Chapter 2 - The Paradoxes of Parnell

Summary

This chapter explores the contradictions in Parnell’s political personality. Parnell emerged as a major political figure with a revolutionary aura. By the time of his death, many nationalists claimed to detect that he had, after all, a bias in favour of the Protestant landlord class from which he had sprung. There is no doubt that Parnell’s relationship with Katherine O’Shea, a woman with strong establishment connections, strengthened his conservatism, especially in the context in which the Land League movement, which he led, was losing momentum anyway. But this is not simply a matter of conjunctural transition but the emergence of underlying assumptions in Parnell’s mind which were present even in the most intense and heavy days of the Land War.