‘It is not easy to describe the mental life of a man who is neither expansive nor introspective’. Thus wrote T. P. O'Connor, one of Parnell's earliest biographers. Historians have never ceased to echo his lament, and however much they may have differed in their interpretation of Parnell, they have generally agreed that, while no Irish leader of the nineteenth century has been so intensively studied, none remains so enigmatic and inaccessible.
Each of the general elections that took place between 1885 and 1910 was significant in the history of the party, but that of 1895 had an interest peculiar to itself, setting it apart from the others in the series. It was not an election which brought about any major change in the relative strength of the various parties; it was not even notable for the number of seats to be contested. Nor was it fought upon any major issue of policy, since it was obvious to all but the most optimistic that home rule was not—and for a long time was not likely to be—a matter of practical politics; even the question of whether or not to continue the liberal alliance—a question hotly debated ever since Lord Rosebery's unpromising reference to home rule in March 1894—seemed largely academic in view of the probability of a unionist victory in Great Britain. For the Irish party—or, to speak more precisely, for the anti-Parnellites—the importance of the election of 1895 lay in quite a different direction; it lay in the fact that as a result of this campaign the methods whereby in the past the party had controlled the conduct of the elections over a large part of Ireland were deeply and permanently discredited, and the party itself confronted with a very serious crisis. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the development of that crisis, but before proceeding to consider it in detail, it will be necessary to describe very briefly the way in which this control over the elections was exercised.
There is a sense in which the home rule debates of 1886 were less the climax of than a deviation from the logical and predictable development of Irish politics in the Parnellite period. Had home rule been achieved, no doubt all would have been changed, and an autonomous Irish parliament would have addressed itself enthusiastically to solving the country's social and economic problems. But in the absence of home rule these problems immediately resumed the centre of the stage and the chief of them, the settlement of the land question, became again the crucial issue in Anglo-Irish relations. For some people, indeed, it had remained the crucial issue even during the ‘home rule’ winter of 1885–6, when the position on the Clanricarde estates in Galway, already notoriously bad, perceptibly worsened and when pressure was brought to bear both upon the Irish National League and upon the parliamentary party itself to adopt a more warlike posture towards rack-renting and evicting landlords.
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