What was irish home rule

Unionist arms were landed along the north Antrim coast in April and smaller consignments of arms were landed by the Nationalist Irish Volunteers on 26 July and 1 August. The two volunteer forces were under the control of elected parliamentarians by the summer of and their combined numbers were close to , volunteers — on paper at least. The Ulster crisis was diffused by the outbreak of the First World War with unionists and Home Rulers rallying behind the crown and pledging their support for imperial defence.

However, an accompanying amending act suspended its operation for the duration of the war in Europe and pending resolution of the Ulster question.

Approximately , Irishmen fought in the First World War. The Rising derailed the prospects of Home Rule being implemented as planned. A fourth Home Rule bill was passed as the Government of Ireland Act offering a two state solution. Whereas Irish nationalism had now evolved beyond Home Rule and demanded a separatist republican settlement, Ulster unionists accepted the offer of a northern parliament governing six of the nine counties of Ulster.

Ironically, this made Northern Ireland the only part of the island in which a home rule settlement was implemented. Section Editor: Jennifer Wellington. Mulvagh, Conor: Irish Home Rule , in: online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. DOI : Version 1. Self-aggrandising statues of prominent nationalists have replaced those of Queen Victoria and the glorious dead of the Boer war, and the bustling city of commerce and industry has given way to pigs, cows and sheep conventional Unionist symbols for lazy, southern Irish farming practices.

Here, another symbol of the royal connection with Ireland, the Prince Albert Clock Tower, is being demolished, while a replacement, in the form of a statue of John Redmond, is wheeled in. The Home Rule cabinet comprised of leading figures of the real Irish Parliamentary Party is shown engaged in an unstatesmanlike fistfight. This was highlighting Unionist claims that passionate and emotional Catholics were incapable of governing themselves.

It was in the field of creative fiction that literary Unionists worked hardest to imagine Home Rule. From the s through to the s, novels of often dubious literary merit were produced in which dystopian visions of self-government were projected. While the corruption, incompetence, and score-settling of Home Rule was savagely satirised in the fiction of Frank Frankfort Moore, popular Unionist fears and assumptions were also fictionalised according to familiar Victorian and Edwardian literary themes of romance, revenge and tragedy.

In one such example, Under Home Rule , published anonymously in , the southern Anglo-Irish Fitzmaurice family resist eviction from Castle Fitzmaurice by the new police force, made up of their former tenantry, after refusing to pay exorbitant taxes to the new Irish parliament. By , the epicenter of Unionism had moved northwards, and novels such as The North Afire , in which a violent civil war is fought between Ulster Nationalists and Loyalists, reflected this shift.

Clearly not everyone was preoccupied with Home Rule. Nonetheless, many groups, organisations, and individuals were. Not only because of party and religious affiliations, but also because they interpreted it through their own experiences and expectations.

Of course, the Irish War of Independence forced the great majority of Irish people to imagine their future in the light of very different circumstances. It is therefore, ironic, that of all those who envisioned Home Rule before , only Unionists were to have the opportunity. The Government of Ireland Act created Northern Ireland, which allowed them to find out if the reality of Home Rule measured up to their predictions.

Kelly, Woodbridge, Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. While such a basic notion involves many more complex issues, the fact remains that in the two years preceding the passage of Home Rule, Irish revolutionary movements took advantage of poor British policies and a weakened Home Rule Bill to finally gain the necessary support for the push towards independence.

Redmond, J. What Ireland Wants Dublin, , pp. Irish Political Documents Dublin: Irish Academic Press , Jones, Francis P. New York: P. Peatling, G. Irish Home Rule, New York: St. Jones, History of Sinn Fein, p. Peatling, British Opinion, p. Acts parl. Garvin, Tom. Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, Oxford: Clarendon Press , Jalland, Patricia.

Announced at Dublin meeting, November 26, Boyce, David G. Redmond did oppose exclusion for Ulster. Hansard 5 Commons , lxv, , August 3,