O’Connell and Parnell were both in the very first rank of nineteenth-century politicians and parliamentarians. Their conditions and their personalities (both in the private sphere and as publicly projected personae) were quite different, and their political campaigns took place in two very dissimilar periods. In this classic essay, the two great exemplars of Irish nineteenth-century statesmanship are compared.

Parnell haunts the city in James Joyce’s Dubliners. An admonishing ghost, he tantalizes its citizens with the abandoned dreams that follow Ireland’s rejection of their lost leader to  the warnings and strictures of the Roman Catholic Church following his adultery with Katherine O’Shea. James Duffy, at the centre of the story A Painful Case, is one such individual, searching for his sexual, spiritual, and political solace. A devotee of classical music, he meets the married Mrs Emily Sinico at a concert. What develops shakes Duffy to his soul for he recoils from her physical show of affection. They separate. A short while later he reads of her suicide, intoxicated, throwing herself before a train. Throughout the story strange echoes and eerie parallels between the fall of Parnell and the fall of James Duffy deepen the confusion and tragedies of both men, and of the Ireland that shaped their connected fates.

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.

The Irish Sea has a singular and resonant place in a shared British and Irish imagination, and the simple question of its power both to connect and to divide has commanded political and cultural attention for centuries. This chapter investigates the cultural history of sea crossings, offering an analysis of their inscription in literature and the visual arts. In the process it describes a phenomenon that is possessed of both highly public and quietly intimate meanings, crossing centuries, countries, and lives in diffuse, extensive, and varied patterns.

Introducing the book’s scope and thematics, Parnell is here positioned in terms of Max Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership; the traumatic void left by his downfall and death is aligned with the rise of post–William Morris utopian reform movements.

The transition from Parnell’s domination of Irish politics to the development and aftermath of the Irish revolution has been variously interpreted by influential mythographers, notably W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse. This essay takes a different angle, querying Conor Cruise O’Brien’s celebrated statement that Parnell ‘deviated into literature’, emphasizing the shifts of influence towards the agency of women’s political organizations, reasserting the importance of the conservative underpinning provided by the revolution in landownership, and questioning the influential but misplaced emphasis on Parnell’s supposed latter-day Fenian sympathies. Concerning the eventual outcome of the revolution, and the kind of Ireland that emerged, the result of the Treaty might be seen not only as consistent with Arthur Griffith’s long-term aims, but squarely in line with the kind of Home Rule Ireland outlined by Parnell to a confidant forty years before: ‘a small-c conservative government, backed by the Irish democracy and peasant proprietary, linked to the Empire by Crown and an imperial contribution, and with enough economic autonomy to protect and encourage Irish industries’. This was a far cry from the ideal nurtured by Pearse and many of the revolutionary generation, but it buttresses Parnell’s claim to be considered a maker of modern Ireland.