Ireland Unfree
"...Parnell's advantage, insofar as there was one, was that he was from a prominent Protestant Anglo-Irish landholding family. He was not some "dirty" tenant farmer, nor was he Catholic. When he spoke, there were many ears at Dublin Castle that listened, even if they later dismissed what he had to say. And more importantly, there were even some sympathetic ears in Whitehall. The Liberals, uncomfortable with the Church of Ireland and supporters of land and franchise reform in all of Britain, viewed the issue of Irish land tenancy as part and parcel of issues where they split with the increasingly ossified Tories. A mass riot on St. Patrick's Day in Cork and street brawls between Orangemen and Republican Brotherhood-affiliated mobs in Ulster had resulted in the deployment of the expanded British Army presence, in support of an increasingly radicalized and aggressive Royal Irish Constabulary, to "areas of minimal government control." The RIC in particular, by 1876, already a gendarmerie in all but name and an auxiliary of British military forces, was the spearpoint of the Carnarvon Cabinet's campaign of terror in the Irish countryside during that spring and summer, with the nearly uniformly-Protestant police force developing a network of spies and informants to turn up not just IRB agents and members, most of whom were utterly nonviolent, but increasingly harassing Land League activists.
It was against this backdrop that Parnell's merger of the Land League with Butt's Home Rule League occurred, combining the activist and constitutional wings of Irish nationalism under the "Irish Parliamentary Party" banner, and tying the issues of land tenancy reform and local rule for Ireland together in one for the first time. The reaction to this development in London was, to say the least, not ebullient..."
- Ireland Unfree
It was against this backdrop that Parnell's merger of the Land League with Butt's Home Rule League occurred, combining the activist and constitutional wings of Irish nationalism under the "Irish Parliamentary Party" banner, and tying the issues of land tenancy reform and local rule for Ireland together in one for the first time. The reaction to this development in London was, to say the least, not ebullient..."
- Ireland Unfree