Explainer: What was Home Rule?
By Dr. Conor Mulvagh
What was Home Rule?
Home Rule was the demand that the governance of Ireland be
returned from Westminster to a domestic parliament in Ireland.
Ireland had had its own parliament up to 1800 when the Act of
Union ended Irish representation at the parliament sitting at
College Green in Dublin. Under the Union, MPs elected for Irish
constituencies went over to Westminster and sat alongside English,
Scottish, and Welsh MPs in a legislature that had jurisdiction
over the whole of both islands as well as the colonies of the
British Empire.
When was the Home Rule movement established?
The idea of Home Rule dates from 1870 but it should be viewed as
part of a longer tradition which aimed at revising the Anglo-Irish
relationship by constitutional methods. The first attempt to
repeal the Act of Union was made by Daniel O’Connell in the
1840s. This was ultimately a failure and Irish politics in the
mid-nineteenth century was dominated by MPs acting as Irish
representatives of the Liberal and Tory parties. In 1870, Isaac
Butt, a barrister and former Tory MP, founded the Irish Home
Government Association. The movement combined a powerful cross
section of progressive landowners, tenant rights activists, and
supporters and sympathisers of the failed Fenian uprising of 1867
to create a third way in Irish politics. By 1874, styled as the
Home Rule League, Butt’s nascent party succeeded in gaining
the loose allegiance of 59 out of 103 Irish MPs.
What about Parnell?
The most significant event to occur in the emergence of a more
powerful Home Rule movement was in 1880 when Charles Stewart
Parnell was elected chairman of the party. Parnell was a master
organiser. He ran the party like a machine from parish level to
parliament and by coupling the demand for Home Rule with the
intensifying agitation for tenant rights in Ireland, Home Rule
became an extremely powerful force in politics. Between the land
question and the demand for Home Rule, Irish issues consumed a
large proportion of parliamentary time at Westminster during the
1880s and intermittently thereafter.
Did the Home Rule movement achieve anything?
On three occasions, a Home Rule bill was introduced to the House
of Commons. In 1886, Prime Minister William E. Gladstone
introduced the first Home Rule bill. However, this move split his
governing Liberal Party and the bill was defeated in the House of
Commons. In 1893, a second Home Rule bill managed to pass through
the House of Commons but it was thrown out by the House of Lords.
Once more, in 1912, a Home Rule bill passed the House of Commons.
The powers of the House of Lords had been curtailed in 1911 and,
under the new parliamentary mechanisms, the Lords could only delay
rather than reject the bill. At the beginning of 1913, the Liberal
Lord Crewe, former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, opened the debates
on the bill in the Lords. The rejection of Home Rule by the Lords
was a fait accompli but, with only the power of delay remaining to
them, the real danger to the passage of the bill came from outside
of Parliament, where Unionist Ulster was organising in earnest its
resistance to the imposition of the bill on the North East.
Why did British governments agree to introduce Home Rule bills
to parliament?
On all three of the occasions when Home Rule bills were introduced
to the House of Commons, Home Rulers held the balance of power
between the Liberal and Conservative parties which were roughly
evenly split. Finding themselves in this position, Home Rulers
were able to negotiate for the introduction of a Home Rule bill in
exchange for supporting the Liberal Party, traditionally a
sympathetic ally on the Irish question. This support gave the
Liberals the required majority to form a government. The exact
same situation exists in Westminster today where Nick
Clegg’s Liberal Democrats hold the balance between the
Labour and Conservative parties, and David Cameron’s
government requires the support of the Liberal Democrats to stay
in power.
How does Home Rule fit into the wider British context?
Home Rule was an extremely important concept in the British Empire
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To fully
appreciate its significance, it must be viewed in an imperial
rather than a purely Irish concept. Before the outbreak of the
First World War, the nature of government in the British Empire
was changing. Greater independence and forms of domestic
governance were granted to Canada, Australia, and South Africa in
1867, 1900, and 1909 respectively. Thus, Britain can be seen to
have been gradually liberalising its system of imperial
governance, at least for ‘civilised’ components of the
empire. This contrasts starkly with the disorderly and chaotic
nature of de-colonisation that was experienced by Britain, France,
and other European powers following the Second World War.
Dr. Conor Mulvagh lectures in the School of History & Archives, University College Dublin