Madam, - Isaac Butt, the "father of Home Rule", died 125 years ago, on May 1st, 1879. He was born on September 6th, 1813 at Glenfin, Co Donegal, the son of a Protestant clergyman.
Butt was chosen to argue the case for the Union in 1843 when those led by Daniel O'Connell were campaigning for its repeal. Nevertheless, O'Connell was so impressed with Butt's performance that he declared: "Depend upon it that Alderman Butt is in his inmost soul an Irishman, and that we will have him struggling with us for Ireland yet."
O'Connell is also reported as having said to the young lawyer on this occasion: "Isaac, you are young and I am old. I will fail in winning back the parliament, but you will do it when I shall have passed away."
Butt wrote about the protection of Irish industry, and his comments on the subject so impressed John Mitchel that he argued successfully for the purchase and distribution of Butt's Protection to Home Industry (1846) among supporters of repeal. This idea later formed part of Sinn Féin's programme, and Fianna Fáil under Eamon de Valera was strongly committed to protectionist policies.
Butt founded the Home Rule movement at a meeting in the Bilton Hotel, Dublin on May 19th, 1870. Several months later, the Home Government Association was publicly inaugurated at the Rotunda. Four years later, its members, reconstituting themselves as the Irish Home Rule league, won 60 seats in the general election. A month after their election victory, the Home Rule Party was officially established.
This new party pledged to pursue self-government for Ireland defined as a federal arrangement whereby an Irish parliament would legislate for and regulate domestic affairs while an imperial parliament, with Irish representatives, would deal with all other matters affecting the imperial crown and government. Although the Home Rule movement was begun largely by Protestants, it quickly attracted the support of the Catholic middle classes.
While Isaac Butt's place in Irish history is largely overshadowed by Parnell, whom he described in 1874 as "a splendid recruit, an historic name, my friend, young Parnell of Wicklow", it is also worth bearing in mind Roy Foster's point that in seeing "Parnell simply as the man who displaced Butt, we forget that he was, before that, the man who followed Butt".
Foster also finds fault with David Thornley's analysis of Butt as someone who was "somehow destined to miss the nationalist boat" and argues that Butt "might equally be seen as someone with a Protestant, even Orange, pedigree who shared in and helped create a sense of Irishness that accepted historic English influence while claiming realistic autonomy".
Alvin Jackson recently paid tribute to Butt's federalist ideas which were not only taken up a century later by Terence O'Neill in 1969, but also inspired some of the signatories to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. - Yours, etc.,
FRANK BOUCHIER-HAYES, Gortboy, Newcastle West, Co Limerick.
