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[1] and to prevent it from destabilising Britain or providing a base for foreign invasion.

[citation needed] However, King George III blocked emancipation, believing that to grant it would break his coronation oath to defend the Anglican church.

Arthur Wellesley, the Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman and First Duke of Wellington, was at the peak of his enormous prestige as the victor of the Napoleonic Wars.

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.

[4] 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.

[8] 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.

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 of the United Kingdom,[10] and future Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

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;[16] 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.

As well as causing the deaths of thousands of Irish speakers, the famine also led to sustained and widespread emigration from the Irish-speaking south and west of the country.

After his death, William Shaw and in particular a radical young Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell, turned the home rule movement, or the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) as it became known, into a major political force.

The party's growing electoral strength was first shown in the 1880 general election in Ireland, when it won 63 seats (two MPs later defected to the Liberals).

Parnell's movement also campaigned for the right of Ireland to govern herself as a region within the United Kingdom, in contrast to O'Connell who had wanted a complete repeal of the Act of Union.

Gladstone, says his biographer, "totally rejected the widespread English view that the Irish had no taste for justice, common sense, moderation or national prosperity and looked only to perpetual strife and dissension.

The revived Orange Order mobilized the opposition, warning that a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholics and nationalists would discriminate against them and would impose tariffs on trade with Great Britain.

(Whilst most of Ireland was primarily agricultural, north-east Ulster was the location of almost all the island's heavy industry and would have been affected by any tariff barriers imposed by a Dublin parliament.

The last obstacle to achieving Home Rule was removed with the Parliament Act 1911 when the House of Lords lost its power to veto legislation and could only delay a bill for two years.

During the following two years in which the bill was delayed, debates in the Commons were largely dominated by questions surrounding Home Rule and Ulster Unionists' determined resistance to it.

Dublin was a city marked by extremes of poverty and wealth, being home to several tenement areas and possessing some of the worst slums anywhere in the British Empire.

It also possessed one of the world's biggest "red light districts" known as Monto (after its focal point, Montgomery Street, on the north side of the city).

Initially, their acts were widely condemned by nationalists, who had suffered severe losses in the war as their sons fought at Gallipoli during the Landing at Cape Helles, and on the Western Front.

The government and the Irish media wrongly blamed Sinn Féin, then a small monarchist political party with little popular support for the rebellion, even though in reality it had not been involved.

Until 1917, Sinn Féin, under its founder Arthur Griffith, had campaigned for a form of government championed first by O'Connell, namely that Ireland would become independent as a dual monarchy with Great Britain, under a shared king.

The scales were finally tipped in Sinn Féin's favor when as a result of the German spring offensive the government, although it had already received large numbers of volunteer soldiers from Ireland, intended to impose conscription on the island linked with implementing Home Rule.

Instead on 21 January 1919 twenty-seven assembled as 'Teachta Dála' (TDs) in the Mansion House in Dublin and established Dáil Éireann (a revolutionary Irish parliament).

In December 1925 the three governments agreed to keep the existing border, and in return, the Irish Free State's treaty liability to pay its share of the UK public debt was ended.