Modern Irish nationalism is rooted in 18th-century Enlightenment Patriotism and was triggered by the double crisis of the 1798 Rebellion and the 1801 Act of Union, which made Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom.

Patriotism in Ireland, parallel to and inspired by its analogue movement in the American colonies, not only vindicated for Ireland an equitable say in the running of its affairs under the British Crown, it also abandoned the ingrained colonial mistrust of the Protestant (“Anglo-Irish”) settler class for the country’s native population (Catholic, still largely Gaelic-speaking, and, despite its overwhelming numerical majority, without legal standing in public affairs). Patriotism started a process of political emancipation for the Catholic majority, motivated partly by Enlightenment ideals of political justice, partly by sentimental paternalism, and partly by an appreciation of the historical interest of the country’s original, pre-colonial, Gaelic culture. It was in these decades (1770-95) that an initial sense of a shared “Irish” identity between native Gaelic and Anglo-Irish settlers began to emerge.

This programme did little to remedy the exploitative landlord system that was the economic hallmark of Ireland’s colonial system. Discontent among pauperized peasantry, linked to the radical republicanism of urban sympathizers with the French Revolution, broke out in a series of insurrections in 1798. Relatively quickly suppressed by the Crown forces, the 1798 rebellion nevertheless had a momentous impact: it effectively bankrupted the tradition of Enlightenment Patriotism with its liberal-sentimental, paternalistic agenda; it provoked the British government to end Ireland’s parliamentary autonomy and to incorporate the country’s political institutions into the United Kingdom (Act of Union, 1801); and in the ideological vacuum thus created, “1798” furnished the prototype of a radical-revolutionary, republican separatism willing to fight its cause with physical force and outside the established political institutions.

Catholic emancipation failed to be carried to completion under post-1801 British rule, causing much resentment. This resentment was mobilized in the huge campaigns of Daniel O’Connell, which effectively turned the disempowered peasantry into a major, albeit extra-parliamentary political force. O’Connell managed to wrest full emancipation from an unwilling British Crown in 1828, thus opening unrestricted access to the country’s institutions for the majority population. In the following decades, this was to transform the country’s public sphere: city spaces (with churches, monuments, and street names), schools and education, sociability and the printing press, all became platforms for an emerging Catholic middle class with its own cultural memories, its remembrance of Gaelic glories and anti-British grievances.

O’Connell followed through his emancipation campaign with a call for “repeal of the Union”: to restore Ireland’s self-rule, abolished in 1801, under the British Crown. Repeal and Home Rule were to become the slogans for that tradition of Irish nationalism which pursued its goals by parliamentary means. While these repeal or Home Rule movements could mobilize huge support among the Catholic majority population, they provoked grave misgivings among Ireland’s Protestants: the urban upper middle class and the country gentry, as well as, more importantly, the Presbyterian population of Ulster, where the counter-ideology of “Unionism” grew in tandem with Home Rule. Unionism was embraced as a fundamental principle by the UK’s Conservative Party around 1890, as the Home Rule leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was working out a Home Rule Bill with Liberal Prime Minster Gladstone. Parnell died in 1891, and Gladstone’s bill was vetoed in the House of Lords in 1893. When another Home Rule Bill was finally enacted in 1914, it had lost credibility; the Unionist majority population of Ulster refused to acquiesce in its potential implementation (backed up in this intransigence by the Conservative Party and by senior army officers), and in any case the measure was kept on hold for the duration of the war. In the Irish party-political landscape, the nationalist voice was meanwhile more strenuously put forward by Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin (a Gaelic phrase meaning “we by ourselves”; founded in 1905 on an agenda vaguely inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867, as per Griffith’s pamphlet The resurrection of Hungary, 1907).

Meanwhile, extra-parliamentary nationalism had taken the initiative. The 1798 rebellion had emerged from its taboo status in the 1840s, and Ireland experienced its share of the Europe-wide revolutionary fervour of the years running up to 1848; the Young Ireland movement around Thomas Davis used its newspaper The nation as a mobilizing platform for its assertions of a separate Irish identity and right to self-government. When the country was devastated by the great potato famines of 1845-48, which decimated the rural peasantry and swelled the tide of emigration, this stance was radicalized into revolutionary action. It was among radicalized Young Irelanders (some, like John Mitchel, sentenced to transportation for their participation in an abortive rebellion in 1848) and among the famine-driven emigrants that a new type of diaspora nationalism took hold, organized in secret or semi-secret societies such as the “Fenians” (founded in the US in 1848, and named after a mythical Gaelic warrior band, the Fianna) and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which, drawing on Fenian sympathizers, organized itself both in Ireland and among the Irish diaspora as a secret revolutionary society clustered in “cells”. From then on, the Irish diaspora in America (and, to a lesser extent, Australia) would provide a moral-political and financial support base for Irish nationalists.

The culture of Fenianism involved elements such as a vehement hatred of British rule; a celebration of Ireland’s Gaelic roots and underlying culture; and the invocation of an apostolic succession of Irish leaders resisting English rule across the centuries, from Gaelic clan times to 1798. This outlook suffused the Irish political climate even as established party politics were still dominated by Home Rule; its tenets were summarized by the journalist D.P. Moran as The philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905), and its adherents tended to gravitate around Moran’s newspaper The leader (founded in 1900) and around Griffith’s Sinn Féin and its newspaper, the United Irishman (founded in 1899; its title harking back to the rebels of 1798). Following the death of Parnell and the failure of the Home Rule Bill in the early 1890s, this generalized culture of Fenianism crystallized in a variety of associations, including the Gaelic Athletic Association, the language revival movement around Douglas Hyde, and the “Irish Literary Revival” around W.B. Yeats. These associations, as well as Griffith’s Sinn Féin, were quickly infiltrated and dominated by radicals who sympathized with, or were active members of, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Patrick Pearse foremost among them. (Yeats himself had some early, sentimental-Romantic sympathy for IRB outlaw-activists; this sympathy was strengthened by his infatuation with the committed revolutionary Maud Gonne, but dwindled after 1907.)

The radicalizing trend manifested itself in an increasing paramilitary presence of armed nationalists in Dublin’s public spaces after 1910. These were drawn from a variety of political organizations (“Irish Volunteers” from the Home Rule League, an “Irish Citizen Army” from the Irish Labour movement), but all were gradually brought in line with IRB policies; it was the IRB that masterminded the armed insurrection in 1916 known as the Easter Rising. It was from the Rising’s headquarters in Dublin’s General Post Office that Patrick Pearse, on behalf of a “provisional government”, proclaimed an independent Irish Republic.

This rising was forcefully suppressed by a British government then locked in the struggle of the Great War. The harshness of the suppression, and the execution of the Rising’s leaders, mobilized and radicalized Irish public opinion, and from 1918 until 1922 the conflict escalated into the “War of Independence”. Irish voters elected Sinn Féin candidates who refused to take their seat in Westminster and instead constituted an Irish parliament; its armed forces became the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which waged a guerrilla war against Crown forces.

In 1921 the British Government offered a compromise form of Home Rule: dominion status for an Irish Free State excluding the Unionist-dominated territories of Ulster. This led to a territorial division of Ireland between Northern Ireland and what later became the Republic; within the ranks of Irish nationalism, a split occurred between a hard-line faction unwilling to abandon the armed struggle and a faction willing to accept the compromise solution. These splits and antagonisms triggered a civil war within the Irish Free State (1922-23), dominated the Irish party-political landscape throughout the 20th century, and also played themselves out in the intermittent flare-ups of armed hostility between government forces and various offshoots of Sinn Féin and the IRA in Northern Ireland