ABSTRACT
Irish nationalism tends to be understood in terms of two distinct traditions, constitutionalist and separatist. Although each tradition embraces a range of aspirations and strategies, most figures from the pantheon of Irish nationalism invite classification as one or the other. However, it is immediately obvious that this Manichaean classification is problematic — in which box does Charles Stewart Parnell during the Irish Parliamentary Party split or Michael Collins during the treaty debates belong? Irish Nationalist identity was continuously shifting and malleable, embracing to a varying degree both traditions and highly sensitive to changing political circumstances and fortunes. It is right to think in terms of a spectrum, rather than a dichotomy. To reduce to political cunning Parnell's ability to talk agrarianism in the west, Fenianism in the United States, and imperial home rule in the House of Commons, would be to reduce the movement he led to an elaborate artifice, as opposed to something that could, and did, embody the spectrum of Irish nationalism, albeit one where the dovetailing heavily favoured constitutionalism. Central to Parnell's achievement was his ability to articulate a constitutionalism that enveloped separatist aspiration.
