A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  The mud and sleech dredged up to create the Victoria Channel had been dumped to create an artificial island adjacent to east Belfast which, during the royal visit, had been renamed Queen’s Island. Here Robert Hickson, a Liverpool engineer who managed a large ironworks upstream at Cromac, decided to build ships with the iron he was finding difficult to sell at a profit. He engaged Edward Harland, a twenty-three-year-old engineer from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

  This appointment was of momentous importance for the industrial future of Belfast. Harland launched his first ship in October 1855, and his craft soon caused a sensation in the shipping world because of their revolutionary design. In 1858 Harland bought out Hickson, with the financial backing of Gustav Schwabe, a partner in John Bibby & Sons of Liverpool, who had been deeply impressed by the young man’s engineering prowess. Schwabe’s nephew, Gustav Wolff, had already joined Harland as a personal assistant. During the American Civil War business was brisk for the partnership of Harland & Wolff, formed in 1861, because the Confederate States were eager to buy fast steamers capable of outrunning the Union blockade. When Schwabe created the White Star Line in 1869, he ordered all his ocean-going vessels from Harland & Wolff, now on its way to becoming the biggest shipbuilding firm in the world.

  But, as we shall see, Belfast, for all its success, was an Irish town with Irish problems.

  Episode 192

  PARTY FIGHTS

  ’Twas on the Twelfth day of July, in the year of ’49,

  Ten hundreds of our Orangemen together did combine,

  In memory of King William, on that bright and glorious day,

  To walk all round Lord Roden’s park, and right over Dolly’s Brae.

  When members of the Orange Order announced that they intended to march from Rathfriland to Tollymore Park, Lord Roden’s estate in Co. Down, the government was alarmed. The return route chosen was a long one, veering north back to Rathfriland through the townland of Magheramayo, inhabited almost exclusively by Catholics. Major Arthur Wilkinson believed the Protestants were ‘epicures to choose it instead of keeping on a good road’.

  Early on Thursday 12 July 1849 Wilkinson’s troops, together with a body of constabulary, took up position at Dolly’s Brae, a defile on the route where there had been trouble the previous year. During the afternoon they were joined by up to a thousand Ribbonmen, Catholics in an organisation mirroring the Orange Order, all armed with pitchforks, pikes and muskets. At 5 p.m. around 1,400 Orangemen, fully armed, marched out of Tollymore, with bands playing, accompanied by dragoons and some anxious magistrates. As they approached Dolly’s Brae, Constabulary Sub-Inspector James Hill later told the inquest, ‘I addressed every file of the procession as it passed, asking them, for God’s sake, to pass on quietly, and not to fire a shot, even for fun.’ Then, Wilkinson recalled, ‘There went bang a shot in front, but I don’t know where it came from no more than the man in the moon.’ There followed, Hill continued, ‘a succession of shots from both sides ... a regular blazing away, helter-skelter.... Shots were tearing up the ground where the men were.... I ordered a few of the police for God’s sake to fire and they did.... At that time the gun balls were flying, I should say in hundreds, from the Protestant party.’

  Resident Magistrate George Fitzmaurice rode along the line of Orangemen urging them to stop shooting, but to no effect. Then at the end of the procession he found Catholic homes being attacked and one of their owners wounded. He stated in evidence: ‘I said to them, there’s a man lying on the road. Go back, perhaps he’s not dead, and afford him some assistance. They roared out—“He’s not one of our party.”’

  Not a single Orangeman was either killed or wounded, and, except for a policeman accidentally bayoneted by a fellow-constable, the forces of law and order were also unscathed. A government inquiry later estimated that at least thirty Catholics had been killed.

  Intense rioting in 1857 showed that traditional fears and rivalries, far from wilting when transferred from the countryside, found new strength in the narrow streets of working-class Belfast. The violence in 1857 began on Monday night, 12 July, when mobs hurled stones and insults at each other across wasteland by Albert Street and Catholics at Millfield beat two Methodist ministers with sticks. On the following night Sandy Row Protestants made a determined attack on the Pound, smashing windows with long poles and setting houses on fire. When the mills stopped work on Saturday afternoon, the police were swept aside as the mobs clashed in ferocious combat. Sporadic gunfire continued during the night, and on Sunday afternoon Head-Constable Henderson from Quadrant Street saw a ditch ‘closely lined with men, having guns levelled, firing without intermission’.

  Sectarian passions were inflamed again in August by street preaching from the Custom House steps. The journalist Frankfort Moore, then a young child, was present on the occasion and later recalled that there was a ‘warm interchange of opinion on a basis of basalt’. A policeman ordered his nurse: ‘Take them childer out o’ this or I’ll not be tellin’ ye. Don’t ye see he’s read the Riot Act. Heth! You’re a gierl bringin’ them wee’uns intill a crowd like thon!’

  Riots regularly erupted every summer in Belfast, given added force by new arrivals pouring in to seek work in the building trade, the mills, the docks, the engineering works and the shipyard. The riots of August 1864 were so fierce that Dublin Castle sent up a special train of twenty-seven wagons carrying two field guns and substantial reinforcements. Then the funeral of one victim of police gunfire was turned into a massive parade of loyalist strength on 18 August. When the procession turned unexpectedly into Donegall Place, Belfast’s most fashionable street, the forces of the crown could do little more than hold back Catholics massing in Castle Place. According to the Northern Whig, ‘The guns fired continuously, the bullets pierced the air, whirr after whirr, in a continuous volley.’ Only what Frankfort Moore called ‘the usual autumn monsoon’ brought this violence to an end.

  Episode 193

  ‘MY MISSION IS TO PACIFY IRELAND’

  In December 1868 the leader of the Liberal Party, William Ewart Gladstone, was engaged in his favourite form of relaxation—chopping down trees on his estate. A messenger arrived to tell him that Queen Victoria had asked him to form a government. ‘Very significant,’ he said, and then resting on his axe, declared with great passion: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’

  Gladstone had long been troubled by foreign criticism of the way that Britain governed Ireland. As a young man he had written to his wife:

  Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west, that coming storm.... Ireland forces upon us these great social and great religious questions—God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face.

  Gladstone had been strongly moved by the desperate courage of the Fenian Brotherhood and by the defiance in the dock of the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, the three Fenians condemned to the scaffold in 1867. Now he was Prime Minister; he promised ‘justice for Ireland’, but did he know how to provide that justice?

  Gladstone began in 1869 by knocking away one of the principal pillars of the Union: he disestablished the Anglican Church of Ireland. He considered it unjust that a church with only 700,000 adherents out of a population of 5,750,000 should continue to occupy its privileged position as the official state church. Above all, disestablishment removed the tithe, the hated enforced contribution made by farmers of all religions to the state church.

  Next, Gladstone put through a Land Act in 1870. The main purpose was to make the ‘Ulster custom’, which compensated tenants for improvements made to their holdings, enforceable by law throughout Ireland. Actually the act was not much use and proved a solicitor’s nightmare; but at least Gladstone had established the principle that parliament should do something to protect tenants as well as uphold the rights of landed property.

  Almost certainly the most valuable measure for Ireland in these years was the introduction of the secret ballot in all elections in 1872. No more could landlords, landlords’ agents and employers scrutinise th
e electoral preferences of voters. At last those enfranchised could cast their votes as they wished without fear of eviction or retaliation.

  Secret ballot was first put to the test in the general election of 1874. The results had dramatic consequences for both British and Irish politics. Liberal representation in Ireland received a deadly blow from which it never recovered. The Liberals had largely been displaced by fifty-nine MPs who described themselves as ‘Home Rulers’.

  Isaac Butt was the unlikely leader of a new movement seeking the restoration of the Irish parliament. Son of a Co. Donegal clergyman, Butt was for a time a Professor of Political Economy, an Orange Tory Dublin councillor, a Conservative MP and a barrister. His opinions changed, and his brilliant defence of Young Ireland and Fenian prisoners won him the respect of a wide range of Irish nationalists. On 19 May 1870, in a Dublin hotel, the Home Government Association had been formed to demand, in Butt’s words, ‘full control over our domestic affairs’.

  Since the Famine and the death of Daniel O’Connell in 1847 Irish politics had become somewhat humdrum and unexciting. Attempts in the 1850s and 1860s to create a robust independent Irish party, to champion the rights of tenant farmers in particular, had proved disappointing. For nearly a quarter of a century the issue of repeal of the Act of Union had been all but dead. Now it was revived by an uneasy alliance of disgruntled Liberals and Conservatives, former Repealers, and Fenians searching for an alternative to futile revolution. Seeking support for a Catholic university, members of the hierarchy, after some hesitation, also gave their support to the new association.

  Any feeling of elation at their success in the 1874 election soon deserted the Home Rule MPs. On the eve of the election the Belfast News-Letter had declared:

  Home rule is simple Rome rule, and, if home rule were accomplished tomorrow, before that day week Rome rule would be evident.

  It was a view firmly believed by the great majority of Irish Protestants. They did not hesitate to express their implacable opposition to an Irish parliament. In any case, the same election put Gladstone and the Liberals out of office. Benjamin Disraeli now headed a Conservative government more interested in imperial adventure than in Ireland’s problems. Isaac Butt’s moderate attempts in the House of Commons to bring Ireland back on the agenda got nowhere.

  Then on 22 April 1875 a tall, bearded young man, a Protestant landlord from Co. Wicklow, made his first appearance in the House of Commons. Returned as a Home Ruler in a by-election in Co. Meath, Charles Stewart Parnell would soon transform the Irish political landscape.

  Episode 194

  ‘KEEP A FIRM GRIP OF YOUR HOMESTEADS’

  On the evening of Thursday 22 April 1875 Joseph Biggar, the Home Rule (or Nationalist) MP for Co. Cavan, was delivering a long, boring speech to an almost empty House of Commons. This was quite deliberate. Biggar, a Presbyterian pork butcher and secretly a sworn member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was filibustering: this was to delay the passage of a coercion bill for Ireland. English MPs found Biggar’s Belfast accent difficult enough to understand at the best of times. Reading long extracts from dry reports, he droned on until, after almost four hours on his feet, he said he was ‘unwilling to detain the House at further length’ and sat down.

  During this interminable speech the newly elected MP for Co. Meath, Charles Stewart Parnell, entered the chamber for the first time. Parnell was impressed. Soon, along with a couple of other members, he joined Biggar in what became known as ‘obstruction’, that is, holding up the business of parliament to force the government to pay attention to Irish problems.

  Isaac Butt, leader of the Irish Home Rule MPs, strongly disapproved of this ungentlemanly tactic of obstruction. But this filibustering was popular with constituents back in Ireland, and Parnell was fast becoming a prominent figure. Butt, the founder of the Home Rule movement, was now being edged aside by members of the party he had created, the Irish Parliamentary Party. At this point a severe economic crisis provided Parnell with the opportunity to become the undisputed leader not only of the Irish Party but of all nationalists in Ireland.

  Unremitting rain throughout August 1877 destroyed the oats and rotted the potatoes in the ground, especially in the west and north-west. Many small-holders could not pay their rents, and for the first time for many years tenant farmers were being evicted in their hundreds. The harvest of 1878 was also poor, but that of the following year was disastrous, the worst since the Famine. The year 1879 was the wettest and coldest since records began. Between March and September rain fell on 125 days out of a six-month total of 183, that is, two days out of every three. Turf cut from the bogs had no chance to dry. Above all, the potato crop was ravaged by blight—the yield was reduced by more than two-thirds.

  Smallholders in the west, still dependent on the potato for their staple diet, faced starvation. Thousands were evicted. The Freeman’s Journal reported on the condition of Co. Mayo at the end of August:

  The prospect of an abundant harvest is at an end; the chance even of a tolerable one hangs dangerously in the balance. The lightnings of Sunday night, the rains and winds which have raged either daily or nightly ever since, have left the footprints of their vengeance deep behind them. The two props of the Mayo farmer’s homestead have collapsed miserably upon his head. The potatoes are bad, the turf is worse.

  Many families owed two or three years’ rent. This time, however, as they received their eviction notices, the tenant farmers planned to resist. Galvanised and organised by the editor of the Connaught Telegraph, James Daly, at least 10,000 assembled at Irishtown, Co. Mayo, on 20 April 1879 to demand action. Most MPs in the Irish Party greeted news of this peasant defiance with alarm. Not so Charles Stewart Parnell: he realised that his party could be swept aside if it ignored the anger of humble people in the countryside facing ruin. He readily accepted an invitation to address a meeting to be held at Westport, Co. Mayo. Parnell was about to draw the respectable Home Rulers into an alliance with poor farmers and militant republicans to engage in a titanic struggle with the privileged landed elite.

  The rain poured in torrents on 8 June 1879 as thousands came in from all parts of Co. Mayo to a field on the edge of Westport town. Many wore green ribbons and rosettes, eighty arrived in a body on horseback, and some held aloft banners proclaiming ‘The Land for the People!’, ‘Down with the Land Robbers!’ and ‘Ireland for the Irish!’ They had come despite the open condemnation of the Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale. And they had come to listen to Parnell, a landlord and a Protestant who spoke in an upper-class accent. He openly urged them to flout the law:

  You must show the landlords that you intend to keep a firm grip of your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves to be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847.

  These tenant farmers had every intention this time of resisting eviction. Organised soon after in the Land League, they launched what became known as the ‘Land War’.

  Episode 195

  THE LAND WAR

  In March 1879 John Devoy, the head of Clan na Gael, the main Fenian organisation in America, met Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Party MP, in northern France. There in secret Devoy explained what he described as a ‘new departure’: the Fenians would abandon plans for armed revolt and support the drive for Home Rule, provided Parnell backed the campaign of tenant farmers against the landlords. Though he was careful not to put it in writing, Parnell did not hesitate to give his approval.

  Michael Davitt played a pivotal role in brokering this deal between republican revolutionaries and constitutional nationalist politicians. A Fenian recently paroled from a term of penal servitude after conviction for illegal arms dealing, Davitt was to make sure that Parnell would lead a great national campaign to break the power of the landlords.

  During that year of 1879 drenching rain, a succession of bad harvests and the reappearance of potato blight had brought many families—particularly in the west of Ireland—to the brink of starvation.

 
Co. Mayo took the lead in defying the landlords and in the formation of the Irish National Land League in October 1879. A poster explained its aims:

  First—To put an end to Rack-renting, Eviction, and Landlord Oppression. Second—To effect such a radical change in the Land System of Ireland as will put it in the power of every Irish Farmer to become the owner, on fair terms, of the land he tills.

  Such excitement had not been witnessed in Ireland since Daniel O’Connell’s monster meetings for repeal of the Union more than thirty years before. Huge numbers of country people, threatened with eviction, unemployment and starvation, assembled to hear fiery speeches from Land League agitators. Economic conditions worsened in the hard winter of 1879–80, and once again torrential rains in the ensuing spring and summer threatened to ruin the harvest. As the general election of 1880 approached, the Fermanagh Times declared:

  The question of the hour is a sad one—destitution. It is echoed from the Giant’s Causeway to the Cove of Cork. Go where we may, throughout Ireland to-day, we hear the wail of distress for food.

  The Land League demanded substantial rent reductions, and if these were refused, tenants were urged to refuse to pay the rent. The Liberal leader, W. E. Gladstone, declared that eviction notices were now falling like snowflakes. This seemed all too true. How could evictions be stopped without recourse to violence? The Land League’s answer was to make life impossible for any farmer who took over an evicted man’s holding. Michael Davitt, at a meeting in Knockaroo, Co. Mayo, made reference to a holding from which the occupier had been just evicted: