Rome Rule

The Nationalist MP for Westmeath, Patrick James Smyth, rose to second the Bill and used his speech to advocate repeal of the Union.

[10] After the collapse of the 1798 United Irish rebellion and the passing of the Act of Union in 1801, the Orange Order was stronger than ever before, but began to decline and fell into disrepute towards the middle of the century.

[11] Long before the 1885 Bill it was already clear that a significant number of Irish people wanted to maintain the Union, particularly those resident in Ulster who were not Roman Catholics.

While the Act was passed to reflect the small percentage of Church of Ireland members in the Irish population, and to increase the self-esteem of Irish Roman Catholics, the resulting level playing field allowed the different Protestant groups to act as political equals for the first time.

From 1882 Charles Stewart Parnell turned his attention from Irish land reform to pursuing Home Rule.

[13] Ironically some leaders of the Irish Nationalist movement such as Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell were not Roman Catholics, but the majority of their supporters were.

For one thing, she saw that the Union was to her economic advantage since she was far more industrialised than the agricultural south, and her future clearly depended on the continuance of friendly trade with Britain.

[16] Her Protestant majority became fearful of one day finding herself dominated by a Roman Catholic Parliament in Dublin: This was the background against which the English Conservative Party played the "Orange Card."

To avoid further accusations about Rome Rule, he nominated six other non-Catholics for safe seats (out of the IPP's new total of 85 MPs) in the 1886 election.

In 1907 Modernism was proscribed in Pascendi dominici gregis and Lamentabili sane, indicating that no Protestant, being a heretic, could ever be well regarded by a Catholic-led government.

Opponents of Home Rule could also quote from several anti-clerical books by Margaret Cusack, the founder of The Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, who had then converted to Protestantism in 1887.

[18] In The Nun of Kenmare: An Autobiography (1889), Cusack complained that she had been vilified by her fellow churchmen behind her back: "The practice of the Inquisition still holds in the Roman church, as I have found again and again, and as this book will show.

Along with indecent works it still included forbidden authors such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and the scientists John Locke and Galileo, that most Europeans would by then have found unobjectionable.

Sometimes it is to raise a memorial church of marble at a cost of £80,000 on an uninhabited hillside in Kerry out of respect to the birthplace of Daniel O’Connell.

We hear from time to time that the Irish people are determined to formulate their own politics, and not to take them from Rome; but events constantly demonstrate that not only the religion but the politics of Ireland are those of the Church of Rome, and that the Irish people are still being exploited in the interest of clericalism and for the proselytising of England.

His optimistic view in 1910 was that the Catholic Church would accommodate itself with an Irish "Workers' Republic", and so Rome Rule could never occur:[23] North and the South will again clasp hands, again will it be demonstrated, as in ’98, that the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class, earnest champions of civil and religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united Social democracy.The phrase took on a new lease of life from the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in April 1912.

Both paramilitary groups imported arms, and by mid-1914 it seemed likely that an Irish civil war would erupt, with people's allegiances based largely, if not primarily, on their parents' religions.

The Protestants' fears about a Dublin Parliament may seem to have been exaggerated at the time, but the history of Ireland since independence has, on the whole, tended to suggest that they were not.

Its envoy Seán T. O'Kelly wrote to Pope Benedict XV in 1920 in terms suggesting that the war was a part of a long religious struggle, and identifying the Irish Republic with "Catholic Ireland".

The letter was not published until recently; it included:[29] Irish Catholics believe that their devotion to their religion and to the Holy See handicaps their efforts for independence.