The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) (commonly called the Irish Party) was formed in 1882
by Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Nationalist Party, replacing the Home Rule League,
as official parliamentary party for Irish nationalist Members of Parliament (MPs)
elected to the House of Commons at Westminster within the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland up until 1918. Its central objectives were legislative independence for Ireland and land reform. It
was instrumental in laying the groundwork for Irish self-government through three Home Rule
bills.
Severing the union
The IPP evolved out of the Home Government Association founded by
Isaac Butt after he defected from the Irish
Conservative Party in 1870, to gain a limited form of freedom from Britain in order to protect and control Irish domestic affairs in the
interest of the Protestant landlord class, after William E. Gladstone and his
Liberal Party came to power in 1868 under his slogan Justice for Ireland, when
Irish Liberals gained 65 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster. Gladstone said his mission was to pacify Ireland and began with
the disestablishment of the Protestant Church of
Ireland and introducing his first land bill which led to the First Irish Land Act
1870, implementing limited tenant rights , thereby infringing on the powers of the Irish landlords to
indiscriminately evict tenant farmers. At first the Catholic hierarchy supported Gladstone supervising Irish affairs, hoping to
gain financial aid for a Catholic University. But his educational programme of 1873 did not provide for a denominational
university.
The Home Government Association adopted educational issues and land reform into its programme, the hierarchy then favouring a
Dublin based parliament. The increasing Catholic numbers within the association frightened off its Protestant, landlord element.
The association was dissolved and Butt replaced it by the Home Rule League. Gladstone
unexpectedly called a new election in 1874, which helped bring the League to the foreground. Since 1872 the Secret Ballots Act had been introduced, so that voting was to be done secretly for the first time from
then on. The League put denominational education, land reform and release of political prisoners at the centre of the movement.
It had difficulty finding reliable candidates to support its Home Rule issue, though succeeded in winning fifty-nine Irish seats,
many with ex-Liberals.
Party inaugurated
After the election they assembled in Dublin and organised themselves into a separate Irish parliamentary party in the Commons.
The political outlook appeared encouraging at first, but the party displayed no initiative to achieve anything, the Liberals and
Gladstone having lost the election. Butt displayed lack of leadership, did not commit his party to anything. He made some
excellent speeches but failed to persuade any of the major parties to support bills beneficial to Ireland, nothing worthwhile
reaching the statute books.
A minor group of twenty Irish members, the genuine "Home-Rulers" adopted the method of parliamentary "obstructionism" to snap Westminster out of its complacency towards Ireland by proposing amendments to
almost every bill and making lengthy overnight speeches. This did not bring Home Rule closer but helped to revitalise the Irish
party. Butt consider obstructionism a threat to democracy, its greatest benefit undoubtedly that it helped bring Charles Stewart
Parnell to the fore of the political scene when in 1876 he joined the obstructionists. An internal struggle began between Butt’s
majority and Parnell’s minority leading to a rift in the party, Parnell determined to obtain control of the Home Rule League.
Land-war mainspring
Parnell first worked successfully to have Fenians who missed out on
Gladstone’s earlier amnesty freed, including Michael Davitt , who was very impressed by
Parnell. After his release in 1877 Davitt travelled to America to meet John Devoy, the leading Irish-American Fenian and raise funds. On his return he founded in October 1879 the
Irish National Land League to which Parnell was elected president, but did
not control it, favouring mass meetings to Fenian militancy. Isaac Butt died of strain later that year and Parnell held back in
grabbing control of the party. Instead he too travelled to America with John Dillon on a
fund raising mission for political purposes and to relieve distress in Ireland after a world economic depression slumped the sale
of agricultural produce.
At the general election of April 1880, sixty-four Home Rulers
were elected, twenty-seven Parnell supporters, facilitating in May his nomination as leader of a divided Home Rule Party and of a
country on the brink of a land war. He immediately understood that supporting land agitation was a means to achieving his
objective of self-government. The Conservatives under Disraeli had been defeated in the election and Gladstone was again Prime Minister. He attempted to
defuse the land question with Balfour’s dual ownership Second Land Act of 1881 which failed to eliminate tenant evictions. Parnell and his party lieutenants,
William O'Brien, John Dillon, Michael Davitt, Willie Redmond, went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned for "sabotaging the
Land Act", from where the No-Rent Manifesto was issued calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike which was
partially followed. Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely.
Truce and treaty
In April 1882 Parnell moved to make a deal with the government, the settlement involved withdrawing the manifesto and
undertaking to move against agrarian crime, seeing militancy would never win Home Rule. The so-called Kilmainham Treaty, a truce not dissimilar to truces to follow, marked a critical turning point in
Parnell’s leadership, though it resulted in losing the support of Devoy’s American-Irish. However, his political diplomacy
preserved the national Home Rule movement after the Phoenix Park murders in May of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Under Secretary. For the next twenty years Fenians and
physical-force militancy ceased to play a role in Irish politics.
With the Land League suppressed and internally fracturing, Parnell resurrected it in October as the Irish National League (INL). It combined moderate agrarianism, a Home Rule programme with
electoral functions, was hierarchical and autocratic in structure with Parnell wielding immense authority and direct
parliamentary control. Parliamentary constitutionalism was the future path. The informal alliance between the new, tightly
disciplined National League and the Catholic Church was one of the main factors for the revitalisation of the national Home Rule
cause after 1882. Parnell saw that the explicit endorsement of Catholicism was of vital importance to the success of this
venture. At the end of 1882 the organisation already had 232 branches, in 1885 increased to 592 branches. He left the day-to-day
running of the League in the hands of his lieutenants Timothy Harrington as
Secretary, William O’Brien editor of its newspaper United Ireland and Timothy
Healy.
Parnellism reigns
The result of these reforms and reorganisation were fully reflected in the first general election of November–December 1885 with extended suffrage under the
1884 Reform Act increasing the number of Irishmen, many small
farmers, who had a right to vote from 220,000 to 500,000. The election increased the total Irish Party representation from sixty
three to eighty-five seats, which included seventeen in Ulster. In January 1886 the INL had developed to 1,262 branches and could
claim to contain the vast body of Irish Catholic public sentiment. It acted not merely as an electoral committee for the Irish
Party, but as local law-giver, unofficial parliament, government, police and supreme court. Parnell’s personal authority in the
organisation was enormous The INL was a formidable political machine built in the traditional political culture of rural Ireland.
It was an alliance of tenant-farmers, shopkeepers and publicans. No one could stand against it.
Unusually, the party even secured a seat in the English city of Liverpool, where
T.P. O'Connor won the Liverpool Scotland seat in 1885 and retained it in every election until
his death in 1929 - even after the demise of the actual party (O'Connor being returned unopposed in the elections of 1918, 1922,
1923, 1924, and 1929).
Parnell’s new Irish Parliamentary Party emerged swiftly as a tightly disciplined, and on the whole, energetic body of
parliamentarians with strict rules. The inauguration of the ‘party pledge’ in 1884 decisively reinforced that each member was
required to sit, act and vote with the party, one of the first instances of a whip
(Richard Power) in western politics. The members were also paid
stipends, or expense allowances from party funds, which helped both to increase parliamentary turnout and enabled middle-class
members such as William O’Brien or later D.D. Sheehan attend parliament, long before other
MPs first received state pay in 1911. The profiles of the 105 Irish MPs. had changed considerably since 1868 when 69% were
landlords or landlords’ sons, reduced to 47% by 1874. Those with professional background increased from 10% to 23% in the same
period, by the early 1890s professionals exceeding 50%.
Home Rule delayed
Now at his height Parnell pressed Gladstone to resolve the Irish Question with Home Rule, but the Liberals were divided.
Parnell then sided with the Conservatives, bringing down Gladstone’s government. Both parties now courted Parnell. In the 1885
election Parnell’s Home Rulers had 86 seats, the 335 seats for the Liberals robbing him of his bargaining position with the
Conservatives who only achieved 249 seats. Gladstone by now converted to granting Home Rule, on introducing the first
Home Rule Bill 1886 and after a long and fierce debate, made a remarkable
Home Rule Speech, beseeching
parliament to pass the bill which was however defeated by 341 to 311 votes.
Since 1882 Parnell’s successful drive for Home Rule created great anxiety amongst Protestants and Unionists north and south alike, fearing Catholic intolerance from a nationalist parliament in
Dublin under their control. It resulted in the revival of the Orange Order to resist
Home Rule and the forming of an Irish Unionist Party. With the Conservatives
playing the "Ulster card" and sections of the Liberal faction voting against the bill, Gladstone hinted that eventually a
separate solution for Ulster might need to be sought. His observation echoed far into the next century. With the defeat of his
bill he dissolved parliament and called an election for July 1886, the result swinging in the other direction, Conservatives and
Liberal Unionists between them winning a clear majority.
The Irish Party retained 85 seats and, in the years up to 1889, centred itself around the formidable figure of Parnell who
continued to pursue Home Rule, striving to reassure English voters that it would be of no threat to them. During this period the
League was out of contact with him and primarily concerned with its own vested interests, keeping up local agitation to further
the not fully resolved land question, and bringing Liberal voters to slowly increase their support for Home Rule.
Zenith eclipse
Parnell successfully exposed a devious Conservative intrigue to associate him and his party with crime and violence through
forged "Pigott Papers" from which he was vindicated in February 1890. Gladstone invited
Parnell to his house to discuss a renewed Home Rule bill. This was the high point of Parnell’s career. However, since 1880 he had
had a family relationship with a separated woman Katherine O'Shea who bore him three
children. Her divorce proceedings first came to court late in 1890, in which Parnell was named co-respondent. This was a
political scandal for English Victorian society. Gladstone reacted by informing Parnell
that if he were re-elected leader of the Irish Party, Home Rule would be withdrawn. Parnell did not disclose this to his party
and was selected leader on 25 November.
A special meeting of the party a week later lasted six days at the end of which 45 "anti-Parnellites" walked out, leaving him
with 27 faithful followers, J. J. Clancy one of his key defenders. Both sides returned
to Ireland to organise their supporters into two parties, the former Parnellite Irish
National League (INL) under John Redmond and John Dillon’s anti-Parnellite
Irish National Federation (INF). By-elections in 1891 were fought with bitter
venom by the INF anti-Parnellites, Dillon and Healy making extremely personal attacks on Parnell. The INF was also supported by
the Catholic clergy who went to aggressive extremes to ensure that INF candidates were returned.
Parnell worked untiringly between Ireland and Britain making speeches for support which he actually got from the (IRB) Fenians
who rallied to him. He was married in June 1891 to Mrs O’Shea. His health deteriorated seriously, dying in October in their
Brighton home. His funeral in Dublin was attended by 200,000 people. In his speeches he was convinced of an Ireland completely
separated from Britain, but was ambiguous, never committing himself nor distancing himself, from the use of physical-force.
Party divided
In the 1892 general elections that followed, Redmond’s
Parnellites won a third of the votes but only nine seats, Dillon’s anti-Parnellites returned 72 MPs.. Gladstone aged 81 and the
Liberals were again in power, the divided Home Rulers holding the balance of power. He brought in his promised second Home Rule Bill in 1893. It was master-handled through three readings of the Commons by
William O’Brien and passed in September by 301 votes to 267, during which Unionist conventions called in Dublin and Belfast to
oppose the bill, denounced the possibility of partition. A week later 419 peers in the Lords rejected it, only 41 supporting. Gladstone retired in 1894.
The Conservatives returned to power in the 1895 general
election, remaining in office until 1905. During those years Home Rule was not on their agenda. Instead, with
Arthur Balfour’s Constructive Unionism approach to settling the Irish Question
they enacted many important reforms introduced by the Irish members, who on the other hand, made no effort to settle their party
differences. This bred apathy amongst the Irish public towards politics, much needed financial contributions from America ebbing
away. In this period of political disarray and disunity of purpose young Irish nationalists turned instead to the country’s’ new
cultural and militant movements, enabling the Church to fill the political vacuum.
The unresolved land reform situation was again the mainspring for renewed political activity. William O’Brien had withdrawn
from parliament to Mayo and in 1898, driven by the plight of the farming community’s need for more land, formed together with
Davitt a new land movement, the United Irish League (UIL). It quickly spread first
in the west, the following year nation-wide like the old Land League and attracted members from all factions of the two split
parties, O’Brien threatening to displace them and take them both over.
Reconstruction
The outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899 was condemned by both Irish factions,
their combined opposition helped to bring about a measure of understanding between them. By 1900 the threat of O’Brien swamping
and out-manoeuvring them at the upcoming elections forced the two divided parties, the INL and the INF, to re-unite. He was the
prime mover in merging them under a new programme of agrarian agitation, political reform and Home Rule into a new united Irish
Parliamentary Party. Redmond, leader of the smaller INL group, was chosen as its leader mainly due to the personal rivalries
between the INF's Anti-Parnellite leaders. There followed a period in which much political development occurred.
The UIL, explicitly designed to reconcile the fragmented party, was accepted as the parliamentary nationalist’s main support
organisation. O’Brien strove ahead with his campaign of agrarian agitation, by 1902 succeeded in bringing landlords and tenants
together for discussions. Encouraged by the Chief Secretary George
Wyndham a Land Reform Conference followed, its outcome the basis for O’Brien architecting the Wyndham Land Purchase Act 1903 through parliament, which abolished landlordism enabling tenant farmers buy out their landlord’s land at favourable annuities, settling
the land question.
Renewed rift
But O’Brien stood alone. Dillon and Davitt were opposed to peasant proprietorship, fearing it would weaken their support for
Home Rule. In 1904 O’Brien was purged out of the party, his UIL taken over by Dillon’s ally, Joseph Devlin, a young Belfast MP., as its new secretary. Devlin had founded a decade earlier the Catholic
sectarian neo-Ribbon Ancient Order of
Hibernians (AOH), organising its rise first in Ulster and after he had control of the UIL, eventually across the south,
displacing the UIL. The Irish Party came to have an unhealthy dependence on the AOH.
The 1906 elections saw the Liberals back in power with 379 seats, an overwhelming majority of 88 over all other parties, after
promising Home Rule. Redmond’s IPP with 83 seats at first delighted until the Liberals backed down, knowing it had no chance in
the Lords. The rift with O’Brien deepened after he guided the Labourers (Ireland) Act 1906 through parliament which provided an
extensive social housing programme for rural labourers. He rejoined the party in 1907 for the sake of unity, was then driven out
again by the party’s vigorous militant support organisation, Devlin’s "Hibernians", after which O’Brien founded his dissident
All-for-Ireland League (AFIL) Party in 1909.
Notable legislation
During the previous years many notable Acts of social legislation were pressed for and passed in Ireland’s interest:
-
- The creation of the Congested Districts Board in 1891, which
built public works for, and provided employment in, the poor districts of western Ireland.
- Local Government Act (1898)
- Irish Department of Agriculture Act and Technical Instructors Act (1899) (initiative of Horace Plunkett)
- Tenant Land Purchase Acts: (Wyndham Act 1903 and
Birrell Act 1909) (the O'Brien Acts),
contributing greatly to the solution of the contentious land question
- Labourers (Ireland) Acts (Bryce Act 1906 and Birrell Act 1911) (the
Sheehan Acts), providing rural labourers with extensive housing
- Town Tenants Act (1906)
- Evicted Tenants Act (1907)
- Old Age Pensions Act (1908)
- Irish (Catholic) University Act (1908)
- Housing of the Working Classes (Ireland) Act (1908) (the Clancy Act)
The extensive 1898 Local Government Act abolished the old
landlord-dominated Grand Juries and replaced them by forty-nine county, urban and rural district councils, managed by Irish
people for the administration of local affairs. The councils were very popular in Ireland as they established a political class,
who showed themselves capable of running Irish affairs. It also stimulated the desire to attain Home Rule and to manage affairs
on a national level. A less positive consequence was that the councils were largely dominated by the Irish Party, becoming the
wielders of local patronage.
Home Rule succeeds
Following the December 1910 general election the
Liberals lost their majority, and were dependent on Labour and the Irish (IPP and
AFIL) parties 84 seats. Redmond, holding the balance of power in the Commons, renewed the old "Liberal Alliance" this time with
Asquith as Prime Minister. Asquith for budget reasons had no choice but to agree to a new
Home Rule Bill and the removal of the veto power of the Lords. The passing of the 1911 Parliament Act limited the Lords to a two year delaying power and ensured that Redmond’s reward of a
Government of Ireland Bill for the whole of Ireland introduced in 1912 would subsequently achieve national self-government in
Dublin by 1914.
This prospect after 40 years of struggle was greeted optimistically, even when self-government was initially limited to
running Irish affairs. But for Unionists, convinced the Union with the United Kingdom was economically best for Ireland, and for
Protestants, now that Devlin’s paramilitary AOH organisation had saturated the entire island, fearing a Church dominated
nationalist government, it was a disaster.
After the Bill passed its first readings in 1913, Ulster Unionist’s opposition became a repeat scenario of events in 1886 and
1893, their leader Sir Edward Carson approving of a Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) militia to oppose Home Rule. Unionists and the Orange Order in mass
demonstrations determined to ensure that it would not apply for them. Nationalists in turn formed the militant Irish Volunteers objectively to enforce Home Rule, recruiting from the former IRB and Fenian movements,
Redmond quickly taking over its control. Unfortunately Redmond and his IPP nationalists, as later those who succeeded them in
1919, had little or no knowledge of Belfast, underestimating Unionist resistance as a bluff, insisting “Ulster will have to
follow”. William O’Brien who in 1893 had worked closely on passing the Second Home Rule Bill, warned to no avail, that if
adequate provisions were not made for Ulster, All-Ireland self-government would never be achieved.
The Bill was the centre of intense parliamentary debate and controversy throughout 1913-14 before it passed its final reading
in May, denounced by the O’Brienite AFIL Party after Carson made provision in an amending bill for the future partition of
Ireland into a North and South, permanent or provisional to be negotiated. This was deeply resented among nationalists and
unionists of the southern and western Irish Unionist Party. The Third
Home Rule Act 1914 received Royal Assent in September 1914, celebrated with bonfires
across southern Ireland..
Europe intervenes
The outbreak of World War I in August led to the suspension of the Act for the duration
of the war, expected to last only a year. The war defused the threat of civil war in Ireland and was to prove crucial to
subsequent Irish history. After neutral Belgium had
been overrun by Germany, Redmond and his party leaders, in order to ensure Home Rule would be
implemented after the war, called on the Irish Volunteers to support Britain’s war effort (her commitment under the
Triple Entente and the Allied cause of
maintaining a Europe free from German oppression). The Volunteers split, a vast majority forming the National Volunteers, enlisting enthusiastically in Irish regiments of the 10th (Irish) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division of the New British
Army. Unlike their 36th (Ulster) Division counterparts of the UVF, they
were not given their own uniforms and were assigned English officers, a War Office reaction
to Redmond’s remark that the Volunteers would soon return as an armed army to oppose the UVF resistance to Home Rule.
As the war situation worsened a new Conservative-Liberal coalition was formed in June 1915, and Redmond was offered a seat in
the cabinet, which he refused. This was welcomed in Ireland but greatly weaken his position, his rival Carson accepting a cabinet
seat. The IPP’s problems continued to mount as the war prolonged with horrific casualties in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, then the
1916 Easter Rising by a section of the Volunteers and the British reaction to it, followed
by Asquith’s attempt to introduce Home Rule in July 1916 failing on the issue of partition, his further initiative to entangle
Home Rule in June 1917 when Redmond called the Irish Convention ended unresolved.
Redmond died in March 1918 at the close of the Convention, Dillon taking over the IPP leadership. In April the German
Spring Offensive overran the Allied front, the severe manpower shortage resulted in a
clumsy cabinet dual policy decision by Lloyd George of linking implementing
Home Rule with an attempt at conscription. Although never enforced, it
radicalised Irish politics to such an extent that the IPP, after losing three by-elections in 1917 to the more physical-force
republican Sinn Féin movement, which with 1,200 branches had reached the strength of the old
INL, lost almost all of their seats to them in the 1918 general
election, and was dissolved.
Britain went ahead in 1919 with its commitment to introduce Home Rule by implementing it under the Fourth Home Rule Act 1921, which as previously predicted with the Partition of Ireland divided Ireland into Northern
Ireland and a non-functioning Southern Ireland prior to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Many IPP members in the south went on to join the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal in the 1920’s, remaining AOH members lingering on to serve as Francoists in the
Spanish Civil War or in the quasi-fascist Blueshirt movement of the 1930s. In Northern Ireland the remnants of the Irish Parliamentary Party, formed
the Nationalist Party.
Party’s legacy
The greatest achievement of the IPP was the introduction to Irish society of a parliamentary constitutional tradition and all
that went with it—a fully up and running local government administration with its diverse institutions, which had rooted itself
more deeply than anyone could have imagined into the life of the country. The party had above all (in the era prior to 1914)
contributed in its prime to the political maturity of the nation and to the transformation of its society.
This in turn paved the way for the creation of the Irish Free State, in which
Dáil Éireann had scarcely started to function before, almost
unconsciously, it began to utilise and to build upon the constitutional tradition it had inherited. This is perhaps the highest
tribute that can deservedly be bestowed upon the old Irish Parliamentary Party, which during fifty years of hard and exacting as
well as frustrating parliamentary labours, established and fostered the development of representative institutions which gave
stimulus to democratic action and discussion at every level of political involvement. Its particular legacy remains that it was
the last and only party to represent and serve an undivided Ireland.
Leaders of the Party, 1882-1921
References
- Tom Garvin The evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (1981) (2005), Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, ISBN
0-7171-3967-0
External links
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Defunct Political Parties in Ireland |
| To 1918: |
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| Post 1918: |
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