the struggle from the 1870’s to the early 20th century for the realization of a program of autonomy for Ireland, providing for the creation of an Irish parliament and national bodies of government and at the same time a preservation of the supreme authority of Great Britain over Ireland.
In 1869 a program for the autonomy of Ireland was put forward by the Irish liberal I. Butt. In 1870 he founded the Home Rule Association of Ireland, which in 1873 became the Home Rule League. In 1874, 60 supporters of home rule were elected to the English parliament. In 1879, in an attempt to obtain mass support for home rule, the leader of the Home Rule movement, C. S. Parnell, and his colleagues helped form a mass peasant organization, the Land League. However, in 1882, Parnell concluded an agreement with the English Liberals to cease agrarian demonstrations in return for various concessions. The growth of the influence of the Irish opposition forced the Liberal Party in 1886 and 1893 to introduce bills in Parliament for the home rule of Ireland, although in a very reduced form. But the Conservatives and some Liberals who broke away from their party rejected the bills each time. In 1890 the Liberal Party itself suffered a schism.
At the beginning of the imperialist era the national liberation struggle of the Irish people outgrew the limits of the movement for home rule. The slogan “home rule” began to express the aspiration of only that part of the Irish bourgeoisie interested in preserving a softened form of colonial dependence on Great Britain. In 1912 the Liberal government introduced a bill on home rule that the House of Lords rejected three times from 1912 to 1914. Conservatives organized a separatist movement of the Protestant bourgeoisie and landowners of Northern Ireland (Ulster), where armed ranks of Unionists (the supporters of the preservation of union with Great Britain) began to be formed. After the start of World War I royal sanction gave a bill on home rule the force of law (Sept. 17, 1914), but with the condition that its implementation would be put off until the end of the war and be accompanied by a supplementary act that would except Northern Ireland from its provisions.
The popular masses of Ireland answered the colonial politics of Great Britain with the Irish revolt of 1916. At the end of the war a new revolutionary crisis arose in Ireland. The Sinn Feinians, who had achieved dominance in the nationalist movement, refused to recognize the act on home rule and proclaimed a struggle for an Irish republic. On Dec. 6, 1921, the British government was forced to sign a treaty with right-wing Sinn Feinians that created the Free Irish Republic (Eire) on the territory of the southern 26 counties.
L. I. IUREVICH