Irish Land and British Politics

Abstract

Land was a pervasive issue in British politics through much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The resonances from it were still sufficiently present for Harold Wilson in one of his 1974 election campaigns to use the ‘Land for the People’ slogan of the 1906 general election as a metaphor for his policy on North Sea oil. Likewise in Ireland, land was a major issue for most of the nineteenth century, and continued to have powerful political repercussions right through to relatively late in the twentieth century. The land as an issue often seemed to provide a filament that linked together the politics of the four countries of the United Kingdom, but the differences lying beneath the surface in each country (and indeed regionally within each) were often significant in economic, political, and social terms. There was, however, in the three countries that constituted the island of Great Britain a sufficient commonality surrounding the land question to enable a broad political identification across those national boundaries, and in particular with the ideologies and structures of Liberal politics as they developed from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Great War. In the island of Ireland the story is a different one, and complicated by the propensity of many contemporaries (particularly British politicians) to understand it misleadingly in terms that fitted the central British political discourse and the equally significant inclination of Irish contemporaries to misunderstand how their concerns were being mutated to suit that central arena. In this chapter, an analysis is presented of the commonalities of land between Ireland and the rest of the British Isles and of what distinguished the Irish case from the wider discourses. In part, this is a study in differing perceptions and how they related to the discourses of two distinct polities held together in unified political structures.