page_title: History of Ireland (1801–1923)
section_title: Home Rule movement
hierarchical_section_title: History of Ireland (1801–1923) / Home Rule movement
caption_attribution_description: Charles Stewart Parnell. Library of Congress description: "Hon. Chas. Parnell of Dublin, Ireland"
context_page_description: Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of Ireland seceding from the United Kingdom.
context_section_description: Until the 1870s, most Irish people elected as their Members of Parliament (MPs) Liberals and Conservatives who belonged to the main British political parties. The Conservatives, for example, won a majority in the 1859 general election in Ireland. A significant minority also voted for Unionists, who resisted fiercely any dilution of the Act of Union. In the 1870s a former Conservative barrister turned nationalist campaigner, Isaac Butt, established a new moderate nationalist movement, the Home Rule League. After his death, William Shaw and in particular a radical young Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell, turned the home rule movement, or the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) as it became known, into a major political force. It came to dominate Irish politics, to the exclusion of the previous Liberal, Conservative and Unionist parties that had existed there. The party's growing electoral strength was first shown in the 1880 general election in Ireland, when it won 63 seats (two MPs later defected to the Liberals). By the 1885 general election in Ireland it had won 86 seats (including one in the heavily Irish-populated English city of Liverpool). Parnell's movement proved to be a broad one, from conservative landowners to the Land League.
  Parnell's movement also campaigned for the right of Ireland to govern herself as a region within the United Kingdom, in contrast to O'Connell who had wanted a complete repeal of the Act of Union. Two home rule bills (in 1886 and 1893) were introduced by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, but neither became law. Gladstone, says his biographer, "totally rejected the widespread English view that the Irish had no taste for justice, common sense, moderation or national prosperity and looked only to perpetual strife and dissension." The problem for Gladstone was his rural supporters in England would not support home rule for Ireland. A large faction of Liberals, led by Joseph Chamberlain, formed a Unionist faction that supported the Conservative party. The Liberals were out of power and home rule proposals languished.
  Home Rule divided Ireland: a significant minority of Unionists (largely based in Ulster) were opposed. The revived Orange Order mobilized the opposition, warning that a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholics and nationalists would discriminate against them and would impose tariffs on trade with Great Britain. (Whilst most of Ireland was primarily agricultural, north-east Ulster was the location of almost all the island's heavy industry and would have been affected by any tariff barriers imposed by a Dublin parliament.) Intense rioting broke out in Belfast in 1886, as the first Home Rule Bill was being debated.
  In 1889, the scandal surrounding Parnell's divorce proceedings split the Irish party, when it became public that Parnell, popularly acclaimed as the 'Uncrowned King of Ireland', had for many years been living in a family relationship with Mrs. Katharine O'Shea, the long-separated wife of a fellow MP. When the scandal broke, religious non-conformists in Great Britain, who were the backbone of the pro-Home Rule Liberal Party, forced its leader W. E. Gladstone to abandon support for the Irish cause as long as Parnell remained leader of the IPP. Inside Ireland, the Catholic Church turned against him.  Parnell fought for control but lost. He died in 1891. But the Party and the country remained split between pro-Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, who fought each other in elections.
  The United Irish League founded in 1898 forced the reunification of the party to stand under John Redmond in the 1900 general election. After a brief attempt by the Irish Reform Association to introduce devolution in 1904, the Irish Party subsequently held the balance of power in the House of Commons after the 1910 general election.
  The last obstacle to achieving Home Rule was removed with the Parliament Act 1911 when the House of Lords lost its power to veto legislation and could only delay a bill for two years. In 1912, with the Irish Parliamentary Party at its zenith, a new third Home
caption: Charles Stewart Parnell, the "uncrowned King of Ireland"
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