14 - The Irish Liberals: A Union of Hearts?

Summary

Historiography

The ‘solution’, as laid down by Parnell, was Home Rule. Home Rule was to remain a dominant political motif until 1916, awakening deep passions on both sides and eventually threatening the whole institutional structure of the British state. The ultimate failure of Home Rule as a policy does not mitigate its importance in the least, both for Ireland and in the long term, for Britain. It is possible to see Home Rule as the first articulation of British federalism and to trace its descendants in Scottish and Welsh movements to this day. Expanding upon this interpretation, Boyce has suggested that 1885, the year of Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule, represented a political and ethical turning point in the history of the UK and the British Empire. Far from seeing it as a mistaken Gladstonian obsession, Biagini even claims that Home Rule served to strengthen and expand Liberal politics and that the ‘synergy created by the “Union of Hearts” reshaped popular expectations of liberty and citizenship in both Britain and Ireland’. Thus it is deemed an important subject in intellectual history. At the time, the Home Rule agenda sounded modern and O'Day has argued for its parallels in other parts of Europe. But it also, as Alvin Jackson astutely notes, wore an air of tradition. It harkened back to a legacy of seventeenth-century patriotism and to the constitutional emancipation campaign.