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The year’s central constitutional development came on 2 May, when the New Ireland Forum issued its report. Convened by Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, the Forum had brought together Fine Gael, Labour, Fianna Fáil and the SDLP to consider how lasting peace and stability might be achieved democratically. Unionist parties had declined to participate, an absence that set clear limits on its reach; nevertheless, the report represented an unusual degree of agreement among constitutional nationalists north and south of the border.
Ireland entered 1901 still within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, governed locally through Dublin Castle and represented at Westminster. The year opened under the long shadow of the Union of 1801, whose centenary invited sharply opposed readings. Unionists treated the constitutional connection as the framework of imperial citizenship and commercial security; nationalists regarded it as the removal of Ireland’s parliament and an unfinished political grievance. Neither Home Rule nor a fresh constitutional settlement was near at hand. Yet the Ireland of 1901 was not politically inert: arguments over land, language, education and local power were giving a wider public meaning to nationality.
The gravest political development of the year was the establishment of the Special Commission, conventionally called the Parnell Commission. Its immediate background lay in The Times campaign of 1887, Parnellism and Crime, which had accused Parnell and fellow nationalists of encouraging agrarian violence and associating with murder. The most sensational item was a facsimile letter purportedly written by Parnell after the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. Parnell denied it at once; it was in fact a forgery, though that decisive exposure still lay in the future at the close of 1888.
The most tangible Irish measure enacted in 1885 was the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act, better known as the first Ashbourne Act. It received royal assent on 14 August. The statute enlarged the means by which occupying tenants could buy their holdings: where the Land Commission judged the security sufficient and a guarantee deposit was provided, it could advance the whole purchase price rather than the three-quarters available under the 1881 legislation. Parliament authorised advances of up to £5 million.
The founding meeting took place at Hayes’s Commercial Hotel, Thurles, County Tipperary, on Saturday 1 November. The surviving record is not wholly uniform about how many men were in the room: later institutional accounts commonly name seven, while contemporary newspaper reporting suggests a somewhat wider attendance. The essentials, however, are firm. Maurice Davin, the celebrated athlete and farmer from Carrick-on-Suir, was elected president. Michael Cusack, the Clare-born schoolmaster and journalist, became one of three honorary secretaries, alongside John Wyse Power and John McKay. Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Davitt and Archbishop Thomas William Croke were invited to act as patrons.
