DAVE MANSEILL THEHOMERULEMOVEMENT Basically both the Belfast industrialists and the Belfast industrial workers (who comprised a « labour aristocracy» amongst the working class as a whole, performing most of the skilled work and belonging to English craft trade unions) felt, by the time of the home rule crisis, in many cases for sound objective reasons, that Belfast had done well out of the Union with England: wage-rates were higher than anywhere in Ireland (in some cases up to English levels); Belfast was the third port in the United Kingdom on the basis of customs revenue, after London and Liverpool); the largest weaving factory, the largest shipping output, the largest tobacco factory and the largest ropeworks in the world were situated in Belfast. As far as the Belfast industrial sector were concerned they were more part of an economic triangle formed by the industrialised valleys of the river Clyde in west Scotland, the river Mersey in north-west England and the river Lagan in east Ulster, i.e. the basis of Ulster's prosperity was the economic tie with Britain and they were not prepared to come under the rule of a Dublin parliament dominated by impoverished small farmers from the provinces of Munster and Connaught. Although the amount of « home rule » envisaged in Gladstone's Home Rule bill amounted to little more than is being proposed today by the Labour government as «devolution» for Scotland and Wales, the threat of any transfer of power to the Catholic majority, plus Parnell's advocacy of protection for small industry in the south welded the Ulster capitalists and workers into a bloc which overrode class divisions and which was cemented by their common religious consciousness of the Catholic as a traitorous agent of Rome. Ironically Parnell's tactical take-over of the Land League (without whose physical and financial support he could not have built his political machine) was destined to remove the last cause of friction within the Ulster Protestant bloc: the opposition between landlords and small tenant farmers. Gladstone had decided to liquidate the « Irish question» by a hard-soft policy of legal repression of « agitators » and the introduction of a Land Act which conceded the Land League's major demands for fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale. The Act (passed into Jaw in 1881) set up land courts to arbitrate fair rents, but excluded from its arbitrations all tenants who were in arrears (approximately a third of all tenants and a 88
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