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The immediate cause was the Government of Ireland Bill, introduced in the House of Commons by Prime Minister H. H. Asquith on 11 April. It was the third great attempt at Irish Home Rule after the defeated bills of 1886 and 1893. This time the constitutional setting had changed. The Parliament Act of 1911 had removed the House of Lords’ permanent veto over public legislation, although the Lords could still delay a bill for two years. The measure therefore had a plausible route to the statute book, but not a quick one.
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.
