ABSTRACT
Despite Gladstone's defeat, Irish Home Rule remained one of the great issues of the day. In March 1887, Sir John Lubbock set out his position in a letter to The Times, insisting, as he had done before, that the division of Great Britain into four ‘nations’ – England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, was ‘accidental’ and modern, masking a more complex ethnic mix. Ireland itself had significant Anglo-Norman and Scandinavian elements in its population (the Parnells, he noted pointedly, were an Anglo-Norman family). All of this added up, he suggested, to an ‘… undeniable ethnological fact’ that ‘the English, Irish and Scotch are all composed of the same elements, and in not very dissimilar proportions’. 1 He was convinced that unrest in Ireland was caused by economic rather than political factors, and looked forward to happier times as the economic situation improved. 2
