Irish Parliamentary Party
The Irish Parliamentary Party was formed in 1874 by Isaac Butt, the leader of the Nationalist Party, replacing the Home Rule League, as official parliamentary party for Irish nationalist Members of Parliament elected to the House of Commons at Westminster within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland up until 1918. Its central objectives were legislative independence for Ireland and land reform. Its constitutional movement was instrumental in laying the groundwork for Irish self-government through three Irish Home Rule bills.
Origins
The IPP evolved out of the Home Rule League which Isaac Butt founded after he defected from the Irish Conservative Party in 1873. The League sought to gain a limited form of freedom for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in order to manage Irish domestic affairs in the interest of the Protestant landlord class. It was inspired by the success in the 1868 general election of William Ewart Gladstone and his Liberal Party under the slogan Justice for Ireland, in which the Liberals won 65 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster. Gladstone said his mission was to pacify Ireland. The Irish Church Act 1869 provided for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland, whose members were a minority in Ireland and would have largely voted Conservative. He also introduced his first land bill which led to the Landlord and Tenant Act 1870, implementing limited tenant rights, thereby impinging on the powers of the Irish landlords to indiscriminately evict tenant farmers. At first the Catholic hierarchy supported Gladstone supervising Irish affairs, hoping to gain financial aid for a Catholic University. But his educational programme of 1873 did not provide for a denominational university.The Home Government Association adopted educational issues and land reform into its programme, the hierarchy then favouring a Dublin-based parliament. The increasing Catholic numbers within the association frightened off its Protestant, landlord element. The association was dissolved and Butt replaced it with the Home Rule League, formed after a conference in Dublin in November 1873. Gladstone unexpectedly called a general election in 1874, which helped bring the League to the foreground. Under the Ballot Act 1872, votes in general election were to be cast in private for the first time. The League put denominational education, land reform and release of political prisoners at the centre of the movement. It had difficulty finding reliable candidates to support its Home Rule issue, though succeeded in winning sixty Irish seats, many with ex-Liberals.
History
Party inaugurated
After the 1874 general election, forty-six members assembled in Dublin and organised themselves into a separate Irish parliamentary party in the Commons. The political outlook appeared encouraging at first, but the party was unable to achieve anything, the Liberals and Gladstone having lost the election. Isaac Butt made some well-received speeches but failed to persuade any of the major parties to support bills beneficial to Ireland, nothing worthwhile reaching the statute books.A minor group of impatient young Irish members, the genuine "Home-Rulers" distanced themselves from Butt's lack of assertiveness and, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, Joseph Biggar, John O'Connor Power, Edmund Dwyer Gray, Frank Hugh O'Donnell and John Dillon, some of whom had close connections with the Fenian movement, adopted the method of parliamentary "obstructionism" during 1876–1877, to bring Westminster out of its complacency towards Ireland by proposing amendments to almost every bill and making lengthy overnight speeches. This did not bring Home Rule closer, but helped to revitalise the Irish party. Butt considered obstructionism a threat to democracy; in practice, its greatest achievement was to help bring Parnell to the fore of the political scene. An internal struggle began between Butt's majority and Parnell's minority leading to a rift in the party; Parnell determined to obtain control of the Home Rule League.
Land-war mainspring
Parnell first worked successfully to have Fenians freed who missed out on Gladstone's earlier amnesty, including Michael Davitt. After his release in 1877, Davitt travelled to America to meet John Devoy, the leading Irish-American Fenian and raise funds. During 1878 Parnell also met with leading members of the Irish American Fenians. In October Devoy agreed to a New Departure of separating militancy from the constitutional movement in order to further its path to Home Rule. Throughout 1879 Parnell continued to campaign for land reform and when Davitt founded the Irish National Land League in October 1879 Parnell was elected president, but did not take control of it, favouring to continue to hold mass meetings. Isaac Butt died later that year and Parnell held back in grabbing control of the party. Instead he travelled to America with John Dillon on a fund raising mission for political purposes and to relieve distress in Ireland after a world economic depression slumped the sale of agricultural produce.At the 1880 general election, sixty-four Home Rulers were elected, twenty-seven Parnell supporters, facilitating in May his nomination as leader of a divided Home Rule Party and of a country on the brink of a land war. He immediately understood that supporting land agitation was a means to achieving his objective of self-government. The Conservatives under Disraeli had been defeated in the election and Gladstone was again Prime Minister. He attempted to defuse the land question with the dual ownership Land Law Act 1881 which failed to eliminate tenant evictions. Parnell and his party lieutenants, William O'Brien, John Dillon, Michael Davitt, Willie Redmond, went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act in Kilmainham Jail for "sabotaging the Land Act", from where the No Rent Manifesto was issued calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike which was partially followed. Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely.
Truce and treaty
In April 1882 Parnell moved to make a deal with the government. The settlement involved withdrawing the manifesto and undertaking to move against agrarian crime, seeing militancy would never win Home Rule. The so-called Kilmainham Treaty, a truce not dissimilar to truces to follow, marked a critical turning point in Parnell's leadership, though it resulted in losing the support of Devoy's American-Irish. However, his political diplomacy preserved the national Home Rule movement after the Phoenix Park Murders in May of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Under Secretary. For the next twenty years Fenians and physical-force militancy ceased to play a role in Irish politics.With the Land League suppressed and internally fracturing, Parnell resurrected it in October as the Irish National League. It combined moderate agrarianism, a Home Rule programme with electoral functions. It was hierarchical and autocratic in structure with Parnell wielding immense authority and direct parliamentary control. Parliamentary constitutionalism was the future path. The informal alliance between the new, tightly disciplined National League and the Catholic Church was one of the main factors for the revitalisation of the national Home Rule cause after 1882. Parnell saw that the explicit endorsement of Catholicism was of vital importance to the success of this venture. At the end of 1882 the organisation already had 232 branches, in 1885 increased to 592 branches. He left the day-to-day running of the League in the hands of his lieutenants Timothy Harrington as Secretary, William O'Brien editor of its newspaper United Ireland and Tim Healy.
Parnellism reigns
Parnell's new Irish Parliamentary Party emerged swiftly as a tightly disciplined—one author described it as "a regiment led by C. S. Parnell and by Michael Davitt" and on the whole, energetic body of parliamentarians with strict rules. The inauguration of the "party pledge" in 1884 decisively reinforced that each member was required to sit, act and vote with the party, one of the first instances of a whip in western politics. The members were also paid stipends, or expense allowances from party funds, which helped both to increase parliamentary turnout and enabled middle-class members such as William O'Brien or later D. D. Sheehan attend parliament, long before other MPs first received state pay in 1911. The profiles of the 105 Irish MPs had changed considerably since 1868 when 69% were landlords or the sons of landlords, reduced to 47% by 1874. Those with professional backgrounds increased from 10% to 23% in the same period, by the early 1890s professionals exceeding 50%.Now at his height Parnell pressed Gladstone to resolve the Irish Question with Home Rule, but the Liberals were divided. Parnell then sided with the Conservatives. Gladstone's second government fell, and Lord Salisbury's Conservatives formed an administration. Both parties now courted Parnell.
The result of Parnell's reforms and reorganisation were fully reflected in the general election of November–December 1885. This election was the first to be fought under the extended suffrage of the 1884 Reform Act. The Reform Act had increased from 220,000 to 500,000 the number of Irishmen who had a right to vote, many of whom were small farmers. The election increased the total Irish Party representation from 63 to 85 seats, which included seventeen in Ulster. In January 1886 the INL had developed to 1,262 branches and could claim to contain the vast body of Irish Catholic public sentiment. It acted not merely as an electoral committee for the Irish Party, but as local law-giver, unofficial parliament, government, police and supreme court. Parnell's personal authority in the organisation was enormous. The INL was a formidable political machine built in the traditional political culture of rural Ireland. It was an alliance of tenant farmers, shopkeepers and publicans. No one could stand against it.
The party secured a seat in the English city of Liverpool, which contains a large Irish Catholic community. T. P. O'Connor won the Liverpool Scotland seat in 1885 and retained it in every election until his death in 1929 – even after the demise of the actual party.
The IPP emerged from the 1885 general election holding the balance of power. The Liberals had won 335 seats, but the IPP's 86 seats were enough to keep the 249 Conservatives in power for the time being.