To what extent do you agree that the land issue was the main source of conflict between the Irish and the British government?
In 1870 a third of the land in Ireland was owned by less than 2 per cent of the land-owning gentry (302 people) and 25 per cent of the total number of landlords did not even live in Ireland. Nearly all of them were protestant and British whose families had been given the land during the Ulster planting, displacing the native Irish or allowing them to work the land but only if they paid rent to the land-owner which sowed the seeds of resentment that would last until the modern day. The problems caused by who owned the land was partly responsible for the terrible impact of the Great Famine or Irish Potato Famine from 1845 to 1847. William Gladstone attempted to resolve the land issue but by the end of the Nineteenth Century not a great deal had been done which specifically improved the lifestyle of those who worked on the land.
The Irish potato famine was one of the worse famines in European history; close to one million people died of starvation and over fifty thousand evictions of land-workers took place. Many in Britain were sympathetic to the suffering of the Irish with the popular newspaper London Illustrated Times publishing accurate or over-dramatized pictures of the famine to encourage members of the public to lend support and even Queen Victoria donated large sums of money to voluntary organisations seeking to aid the Irish, however the Tory government of the time believed in a laissez faire approach to ruling so they believed that too much interference on the governments behalf would lead to a nanny s state so in 1847 they scrapped work programmes, designed to provide a source of income for unemployed Irish, and replaced them instead with soup kitchens which were unable to cope with the demand for food. Some landlords tried to help the starving and penniless but many just evicted the tenants who were unable to pay the rent on the land. This lack of caring from the British government caused many to question the Anglo-Irish relationship and the Land issue and one of the main advocates of this was James Fintan Lalor. Lalor was a member of Young Ireland, a radical group who sought republicanism for Ireland and were prepared to use force to do so. This implies that the land issue was a huge source of tension and conflict between a small percentage of the Irish population and the British government however this doesn’t encompass the entirety of the Irish as there were several other areas of conflict which could be said to have been the main source of conflict.
Britain was a protestant nation so naturally the people of Britain were distrustful of the Irish, nearly all of whom were Catholic. This mistrust spiralled into The British seeing the Irish as second class citizens which can be seen in David Hume’s “History of England” in which he describes the Irish as “barbaric” and “ignorant”. The mistrust and hatred even culminated in 1691 after William of Orange had defeated the Catholic king, James Stuart, following an attempt by James to regain the throne of England, at the battle of the Boyne. James’ defeat led to the implementation of a series of penal laws designed to secure protestant rule over Ireland. These laws include: Catholics were not allowed to vote, to sit in Parliament in Dublin (or Westminster), they were not allowed to join the legal profession or even own a horse over the value of five pounds and whilst these laws were relaxed slightly in the 1790’s so Catholics who owned property worth more than forty shillings many Catholic’s still argued for the end of all discrimination and full emancipation. In fact in 1798 a group of people, known as the United Irishmen and led by Wolfe Tone, attempted a rebellion against British rule in Ireland. The rebellion was unsuccessful and approximately thirty thousand people lost their lives including Wolfe Tone. This clearly shows that people were willing to take militant action against Britain due to religion which is a strong argument for religion being the main source of conflict between the Irish and the British government.
In 1800 Parliament passed the act of Union which essentially dissolved the Irish Parliament so know all decisions were to be made in Westminster and the Church of Ireland was to become The Church of England. Many Irish opposed this act, the most prominent of which was Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell was a Catholic Irishman who set up the Catholic association with the aim of emancipating all Irish Catholics and repealing the act of Union. This issue not only caused conflict between the Irish and the British government but also within the British government itself. When Pitt the Elder had tried to convince King George III to agree to have all Catholic’s emancipated, the King openly ridiculed Pitt in front of Parliament causing him to resign as Prime Minister. However the conflict between the Irish and the British government was relatively peaceful. O’Connell campaigned through petitions and speeches in Parliament all funded by the Catholic rent (a one penny payment made by all Irish Catholics when they went to church) however he was unsuccessful and he died before the Act was repealed.
In conclusion, I believe that the land issue was not the main source of conflict between the Irish and the British government as I believe it to be a number of different that contributed and there was no one main source of conflict.