Unlike the preceding Bill, this one did get ratified by the Commons albeit under controversial circumstances and strong opposition, apparently culminating in a brawl between Conservative and Irish Party MP’s. Gladstone became Prime Minister again in 1892 and he again bought a Home Rule Bill before the House of Commons in 1893. This was defeated on the second reading and his short-lived government collapsed. In 1886, William Gladstone saw the writing on the wall and with the support of the Irish Party, took a Home Rule Bill to the House of Commons. Clearly, something had to give and the answer was staring Westminster in the face. Only the most staunchly Unionist parts of Ulster held out against this surge. When the voting franchise was expanded in the Representation of the Peoples Act 1884, effectively giving half of all men in Ireland the vote, the successor to the Home Rule League, the Irish Party went on to win 68% of the vote and 85 of 101 seats. Instead, the unapologetically pro-Unionist Conservative Party held those seats while the Liberals had mostly been wiped out. Only in Ulster and parts of Dublin did they fail to gain a foothold. This began to change in the 1870’s when in the general election of 1874, the Home Rule League swept to victory in 60 of the 103 Irish seats in the House of Commons. While it is well known that Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom was never of equal standing with the three other home nations, something the horrific events of the Potato Famine in the 1840’s made all too clear, there was no sign of Ireland leaving the Union it had been forced into in 1801. I hope that in this piece, I can provide some background to this overlooked, but no less fascinating political crisis. Yet this is an area of our history that is rarely discussed and apparently known about despite it being the reason Northern Ireland exists as part of the United Kingdom. Quite literally, only the start of the First World War, mere days after negotiations between the Liberal government, their Irish Nationalist partners and Ulster Unionists at Buckingham Palace might have prevented a civil war in Ireland. In the summer of 1914, issues that had been simmering and boiling away in the background in regards to Home Rule for Ireland had come to the fore. In case you are wondering, no I am not talking about the run up to the First World War, but Britain, and more specifically Ireland. Negotiations seemed to be going nowhere, both sides were armed and ready to fight to the death to defend their identity and ideals, war seemed inevitable. In the summer of 1914 politicians scrambled to prevent conflict.
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