As prime minister, Gladstone introduced the first Home Rule Bill in Parliament in 1886. Although the measure was defeated in the House of Commons, its mere formulation was sufficient to raise the spectre of the political domination of Irish Protestants, located mainly in the north, by Irish Catholics, spread throughout the island. Orangeism revived explosively and was adroitly exploited by Conservatives, who made “unionism”—preservation of the union of Great Britain and Ireland—its foremost concern.

A second Home Rule Bill, also introduced by Gladstone, was defeated in 1893, during a Liberal interregnum in a period of prolonged Conservative rule. When the Liberals finally returned to power in 1905, their victory foretold another effort to establish a measure of self-government for Ireland.

In 1912 the third, and final, Home Rule Bill twice passed the House of Commons, but both times it was defeated in the House of Lords. Protestant Ulster, under the leadership of a prominent barrister and member of Parliament, Edward Carson, Baron Carson of Duncairn, resisted incorporation into a self-governing Ireland. Oaths were sworn (the Solemn League and Covenant), and paramilitary forces were organized and armed. A civil war in Ireland, between Irish nationalists in the south and unionists in the north, seemed imminent. In 1914 the Home Rule Bill of 1912 passed the Commons for the third time, which, according to the Parliament Act of 1911, made ratification by the House of Lords unnecessary. However, when war broke out in Europe, the British government postponed the operation of the Home Rule Act until after the war, and the Liberal government of H.H. Asquith implied that special provision would be made for Ulster.

Putting aside their political differences, thousands of Irish Catholics and Protestants joined the British fighting forces in World War I. The situation in Ireland was dramatically inflamed, however, by the Easter Rising of 1916 and its immediate and harsh suppression. The south was becoming radicalized, and it began to appear that, however offensive the third Home Rule Bill was for Protestant Ulster, it was too late and too little to satisfy separatist sentiment in Catholic Ireland. In the 1918 election Sinn Féin (the republican party led by Eamon de Valera) ousted the Home Rule Party, refused to take their seats in the Westminster Parliament, and instead established their own alternative parliament, Dáil Éireann, in Dublin, which was supported by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the Irish War of Independence of 1919–21 (Anglo-Irish War).

In 1919 the British coalition government of David Lloyd George was obliged to deal with an almost impossible situation in which most of Ireland rejected the union and most of Ulster rejected everything else. The intended remedy was the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which created two modestly self-governing units: one comprising six of Ulster’s nine counties (later to be known as Northern Ireland), the other comprising the three remaining counties of Ulster together with the 23 counties of the rest of Ireland. Although the Protestant majority of the six counties clearly preferred continuation of the union for all of Ireland, it settled for Home Rule for itself, and the Northern Ireland parliament and government began functioning in June 1921. Paradoxically, the Catholic majority of the 26 counties, for whom Home Rule had originally been intended, rejected it as inadequate.

Lloyd George’s government then negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 6, 1921, with Sinn Féin. The treaty gave the new Irish Free State dominion status within the British Empire, but it also permitted the six counties of Northern Ireland to opt out of the arrangement, which they did.

A boundary commission was established to review the borders between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. In 1925 the commission’s final report proposed only small territorial adjustments, with parts of Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Armagh being ceded to the Irish Free State and a part of Donegal to Northern Ireland. But these alterations were opposed by both the Northern Irish and Irish Free State governments, and a final report was never issued. Instead, the Boundary Commission agreement of December 3, 1925, confirmed the boundaries of Northern Ireland as those marked by the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry (Derry), and Tyrone.

Precarious coexistence

The constitutional revisions of 1920–22 succeeded in creating a parliament in Northern Ireland that was acceptable to the approximately one million Protestant unionists of the six counties. However, they did not provide a remedy for the several hundred thousand Protestant unionists who lived elsewhere in Ireland, many of whom eventually moved to Northern Ireland. More important, they did not satisfy the concerns of the half million Roman Catholic nationalists who resided within the six counties. Under the leadership of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, who served as prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1940, the Northern Ireland parliament was dominated by a Protestant majority, which governed in its own interest and which was dedicated to maintaining the union with Great Britain. Most Roman Catholics were never reconciled to their status within Northern Ireland, though their opposition was politically ineffective, and they suffered discrimination in employment, public housing, education, and social services. In addition, unionists ensured their political hold over Northern Ireland through the manipulation of electoral boundaries, which minimized the representation of Roman Catholics.

Balancing these disadvantages for the Catholic minority was the industrial economy of the north, which had no parallel in the south. By the end of the 19th century, Belfast was Ireland’s largest city, with a population of nearly 350,000 and with numerous jobs in the textile industries and in shipbuilding. Although Protestants were overrepresented, often unfairly, in skilled jobs and managerial positions, Belfast’s economic magnet drew lower-class Catholics from the impoverished countryside. The city experienced sectarian violence, its housing was highly segregated (with Catholics generally occupying much of the poor housing stock), and religious intolerance was rampant—all of which worsened already difficult living conditions for Catholics—but its economic appeal endured even through the Great Depression of the 1930s and the doldrums of the 1960s and ’70s.

Several factors help to explain the relatively minor emigration of Roman Catholics from the north. Not only did they fear that they would be economically worse off in the south, but World War II brought a measure of economic revival, especially in ship and aircraft manufacture. Moreover, the social welfare provisions extended to Northern Ireland after the war by far exceeded the supports and protections available to individuals in the socially conservative south. Northern Catholics did not “vote with their feet,” but neither did they accept the stark inequities in Northern Ireland.