Twice — 1886 and 1892 — the Liberal leader Gladstone tried to pass a bill to give Ireland Home Rule. He lost in the Commons in 1886 and won in 1892 only to have the measure vetoed in the House of Lords.
The Home Rule crisis on the eve of World War I was triggered when the House of Lords lost its veto.
A major crisis in the British state erupted when the Lords vetoed the Liberal government’s radical budget in 1909. The conflict was resolved by the surrender of the House of Lords, where absolute veto was now abolished, leaving only a delaying power for two years In the course of this struggle the Liberals fought a General Election which left them dependent on the 70-odd Irish Home Rule MPs at Westminster. The new Liberal Prime Minister, Henry Asquith was not, like Gladstone, a believer in Home Rule. When they had a big majority after 1906 the Liberals had made no move for Home Rule. Now they proposed a new Home Rule Bill and did it under compulsion of the Irish Nationalist MPs. All the Lords could do was hold it up for two years.
Still keyed up from the struggle for the Lords, the Tory party resolved on direct defiance of the government. They helped organise and arm a powerful private army in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Volunteer Force. They pledged — some of them signing the Ulster Covenant in their own blood — that they would not accept the proposed Home Rule government in Dublin and would instead set up a Parliament of their own in Belfast if the issue were forced. The opposition to Home Rule was a great mass movement in North East Ulster. It included the big majority of the working class of all Ireland and most of its modern industrial working class. They saw themselves as British and feared being a minority in a Catholic-ruled all-Ireland state. Their Tory-Unionist allies in Britain stood by them while the Liberal allies of the catholic Irish did not stand by them.
They were still importing guns from Germany a few weeks before World War I broke out.
In contrast to the Tories the Liberals abandoned the interests of their long too-docile Irish middle-class Parliamentary allies and agreed to partition the country. They persuaded the Irish leader John Redmond to “temporarily” accept partition. Because they though that they could rely on the Liberals if necessary to coerce the Irish resistance to Home Rule, the nationalists had made no efforts to reach an intra-Irish agreement allowing the Protestant areas local autonomy.
The Protestant example of arms and threats — and victory! — together with the discrediting of the Home Rule parliamentarians generated a movement for armed revolt in Catholic Nationalist Ireland such as had not been dreamt of for four or five decades.
The Orange Order
The Orange Order was set up by Anglican peasants in 1795 in County Armagh. It grew out of Orange secret societies which had been competing and warring with Catholic secret societies for decades.
In the 1790s the Catholic “Defenders” overlapped with the United Irishmen, who were mostly Protestant but more often Presbyterian than Anglican. The Orange Order was immediately made a vehicle for resistance by the Establishment to the revolutionaries.
It was always a sectarian, supremacist organisation. It fell into disfavour in the 19th century, and was a banned organisation for a while in the 1830s.
It was heavily involved in agitation against the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland in 1869, demonstrating with banners threatening to “kick the Queen’s crown into the Boyne’’ as King James’s crown was once kicked. The movement has always had its own concerns, and it has sometimes clashed with the British government, most notably in the 1870s and ‘80s.
It became the mass base of the upper classes in their fight against Home Rule from the 1880s onwards, patronised by Colonels and MPs and other gentry.
A working-class Independent Orange Order broke away in 1905 and was briefly radical.
After the Six County state was set up in 1921-22, the Orange Order became a great machine of patronage and discrimination, closely tied up with the state. It is still a great force.
There was also a Catholic “Orange Order”, the “Ancient Order of Hibernians”. Modelled on the Orange Order and claiming descent like the Orange Order from 18th century secret societies, the AOH became a big force in Catholic Ireland in the early years of the 20th century, when it was registered as a benevolent society, administering parts of the early social security system set up by the Liberals before World War 1.
It was bitterly hostile to the militant labour movement. It declined in strength and never had anything like the role in 26-Counties Ireland that the Orange Order had in the Six. Other Catholic agencies took its place, above all the Church.
Why Protestants opposed Home Rule
The Anglo-irish Protestant landlord class opposed Home Rule for class reasons. Home Rule would end their domination of Ireland, and might lead to the process of “buying out” the land being completed in a radical or revolutionary way. The compact Protestant community of the north-east, including the workers, opposed Home Rule from a different angle.
A society radically different from that in Ireland’s south had grown up around Belfast: they did not feel at one with the rest of the Irish. The extension of the franchise in 1867 and ’84 meant that in a Home-Rule Ireland the Protestants would be a minority, at the mercy of the politics of the majority. Their identity was that of a “Protestant” colony in a Catholic country: the Catholics, in contrast to the 1798 period, were militant, organised, and often priest-led. In Protestant eyes Home Rule would inevitably become “Rome Rule”. They did not want an Irish exchequer with Northern Ireland as the biggest taxpayer to carry the burden of financing the buying out of the landlord. They had seen the power of the priests when they — together with the British “non-conformists” of the Liberal Party — had pulled down and destroyed the great nationalist leader, Parnell. They saw that the Home Rule political party on the ground in rural Ireland and in the small towns was venal and deeply corrupt — and they did not want to submit to it. A few Southern Unionists would in 1917 and 1918 express a preference for the “rebel” — but clean and honest — Sinn Fein movement over the ‘moderate’ Home Rulers. The Protestant working class of the north had contempt for the south, seen typically as a land of backward superstitious peasants.
All of these reasons operated in varying degrees on top of the basic thing: the Protestants had begun as, and never ceased to be a distinct and different people. A Protestant-Jacobin-led revolution in 1798, uprooting the landlords and allied to Revolutionary France, would have fused the different elements in the population of Ireland into one people. But Britain’s strength was too great, and that movement was crushed. Historic development then took the form of the Catholic struggle for equality and the striking economic divergence in the development of North and South.