Isaac Butt

Isaac Butt (born Sept. 6, 1813, Glenfin, County Donegal, Ire.—died May 5, 1879, near Dundrum, County Dublin) was a lawyer and Irish nationalist leader who, if not the originator of the term Home Rule, was the first to make it an effective political slogan. He was the founder (1870) and first chief of the Home Government Association and president (1873–77) of the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, but he was superseded in 1878 as head of the Home Rule movement by the younger and more forceful Charles Stewart Parnell.

Butt served as professor of political economy at Trinity College Dublin (1836–41) and was called to the Irish bar in 1838 and the English bar in 1859. Intermittently from 1852 he represented, successively, one English and two Irish constituencies in the House of Commons. In 1848 he undertook the defense of the Young Ireland leaders, who were charged with high treason for their abortive insurrection that year. From 1865 to 1869 he was the principal defense counsel for the imprisoned leaders of the Fenians (Irish Republican, or Revolutionary, Brotherhood).

Despite his legal work for the Fenians, Butt, who was basically a conservative, feared the consequences of a successful Fenian revolt. Disillusioned, however, by the British government’s failure to relieve the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s, he became convinced that a native parliament was required for Irish land reform and other needs. In May 1870 he called for an Irish Parliament subordinate to the imperial Parliament at Westminster, and later that year he formed the Home Government Association. From 1871 he quickened the Irish nationalist agitation in the House of Commons but gradually lost his leadership, partly because he disapproved of Parnell’s tactics of obstructing routine parliamentary business.