Irish issue in British politics

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The issue of Ireland has been a major one in British politics, intermittently so for centuries. Britain's attempts to control and administer the island, or parts thereof, have had significant consequences for British politics, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although nominally autonomous (as the Kingdom of Ireland) until the end of the 18th century, Ireland became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.

In 1844, a future British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, defined what he called the Irish Question:

A dense population, in extreme distress, inhabit an island where there is an Established Church, which is not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom live in foreign capitals. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church; and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

— Hansard^[2]

The Great Famine of 1845–1851 killed upward of 1 million Irish men, women, and children, and forced another million to migrate, especially to the United States. Poor handling by the British government left distrust and hatred in its wake, roiling every grievance that followed. The view in Ireland was that the combination of laissez faire policies, which permitted food exports from Ireland, and protectionist Corn Laws, which prevented import of low cost wheat, had been a major factor in the famine, and that an independent government would have mitigated it.

The Representation of the People Act 1884 enfranchised many Catholics in Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell mobilised the Catholic vote so that the Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Parnell sought to re-establish home rule for Ireland and used tactics that kept British politics in turmoil. William Gladstone and his Liberal Party usually worked with Parnell in search of Home Rule, but the Liberal Party was irreversibly split in doing so, and a substantial faction left to form the Liberal Unionist Party. The result was the long term decline of the Liberal Party.

Home Rule was passed in 1914, but suspended in operation during the First World War. The issue was resolved in 1921 by partitioning Ireland into the quasi-autonomous, Catholic-dominated, Irish Free State in the southwestern four-fifths of the island, and the Presbyterian dominated Northern Ireland in the remaining fifth, which remained part of the United Kingdom.^[3] The next round of troubles emerged in the 1960s, when the Catholics living in Northern Ireland could no longer tolerate the discriminatory policies long imposed on them by the devolved government of Northern Ireland. The Troubles – 30 years of near civil war which had sporadic but significant impact on British politics – ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a power-sharing agreement between the parties in Northern Ireland and an international treaty between Ireland and the United Kingdom, as co-guarantors.

From 2017 onwards, Britain's relationship with Ireland again disrupted British politics, specifically over Brexit. Until late 2019, Parliament was unable resolve the trilemma among three competing objectives: an open border on the island; no trade borders within the United Kingdom; and no British participation in the European Single Market and the European Union Customs Union. The government abandoned the second of these objectives by negotiating and signing the Northern Ireland protocol that took effect from early 2021.