Irish Culture and Nationalism Translated: St Patrick’s Day, 1888, in Australia

Abstract

Ambiguity is inherent in the political process, and perhaps most of all where, as in the Anglo-Irish case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a masked colonialism at play.[1] Of course, the existence of an ostensibly independent Irish Parliament before 1800, and participation in an ostensibly unitary Parliament, thereafter, forced double-thought and double-language upon the controlling power. It is not with this but with Irish nationalist ambiguity, in its constitutional form, that I am here concerned. None the less, the interaction should never be forgotten. It was British opinion, and in the last resort British opinion working in British domestic politics, which produced political change in Ireland. From stage to stage, the form of Irish pressure altered, from mollification to violence or outrage, and back again, and intermingled. But the strategic iron law — that all words and actions were ultimately to be evaluated in terms of their effects upon neighbouring opinion — endured.