Since the 1870s a Land War had been waged incessantly by tenant farmers in Ireland against their gentry landlords mainly due to rack-renting, evictions and depressed economic conditions.
The United Kingdom Government tried to alleviate tensions by introducing several Irish Land Acts which only partly relieved the situation.
The diehard Unionists of Ulster were also against the scheme – "worse than Home Rule of the Gladstone type, or Repeal of the Union", said Sir Edward Carson MP.
[8] On 31 August 1904 the Reform Association released a preliminary report calling for the devolution of larger powers of local government for Ireland.
[8] When with the approval of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Earl of Dudley, MacDonnell sponsored this scheme for the devolution of certain domestic affairs to an Irish Council,[9] it heralded high hopes for O'Brien, that Ireland had somehow entered a new era in which 'conference plus business' could replace agitation and parliamentary tactics as a primary strategy for achieving national goals.
[11] The reports became quickly less significant than the scandal that the Unionist administration in Dublin Castle, headed by Wyndham and Dudley, had apparently “gone native” and succumbed to home rule.
Despite his denials, it is likely that Wyndham tacitly encouraged the debate on devolution in August, and it is possible that he even involved Tim Healy MP in an effort to broaden the reformists base.
John Dillon MP, the Irish party deputy leader, who believed that the party could maintain its hold upon the country only if it remained pledged absolutely to Home Rule,[14] and those other nationalists such as Michael Davitt, who thought like him, had taken to the field against what Dillon called 'Dunraven and his crowd', and savagely repelled his movement towards a national unity that would embrace all classes and creeds, Joe Devlin MP telling his constituents "they were not going to seek the co-operation of a few aristocratic nobodies".
He retired in May 1905 driven into political oblivion by a union of angry loyalists and nationalists, including Dillon, which helped to precipitate a schism which lasted the life of the Home Rule movement.