Welcome to Unit AS 2: Ireland 1823–67
Welcome to your complete revision notes for CCEA History AS Unit 2, Option 3: Ireland 1823–67. This unit explores how nineteenth-century Ireland moved between peaceful, mass constitutional politics and revolutionary armed rebellion, alongside massive social changes like the Great Famine. Don't worry if this period seems packed with names and dates at first—we will break down each major theme step-by-step so you can ace both your 8-mark causation questions and 22-mark evaluative essays!
Quick Exam Breakdown:
• Part (i) [8 marks]: A short, focused analytical explanation (e.g., explaining why an event happened or why a group succeeded/failed).
• Part (ii) [22 marks]: An extended essay requiring balanced evaluation, sharp historical judgment, and clear structure.
• Top Examiner Tip: Avoid writing pure chronological narratives (telling a story from start to finish). Always group your points into thematic arguments (such as leadership, government response, public support, and ideology).
Theme 1: Daniel O’Connell & Catholic Emancipation (1823–1834)
1. The Founding of the Catholic Association (1823)
Before the 1820s, Irish politics was dominated by the Protestant Ascendancy. Catholic campaigns were mostly polite appeals by wealthy elites that achieved very little. In 1823, barrister Daniel O’Connell ("The Liberator") and Richard Lalor Sheil transformed Irish politics by creating the Catholic Association.
What made it revolutionary? The Catholic Rent (1824)
• O'Connell introduced a membership subscription of one penny a month (the "Catholic Rent"), collected at church gates after Sunday Mass by local Catholic priests.
• Why it mattered: It turned the Catholic peasantry into active political stakeholders. The tiny fee funded national organisation, published campaign pamphlets, and protected tenants against landlord retaliation.
2. Electoral Mobilisation: Waterford and County Clare
• 1826 General Election (Waterford): Catholic 40-shilling freeholders defied their Protestant landlords to elect pro-Emancipation Protestant Villiers Stuart, defeating the powerful landlord Lord George Beresford.
• 1828 County Clare By-Election: O’Connell took the bold step of running directly for Parliament against government minister William Vesey Fitzgerald. O'Connell won by a landslide. However, as an oath-bound Catholic, British law prevented him from taking his seat in Westminster!
3. The Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) and "The Wings"
Faced with the threat of massive civil insurrection across Ireland, Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington and Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel backed down. The British Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold senior civil and military offices.
The Price of Victory ("The Wings"):
To appease British hardliners, the British government passed a compromise measure that raised the Irish county voting qualification from the 40-shilling (£2) threshold to a £10 freehold qualification. This disenfranchised roughly five out of every six Irish voters, cutting off the very peasant base that had powered O'Connell's victory.
4. The Tithe War (1831–1838)
Even after 1829, Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters were legally forced to pay compulsory tithes (one-tenth of their produce/income) to fund the established Anglican Church of Ireland. Widespread passive and violent rural resistance broke out—known as the Tithe War—with boycotts, livestock seizures, and violent clashes with police until a legislative solution was found.
Key Takeaway for Theme 1: O’Connell succeeded by fusing middle-class leadership, mass peasant finance (the Catholic Rent), and the organisational power of the Catholic Church. The government conceded out of fear of civil war, not goodwill.
---Theme 2: The Lichfield House Compact & Irish Reform (1835–1840)
1. The Lichfield House Compact (February 1835)
Realising he could not achieve full constitutional changes alone, O'Connell entered a tactical parliamentary alliance in February 1835 known as the Lichfield House Compact.
• The Alliance: Lord John Russell (Whigs), Radical MPs, and Daniel O'Connell's Irish MPs agreed to cooperate.
• The Objective: Defeat Sir Robert Peel’s minority Conservative government and install a reform-minded Whig administration under Lord Melbourne in return for substantial reforms for Ireland.
2. Key Reforms Under the Melbourne Administration
• Irish Tithe Act (1838): Reduced tithe payments by 25% and converted the remaining amount into a fixed rent charge paid directly by landlords, ending the bitter street-level Tithe War.
• Irish Poor Law Act (1838): Divided Ireland into 130 Poor Law Unions governed by elected Boards of Guardians. It created a network of workhouses based strictly on the English model—a system poorly suited to widespread Irish seasonal poverty.
• Irish Municipal Corporations Act (1840): Reformed corrupt, closed Protestant "rotten borough" councils. It broadened the municipal vote, enabling Daniel O'Connell to be elected the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1841.
• Thomas Drummond’s Administration: As Under-Secretary for Ireland, Drummond appointed Catholics to the magistracy and the newly created unified Irish Constabulary (1836). He famously warned Irish landlords that "Property has its duties as well as its rights."
Evaluating the Compact: Success or Compromise?
• Successes: Catholics gained real administrative representation, tithe violence ended, and municipal governance was democratised.
• Shortcomings: The Poor Law was too rigid, franchise reforms were limited, and O'Connell put his ultimate goal—Repeal of the Act of Union—on the backburner for five years, frustrating younger nationalists.
Key Takeaway for Theme 2: The Compact proved that O'Connell could work pragmatically within Westminster to secure reforms, but it showed the strict limits of what British politicians were willing to grant Ireland.
---Theme 3: The Repeal Campaign and Its Failure (1840–1847)
1. The Loyal National Repeal Association (1840)
When the Whigs lost power and Peel's Conservatives returned, O'Connell went back to mass agitation, founding the Loyal National Repeal Association in 1840 to demand the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union and the restoration of a domestic Irish Parliament.
2. The Monster Meetings (1843)
In 1843—dubbed the "Repeal Year"—O'Connell held massive peaceful open-air rallies known as Monster Meetings at symbolic historical sites, such as the Hill of Tara and Mullaghmast. Hundreds of thousands of men and women attended to hear O'Connell speak.
3. The Clontarf Crisis (October 1843): The Turning Point
O’Connell scheduled a giant meeting at Clontarf (the site of Brian Boru’s famous battle). Just 24 hours beforehand, Prime Minister Robert Peel prohibited the rally, dispatching troops and artillery to enforce the ban.
• O’Connell’s Decision: Committed strictly to peaceful constitutionalism, O'Connell called off the meeting to prevent a massacre.
• The Consequence: The British government called his bluff. The myth of his unstoppable mass power was shattered, and O'Connell was subsequently arrested and briefly imprisoned.
4. The Young Ireland Split (1846)
Young Ireland was an intellectual, non-sectarian nationalist group founded in 1842 by writers for The Nation newspaper, including Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, and John Blake Dillon.
• The Ideological Clash: Young Ireland wanted a romantic, all-inclusive Irish identity (uniting Catholics and Protestants) and rejected O'Connell's heavy reliance on Catholic clerical influence.
• The Split: In 1846, O’Connell forced through the "Peace Resolutions", demanding that all Repeal members completely renounce the use of physical force in all circumstances. Young Ireland refused to rule out armed resistance as an ultimate resort and walked out, breaking the nationalist movement into rival factions.
Key Takeaway for Theme 3: The Repeal campaign failed because Westminster treated the Union as non-negotiable, Peel refused to back down, and the nationalist movement fractured over tactics (constitutionalism vs. physical force).
---Theme 4: The Irish Famine (1845–1850s)
1. Background Causes of the Famine
• Potato Monoculture: Over 3 million people, especially poor cottiers and agricultural labourers, relied almost exclusively on a single high-yielding potato strain—the Lumper potato—for daily survival.
• Overpopulation and Land Sub-division: By 1845, the population had swelled to approximately 8.5 million. Landlords and tenants repeatedly subdivided tiny plots of land among their children, leaving families with holdings too small for any crop other than potatoes.
• The Blight: In 1845, the airborne fungal blight Phytophthora infestans arrived from Europe, turning healthy potato crops into black, rotting sludge overnight.
2. British Government Relief Policies
Examiner Warning: Never treat British famine response as one single policy! You must contrast Peel’s early interventionism with Russell’s strict reliance on market forces.
Phase 1: Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative Ministry (1845–1846)
• Direct Intervention: Peel secretly imported £100,000 worth of American Indian corn ("Peel’s Brimstone") to stabilise Irish food prices.
• Relief Measures: Set up local relief commissions and funded public relief works to provide wages.
• Repeal of the Corn Laws (1846): Abolished grain tariffs to make cheap food available, a move that split his party and ended his government.
Phase 2: Lord John Russell’s Whig Ministry & Charles Trevelyan (1846 onwards)
• Laissez-Faire Ideology: The Treasury, led by Assistant Secretary Charles Trevelyan, believed government interference in food markets would ruin private trade.
• Soup Kitchens (1847): The Temporary Relief Act provided direct food rations to over 3 million people at its peak during "Black '47", but was abruptly ended in Autumn 1847.
• Throwing Relief on Irish Property: Russell shifted the entire financial cost onto the Irish Poor Law workhouses through local rates.
• The Gregory Clause (1847): A cruel rule stating that anyone occupying more than ¼ acre of land could not receive poor relief unless they surrendered their land to the landlord. This led to mass evictions and the demolition of peasant cottages.
3. Consequences of the Great Famine
• Demographic Collapse: Over 1 million people died from starvation and disease (typhus and dysentery), while over 1 million fled abroad on hazardous "coffin ships", predominantly to Great Britain and North America.
• Destruction of the Cottier Class: The cottier and smallholder social class was virtually wiped out.
• Agricultural Shift: Irish agriculture shifted decisively from labour-intensive tillage (crops) to pastoral farming (cattle grazing).
• Legacy of Bitterness: Deep anti-British resentment was embedded permanently in the growing Irish-American diaspora, providing future funding for revolutionary republicanism.
Key Takeaway for Theme 4: The Famine was an environmental disaster made catastrophic by land tenure structures, rural poverty, and the ideological rigidity of British laissez-faire policy after 1846.
---Theme 5: Revolutionary Nationalism & The Fenians (1848–1867)
1. The 1848 Young Ireland Rebellion
Inspired by the European revolutions of 1848 and horrified by the Famine, Young Ireland leaders attempted an armed uprising led by William Smith O'Brien. The rebellion collapsed in a minor skirmish with police in Ballingarry, County Tipperary—mockingly termed the "Battle of Widow McCormack's Cabbage Patch". The leaders were arrested and transported.
2. The Birth of the Fenian Movement (1858)
Founded on St. Patrick's Day 1858, the Fenian movement had two interconnected wings:
• The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB): Founded in Dublin by James Stephens as a secret, oath-bound conspiracy dedicated to achieving an independent democratic republic through physical force.
• The Fenian Brotherhood: Founded in the United States by John O’Mahony to raise funds, purchase weapons, and recruit Irish-American civil war veterans.
3. The 1867 Fenian Rising and Why It Failed
In March 1867, the Fenians staged simultaneous uprisings across Kerry, Dublin, Cork, and Limerick. It was a complete military failure due to:
• British Intelligence and Informers: Infiltrators like Pierce Nagle alerted Dublin Castle, allowing authorities to arrest key leaders and seize weapons before the rising began.
• The Weather: Bitter winter blizzards made troop coordination impossible.
• Lack of Church and Peasant Support: The Catholic Church strongly condemned secret oath-bound societies, discouraging ordinary rural Catholics from joining.
4. Dramatic Incidents in Britain (1867)
• The Manchester Martyrs: In September 1867, Fenians ambushed a police van in Manchester to rescue leaders Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy. Police Sergeant Brett was accidentally shot dead. Three Fenians—William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien—were publicly hanged, instantly becoming revered nationalist martyrs.
• The Clerkenwell Prison Explosion (December 1867): A botched bombing intended to break out Fenian organiser Ricard O'Sullivan Burke demolished nearby tenement houses, killing 12 civilians and injuring over 100.
5. Long-Term Significance of the Fenians
While militarily weak, Fenian violence shocked British political opinion. It convinced Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone that Ireland required urgent conciliation, sparking his famous pledge: "My mission is to pacify Ireland." This directly led to the Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) and the Land Act (1870).
Key Takeaway for Theme 5: The Fenians failed as a military force due to informers, poor logistics, and Church opposition, but their martyrdom and violence forced Irish reform to the very top of the Westminster political agenda.
---Quick Comparison Table: Constitutional vs. Revolutionary Nationalism
Constitutional Nationalism (e.g., O'Connell, Repeal Association):
• Methods: Mass peaceful rallies, legal elections, parliamentary compacts, collecting rent/funds.
• Strengths: Backed by Catholic clergy; capable of mobilising millions of ordinary people.
• Weaknesses: Powerless when Westminster refused to negotiate or banned public gatherings.
Revolutionary Nationalism (e.g., Young Ireland, IRB / Fenians):
• Methods: Secret oaths, underground networks, armed rebellion, international diaspora funding.
• Strengths: Created powerful martyrs and kept the ideal of complete republican independence alive.
• Weaknesses: Riddled with informers; condemned by the Catholic hierarchy; lacked military logistics.
Top Examiner Tips & Common Pitfalls to Avoid
• Don't confuse your exam units: This is Unit AS 2 (1823–67). Do not write about Parnell, Home Rule in the 1880s, the Easter Rising of 1916, or the 1921 Partition Treaty.
• Show balance in Part (ii) essays: When asked why O’Connell succeeded in 1829 or failed in 1843, do not focus on just one reason. Weigh up his own leadership against the response of the British government (Wellington/Peel) and the social climate.
• Differentiate Famine policy: Always demonstrate that Peel’s response in 1845–46 (corn purchase, public works) was significantly more active and pragmatic than Russell and Trevelyan's rigid laissez-faire approach from 1846 onwards.
• Explain the Young Ireland split properly: It wasn't just a clash of personalities. It was a deep ideological debate between O’Connell’s strict non-violent constitutionalism and Young Ireland’s belief that self-defence and national freedom justified physical force.