ABSTRACT
A substantial section of the commercial class together with many tenant farmers were Presbyterians with a history of strained relations with the Church of Ireland. These groups had been the backbone of Ulster Liberalism which down to the 1880s had been the main electoral challenge to the Conservatives in the Ulster constituencies. They were traditionally contemptuous of Orangeism which was seen as both an appendage of Conservatism and, with its flamboyant and often aggressive sectarianism, an embarrassment to the Unionist cause in the rest of the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, Liberals and Conservatives would soon be forced into what was for some time an uneasy alliance by the emergence of a disciplined Irish Nationalist party under Parnell. This party won 85 Irish seats, 17 of them-a majority of one - in Ulster in the 1885 election and put the Irish demand for a limited measure of autonomy, Home Rule, at the centre of British and Irish political debate for the next four decades.
