Enigma

by Paul Bew

  But what was this Parnellite nationalism? ‘No man has the right to set a boundary to the onward march of a nation,’ is, of course, one of his most famous declarations. But how did he conceive the nation? Michael Tierney was to claim that ‘When Parnell refused to put bounds to the march of the nation, he simply meant that he did not really know what, in the political sense, the nation wanted’.37 Eamon de Valera, the dominating figure of independent Irish politics, offered a more confident and triumphalist interpretation of Parnellism: ‘All that Parnell wanted and more than he felt it expedient to demand in his day have been secured for this part of Ireland,’ he told a Parnell commemoration gathering at Creggs, Co. Roscommon, on 29 December 1946. ‘. . . Our “eyes have seen the glory” which Parnell . . . longed for and strove for but did not see.’38 But Parnell’s ‘glory’ was certainly not that mystic Celtic culture nor that Catholic peasant Ireland which was so dear to de Valera’s heart. According to Tim Healy, his distaste for Gaelic scholarship was so pronounced as to be almost rude; and while he certainly felt a sense of duty towards the unfortunate sections of the Irish peasantry, there is no sign that he regarded them on religious or any other grounds as particularly fine examples of humanity.

  Parnell’s nationalism resided basically in a faith in the superior capacity of Ireland’s local ruling class—as compared with the incompetence of the English administration—to control the inhabitants. But who was to be the ruling class? The nascent domestic Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, its literary or legal representatives, were decidedly not Parnell’s first choice. He did not wish them to be the exclusively dominating force within the new dispensation of power. As he put it to Andrew Kettle: ‘I have to work with the tools that come to my hand. I have no choice. The men I would like to have won’t come, so I have to use the men who will.’39

  This is the paradox of Parnellism. He hoped for reconciliation between the Catholic democracy and the southern Irish Protestant ascendancy, but he failed to achieve it. In fact the time was not ripe for such a compromise. As one shrewd pro-landlord commentator acknowledged in 1881, the chance had really been missed at an earlier stage, the period of Butt’s dominance. In the words of this writer:

  Elated with an absolute power which had lasted for centuries; blind to the fact that their political influence was going, if not gone; forgetful of the fact they were only a minority; the friends of England in a country where England was hated, the Irish aristocracy laughed at Mr Butt and refused to leave a position which political power alone could have retained for them.40

  Parnell was no less desirous of winning over the landlords than Butt was; however, in his time elemental forces were at work which made a compromise doubly difficult to achieve. Indeed, as the agrarian class conflict intensified, the terms Parnell was able to offer deteriorated all the while. As he reminded the Irish landlords in 1891: ‘The terms which they scoffed at or ridiculed in 1879, they would be only too glad to obtain today’.41 But in 1886, and again in 1890 and 1891, Parnell did his best to get his fellow landlords ‘off the hook’.

  As the scholar Frank Callanan observed: ‘The idea of Parnell’s conservatism is based on an extrapolation of his views on the land question, which were to the right of most of his party, and closer to the Conservatives than the Liberals. Parnell sought to ensure the retention of a scaled-down residential landlord class under Home Rule, to maintain a class that would contribute to Irish economic development; to contrive in political balance; and to secure ultimate Anglo-Irish and Conservative assent to a scheme of Home Rule.’42

  2

  Parnell was decidedly less consistent in his attitude towards the large Protestant community in the north. In the early part of his career he had not been much interested in Ulster. He tended to treat the Ulster Protestants as though they constituted a solid but insignificant bloc of bigotry and reaction. But a sophisticated patrician’s cold disdain is no substitute for analysis and action.

  In part, Parnell’s lack of grasp of northern politics is to be explained by his own lack of serious religiosity. His father was rather a committed Protestant; Parnell much less so. He agreed completely with John Devoy that J. G. Biggar had done harm to the nationalist cause by converting to Catholicism from Presbyterianism. He was angry—as the British-based Home Rule activist John Valentine’s memoirs record—when it was suggested to him that he would die a Catholic. He was visibly uncertain and confused by the tides of Catholic politics in Mayo in the epoch of the Knock apparition.43 But he was capable in conversation with Andrew Kettle of sympathetically suggesting that Catholicism was, indeed, the only real religion. However casual the comment—and in Parnell’s case it was probably very casual—it was not the type of remark any northern Unionist political leader would make in the 1880s. Insofar as there was a religious element to Ulster Unionism—and there was—Parnell was unable to empathise with it. As he explained to the House of Commons on 4 March 1879: ‘I deny, Sir, that the people of Ireland are bigoted . . . and I bear testimony to the fact that I, a Protestant, a member of the disestablished Church of Ireland, and a member of a Synod, represent the Catholics of Meath.’44 For Parnell, for most of his career, that was the beginning and end of the matter. In Portsmouth in June 1886 he declared that the great majority of Irish Protestants did not feel strongly on Home Rule ‘one way or another’.

  Parnell had been slow to see the importance of attempting to neutralise the Presbyterian ‘Whig’ agrarian radical element in Ulster. In February 1878 he had been among those thirty-five Home Rule MPs censured by The Nation for failing to vote for the land reform measures for Ulster proposed by the Liberal opposition at Westminster. Later, during the land war in 1881, one of his close lieutenants, J. J. O’Kelly, urged that nothing should be done to alienate this potentially sympathetic group of northern radicals. (There had in fact been significant Ulster Protestant tenant support for the Land League, which did not translate into support for nationalism.) Parnell, however, against the advice of both O’Kelly and Kettle, put up a Nationalist candidate in Tyrone, an action which, in O’Kelly’s words, ‘alarmed and angered the whole Presbyterian body, and split Ulster once more into distinctly hostile camps of Catholic and Protestant’.45

  In March 1885 Parnell had said of the nascent Ulster Unionist movement:

  I call them the English party in Ireland because I think that more correctly designates them than the title of ‘loyal minority’ which they have assumed. . . . No doubt there had been and still were brave men among them (hear, hear); but on the whole they had shown themselves to be a selfish and inconsiderate race mindful only of their own interests (cheers).46

  In November of that year he had gone on to say:

  I absolutely deny that Ulster is the most industrious province. I have never seen anything in any country to equal the indefatigable toil of the Connaught peasant, who has reclaimed the mountains and the marshes . . . and who migrates every year to England and Scotland to find in the cornfields and gardens of those countries that employment which is denied to him at home.47

  Parnell was merely reflecting widespread nationalist sentiment here. The Connaught Telegraph put it more bitterly:

  We have been told in the canny Scotch patois of the oily souper that the obvious cause of peace and plenty in one region and crime and misery in the other, originated and centred on the fact that Protestantism dignified the former and Catholicism impoverished the latter.48

  What these remarks indicate is a culture clash of enormous proportions. Parnell, in the years 1885–6, simply lacked the intelligence, sympathy or vision—especially when confronted with Orange anti-Catholic violence in Belfast—to produce a political line that would allay the fears of northern Protestants.

  In particular, his flirtation with ‘Conservative Home Rule’ in 1885–6 included a public flirtation with protectionist policies; indeed, Parnell was privately convinced that the policy was entirely realistic49 and likely to be conceded by the Tories. In fact, of course, protection would be bound to ter
rify the industrial elite of Belfast which believed itself to be entirely dependent on the British market. As one exasperated Belfast writer explained: ‘It is known that Mr Parnell has declared himself in favour of protection, and if he were in a position to give effect to his idea, he would put an import duty on flax to please the farmers. This would mean . . . the ruin of the linen industry.’50 There is no evidence that Parnell was even aware of the irritation he was causing.

  By the late 1880s Parnell seems at least to have realised that his conciliatory approach towards the landlords ought to be extended to Ulster Protestants as well. It is necessary to stress this, because the recent phase of the Irish troubles has tended to create a more critical attitude towards Parnell. The sharpest censures of the Irish leader have been those made on account of his record on the issues which seem most relevant to the present conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

  In 1957 Conor Cruise O’Brien felt able to claim in his study Parnell and his Party:

  It would be unsafe to say that an English majority led by Gladstone and an Irish majority led by Parnell could not—especially in the favourable climate of opinion created by the exposure in 1889 of the forgeries published by The Times—have achieved a settlement which preserved Irish unity.51

  But in 1978 the same writer commented on Parnell in a very different tone:

  He could not . . . ever have ‘won Home Rule’, because Home Rule was simply not winnable. Parnell, though a Protestant, was speaking for the Catholics of Ireland, not—as he and his followers appeared to take for granted—for an Irish nation that included the Ulster Protestants.52

  In his biography of Parnell published in 1977 F. S. L. Lyons has observed sharply that Parnell

  seems never to have asked himself what he meant by the ‘Irish nation’ or the ‘Irish race’ which he claimed to lead, and the idea that Ireland might possibly contain two nations, not one, apparently never entered his head.

  Lyons says of Parnell’s position on Ulster Unionism that he ‘never came remotely within reach of developing a constructive approach to the potentially lethal threat it represented’.53

  In partial defence of Parnell, Nicholas Mansergh has argued in this context that there was a real possibility that a ‘two nations’ line on the part of constitutional leaders might simply have hastened a revolutionary takeover of nationalist politics. He has further commented on Parnell’s ‘one nation’ position: ‘From such assumptions of unity may have derived many of the insensitivities which confirmed partition, but how far did they cause it?’ Mansergh here is signalling an important fact: there were strong forces making for a partition settlement regardless of the line adopted by the nationalist leaders.54 This is a weighty argument, but it is not the one pursued here. For it is still reasonable to insist, as Lyons does, that as the dimensions of Ulster Unionist resistance to Home Rule were clear enough before Parnell’s death, he ought to have offered some serious reflections on the subject.

  This study has argued that Parnell, as a Protestant himself, was concerned about the place of Irish Protestants in the national life. This is a neglected clue to Parnell’s political career. Most of this concern was directed towards Parnell’s ‘own people’, the southern Irish Protestants. His interest in the northern Protestants was much less marked; he found it difficult to identify with them, and for most of his career his views on their role and problems were uninformed and ill-conceptualised. Yet, as has been shown, after this slow and unpromising start he offered what ought to have been seminal suggestions concerning attitudes to the Ulster Unionist movement.

  By 1891 Parnell was openly stating that

  It has been undoubtedly true that every Irish patriot has always recognised . . . from the time of Wolf[e] Tone until now that until the religious prejudices of the minority, whether reasonable or unreasonable, are conciliated . . . Ireland can never enjoy perfect freedom, Ireland can never be united.55

  This suggestive statement might stand rather better on Parnell’s statue in Dublin than the windy blast of ‘patriotic’ rhetoric which at present adorns it.

  But if this is the correct interpretation of Parnell’s politics on the Ulster question, what are the implications? Parnell’s most explicit statements on this point occur after the divorce crisis. It can be argued that only then could Parnell afford to say such things. While he was still the leader of a united Nationalist contingent such arguments would have been highly divisive. In other words, Parnell’s attack on his party’s traditional views on Ulster in 1891 may be regarded as a proof that he was virtually the captive of Catholic nationalism during the entire period when he was supposed to be its unrivalled autocratic leader.

  3

  The key to Parnell’s rise was the land war. It was this struggle which turned him from a coming young man into the ‘uncrowned King of Ireland’. The sudden and dramatic effects of the Land League are clear: at the beginning of 1880 Irish landlordism was intact; by the spring of 1881 it was clear to friend and foe that it was doomed.

  Once the masses got involved in politics—as they did in the period 1879–82—all the ‘leaders’ were swept along. They all had their hopes for the outcome of the agitation, but nobody was in a position to impose a solution—Fenian, constitutional, clerical or otherwise. The price of non-involvement was total irrelevance. It was the action of the people which imposed a unity of sorts on the leadership. By 1882 Parnell was the symbol of that unity, but it was forged not from genuine consensus but out of the exhaustion of the competing forces. Specifically Fenian hopes for a revolutionary outcome to the agrarian conflict had been disappointed, and some turned in bitterness to terrorism. On the other hand, ‘moderates’ now had to work with men they had previously shunned. ‘The Chief’ was uncomfortably aware that, while he was the focus of national sentiment, he was by no means in control of it. By 1882 the very turbulence of the agitation had convinced him of the need to strengthen the more conservative forces in Irish political life. He began the business of providing the machinery—which was strongly influenced by the Catholic clergy—for a constitutional agitation aimed at Home Rule rather than an agrarian revolution. It is only fair to say that Parnell’s room for manoeuvre was weakened by those republican militants who, rather than struggle politically for those non-sectarian national ideals to which they were in principle dedicated, involved themselves in acts of terrorism. The shocking crime in Phoenix Park in 1882 and the subsequent dynamite outrages in 1883 and 1884 were significant incentives to quieter politics. Parnell was thus pushed towards the ‘right centre’ of Irish politics.

  The question of Parnell’s relationship to violence is an extremely complex one. In his celebrated work Reflections on Violence Georges Sorel declared:

  Parnell’s authority did not rest only upon the number of votes at his disposal, but mainly on the terror which every Englishman felt at the bare announcement of agrarian troubles. A few acts of violence were exceedingly useful to the Parnellian policy . . . a parliamentary group sells peace of mind to the Conservatives who dare not use the force they command.56

  There can be no doubt that there is a certain truth in these words. In addition, there is a different point well made in a Spectator editorial: ‘That Irish “outrage” has helped the English to realise how guilty they were towards Ireland, no one will deny.’57 Irish violence stimulated both fear and moral self-questioning. There is no doubt also that senior officials who supported Home Rule did so, at least, in significant measure because they feared nationalist violence. Parnell and those close to him were not contaminated by association with violence as much as might be expected—if a policymaker could seriously believe that political concession to Parnellism was the only realistic way to end it.58 A cynical view of the Land League leadership’s relationship to the Phoenix Park assassins was compatible, at least in some circles, with support for Home Rule: it should not be forgotten that Gladstone himself was inclined to regard Parnell as personally responsible for violence before the
civilising effects of his stay in Kilmainham. Forster’s comment on 9 May 1882 on Parnellite responsibility for crime was widely accepted, even by those Liberals who had been glad to see him forced out of office: ‘Do not let the hon. members opposite suppose I think they instigated these assassinations. I do think, if they had set their faces as they now set them against past murders, we should not have had these murders.’59

  Where did this leave Parnell himself? In his speech at Cork in December 1882 Parnell explicitly addressed the issue that ‘it has been said . . . that you have to bring Ireland to a state bordering on revolution to obtain justice.’60 There is little doubt that this reflected his own belief in the Land League era. Parnell himself had said in Brooklyn in January 1880: ‘You have to act upon English public opinion in some extraordinary and unusual manner in order to obtain any attention for Irish questions. We are therefore obliged to make the situation a very hot one indeed.’61 But in the aftermath of the Kilmainham Treaty, matters were more complex. He hoped that the country would remain ‘tranquil’, and that this peaceful state would test the assurances of those English politicians who claimed to have made concessions to Ireland not out of fear but a sense of justice. Were these assurances true or untrue? Parnell was content to leave the question open. There were to be inevitable oscillations of tone; but it is striking how close observers of Parnell stated that his ‘heart’ was not in any occasional display of militancy after 1882.62