Joseph Chamberlain espoused ethnic unionism instead of Home Rule

Hitherto Chamberlain had been sympathetic to Irish demands in a way Lord Salisbury, the Conservative leader, had not been. During Gladstone’s second administration Chamberlain had opposed ‘coercion’ and had advocated an Irish council and a scheme of national boards for Ireland, Scotland and Wales instead of Home Rule. He believed that Ireland was entitled to local government ‘more complete, more popular, more thoroughly representative, and more far reaching’ than anything that had yet been proposed.

However, Chamberlain and Salisbury were at one in fearing the ‘disintegration’ of the United Kingdom and the Empire. Chamberlain told W H Duignan, a Walsall antiquarian, historian and radical, that he believed Home Rule would be the first step on the road to separatism and independence. Duignan has a modest niche in Irish history as ‘the man with the tricycle’ because that is how he travelled around Ireland on a fact-finding mission in 1884.

In the months after the defeat of the first Home Rule bill, Chamberlain gave a lot of thought to the position of Ulster and the necessity of retaining Irish representation at Westminster. For some inexplicable reason he feared that antipathy to Home Rule in Ulster had diminished. It was in this pessimistic frame of mind Chamberlain, accompanied by his loyal acolyte Jesse Collins, set off from New Street Station, Birmingham, to visit Ulster on October 10 1887.

Travelling overnight, Chamberlain and Collins arrived in Larne on October 11 and completed the journey to Belfast by special train. The flag-decked streets and enthusiastic crowds ought to have reassured him right away.

That evening Chamberlain spoke in the Ulster Hall where he posed the question: ‘How is it that Belfast continues to increase and multiply while Cork and Waterford decline?’ He flattered his audience by observing that Belfast (and Ulster) included people of Protestant and English and Ulster-Scots descent who represented ‘almost all the cultivated intelligence of Ireland’. These same people also represented ‘the greatest part of its enterprise and its wealth’. They were also loyal and law-abiding. Furthermore, Belfast and Ulster were connected ‘by ties of race, and religion, and sympathy, with the greater nation of which it is proud to be a part’.

Chamberlain returned to the Ulster Hall the following evening to deliver a second speech. Thousands filled the building with as many more outside.

Chamberlain expanded on his theme of the previous evening by contending that there were ‘the two Irelands’. In the north there was an Ireland which was ‘prosperous, loyal and contented’ whereas in the south there was another Ireland which was ‘miserable and dissatisfied and continually under the control of agitators who profit from the disturbances they create’.

He also claimed that there were two races in Ireland. One which had historically displayed ‘all the qualities of a dominant people’ and another which had ‘always failed in the qualities which compel success’.

It would be contrary to nature to place a naturally dominant race under a weaker one. For this reason he did not favour ‘submitting Ulster to a Dublin Parliament’.

On October 13 Chamberlain travelled to Coleraine via Antrim and Ballymena. Cheering crowds calling out ‘No Home Rule’ and ‘Chamberlain forever’ ought to have dispelled all Chamberlain’s anxieties.

At Ballymena Chamberlain said that ‘separate treatment for Ulster’ was a ‘cardinal condition’ for any Irish settlement.

As in Belfast, Chamberlain delivered two speeches in Coleraine. He spoke to a large meeting in Corporation Hall and subsequently spoke to 5,000 people in a marquee in the Fairgreen, urging his audience ‘to prevent any weakening or loosening of the bonds’ which bound them to Great Britain. He predicted that any alteration in the constitution along the lines proposed by Gladstone and Parnell were likely to result in either anarchy and civil war or commercial disaster and national bankruptcy.

On October 14 Chamberlain visited Portrush and Bushmills to view the Giant’s Causeway. After lunch in the Causeway Hotel he gave a short speech revisiting the differences between the population of Ulster and the population of the south.

The thrust of Chamberlain’s speeches in Ulster was surprising. One would expect him to have articulated a civic unionism, ideas similar to those advanced by J J Shaw, an Ulster-Scot from the Ards peninsula, in ‘Mr Gladstone’s two Irish policies’ in 1888 or the resolutions drafted by his fellow-Ulster-Scot Thomas Sinclair for the Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892, rather than an ethnic unionism. Chamberlain’s ethnic unionism was essentially ‘the two nations theory’ of Irish history repackaged.

Although he had not defined his two Irelands in territorial terms, in 1884 Edward Saunderson, the future leader of the Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party who was also of Ulster-Scots descent, with the assistance of journalist E C Houston and historian Richard Bagwell, had published ‘Two Irelands; Loyalty versus Treason’.

Thomas MacKnight, the English-born editor of the liberal Northern Whig, advanced the theory in ‘Ulster as it is, or, Twenty-eight years’ experience as an Irish editor’ (1896).

The Times journalist William Flavelle Moneypenny, also explored the theory further in his ‘Two Irish Nations: An Essay in Home Rule’ (1913).

A Portadown-born Tory and Ulster-Scot, Moneypenny was the biographer of Disraeli and an alumnus of the Royal School, Dungannon. Moneypenny’s posthumously published work made a profound impact on Andrew Bonar Law.

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