Ireland and the Home Rule MovementMcDonnell, Michael, Sir
History
Ireland and the Home Rule Movement
McDonnell, Michael, Sir
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland
I do not know whether it struck many people in the course of the general
election that the country in which the elections made the least
difference was the one of the three kingdoms in which politics claim
most public attention. There was a monotony in the unopposed returns,
and, in the result, in the place of 80 Nationalists, 1 Liberal, and 22
Unionists, there appeared 83 Nationalists, 3 Liberals, and 18 Unionists,
To appreciate the full force of these numbers one must realise,
moreover, that of the Unionists in both cases, two out of the total
represent University seats, the Conservative nature of which, whether in
England, Ireland, or Scotland, is one of the features of political life
which is, it appears, immutable. A study of the results shows that
Unionism is in a minority in Ulster. There are in the present Parliament
15 Unionists as against 15 Nationalists, who, with 3 Liberals, go to
make up the 33 members sitting at Westminster for that province.
These figures relieve me from the necessity of entering a caveat against
the use of the word Ulster as though the whole province were Unionist.
Virtually, all that is Unionist in Ireland is in Ulster, but it is very
far from the truth to say that all Ulster is Unionist. Not one of the
Counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Monaghan, or Cavan, out of the whole nine
of which the province consists, returns a Unionist. In the three
Counties of Down, Armagh, and Fermanagh, the representation is divided,
and as for the two Counties of Londonderry and Antrim, which are
ordinarily the sole strongholds of the Orangemen, even in them a breach
was effected in West Belfast, where the Labour vote returned a
Nationalist for the first time since Mr. Sexton sat for it from
1886-1892.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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