ABSTRACT
Conflict over Ireland reconfigured the political landscape of the UnitedKingdom during the 1880s and brought the UK close to civil conflict at the outbreak of the First World War. From the Famine of the mid-1840s onwards, affairs in Ireland had been casting a very long, and very dark, shadow (see Chapters 25 and 38). The natural reaction of both survivors in, and emigrants from, Ireland was to blame Britain for the conditions which brought the Famine about and for its partial and inefficient response. A fierce debate has raged about alleged British ‘betrayal’.1
