Truce and Treaty
In April 1882 Parnell moved to make a deal with the government. The settlement involved withdrawing the manifesto and undertaking to move against agrarian crime, seeing militancy would never win Home Rule. The so-called Kilmainham Treaty, a truce not dissimilar to truces to follow, marked a critical turning point in Parnell’s leadership, though it resulted in losing the support of Devoy’s American-Irish. However, his political diplomacy preserved the national Home Rule movement after the Phoenix Park Murders in May of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Under Secretary. For the next twenty years Fenians and physical-force militancy ceased to play a role in Irish politics.
With the Land League suppressed and internally fracturing, Parnell resurrected it in October as the Irish National League (INL). It combined moderate agrarianism, a Home Rule programme with electoral functions. It was hierarchical and autocratic in structure with Parnell wielding immense authority and direct parliamentary control. Parliamentary constitutionalism was the future path. The informal alliance between the new, tightly disciplined National League and the Catholic Church was one of the main factors for the revitalisation of the national Home Rule cause after 1882. Parnell saw that the explicit endorsement of Catholicism was of vital importance to the success of this venture. At the end of 1882 the organisation already had 232 branches, in 1885 increased to 592 branches. He left the day-to-day running of the League in the hands of his lieutenants Timothy Harrington as Secretary, William O’Brien editor of its newspaper United Ireland and Timothy Healy.
Read more about this topic: Irish Parliamentary Party
Famous quotes containing the words truce and/or treaty:
“Our whole life is startingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.”
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