Home Rule
In Anglo-Saxon political science, the term Home Rule ( English for " self-government ") generally refers to self-administration by local authorities .
He is particularly identified with the central conflict in the history of Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is called Rialtas Dúchais in Irish . On the Irish side, there was a move towards self-government within the United Kingdom. This resulted in four Home Rule Bills , only the fourth of which came into effect in 1920 as the Government of Ireland Act and granted Ireland excluding Northern Ireland limited independence.
In 1998, the principle of self-government in the form that was devolution legislating ( Devolution Acts ) in Wales , Scotland and Northern Ireland transmitted. Their partial independence is also referred to as a home rule .
Historical background
With the so-called Act of Union in 1800, the Kingdom of Great Britain (created through the unification of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland ) and the Kingdom of Ireland were merged to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland . Previously, the British kings had worn two crowns - that of Great Britain and that of Ireland - after which only the United Kingdom's. Ireland had practically ceased to exist as a separate state under constitutional law. Members of the Irish Parliament took their seats in Westminster . However, this state union was unpopular in Ireland from the start. The country was largely Catholic and the Catholics only received the right to stand for election in 1829 as part of the " Catholic emancipation ". In the Irish parliament before 1800, however, only Protestants sat and they had decided on the Act of Union .
Ireland had centuries of oppression by English and Scottish masters and the Irish felt themselves to be second-class citizens in the newly created United Kingdom. This Irish resentment was intensified considerably by the great famine in Ireland in 1845-49, which fell victim to nearly a million inhabitants, that is to say almost a seventh of the Irish population at the time. During these crisis years the government in distant London had shown itself incapable or even indifferent to the misery of Ireland. Several million Irish emigrated to the United States in the 19th century .
Among these emigrants, too, the aversion to the English masters in their old homeland remained widespread and organizations were founded with the aim of promoting Ireland's independence by legal or illegal means (e.g. the Fenian Brotherhood ). In Ireland itself secret societies were formed as 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood ( IRB ), which pursued the goal of Irish independence even by violent means. Ireland was repeatedly shaken by politically motivated riots and murders. The most spectacular were the Phoenix Park murders in May 1882. There was repeated passive or violent resistance from landless Irish tenants against the large English or Anglo-Irish landowners. In 1879 the Irish Land League was founded, which campaigned for the legal betterment of landless Irish farmers. In 1870 the Dublin lawyer Isaac Butt founded the Home Rule League as an interest group for the political implementation of the concept of self-government in Ireland. In the general election of 1874 , the Home Rule League won 60 of Ireland's 100 seats in Parliament. In 1882, the Home Rule League under Charles Stewart Parnell was reorganized into a tightly run political party, the Irish Parliamentary Party , which from then on represented Irish interests in Westminster and which, with almost 10% of the parliamentary seats, held a not inconsiderable political party there, especially when the majority was tight Power factor represented.
Politicians from the Liberal Party, in particular, saw the need for constitutional reforms in the face of the Irish trouble and began to propagate the concept of the Home Rule , i.e. extensive self-government of Ireland within the framework of the United Kingdom. This concept was rejected by the British Conservatives, in alliance with many Irish Protestants, because they feared that it would endanger the internal unity of the United Kingdom. The majority of the Irish Unionists were Protestants , most of whom lived in Ulster . They feared being dominated by the Catholic majority in the case of self-government in Ireland ( Home rule is Rome rule! - “Home rule means the rule of Rome!” (I.e. the Pope)). However, there was not a very sharp division along the confessional lines. Some leading Irish home rule advocates, such as B. Charles Stewart Parnell were Protestants and there were many Irish Catholics working in the British Administration of Ireland.
The desire for “Home Rule” from around 1870 until the early 20th century differed from Daniel O'Connell's earlier request for the Act of Union to be repealed in the early 19th century. Daniel O'Connell had the complete abolition of the Act of Union demanded and creating a completely independent Irish state, but in personal union should remain united under the British monarch with the rest of the UK. The supporters of the home rule concept, on the other hand, sought a regional parliament for Ireland in the United Kingdom, in today's parlance a devolution .
Home Rule Bill 1886
The first Home Rule Bill was introduced on April 8, 1886, by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone . The bill was almost entirely Gladstone's work and did not come about through discussions in the cabinet. Gladstone tried to secure the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party , which had won 85 of the 103 Irish seats in the British Parliament in the general election in 1885 and was thus decisive for a majority in the Prime Minister.
The main points were:
- Establishment of a legislative assembly made up of two chambers :
- 103 members of the high nobility who are elected for 10 years
- 204 members of the House of Commons
- Exclusion of all Irish nobles and MPs from the British Parliament in Westminster
- The executive will continue to be led by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, representing the British Crown.
- Britain retains control over a number of issues such as: B. Defense, Foreign Policy, Trade and Coin Law.
- The UK continues to maintain control of the Royal Irish Constabulary to the point where it can be safely handed over to Dublin
- Ulster becomes part of Ireland with a minority vote in Parliament
When the proposal was tabled, Charles Stewart Parnell , chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party, had mixed feelings. He thought there were still big flaws in it, but he was ready to vote for them. After two months of debate the proposal on 8 June 1886 lower house ( House of Commons rejected) with 341 (including 93 Liberals) to 311 votes and therefore never came before the upper house ( House of Lords ). As a result of the rejection of the bill and the split of the Liberal Unionists from the Liberal Party, Gladstone had new elections scheduled. The general election in 1886 resulted in a victory for the opposition Conservatives and the Unionists allied with them, and Gladstone had to surrender his post as Prime Minister to Lord Salisbury . Under the conservative governments from 1886 to 1892, the concept of the home rule was not pursued any further.
Home Rule Bill 1893
In August 1892, William Gladstone was again prime minister. However, he was dependent on the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party for a majority . It was therefore understandable that he wanted to bring in another Home Rule Bill as soon as possible . In February 1893 he brought the Irish Government Bill 1893 (Second Irish Home Rule Bill) as a bill before Parliament. Like the first bill, this second Home Rule Bill was largely drafted by Gladstone alone and his immediate confidants and without the involvement of Irish or other liberal politicians, a fact that was alienated by his Liberal party comrades. In addition, during the discussion of the draft bill in the House of Commons, serious errors in the proposed regulations on financial relationships were revealed because Gladstone had obviously miscalculated.
In detail, the draft law provided for the following regulations:
- An all-Ireland parliament is set up for domestic affairs.
- The Parliament consists of a legislative council of 48 members, elected for 8 years, and a legislative assembly of 103 members.
This proposal differed from the first Home Rule Bill in that it allowed 80 Irish Members of Parliament at Westminster to take part in votes on Ireland and in that it did not include a Chamber of Nobility.
The proposal was accepted on September 1, 1893 after violent, sometimes tumultuous debates with 301 to 267 votes in the lower house, but later rejected in the upper house with 419 to 41 votes. The House of Lords was dominated by the Conservative Party and Gladstone saw no chance of getting the proposal approved. He resigned from his post as Prime Minister a year later.
Home Rule Bill 1912
Supporters : Irish Parliamentary Party (73) Independent Irish Nationalists (2) Moderate Home Rule Supporters: All for Ireland League (8) Liberals (1) Opponents of the Home Rule : Irish Unionist Alliance (17) Liberal Unionists (2)
In 1909 a constitutional crisis began between the British lower and upper houses. Each accused the other of having broken previous customs: the House of Commons accused the House of Lords of having rejected a budget for the first time , while the House of Lords interjected that the budget included the introduction of property taxes, a procedure that the House of Commons has always refused to date would have.
The two general elections in January and December 1910 did not lead to a clear majority, ie neither the conservatives nor the liberals had an absolute majority. This gave the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) the majority vote in the lower house. Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith came to an agreement with IPP leader John Redmond in which he would introduce another "Home Rule" if Redmond supported him in eliminating the House of Lords' veto power.
With the support of Kings Edward VII (died May 1910) and George V , Asquith threatened to flood the upper house with new, liberal members of the nobility appointed by the king ("peer boost") in order to gain a majority in the government help. The nobles gave in and this changed the relationship between upper and lower houses ("Lords" and "Commons") permanently. The Parliament Act 1911 allowed the House of Commons to override the House of Lords under certain circumstances. The House of Lords no longer had power over draft finance laws and its previously unrestricted veto was now only valid for 2 years - if a draft passed the House of Commons in the third year, it would become law even if the House of Lords did not agree.
The bill
In April 1912, Asquith Ireland offered independent government in the form of a third Home Rule Bill . In addition to a slightly expanded autonomy compared to the two predecessors, the proposal included the following:
- An Irish parliament with a bicameral system in Dublin (a Senate with 40 members and a House of Commons - “People's Chamber of Southern Ireland” - with 164 seats) with authority over most national matters.
- A number of Irish Members of Parliament (42) retain their seats in the UK Parliament in Westminster.
The 1912 proposal was approved by a majority of 10 votes in the House of Commons, but the House of Lords rejected it with 326 votes to 69.
The Northern Ireland question
Protestants were in a slim majority in Ulster . They fought against a local government in Dublin in a predominantly Catholic Ireland - historically speaking, the Protestants had been the political and social leading elite in the English-dominated Ireland for centuries. Catholics were only allowed to vote in Ireland since 1791 and only after the Catholic emancipation in 1829 could they become parliamentarians. Since the Act of Settlement 1701, no Catholic had held the office of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland , the supreme representative of the British Crown in Ireland, a country whose population had always been predominantly Roman Catholic.
The main point of contention during parliamentary debates was the "coexistence" of Ulster and whether some Irish counties should be exempted from the "Home Rule".
Mainly represented by the Conservative and Unionist Party and supported by the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Orange Order , the Protestants threatened armed opposition to the implementation of the Home Rule and threatened not to recognize the authority of an all-Ireland parliament. Hundreds of thousands of unionists signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912 , in protest against the Home Rule Bill introduced that year . Though its leaders, Edward Carson and James Craig thought that secession of this small region was a fraud against unionists in the south and west of Ireland, he was ready to support the establishment of a separate government for Ulster.
Irish nationalists, led by John Redmond, declared that Ulster had to submit to the decision to adopt the Home Rule and, in turn, founded their own voluntary organization, the Irish Volunteers , to help the British army enforce it.
Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith suggested as a compromise that six counties in the north-east of Ireland, excluded (about 2/3 of Ulster), which had a Protestant majority "temporarily" from the scope of "home rule" and further from Westminster and Whitehall are governed should. How “temporary” this exception would be and whether the Northeast should ultimately be governed by the Irish Parliament remained unclear. Redmond fought stubbornly against the idea of partition, but was ready to give Ulster limited local autonomy within an undivided Ireland.
Another vote
In 1913, the Home Rule Bill was re-introduced, adopted in the House of Commons and rejected in the House of Lords with 302 to 64 votes. On May 25, 1914, the proposal passed through the House of Commons again (this time with a majority of 77 votes). Due to the Parliament Act , approval by the House of Lords was no longer required.
On March 20, 1914, the so-called Curragh Incident occurred in the army camp . In the run-up to a legislative debate on self-government for Ireland, the Commander of Curragh Base , Sir Arthur Paget , had received an order from the War Department to prepare his troops to be relocated to Ulster in the event of unrest by loyalists against the self-government. Paget misunderstood this order as an immediate marching order. He then gave his officers the freedom to resign at their own risk. 57 of 70 officers, including Brigade Commander Hubert Gough , accepted this offer. Formally, they had not yet been guilty of mutiny because they had not yet refused to carry out a direct order. The government under Prime Minister Asquith then withdrew the original order, spoke of a misunderstanding and reinstated the officers. The incident encouraged Irish nationalists to believe that self-government would not be supported by the British Army. The incident is noteworthy in that it was one of the few situations since the English Civil War where elements of the British military openly intervened in politics. John French had to resign as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and promise that the British Army would not take action against the Ulster Loyalists.
In June the Irish Unionist Party (made up mostly of members of parliament from Ulster ) pushed for Northern Ireland to secede. Some of these MPs were also involved in creating the Ulster Volunteer Force to prevent the law from being implemented. The group had illegally imported weapons from the German Reich in the expectation that the British Army would enforce the law in north-east Ireland. Ireland was on the verge of civil war, the outbreak of which was only prevented by Britain's entry into the First World War in August 1914. The Home Rule Bill was signed by the king in September 1914, but its implementation was initially postponed until after the end of the presumed short war. This decision turned out to be decisive for the further history of Ireland .
Both nationalists and unionists were now anxious to win the support of the British government, on the one hand to ensure the implementation of the Act and on the other hand to influence how permanent the provisional partition would be. This sparked a real surge of support for the British government during World War I. The Irish National Volunteers and many other Irish joined the new 16th Irish Division of the British new Kitchener's Army to "defend the freedom of small nations" (that meant Belgium , which the German armies had occupied) on the Western Front to fight. The men of the Ulster Volunteer Force , however, joined the 36th Ulster Division , which was even allowed to provide its own officers.
A small portion of the nationalists were critical of Irish war support. Irish people who want to fight to "defend the freedom of small nations" should do so at home first. On Easter 1916, the poorly organized Easter Rising took place in Dublin with German arms support , which was quickly suppressed by the British authorities and immediately condemned from all sides. The nationalist newspaper Irish Independent even called for the rebels to be executed. However, the actions of the British government after the uprising, particularly the execution of the leading insurgents, turned the mood in Ireland and led to a republican movement within Sinn Féin , a small, formerly separatist-monarchist party that had been taken over by the survivors of the rebellion and was falsely blamed by the British for the rebellion.
This was a critical turning point on the way to the "Home Rule". The uprising put an end to the constitutional and balanced parliamentary movement and replaced it with a radical approach to violence that culminated in the Irish War of Independence . The unionists were reinforced in their reservations about an independent Irish government, which contributed to deepening the division of Ireland.
Tried implementation
Irish nationalists: Sinn Féin (73 seats) Moderate Home Rule supporters Irish Parliamentary Party (6 seats) Unionists: Irish Unionists (22 seats) Labor Unionists (3 seats) Independent Unionist (1 seat) The three universities of Ireland also sent elected MPs to Parliament: Trinity College Dublin (TCD): 2 seats National University of Ireland (NUI): 1 seat Queen's University Belfast (QUB): 1 seat
After the Easter Rising, the British government decided that the law was now urgently to be implemented. She instructed Secretary of War David Lloyd George to negotiate with the leaders of the two main Irish parties, Redmond and Carson. Since Redmond was unwilling to agree to a permanent partition of Ireland, the negotiations failed.
A second attempt to lay down the conditions for the implementation of the law was made by the Irish Convention convened by the now Prime Minister Lloyd George in 1917 , which presented its final report in April 1918. The turbulent events of 1918 prevented the recommendations from being implemented. In the British general election of November 1918, Sinn Féin achieved a clear victory over the "old" nationalists. Sinn Féins' MPs proclaimed themselves the first Dáil Éireann in Dublin in January 1919 and declared Ireland's unilateral independence. At the same time, the Irish War of Independence broke out, which ended in 1921.
Home Rule Bill 1920
The fourth Home Rule Bill , a proposal by the Lloyd George administration , now finally divided Ireland into southern and northern Ireland . Each area was given its own government, with full authority except for specific issues (e.g. foreign affairs, world trade, currency, defense) which remain under the UK Parliament. The fourth Home Rule Bill , introduced during the Irish War of Independence, was the first to be implemented.
"Southern Ireland" comprised the whole of the Irish island with the exception of the six counties Antrim , Armagh , Down , Fermanagh , Londonderry and Tyrone as well as the boroughs of Londonderry and Belfast , which together formed "Northern Ireland". "Northern Ireland", which in turn comprised six out of nine counties in Ulster , was seen as the maximum area in which unionists could count on a safe majority. This division of Ireland was an attempt by the British government to reconcile the two opposing attitudes.
Each of the two units got its own parliament, which consisted of the Senate, the House of Commons and "His Majesty". A single Lord Lieutenant of Ireland represented the King in the country and a Council of Ireland was to coordinate issues affecting both parliaments. From each of the two parliaments, some members of parliament could still claim a seat in the Parliament of Westminster. Elections for both lower houses took place on May 24, 1921.
Aftermath
The Northern Irish Parliament was established in 1921. When it was inaugurated in Belfast City Hall , King George V made an important proposal for a reconciliation between North and South. The speech, drafted by David Lloyd George on the recommendation of Jan Smuts , opened the door for formal contact between the British government and the Republican administration under Éamon de Valera .
Southern Ireland, on the other hand, never became a reality. The 128 elected members of Parliament in the Lower House of Ireland never met, as 124 of them (from the Sinn Féin party ) appointed themselves Teachta Dála , i.e. H. to members of the Irish House of Commons Dáil Éireann and gathered as the second Dáil of the Irish Republic.
With that, only 4 unionists and 15 appointed senators appeared in 1921 for the opening of the Parliament of Southern Ireland at the Royal College of Science in Dublin . The House of Commons of Southern Ireland met for a short time under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 to fulfill two functions: to formally ratify the treaty (this happened in January 1922 - the Second Dáil, in the eyes of the nationalists the institution for ratification, did so in December 1921) and to set up a provisional government, which happened under Michael Collins . Collins was officially introduced into office by Lord Lieutenant Edmund FitzAlan-Howard, 1st Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent .
In June 1922, the third Dáil was elected as a constituent assembly in Southern Ireland , while Northern Ireland immediately withdrew from the Irish Free State created by the treaty . After the electoral victory of the treaty supporters, the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) broke out. In 1923 the constitution of the Irish Free State came into force, which existed as a de facto republic until 1937 and was then superseded by the Republic of Ireland , which has been independent from the Commonwealth since 1949 . The Republic of Ireland set out in its constitution the political aim of reunifying Ireland. This constitutional requirement was only repealed after the British-Irish agreement in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 remained the basic law for the Government of Northern Ireland until 1998. In 1972 the Northern Ireland Parliament was suspended and dissolved by the Northern Ireland Constitution Act of 1973. Under the agreement of Sunningdale in 1973 was in its place Northern Ireland Assembly formed next to the Irish Council ( Council of Ireland ) and the Northern Ireland Executive . After the Good Friday Agreement 1998, the Government of Ireland Act was replaced by the Northern Ireland Act .
See also: Direct Rule
British devolution legislation 1998
The Labor government under Tony Blair has the "self government" in 1998, the idea in the form of devolution legislating ( Devolution Acts ) in Wales , Scotland transmit and Northern Ireland. This gave all three parts of the country their own regional governments and parliaments, which have a limited range of powers. This process was most difficult in Northern Ireland, where the serious differences between Northern Irish Unionists and Republicans could hardly be resolved. After the first two sessions after the regional elections in 1998 and 2003 respectively selected "Northern Ireland Assembly" ( Northern Ireland Assembly ) and Northern Ireland's regional government are suspended due to irreconcilable differences by the British government had, cooperation designed from the elections in 2007 and 2011 better . The Good Friday Agreement obliges the conflicting parties to work together in the Northern Irish regional government according to their share of the vote. Northern Irish Republicans and Northern Irish Unionists are sitting at the same cabinet table, which does not always go smoothly.
swell
- Government of Ireland Act 1914, available from the House of Lords Record Office
literature
- Alvin Jackson: Home Rule - An Irish History 1800-2000 Phoenix, London 2004. ISBN 0-75381-767-5 .
- Robert Kee: The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism . Penguin, London 2000. ISBN 0-14-029165-2 .
- Francis Stewart Leland Lyons: Ireland since the famine . Fontana Press, London, 10th ed. 1987. ISBN 0-00-686005-2 . Pp. 141-311.
- Michael MacDonagh: The Home Rule Movement , Talbot Press, Dublin 1920.
- Andreas Schwab: Devolution - The asymmetrical state order of the United Kingdom . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2003. ISBN 3-7890-8067-5 .