Irish Nationalism

Abstract

Gareth Stedman Jones has argued that ‘the growth and decline of Chartism was a function of its capacity to persuade its constituency to interpret their distress or discontent within the terms of its political language’.¹ ‘A political movement’, he explains, ‘is not simply a manifestation of distress and pain, its existence is distinguished by a shared conviction articulating a political solution to distress and a political diagnosis of its causes.’² During the 1840s, he continues, Chartism lost support because government reforms undermined the movement’s fundamental claim that the political system was incapable of implementing reforms that would improve the material conditions of the working class. As Chartism’s established political languages ceased to describe the lived realities of its supporters, so the movement inevitably went into decline. Similar patterns can be identified in the development of Irish nationalist languages and activism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The credibility of the heightened nationalist rhetoric generated by nationalism’s failures during and after 1848 was undermined by the apparent readiness of the British government, in the light of the Fenian threat of the late 1860s, to address Irish grievances. This engageant political environment gave credibility to Home Rule politics and its parliamentary strategy.