Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

Chapter 1
National identity, Home Rule and the
Ulster question
The Government of Ireland Bill
In Ireland, constitutional theory and nationalist ideology met in the
demesne of Irish self-government. The emergence of the homerule
movement in the 1880s revealed the sectarian nature of Irish
politics, particularly in the northern province of Ulster. Until this
point, Ulster Protestant voters had been divided between the two
major British political parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, while
a small section of extreme loyalists identified with Orangism. Most
Ulster Catholics, on the other hand, tended to support Charles
Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, commonly called the
Irish Party, which in 1885 had seized seventeen of the province’s
thirty-three seats at Westminster. The decision of the Prime
Minister, W.E.Gladstone, to grant home rule led to the revival of
the Orange Order, which had originally been formed in Armagh in
1795 against a background of sectarian faction—fighting. From
the 1880s it formed a powerful cross-class alliance of Protestants
who feared the implications of home rule. 1 The first two Home
Rule Bills, in 1886 and 1893, had been defeated in Parliament, and
it was not until 1910 that the possibility of home rule returned.
Following the 1910 general elections, Herbert Asquith’s Liberal
Party relied upon the parliamentary support of Parnell’s successor,
John Redmond, to secure a House of Commons majority After the
passage of the 1911 Parliament Act, which restricted the ability of
the House of Lords to reject Commons legislation, it appeared that
the final obstacle to home rule had been removed. It now seemed
that Redmond was to secure the goal which had eluded his
predecessor.
In 1912 the Liberal Government introduced the Government
of Ireland Bill, commonly known as the Home Rule Bill, creating an
Irish parliament within the United Kingdom. The Irish Parliament
was to be bicameral consisting of, first, a forty-member Senate.