Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone was savagely repressed (1593-1603), setting the stage for a further drive to Anglicize the country under the Stuarts.

In the first half of the 17th century, the resistance of Irish leaders to English encroachment created a cycle of rebellion, military repression, appropriation of lands in rebel territory, and the settling of those lands with people from the British mainland. Ulster was resettled with Protestants in exactly this way (see Ulster Plantation), and on the eve of the English Civil War, in 1641, a bloody rebellion there pitted Protestant against Catholic. This marked a turning point in Irish history, with religion, economic antagonisms, and sectarian hatred creating a gulf between the two nations that was deeper than ever before. The ruthless suppression by Oliver Cromwell of the Irish royalists in 1649 with the Siege of Drogheda, followed by the Restoration in 1660 of Charles II, cemented the fate of the old Roman Catholic Irish landowners: having owned nearly three-fifths of the land in 1640, they found themselves reduced to less than one-fifth 20 years later. The accession of the Roman Catholic James II in 1685, his deposition, and his doomed attempt to regain his throne at the head of an Irish army led to the disastrous Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690, at which James was utterly defeated by the Protestant forces of William III. Thereafter, the Protestant Irish Parliament passed a series of penal laws against the Irish Catholics which forbade them to attend Mass or buy or inherit land. This had the practical effect of crippling the economic activities of the native Irish.

Thus began the era of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, which held rebellion at bay for nearly a century—until the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 sponsored by William Pitt the Younger, which gave the Catholics the vote on the same basis as Protestants and made them eligible for most offices. However, this was followed in 1798 by the failed uprising of the United Irishmen under Wolfe Tone and its suppression by British forces under Charles Cornwallis; and Pitt, after negotiating the Act of Union of January 1, 1801, which abolished the Irish Parliament and gave Ireland full representation at Westminster, was forced to resign when George III refused to approve full Catholic emancipation.

The 19th century saw a sea change in the political condition of Ireland. The mass movement for emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell was successful in 1829, when civil disabilities against Catholics were removed by the administration of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington; but perhaps the most important event for Ireland's future was the Irish Famine of 1845-1848, in which almost a million people died and over a million emigrated, principally to the United States. These new exiles carried with them a deep resentment of the British presence in Ireland, and eventually they and their descendants played a vital role in financing the fight for Irish independence.

Meanwhile, at home, the Fenian political revolutionaries plotted unavailingly to overthrow British rule by violence, until the call for Irish Home Rule revived mass Irish nationalism under the banner of Charles Stewart Parnell. The conversion of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone to Parnell's ideas in the 1880s caused a sensation, but he failed in two attempts (1886 and 1892-1893) to push his Home Rule Bill through Parliament. The result of this disappointment was to radicalize many younger Irish men, who joined organizations such as Sinn Féin, led by Arthur Griffith, to promote the idea of a free Ireland. Rising national feeling also led to the Irish Renaissance in Irish literature. But Home Rule was not dead: on the eve of World War I, the government of Herbert Henry Asquith in London finally passed the third Home Rule Bill, though it was immediately suspended until the end of hostilities.

As it turned out, the diversion of British energies into the war hastened a denouement to the Irish question. A rising directed by Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and Roger Casement was planned to take place in Dublin on Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916. The Easter Rising, as it was to be known, lasted for five days (April 24-29), but although the rising ended in failure the executions that followed profoundly shocked public opinion and gained many thousands of new recruits for Sinn Féin and its military arm, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). When World War I ended in 1918, the Irish Revolution entered its decisive phase as a guerrilla war broke out in Ireland between the IRA and the Royal Irish Constabulary, supported by British Army units (the Black and Tans). The IRA tactic of killing police officers wherever they were encountered led to a collapse of public order, and the atrocities committed by both sides between 1919 and 1921 aroused public opinion in Britain and the United States to such a pitch that Prime Minister Lloyd George was obliged to negotiate with Sinn Féin in July 1921. After five months of talks, terms were agreed for the formation of an Irish Free State similar to the Dominion of Canada, but excluding the six counties of Ulster. The resulting treaty was signed on December 6, 1921.

Irish nationalism proper achieved its goal in 1921 with the establishment of the independent nation which became the present Republic of Ireland; but following the Partition of Ireland and the retention of the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster in the United Kingdom, old Irish nationalist forms and traditions were perpetuated in the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, breaking out in agitation and eventual violence in the 1960s. The sections of the Irish Republic's constitution laying claim to the entire island of Ireland sustained a territorially based nationalism, until these were dropped following a referendum in May 1998, in an effort to promote closer cooperation between the Republic and Northern Ireland.