What were Charles Stewart Parnell's strengths and weaknesses?

Answer 1

Assessment: Strengths and WeaknessesParnell possessed enormous political skills and abilities but also weaknesses.

His main achievements were in the field of practical politics and these included:

• He used the Land Movement and its mass appeal to gain control of the Home Rule party. He also brought the movement under the control of the party and weakened Fenian influence.
• Parnell was clever to tailor his speeches to the audience he was addressing. This tactic aimed at maintaining his popular base, both in Ireland and America and keep his movement united.

Here are excerpts from three of Parnell's speeches where he discussed the nature of Irish independence. The first one is to an American audience, the second to an Irish one and the third was given to the House of Commons.

1. When we have undermined English misgovernment, we have paved the way for Ireland to take her place among the nations of the earth. And let us not forget that is the ultimate goal at which all we Irishmen aim��None of us whether we are in America or Ireland, or wherever we may be, will be satisfied until we have destroyed the last link which keeps Ireland bound to England.
2. No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has the right to say to his country: thus far shall thou go and no further. We have never attempted to fix the "ne plus ultra" to the progress of Ireland's nationhood and we never shall.
3. We look upon the provisions of this bill as a final settlement of the "Irish Question" and I believe the Irish people have accepted it as a settlement.

• He was able to present to Britain the image of a people united in a common aim behind his leadership
• His creation of a disciplined, pledge-bound party organised by a party machine in each constituency was perhaps his greatest achievement. This made Home Rule a practical political possibility. It forced the two main British parties to acknowledge that there was now a third force in politics that could decide who held power in Britain as a whole.
• Another of his greatest political successes was the conversion of Gladstone and the Liberals for Home Rule.
• The strength of his movement meant that the economic and social problems in Ireland could not be ignored. The Conservatives and Unionists realised that constructive policies would be needed if the demand for Home Rule was to be defeated.

However there were a number of weaknesses in both his political successes and his own leadership:

• He failed to achieve Home Rule and after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill the party had lost its political freedom at Westminster.
• Having staked everything on the constitutional approach, there was no alternative to the alliance with the Liberals. This was a new political reality that Parnell failed to recognise during the divorce scandal.
• Parnell's greatest flaw was the O'Shea liaison that Bew calls "reckless in the extreme." In not contesting the divorce case he put his whole political career on the line.
• He was also a victim of his own strengths during the scandal, his iron will, pride and determination to fight on. These qualities led to a stubborn refusal to recognise political reality e.g. his Manifesto to the People of Ireland and his rejection of mediation at Boulogne.
• Like so many Irish Nationalists he never came close to developing a constructive policy towards the northern Protestants and of how to deal with their determined opposition to the idea of Irish self-government.
• He seriously underestimated the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling which was deep-rooted in all social classes in Britain, especially the view that the Irish were unfit for self-government.

Until the divorce case he managed to hold together a complex coalition of Irish society against attacks from all sides and gave Irishmen a sense of their own worth.

His goal of domestic self-government as a solution to the Irish Question may never have been achieved, but he ensured that the desire for self-government was a political reality with which British governments would continue to have to deal.