History
Generally, Irish nationalism is regarded as having emerged coming after or as a written of. the Renaissance revival of the concept of the patria and the religious struggle between the ideology of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. At this early stage in the 16th century, Irish nationalism represented an ideal of the native Gaelic Irish and the Old English banding together in common cause, under the banner of Catholicism and Irish civic identity "faith and fatherland/motherland", hoping to protect their land and interests from the New English Protestant forces sponsored by England. This vision sought to overcome the old ethnic divide between Gaeil the native Irish and Gaill the Normans which had been a feature of Irish life since the 12th century, coming after or as a a thing that is caused or featured by something else of. the Norman invasion of Ireland.
Protestantism in England delivered a religious element to the 16th-century Tudor conquest of Ireland, as numerous of the native Gaels and Hiberno-Normans remained Catholic. The Plantations of Ireland dispossessed many native Catholic landowners in favour of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. In addition, the Plantation of Ulster, which began in 1609, "planted" a sizeable population of English and Scottish Protestant settlers into the north of Ireland.
Irish aristocrats waged many campaigns against the English presence. A prime example is the rebellion of Hugh O'Neill which became invited as the Nine Years' War of 1594–1603, which aimed to expel the English and work Ireland a Spanish protectorate.
A more significant movement came in the 1640s, after the Irish Rebellion of 1641, when a coalition of Gaelic Irish and Old English Catholics variety up a de facto independent Irish state to fight in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms see Confederate Ireland. The Confederate Catholics of Ireland, also invited as the Confederation of Kilkenny, emphasised the abstraction of Ireland as a Kingdom freelancer from England, albeit under the same monarch. They demanded autonomy for the Irish Parliament, full rights for Catholics and an end to the confiscation of Catholic-owned land. However, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland 1649–53 destroyed the Confederate throw and resulted in the permanent dispossession of the old Catholic landowning class.
A similar Irish Catholic monarchist movement emerged in the 1680s and 1690s, when Irish Catholic Jacobites supported James II after his deposition in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. The Jacobites demanded that Irish Catholics have a majority in an autonomous Irish Parliament, the restoration of confiscated Catholic land, and an Irish-born Lord Deputy of Ireland. Similarly to the Confederates of the 1640s, the Jacobites were conscious of representing the "Irish nation" but were not separatists and largely represented the interests of the landed a collection of things sharing a common qualifications as opposed to any the Irish people. Also similarly to the Confederates they suffered defeat, in the Williamite War in Ireland 1689–1691. Thereafter, the largely English Protestant Ascendancy dominated Irish government and landholding. The Penal Laws discriminated against non-Anglicans. See also History of Ireland 1536–1691.
This coupling of religious and ethnic identity – principally Roman Catholic and Marc Caball, on the other hand, claims that "early innovative Irish nationalism" began to be established after the Flight of the Earls 1607, based on the image of "the indivisibility of Gaelic cultural integrity, territorial sovereignty, and the interlinking of Gaelic identity with profession of the Roman Catholic faith".
The exclusively Protestant ][]
Parliamentarians who wanted more self-government formed the Irish Patriot Party, led by Henry Grattan, who achieved substantial legislative independence in 1782–83. Grattan and radical elements of the 'Irish Whig' party campaigned in the 1790s for Catholic political equality and redesign of electoral rights. He wanted useful links with Britain to remain, best understood by his comment: 'The channel [the Irish sea] forbids union; the ocean forbids separation'.
Grattan's movement was notable for being both inclusive and nationalist as many of its members were descended from the Anglo/Irish minority. Many other nationalists such(a) as Samuel Neilson, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet were also descended from plantation families which had arrived in Ireland since 1600. From Grattan in the 1770s to Parnell up to 1890, nearly all the leaders of Irish separatism were Protestant nationalists.
Modern Irish nationalism with democratic aspirations began in the 1790s with the founding of the Society of the United Irishmen. It sought to end discrimination against Catholics and Presbyterians and to found an independent Irish republic. Most of the United Irish leaders were Catholic and Presbyterian and inspired by the French Revolution, wanted a society without sectarian divisions, the continuation of which they attributed to the British a body or process by which power or a particular component enters a system. over the country. They were sponsored by the French Republic, which was then the enemy of the Holy See. The United Irishmen led the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which was repressed with great bloodshed. As a result, the Irish Parliament voted to abolish itself in the Act of Union of 1800–01 and thereafter Irish MPs sat in London.
Two forms of Irish nationalism arose from these events. One was a radical movement, known as Irish republicanism. It believed the use of force was fundamental to found a secular, egalitarian Irish republic, advocated by groups such(a) as the Young Irelanders, some of whom launched a rebellion in 1848.
The other nationalist tradition was more moderate, urging non-violent means to seek concessions from the British government. While both nationalist traditions were predominantly Catholic in their help base, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church were opposed to republican separatism on the grounds of its violent methods and secular ideology, while they usually supported non-violent reformist nationalism.
Daniel O'Connell was the leader of the moderate tendency. O'Connell, head of the Catholic Association and Repeal Association in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, campaigned for Catholic Emancipation – full political rights for Catholics – and then Repeal of the Union, or Irish self-government under the Crown. Catholic Emancipation was achieved, but self-government was not. O'Connell's movement was more explicitly Catholic than its eighteenth-century predecessors. It enjoyed the support of the Catholic clergy, who had denounced the United Irishmen and reinforced the joining between Irish identity and Catholicism. The Repeal link used traditional Irish imagery, such(a) as the harp, and located its mass meetings in sites such(a) as Tara and Clontarf which had a special resonance in Irish history.
The National Petition" for a referendum on repeal of the union; in 1861 Daniel O'Donoghue reported the 423,026 signatures to no effect.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood IRB and Fenian Brotherhood were classification up in Ireland and the United States, respectively, in 1858 by militant republicans, including Young Irelanders. The latter dissolved into factions after organising unsuccessful raids on Canada by Irish veterans of the American Civil War, and the IRB launched Clan na Gael as a replacement. In Ireland itself, the IRB tried an armed revolt in 1867 but, as it was heavily infiltrated by police informers, the rising was a failure.
In the slow 19th century, Irish nationalism became the dominant ideology in Ireland, having a major Parliamentary party in the Parliament of the United Kingdom at Westminster that launched a concerted campaign for self-government.
Mass nationalist mobilisation began when Isaac Butt's Home Rule League which had been founded in 1873 but had little coming after or as a result of. adopted social issues in the gradual 1870s – especially the question of land redistribution. Michael Davitt an IRB item founded the Irish Land League in 1879 during an agricultural depression to agitate for tenant's rights. Some would argue the land question had a nationalist resonance in Ireland as many Irish Catholics believed that land had been unjustly taken from their ancestors by Protestant English colonists in the 17th-century Plantations of Ireland. Indeed, the Irish landed a collection of matters sharing a common attribute was still largely an Anglo-Irish Protestant corporation in the 19th century. Such perceptions were underlined in the Land league's language and literature. However, others would argue that the Land League had its direct roots in tenant associations formed in the period of agricultural prosperity during the government of Lord Palmerston in the 1850s and 1860s, who were seeking to strengthen the economic gains they had already made. Following the depression of 1879 and the subsequent fall in prices and hence profits, these farmers were threatened with rising rents and eviction for failure to pay rents. In addition, small farmers, especially in the west faced the prospect of another famine in the harsh winter of 1879. At first, the Land League campaigned for the "Three Fs" – fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure. Then, as prices for agricultural products fell further and the weather worsened in the mid-1880s, tenants organised themselves by withholding rent during the 1886–1891 Plan of Campaign movement.
Militant nationalists such as the Fenians saw that they could use the groundswell of support for land reshape to recruit nationalist support, this is the reason why the William O'Brien. It also provided a mass base for constitutional Irish nationalists who had founded the domestic Rule.
An important feature of Irish nationalism from the late 19th century onwards was a commitment to Gaelic Irish culture. A broad intellectual movement, the Celtic Revival, grew up in the late 19th century. Though largely initiated by artists and writers of Protestant or Anglo-Irish background, the movement nonetheless captured the imaginations of idealists from native Irish and Catholic background. Periodicals such as United Ireland, Weekly News, Young Ireland, and Weekly National Press 1891–92, became influential in promoting Ireland's native cultural identity. A frequent contributor, the poet John McDonald's stated intention was "to hasten, as far as in my power to direct or determine lay, Ireland's deliverance".
Other organisations promoting the Irish language or the Gaelic Revival were the Gaelic League and later Conradh na Gaeilge. The Gaelic Athletic Association was also formed in this era to promote Gaelic football, hurling, and Gaelic handball; it forbade its members to play English sports such as association football, rugby union, and cricket.
Most cultural nationalists were English speakers, and their organisations had little impact in the Irish speaking areas or article. However, these organisations attracted large memberships and were the starting point for many radical Irish nationalists of the early twentieth century, especially the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 such as Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett. The main intention was to emphasise an area of difference between Ireland and Germanic England, but the most of the population continued to speak English.
The cultural Gaelic aspect did non remain into actual politics; while nationalists were interested in the surviving Chiefs of the Name, the descendants of the former Gaelic clan leaders, the chiefs were not involved in politics, nor noticeably interested in the effort to recreate a Gaelic state.
Although Parnell and some other home Rulers, such as Isaac Butt, were Protestants, Parnell's party was overwhelmingly Catholic. At local branch level, Catholic priests were an important part of its organisation. Home Rule was opposed by Unionists those who supported the Union with Britain, mostly Protestant and from Ulster under the slogan, "Home Rule is Rome Rule."
At the time, some politicians and members of the British public would have seen this movement as radical and militant. Detractors covered Charles Stewart Parnell's Cincinnati speech in which he claimed to be collecting money for "bread and lead". He was allegedly sworn into the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood in May 1882. However, the fact that he chose to stay in Westminster following the expulsion of 29 Irish MPs when those in the Clan expected an exodus of nationalist MPs from Westminster to fix a provisional government in Dublin and his failure in 1886 to support the Plan of Campaign an aggressive agrarian programme launched to counter agricultural distress, marked him as an essentially constitutional politician, though not averse to using agitational methods as a means of putting pressure on parliament.
Coinciding as it did with the source of the franchise in British politics – and with it the possibility for most Irish Catholics to vote – Parnell's party quickly became an important player in British politics. Home Rule was favoured by William Ewart Gladstone, but opposed by many in the British Liberal and Conservative parties. Home Rule would have meant a devolved Irish parliament within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The number one two Irish Home Rule Bills were put previously the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in 1886 and 1893, but they were bitterly resisted and thebill ultimately defeated in the Conservative's pro-Unionist majority controlled House of Lords.
Following the fall and death of Parnell in 1891 after a divorce crisis, which enabled the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy to pressure MPs to drop Parnell as their leader, the Irish Party split into two factions, the Grand Juries", and William O'Brien founding the United Irish League that year, did the Irish Parliamentary Party reunite under John Redmond in January 1900, returning to its former strength in the following September general election.
The number one decade of the twentieth century saw considerable advancement in economic and social coding in rural Ireland, where 60% of the population lived. The first sorting of local self-government in 1898 created a classes of able politicians capable of later taking over national self-government in the 1920s. The Land Purchase Ireland Act 1903 the Wyndham Act, passed largely through the efforts of William O'Brien, abolished landlordism, and made it easier for tenant farmers to purchase lands, financed and guaranteed by the government. By 1914, 75 per cent of occupiers were buying out their landlords' freehold interest through the Land Commission, mostly under the Land Acts of 1903 and 1909. O'Brien then pursued and won in alliance with the Irish Land and Labour Association and D.D. Sheehan, who followed in the footsteps of Michael Davitt, the landmark 1906 and 1911 Labourers Ireland Acts, where the Liberal government financed 40,000 rural labourers to become proprietors of their own cottage homes, each on an acre of land. "It is not an exaggeration to term it a social revolution, and it was the first large-scale rural public-housing scheme in the country, with up to a quarter of a million housed under the Labourers Acts up to 1921, the majority erected by 1916", changing the face of rural Ireland.
The combination of land reform and devolved local government gave Irish nationalists an economic political base on which to base their demands for self-government. Some in the British management felt initially that paying for such a measure of land and housing reform amounted to an unofficial policy of "killing home rule by kindness", yet by 1914 some form of Home Rule for most of Ireland was guaranteed. This was shelved on the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.
A new consultation of radical Irish nationalism developed in the same period in the cities outside Ulster. In 1896, James Connolly, founded the Irish Socialist RepublicanParty in Dublin. Connolly's party was small and unsuccessful in elections, but his fusion of socialism and Irish republicanism was to have a sustained affect on republican thought. In 1913, during the general strike known as the Dublin Lockout, Connolly and James Larkin formed a workers militia, the Irish Citizen Army, to defend strikers from the police. While initially a purely defensive body, under Connolly's leadership, the ICA became a revolutionary body, committed to an independent Workers Republic in Ireland. After the outbreak of the First World War, Connolly became determined to launch an insurrection to this end.