ABSTRACT
Ireland after the famine was in some ways a Janus-faced, deceptive country, liable to mislead its own spokesmen as well as the British. A ‘Young Ireland’ attempt to raise a revolt in Munster met with virtually no response. The Fenians were condemned by the Catholic Church, since they based their organisation on the methods of the Italian Carbonari and other Continental-type secret societies, to which Vatican was fiercely opposed. The British government was sufficiently concerned to set up a naval patrol off the Irish coast, and an intelligence system in New York and Washington, run from the British consulate and embassy. The fall in agricultural incomes had made Gladstone’s 1870 Act irrelevant. Home Rule was opposed within the Liberal Party not only by the Whigs, led by Lord Hartington, but by the Radicals, led by Joe Chamberlain, who thought it had no chance of acceptance by parliament or the English nation, and would waste time better spent on social reform.
