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February brought the report of the Special Commission appointed after The Times had published allegations linking Parnell and other Irish nationalist MPs to crime, including forged letters supposedly written by Parnell. Richard Pigott’s exposure as the forger had already destroyed the newspaper’s most dramatic accusation. The commission’s findings did not present Parnell as the author of the forged material, and parliamentary debate in February treated that conclusion as a major vindication. It restored much of the political standing that the attacks had threatened to take away.
The Irish university question had long been inseparable from denominational division. Trinity College Dublin possessed ancient wealth, prestige and a Protestant institutional inheritance. The Queen’s Colleges at Belfast, Cork and Galway, created in the 1840s and linked through the Queen’s University, offered non-denominational instruction. Yet many Catholic bishops and lay leaders regarded the latter arrangement as inadequate, and regarded a Catholic university education under Catholic supervision as essential. The Catholic University, associated above all with John Henry Newman in an earlier phase, did not possess the secure public endowment or degree-granting position its advocates wanted.
