Unit AS 2: Historical Conflict and Change – Ireland 1823–67
Welcome to your complete revision guide for CCEA A Level History Unit AS 2 (Option 3: Ireland 1823–67). Don't worry if Irish nineteenth-century history feels overwhelming at first with all its dates, acts, and political figures! We will break down this dramatic era into four clear, bite-sized stories of reform, crisis, and rebellion.
Exam Snapshot:
• Paper: Unit AS 2: Historical Conflict and Change
• Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
• Structure: You choose two questions out of three. Each question has two parts:
— Part (a): Short response focusing on historical understanding (8 marks)
— Part (b): Extended essay focusing on analysis, evaluation, and debate (22 marks)
Because the unit is titled Historical Conflict and Change, examiners want to see not just what happened, but why change happened, why some campaigns succeeded while others failed, and how conflict shaped British-Irish relations.
---Part 1: Daniel O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation (1823–29)
In the 1820s, Roman Catholics made up the vast majority of Ireland's population, yet under British law, they were barred from sitting as Members of Parliament (MPs) in Westminster. Daniel O'Connell, a brilliant Catholic barrister known as "The Liberator," set out to dismantle this injustice through peaceful, constitutional mass agitation.
1. The Catholic Association (1823) and the "Catholic Rent" (1824)
• Founding: O’Connell founded the Catholic Association in 1823 to lobby for full civil and political rights for Catholics.
• The Game Changer — The Catholic Rent (1824): Initially a middle-class debating club, O’Connell transformed it into the world’s first mass democratic movement by introducing a membership fee of just one penny a month (the "Catholic Rent").
• The Role of the Catholic Church: Local parish priests collected the rent after Sunday Mass. This gave ordinary, impoverished Catholic peasants a personal, financial stake in national politics and funded legal aid, election campaigns, and propaganda.
2. Key Electoral Breakthroughs
• The 1826 General Election (Waterford): Catholic 40-shilling freeholders (small tenant farmers who had the vote) bravely defied their Protestant landlords by voting for pro-Emancipation Protestant candidate Lord George Beresford's opponent. This proved that landlords no longer controlled their tenants' votes.
• The 1828 Clare Byelection: O'Connell took an audacious gamble. He stood for election in County Clare against a popular government minister, Vesey Fitzgerald. O’Connell won by a landslide! However, as a Catholic, he could not take his seat without swearing an anti-Catholic oath of supremacy.
3. The Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) and the "Bitter Pill"
British Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington and Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel realized that refusing O’Connell his seat would trigger widespread civil rebellion in Ireland. To maintain public order, they conceded.
• The Victory: The Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) allowed Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold almost all public offices.
• The Price Paid: Alongside Emancipation, Parliament passed the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. This raised the voting qualification from a 40-shilling freehold to a £10 freehold, instantly disenfranchising tens of thousands of poor Catholic voters who had powered O'Connell’s victory.
Quick Review & Takeaway: O'Connell succeeded in 1829 because he combined the organizational power of the Catholic Church, mass funding via the Catholic Rent, and the legal threat of civil unrest to force the British government into a corner.
---Part 2: O’Connell and the Campaign for Repeal of the Act of Union (1840–45)
Having won Emancipation, O'Connell turned to his ultimate political ambition: Repeal of the 1800 Act of Union, aiming to restore a separate Irish Parliament in Dublin while remaining loyal to the British Crown.
1. The Repeal Association and "Monster Meetings"
• The Repeal Association (1840): O'Connell attempted to replicate his 1820s playbook by creating a new mass movement funded by a "Repeal Rent."
• Monster Meetings (1843): O’Connell held enormous open-air rallies across Ireland to demonstrate overwhelming public demand. At the historic Hill of Tara in August 1843, hundreds of thousands gathered peacefully to hear him speak.
2. The Turning Point: The Clontarf Crisis (October 1843)
• The Ban: O’Connell scheduled a colossal Monster Meeting at Clontarf for October 1843. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s government banned the meeting at the eleventh hour and deployed troops and artillery.
• O’Connell’s Dilemma: Defying the ban meant violent bloodshed; obeying it meant surrendering his political momentum. Committed strictly to constitutional, non-violent methods ("peace policy"), O'Connell called off the meeting.
• The Fall: Peel promptly arrested O’Connell for conspiracy. Although later released, O'Connell's aura of invincibility was permanently broken.
3. The Rise of "Young Ireland" and the Nationalist Split
• Young Ireland: A group of young, educated, romantic nationalists (including Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy) wrote for The Nation newspaper. While initially supporting O'Connell, they grew frustrated by his cautious tactics and sectarian Catholic focus.
• The Split: In 1846, Young Ireland formally broke away from O'Connell over his insistence on absolute non-violence ("peace policy"). Young Ireland argued that if constitutional methods failed, physical force was a legitimate moral right.
Examiner Warning — Don't Mix Up 1829 and 1843!
Students often confuse why O'Connell won in 1829 but failed in 1843. Use this comparison table to keep them distinct:
• Catholic Emancipation (1829 — Success): British opinion was divided; Wellington and Peel feared civil war; the issue was civil rights within the UK.
• Repeal of the Union (1843 — Failure): British political parties were totally united against breaking up the Empire; Peel called O'Connell's bluff; O'Connell's strict commitment to non-violence left him with no backup plan once meetings were banned.
Part 3: The Great Famine (1845–52)
Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland suffered a devastating social and demographic catastrophe. Understanding both the underlying causes and the British political ideology is essential for your exam essays.
1. Long-Term and Short-Term Causes
• The Potato Blight: In 1845, a fungal disease (Phytophthora infestans) struck Ireland's potato harvest, turning crops into black, rotting sludge.
• Extreme Monoculture: Over 3 million people relied almost exclusively on the potato for survival because it provided high yields of calories on tiny plots of poor soil.
• The Land Tenure System: Land was owned predominantly by Anglo-Irish landlords who rented to middlemen, who further subdivided plots into tiny, precarious strips (conacre) rented by impoverished cottiers and landless labourers.
• Population Growth: Ireland's population surged to over 8 million by 1841, putting unbearable strain on rural land.
2. Government Responses: Peel vs. Russell
Phase 1: Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative Government (1845–1846)
Peel acted promptly and pragmatically:
• Relief Commissions: Set up local relief committees to distribute food.
• Indian Meal ("Peel’s Brimstone"): Secretly purchased £100,000 worth of maize (corn) from the USA to sell cheaply and keep private market food prices down.
• Repeal of the Corn Laws (1846): Repealed British agricultural import tariffs to encourage cheaper food imports, a move that split his Conservative party and brought down his government.
Phase 2: Lord John Russell’s Whig/Liberal Government (1846–1852)
Russell's administration took a rigid ideological approach dominated by Laissez-faire (the belief that governments should not interfere in the free market or private trade):
• Public Works Schemes (1846–47): The government required starving men to perform hard manual labour (building roads) for meager wages. Starving, exhausted workers collapsed on site.
• The Soup Kitchen Act (Temporary Relief Act, 1847): A brief, successful measure providing direct free rations of cooked soup to over 3 million people daily, but it was discontinued prematurely in autumn 1847 to save Treasury money.
• Reliance on the Irish Poor Law and Workhouses: The British government transferred the full financial burden of famine relief onto local Irish ratepayers. Overwhelmed workhouses became death traps ridden with typhus and cholera.
• The Gregory Clause ("Quarter-Acre Clause"): Anyone holding more than a quarter-acre of land was denied Poor Law relief until they surrendered their land to their landlord, accelerating mass evictions.
Exam Pitfall Avoidance: Never write that Russell’s government acted out of deliberate malice or intended to cause starvation. In your essays, explain that their policies were driven by prevailing Laissez-faire economic dogma, fears of making the Irish population dependent on state charity, and the immense logistical difficulties of transport and distribution in the 1840s.
3. The Impact of the Great Famine
• Demographic Loss: Approximately 1 million people died from starvation and disease (typhus, dysentery, cholera), and roughly 1 million people emigrated (many on dreaded "coffin ships" to North America and Britain).
• Social and Agricultural Changes: The cottier class was virtually wiped out; land consolidation increased; the Irish language suffered a catastrophic decline.
• Political Legacy: Intense anti-British bitterness was permanently planted in the minds of the Irish diaspora in the United States, creating fertile ground for future violent republicanism.
Part 4: The Fenian Movement (1858–67)
Out of the trauma of the Famine and the collapse of constitutional politics arose the Fenian movement, a dedicated physical-force republican organisation.
1. Origins and Aims
• Founding (1858): Founded simultaneously by James Stephens in Dublin (the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or IRB) and John O’Mahony in the USA (the Fenian Brotherhood).
• Core Ideology: Complete separation from Britain and the establishment of an independent, democratic Irish Republic through armed revolution.
• Structure: A secret, oath-bound society organised into covert "circles" to prevent infiltration by British spies.
2. Key Events (1865–67)
• British Crackdown (1865–66): British authorities suspended Habeas Corpus, suppressed the Fenian newspaper The Irish People, and arrested key leaders (including Stephens, who later escaped).
• The Fenian Rising of 1867: A series of poorly coordinated, ill-equipped rebellions broke out in March 1867 (notably in Dublin, Cork, and Tipperary). Marred by severe winter snowstorms and British intelligence penetration, the rising was swiftly crushed.
• The Manchester Martyrs (September 1867): While rescuing two arrested Fenian leaders from a police van in Manchester, a police sergeant was accidentally shot dead. Three Fenians (Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien) were publicly hanged. Their dignified deaths made them instant nationalist martyrs.
• The Clerkenwell Outrage (December 1867): An attempt to blow open the wall of Clerkenwell Prison in London to free a Fenian prisoner resulted in an explosion that killed 12 innocent civilians and injured over 100, causing widespread anti-Irish panic across Britain.
3. Evaluating Fenianism: Military Failure vs. Political Significance
Was Fenianism a total failure? In the exam, you must provide a balanced evaluation:
• Why it Failed Militarily: Poor leadership, efficient British spy networks, opposition from the Catholic Church (which condemned secret societies and armed rebellion), and lack of weapons.
• Why it Succeeded Politically: The Fenian violence shocked British politicians out of their complacency. Incoming Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone famously declared in 1868: "My mission is to pacify Ireland." Fenian agitation directly forced Westminster to address Irish grievances over land, church, and governance over the following decades.
Quick Revision Checklist & Memory Aids
1. Chronology at a Glance:
• 1823: Catholic Association founded
• 1824: Catholic Rent introduced (penny a month)
• 1828: O’Connell wins County Clare byelection
• 1829: Catholic Emancipation Act passed (accompanied by raising voter qualification to £10)
• 1840: Repeal Association founded
• 1843: Clontarf Monster Meeting banned; O'Connell yields
• 1845–52: The Great Famine
• 1846: Young Ireland splits from O'Connell
• 1858: Fenian movement founded (Stephens in Ireland; O'Mahony in USA)
• 1867: Fenian Rising; Manchester Martyrs; Clerkenwell Outrage
2. How to Tackle AS 2 Exam Questions:
• Part (a) [8 marks]: Be direct, precise, and concise. Explain reasons or factors clearly using specific dates, names, and policies from the notes above.
• Part (b) [22 marks]: Build a balanced historical debate. Always explore both sides of the argument (e.g., Peel's proactive measures vs. Russell's laissez-faire constraints; Fenian military disaster vs. long-term political catalyst for Gladstone). Conclude with a clear, reasoned judgment directly answering the question prompt.