DAVE MANS5LL Before the election neither the Liberals nor the conservatives were committed to Home Rule. After the election Parnell's Home Rule bloc held the balance of power in the English House of Commons, and in December Gladstone's son announc• ed his father's conversion to the principle of Home Rule for Ireland. This sensational announcement polarised politics in England and Ireland for the next thirty years. Proviously the conservatives had been toying with the idea of jumping on the Home Rule band waggon since it held out a prospect of power, but now they were delighted to be able to leap the other way and to start vigorously preaching the gospel of imperialism and the indissolubility of the United Kingdom. In their campaign against Home Rule, one of the main weapons was a racialist anti-Irishism, which coincided with the Ulster Orangemen's view of the ethnic inferiority of the Catholic Irish. The Catholic Irish were the first « inferior race » to be created by the English colonialist mentality, and anti-Irish feeling has survived into British society today, to be revived during the present « troubles » in Ulster. In fact much of the propaganda material used by the conservatives in England had its inspiration in pamphlet and leaflets produced by the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union, a grouping of anti-Parnell southern Protestants from the provinces of Leinster, Munster and Connaught who came together in May 1885 to fight the general election in the south. The only plank in its platform for the election was « maintenance of the Union». The southern Protestants who were much nearer to Home Rule agitation and could· judge its strength better than the Ulster Protestants, had a much narrower social base than their northern co-religionists. Firstly there were only 250,000 of them scattered thinly (except in the two large towns, Dublin and Cork) amongst the Catholic population who numbered 2,500.000; in fact, they could not muster more than 10% of the vote in the election despite vigorous campaigning. (Nevertheless their electoral activity was not entirely wasted since they had demonstrated that both liberals and conservatives could co-operate in a common cause and their activities had attracted favourable attention in England so that the association felt confident enough to extend its activities in 1886). Secondly they formed an elite within southern society, consisting of aristocrats, landowners and big businessmen, whereas the Ulster Protestants were represented in all sectors of society. The southern protestants' isolated position meant 90
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