Nationalist Party

Nationalist Party (1882–1922), the generic term for the Irish parliamentary party and its successive constituency organizations. From Isaac Butt's loose group in the 1870s it grew into a strongly centralized party under Parnell and his successors. The party was tightly structured: Parnell's aristocratic authority being reinforced by control of the funds made available to needy MPs, and by strict enforcement of ‘the pledge’ by all candidates to ‘sit, act, and vote’ as directed. In Ireland the party was sustained first by the National League, a constituency organization which replaced the Land League in 1882, and which was itself over‐shadowed during the 1890s by the anti‐Parnellite Irish National Federation; both were replaced in 1900 by the United Irish League (UIL), supported later by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Irish vote in Great Britain was organized by the Irish National League of Great Britain until 1900 and thereafter by the United Irish League of Great Britain (UILGB) under the leadership of T. P. O'Connor. Except during the 1890s, party funds raised from the Irish abroad exceeded the totals raised at home.

In parliament after 1882, weight of numbers replaced disruptive tactics. After the electoral changes of 1884–5, up to 86 of Ireland's 103 parliamentary seats (plus one in Liverpool) went regularly to Nationalists. In the 1880s most MPs were young agrarian militants, but the average age rose from 40 in the 1880s to 55 in 1918. Outside the divided north, over 60 seats often went uncontested. The party usually included about ten Protestant MPs, but its record in securing northern Protestant votes was minimal: Ulster's segregated society dictated that elections would be sectarian headcounts where the crucial contests were not those fought by politicians on the hustings but those between rival party solicitors at the annual revision courts which maintained the electoral register. In the north as in the south the route to maximum support lay through the social institutions of Catholic Ireland: a majority of the hierarchy supported the party, while at the local level priests played key roles, and made up about a third of the attendance at conventions.

The party had two weapons: the ‘Irish vote’ in British constituencies; and the ‘balance of power’ at Westminster, which after the Conservatives espoused unionism in 1885–6 meant a Liberal alliance. Nationalist leaders probably exaggerated their influence over the Irish vote in Britain, but despite the rival appeal of Conservatives on Catholic schools and liquor licensing, and of Labour to trade unionists, the UILGB maintained its official commitment to the Liberals. Legislative home rule, the party's overarching aim, was scarcely on the parliamentary agenda between 1886 and 1910: although the balance of power might be achieved, the House of Lords' veto continued. During its long wait the party developed a role as parliamentary advocate of Catholic interests, its most notable success being the creation of the National University in 1908. More central to its authority in these years was a continued dependence on agrarianism and the UIL: but although still serviceable, ‘the land for the people’ was becoming an increasingly rickety slogan as the social structure of rural Ireland diversified.

Explanations for the party's decline fall into two categories. One emphasizes the impact of the First World War, while the other places more stress on earlier failings and on underlying social changes already beginning to be apparent before 1914. There is little serious evidence that the futility of the 1890s Parnellite split did the party long‐term damage: the later breakaway by William O'Brien and T. M. Healy in 1910, though restricted to the south‐west, created as many dissident nationalist MPs, yet coincided with the party's greatest years.

More important than these divisions among the older generation of Nationalist politicians were generational and social changes. First, electoral reform and the passage of years meant that fewer than one‐third of the 1918 electorate which rejected the party so resoundingly had been electors in 1910. Secondly, although about half of the Irish party in the 1880s came from humbler occupational backgrounds than their British counterparts, a further third were university educated and many were men of high local standing. The party did not take up cultural nationalism after 1900 as convincingly as it had embraced agrarianism a generation earlier, but this was less because it failed to identify the issues than because its involvement was not welcomed: those who took up the new movements most enthusiastically came mainly from more modest backgrounds—typically farmers' sons with an education and a job in the public service, for whom the small‐town notable so characteristic of the Nationalist Party seemed to represent less an ideal of patriotism than an uninspiring gombeenism.

But from 1910 to 1914 the party played the balance of power card very effectively, restoring home rule to centre stage. Its dramatic collapse from over 70 seats in 1910 to 6 seats in 1918 stemmed not from its adherence to parliamentary methods but from its failure to develop an effective Ulster policy—a failing shared by Sinn Féin. Having adhered to an ostrich‐like policy on Ulster Unionism until 1914, the party compounded its difficulties at home by a misguided attempt to make active support for the war the foundation for a new sense of unity in Ireland. Instead the opposite happened: economic hardship recruited the urban poor for the British army but elsewhere, especially in rural areas, the call for sacrifice merely sharpened the sense of national difference. As in continental Europe, the war weakened a liberal ethnic movement and nurtured more strident articulations of national sentiment. It is unlikely that, without its influence, the new would have overcome the old either so completely or so rapidly.

Bibliography

Bew, Paul , Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910 (1987)
Lyons, F. S. L. , The Irish Parliamentary Party, 1890–1910 (1951)
O'Brien, C. C. , Parnell and his Party (1957)

A. C. Hepburn