home rule

home rule, the objective of constitutional nationalists from 1870 to 1918. The term was believed to have been coined by Revd Joseph A. Galbraith, a member of the Home Government Association, and was carefully chosen to maximize the appeal of a movement which, in the wake of Anglican disestablishment, was attracting significant support from the Protestant middle and upper classes. Its political usefulness has been described in terms of a ‘transfiguring vagueness’ which enabled the most extreme nationalists, as well as the most moderate, to invest the term with their own meanings.

The most authoritative statement of what home rule meant was made by Isaac Butt, who envisaged an arrangement whereby Ireland, Scotland, and England would have a common sovereign, executive, and ‘national council’ at Westminister for the purposes of statehood in the international arena, while each country would have its own parliament for domestic affairs. In Ireland's case the specific form of parliament would be decided by an Irish assembly elected on the basis of household suffrage. Throughout his leadership Butt refused to commit his ideas to the precise form of a parliamentary bill, believing it best to campaign for the principle of home rule rather than have to defend every detail of its implementation.

Butt's approach to the home rule question was followed by his successor Parnell, and the vagueness of ‘home rule’ took on an enhanced importance as the character of the movement changed in the 1870s, with the decline in landlord involvement and the growing prominence of Fenians, Catholic clergy, and, from 1879, agrarian radicals. Indeed vagueness on the specific meaning of home rule was especially suited to Parnell, whose politics in general were based on ambiguity. Home rule took a concrete form only when Gladstone became converted to the policy and used Butt's ideas, together with colonial precedents, especially those of Canada, as the groundwork for the home rule bill of 1886. This plan envisaged a local assembly consisting of two chambers, charged with responsibility for Ireland's internal affairs, while Westminster retained control of such areas as imperial and foreign affairs, armed forces, currency, security, and major taxation.

However, there were problems inherent in the very concept of home rule, and these became part of the case against Gladstone's plan. Most difficult was the question of taxation and representation. Since Ireland would continue to pay an imperial contribution, it was accepted that Irish MPs would continue to sit at Westminster; but this would give them a voice not only in imperial policies but in the making of governments at Westminster and in the domestic affairs of the British mainland. This was a problem that was never resolved.

Gladstone's plan of 1886 failed to get the unanimous support of the Liberal Party. A section led by Joseph Chamberlain (see central board) allied with the Conservatives to defeat it in the Commons. Nevertheless, despite its weaknesses, it became the template for the second home rule bill, rejected by the Lords in 1893, and for the third, introduced by a Liberal government dependent on Irish nationalist support in 1912. Politically, as distinct from constitutionally, the most significant weakness of the home rule schemes was the failure to cater for the specific interests of Protestant north‐east Ulster; and it was from that quarter that the most strenuous opposition to home rule came in the pre‐war period. The enactment of the third home rule bill in 1914, despite Ulster Unionist opposition, was purely formal, its implementation being suspended until the end of the First World War, by which time the Irish parliamentary party and home rule had been superseded by Sinn Féin and the demand for a republic. By a supreme historical irony the only part of Ireland to be given home rule (see partition) was Unionist Ulster, which had done so much to oppose it.

Bibliography

Kendle, John , Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution (1989)
Loughlin, James , Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question 1882–93 (1986)

James Loughlin