Churchill and Ireland Revisited
Winston Churchill entered the world of Irish politics at a decisive moment: as a young MP he witnessed the final collapse of the project of legislative union as envisaged by the Act of Union (1801) and its replacement by an entirely different concept. The original idea had been to create “one people” across two islands. Edmund Burke, Irish-born, raised, and educated, but as a politician and writer totally locked into English politics, had been the creator of this notion. He convinced William Pitt, who loved to repeat Burke’s phrase: “It was impossible to speak as ‘a good Englishman without speaking as a good Irishman’ and impossible also to speak as a ‘good Irishman without speaking as a good Englishman.’” There was a strategic dimension, of course, in the age of the Napoleonic threat, but the union was based also on a sentimental aspiration.
The Burkean conception failed in the nineteenth century. It failed because of the thirty-year delay in implementing Catholic emancipation. It failed because the horrific Irish famine (1846–50) was at the very least a refutation of the idea that the union guaranteed prosperity. For John Mitchel (an Irish revolutionary turned militant southern slaveholder and the most influential Irish writer of the nineteenth century) it was a proof of something worse—genocidal intent. By the mid-1880s a mass democratic demand led by Charles Stewart Parnell in support of a Dublin parliament and thus a substantial modification of the union had a profound legitimacy in Ireland. One of the two great English parties—the Liberals, under William Gladstone—after 1886 supported that demand. The other great party, the Tories, flirted with it in 1885, especially inspired by Winston’s father, Lord Randolph
