First Irish Home Rule Bill (1886): Gladstone and Parnell

The First Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced by the Liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone on 8 April 1886 to give Ireland its own parliament in Dublin for domestic affairs. Backed by Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, it was defeated in the House of Commons on 8 June 1886 when nearly a hundred Liberals voted against it. The failure split the Liberal Party, kept the Conservatives in power for most of the next twenty years and made Home Rule the central question of Irish politics until 1914.

Background: Ireland under the Union

Since the Act of Union of 1801, Ireland had been governed from Westminster, with no parliament of its own. The memory of the Great Famine of 1845-1852, the dominance of a mostly Protestant landowning class over a mostly Catholic tenantry, and repeated cycles of unrest kept Irish discontent alive.

In the 1870s the lawyer Isaac Butt launched a movement for Home Rule, meaning self-government within the United Kingdom rather than full independence. From 1880 the movement was led by Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landlord with a talent for discipline and obstruction in Parliament. Parnell also linked Home Rule with the Land War of 1879-1882, when the Irish National Land League campaigned against evictions and high rents.

The 1885 election and the Hawarden Kite

The Third Reform Act of 1884 greatly extended the vote in rural areas, including Ireland. In the general election of November-December 1885, Parnell’s party won 86 seats, almost every constituency outside eastern Ulster and Trinity College Dublin. This was exactly the margin between the Liberals, with 335 seats, and the Conservatives, with 249, so the Irish members held the balance of power.

Gladstone had privately concluded that Ireland should have self-government. In December 1885 his son Herbert revealed this to the press, an episode known as the Hawarden Kite. In January 1886 the Irish members joined the Liberals to defeat Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government, and Gladstone formed his third ministry on 1 February 1886.

What the bill proposed

Gladstone introduced the Government of Ireland Bill in a speech of about three and a half hours on 8 April 1886. Its main provisions were:

• An Irish legislature in Dublin to deal with Irish domestic affairs, made up of two “orders” that would normally sit together, one partly elected on a restricted property franchise.
• Reserved powers for Westminster: the Crown, peace and war, defence, foreign relations, trade, customs and coinage remained with the imperial Parliament.
• No Irish MPs at Westminster: Irish members would leave the House of Commons, a feature that critics said would separate Ireland from the rest of the kingdom.
• A financial contribution: Ireland would pay a fixed share, set at one-fifteenth, of imperial expenditure.

A companion Land Purchase Bill offered a large state-funded scheme to buy out Irish landlords and sell the land to their tenants. Its cost alarmed many Liberals and added to the opposition.

Key people

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) was 76 when he took up Home Rule. Long seen as the leading Liberal statesman of his age, he had already disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869 and passed Irish Land Acts in 1870 and 1881. He came to regard self-government as the only way to reconcile Ireland to the Union and end coercion.

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) combined parliamentary pressure with the threat of mass agrarian protest. His imprisonment in Kilmainham Gaol in 1881-1882 and the deal that released him made him a national hero, while the Phoenix Park murders of May 1882, carried out by a militant splinter group, showed how fragile his position was between moderates and radicals.

Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914), the former mayor of Birmingham, had favoured a more limited scheme of local councils for Ireland. His break with Gladstone in 1886 ended his chance of leading the Liberals and later took him into coalition with the Conservatives.

Opposition and the Liberal split

Resistance came from several directions. Lord Hartington, leader of the Whig wing of the party, had refused to join the government. Joseph Chamberlain, the leading Radical, and George Otto Trevelyan resigned from the cabinet in March 1886. Both groups feared that Home Rule would lead to separation and weaken the Empire.

In Ulster, where Protestants were a majority in several counties and industrial Belfast was closely tied to Britain, unionists warned that “Home Rule means Rome Rule”. The Conservative Lord Randolph Churchill visited Belfast in February and in a public letter in May wrote the slogan “Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right”. In the summer of 1886 Belfast suffered some of the worst sectarian riots of the century, in which dozens of people were killed.

The decisive vote on the second reading came in the early hours of 8 June 1886. The bill was defeated by 343 votes to 313, with 93 Liberals voting against the government.

Aftermath

Gladstone asked Queen Victoria for a dissolution and fought a general election in July 1886 on the Irish question. The Conservatives won 316 seats, and the dissident Liberals, now called Liberal Unionists, won 77, giving opponents of Home Rule a large majority. Salisbury returned as prime minister. The Liberal Unionists eventually merged with the Conservatives, which is why the party was long known as the Conservative and Unionist Party.

The alliance between Gladstone and Parnell survived the defeat but suffered a heavy blow in 1890, when Parnell was named in the divorce case of Katharine O’Shea. Gladstone made clear that the Liberals could not continue to cooperate with him as leader, the Irish party split, and Parnell died in October 1891.

Gladstone tried again in 1893, aged 83. The Second Home Rule Bill passed the House of Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords by 419 votes to 41. A Third Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912 by H. H. Asquith, was passed as the Government of Ireland Act 1914 after the Lords’ veto had been limited, but its operation was suspended because of the First World War.

Legacy

The 1886 bill turned Home Rule from a demand of Irish nationalists into a dividing line of British politics. It created a lasting Unionist bloc and convinced many Ulster Protestants that they would have to resist any Dublin parliament. Those attitudes hardened in the crisis of 1912-1914, when unionists formed the Ulster Volunteers and nationalists responded with their own armed force.

The failure of constitutional Home Rule weakened moderate nationalism. After the Easter Rising of 1916, support shifted to Sinn Féin and the demand for an independent republic, leading to the War of Independence and the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s.

Timeline

• 1801, 1 January: The Act of Union joins Great Britain and Ireland.
• 1880, May: Charles Stewart Parnell becomes chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
• 1885, December: The Hawarden Kite reveals Gladstone’s support for Home Rule.
• 1886, 1 February: Gladstone forms his third government.
• 1886, 8 April: Gladstone introduces the Government of Ireland Bill.
• 1886, 8 June: The bill is defeated at second reading by 343 votes to 313.
• 1886, July: General election returns a Conservative and Liberal Unionist majority.
• 1893, 8 September: The Lords reject the Second Home Rule Bill.
• 1914, 18 September: The Government of Ireland Act becomes law but is suspended.

Why it matters

The First Home Rule Bill was the first serious attempt by a British government to give Ireland self-rule. Its defeat reshaped British party politics, hardened the divide between nationalists and unionists, and set Ireland on a longer and more violent road to independence and partition.