Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of the island seceding from the United Kingdom, becoming the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland), with only the six northeastern counties remaining within the United Kingdom.
Acts of Union, politics from 1801-1922
Ireland opened the 19th century still reeling from the after-effects of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Prisoners were still being deported to Australia and sporadic violence continued in County Wicklow. There was another abortive rebellion led by Robert Emmet in 1803. The Acts of Union, which constitutionally made Ireland part of the British state, can largely be seen as an attempt to redress some of the grievances behind the 1798 rising and to prevent it from destabilising Britain or providing a base for foreign invasion.
In 1800 the Irish Parliament and the Parliament of Great Britain each passed an Act of Union which, from 1 January 1801, abolished the Irish legislature and merged the Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of Great Britain to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
After one failed attempt, the passage of the act in the Irish parliament was finally achieved, albeit, as with the 1707 Acts of Union that united Scotland and England, with the mass bribery of members of both houses, who were awarded British peerages and other "encouragements".
In this period, the administration of Ireland consisted of authorities appointed by the central British government. These were the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who represented the King, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland appointed by the British Prime Minister. Almost equally important was the Under Secretary for Ireland, who headed up the civil service in Ireland.
As the century went on, the UK Parliament and Cabinet took over from the monarch as the legislative and executive branches of government, respectively. For this reason, in Ireland, the Chief Secretary became more important than the Lord Lieutenant, who became of more symbolic than real importance. After the abolition of the Irish Parliament, Irish Members of Parliament were elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in Westminster.
The British Administration in Ireland – known by metonymy as "Dublin Castle" – remained largely dominated by the Anglo-Irish establishment until its removal from Dublin in 1922.
Catholic emancipation
Part of the Union's attraction for many Irish Catholics and Dissenters was the promised abolition of the remaining Penal Laws then in force (which discriminated against them), and the granting of Catholic emancipation. However, George III blocked emancipation, believing that to grant it would break his coronation oath to defend the Anglican church. A campaign under the Irish Catholic lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell and the Catholic Association led to renewed agitation for the abolition of the Test Act. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, was at the peak of his prestige as the victor of the Napoleonic Wars. As Prime Minister he used his considerable political power and influence to steer the enabling legislation through the UK Parliament. He persuaded George IV to sign the Act into law under threat of resignation. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, allowed British and Irish Catholics to sit in the Parliament. Daniel O'Connell became the first Catholic MP to be seated since 1689. As head of the Repeal Association, O'Connell mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union and the restoration of Irish self-government.
O'Connell's tactics were largely peaceful, using mass rallies to show the popular support for his campaign. While O'Connell failed to gain repeal of the Union, his efforts led to reforms in matters such as local government and the Poor Laws.
Despite O'Connell's peaceful methods, there was also a good deal of sporadic violence and rural unrest in the country in the first half of the 19th century. In Ulster, there were repeated outbreaks of sectarian violence, such as the riot at Dolly's Brae, between Catholics and the nascent Orange Order. Elsewhere, tensions between the rapidly growing rural population on one side and their landlords and the state on the other gave rise to much agrarian violence and social unrest. Secret peasant societies such as the Whiteboys and the Ribbonmen used sabotage and violence to intimidate landlords into better treatment of their tenants. The most sustained outbreak of violence was the Tithe War of the 1830s, over the obligation of the mostly Catholic peasantry to pay tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was set up to police rural areas in response to this violence.
Socioeconomic situation 1800–1840
There were economic booms during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). Most people in pre-famine Ireland had little or no access to land. Landless laborers or cottiers comprised the single most common profession in the 1841 census, when 40% of Irish houses "were one room mud cabins with natural earth floors, no windows and no chimneys".
The Great Famine, 1845–1851
Ireland underwent major highs and lows economically during the 19th century; from economic booms during the Napoleonic Wars to severe economic downturns and a series of famines, the last threatening in 1879. The worst of these was the Great Irish Famine (1845–1851), in which about one million people died and another million emigrated.
The economic problems of most Irish people were in part the result of the small size of their landholdings and a large increase in the population in the years before the famine. In particular, both the law and social tradition provided for subdivision of land, with all sons inheriting equal shares in a farm, meaning that farms became so small that only one crop, potatoes, could be grown in sufficient amounts to feed a family. Furthermore, many estates, from whom the small farmers rented, were poorly run by absentee landlords and in many cases heavily mortgaged. Enclosures of land since the start of the 19th century had also exacerbated the problem, and the extensive grazing of cattle had contributed to the decrease in size in the plots of land available to tenants to raise their crops.
In the new Whig government (from 1846), Charles Trevelyan became assistant secretary to the Treasury, and largely responsible for the British Government's response to the famine in Ireland. When potato blight hit the island in 1845, much of the rural population was left without food. At this time, the Prime Minister Lord John Russell adhered to a strict laissez-faire economic policy it has been claimed, which maintained that further state intervention would have the whole country dependent on hand-outs, and that what was needed was for economic viability to be encouraged. The government of Lord John Russell attempted to raise a loan of £8 million and intended a further loan but this provoked a financial crisis made worse by demand for funds for railways and food imports. The crisis prevented the expending of the loan if the pound was to remain convertible to gold and government funding was slashed in 1847 and the costs of relief transferred to local taxes in Ireland.
Despite Ireland producing a net surplus of food, most of it was exported to England and elsewhere. Public works schemes were set up but proved inadequate, and the situation became catastrophic when epidemics of typhoid, cholera and dysentery took hold. About £2,000,000 was donated all over the world by charities and private donors, including the Choctaw people in the US, former slaves in the Caribbean, Sultan Abdülmecid I of the Ottoman Empire, Queen Victoria, and future Tsar Alexander II of Russia. However the inadequate nature of the British Government's initiatives led to a problem becoming a catastrophe.
Emigration was not uncommon in Ireland in the years preceding the Famine. Between 1815 and 1845, Ireland had already established itself as the major supplier of overseas labour to Great Britain and North America. However, emigration reached a peak during the famine, particularly in the years 1846–1855. The famine also saw increased emigration to Canada and assisted passages to Australia. Because of ongoing political tensions between the US and the UK, the resulting large and influential Irish American diaspora created, financed and encouraged the Irish independence movement. In 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB, also known as the Fenians) was founded as a secret society dedicated to armed rebellion against the British. A related organisation formed in New York was known as Clan na Gael, which several times organised raids into the British Province of Canada. While the Fenians had a considerable presence in rural Ireland, the Fenian Rising launched in 1867 was a fiasco. Moreover, wider support for Irish republicanism, in the face of harsh laws against sedition, was minimal in the period.
Young Irelander Rebellion
Some members of the Repeal Association, called the Young Irelanders, formed the Irish Confederation and tried to launch a rebellion against British rule in 1848. This coincided with the worst years of the famine and was contained by British military action. William Smith O'Brien, leader of the Confederates, failed to capture a party of police barricaded in Widow McCormack's house, who were holding her children as hostages, marking the effective end of the revolt. Although intermittent resistance continued until late 1849, O'Brien and his colleagues were quickly arrested. Originally sentenced to death, this sentence was later commuted to transportation to Van Diemen's Land, where they joined John Mitchel.
Land agitation and agrarian resurgence
In the wake of the famine, many thousands of Irish peasant farmers and labourers either died or left the country. Those who remained waged a long campaign for better rights for tenant farmers and ultimately for land re-distribution. This period, known as the "Land War" in Ireland, had a nationalist as well as a social element. The reason for this was that the land-owning class in Ireland, since the period of the 17th century Plantations of Ireland, had been composed of Protestant settlers, originally from England, who had a British identity. The Irish (Roman Catholic) population widely believed that the land had been unjustly taken from their ancestors and given to this Protestant Ascendancy during the English conquest of the country.
The Irish National Land League, was formed to defend the interests of tenant farmers, at first demanding the "Three Fs" – Fair rent, Free sale and Fixity of tenure. Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, such as Michael Davitt, were prominent among the leadership of this movement. When they saw its potential for popular mobilisation, nationalist leaders such as Charles Stewart Parnell also became involved.
The most effective tactic of the Land League was the boycott (the word originates in Ireland in this period), where unpopular landlords were ostracised by the local community. Grassroots Land League members used violence against landlords and their property; attempted evictions of tenant farmers regularly turned into armed confrontations. Under the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, an Irish Coercion Act was first introduced – a form of martial law – to contain the violence. Parnell, Davitt, William O'Brien and the other leaders of the Land League were temporarily imprisoned – being held responsible for the violence.