The Irish question 1815 to 1870: Daniel O'Connell, Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal campaign, the Great Famine, Young Ireland and 1848, and the rise of Fenianism and Gladstone's early reforms.

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain how Daniel O'Connell won Catholic Emancipation and then failed to win Repeal, the catastrophe of the Great Famine, the failure of Young Ireland in 1848, and the rise of the Fenians and Gladstone's first response. The AS 2 paper rewards causal analysis and judgement; the Famine in particular is contested ground (the debate over whether British policy amounted to negligence or worse), which suits both the essay and the source-evaluation question.

O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation

O'Connell pioneered mass peaceful agitation, organising the Catholic Association (1823) through a network of priests and a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month, which built the first genuinely mass political movement in Europe. Faced with the prospect of unrest in Ireland, Wellington and Peel conceded Emancipation in 1829, the first great victory of constitutional Irish nationalism.

The Repeal campaign

O'Connell next campaigned to repeal the Act of Union and restore an Irish Parliament. The Repeal Association revived the mass model, and the movement peaked with the "monster meetings" of 1843, some drawing hundreds of thousands. It collapsed, however, when the government banned the planned Clontarf monster meeting (October 1843) and O'Connell, true to his rejection of bloodshed, called it off and was then arrested. He died in 1847 with the Union intact, his reputation dented among younger radicals.

The Great Famine

Young Ireland and the Fenians

• Young Ireland. A cultural and nationalist movement, associated with the newspaper The Nation, whose 1848 rising (the "Battle of Widow McCormack's cabbage patch") failed almost immediately amid the chaos of the Famine.
• The Fenians. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), founded in 1858 and linked to the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood, pursued physical-force republicanism. Their 1867 rising failed, but Fenian activity (including the Manchester and Clerkenwell incidents) kept Irish grievances violently before British politics.

Gladstone's early response

The Fenian threat convinced William Gladstone that his "mission was to pacify Ireland". His first measures, on becoming Prime Minister in 1868, were the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869), ending the Anglican Church's privileged position in a largely Catholic country, and the first Irish Land Act (1870), a modest attempt to protect tenants. These opened a long era of British attempts to address Irish demands through reform.

Examples in context

A model AS paragraph on O'Connell's significance might read: "O'Connell's career shows both the power and the limits of constitutional agitation. His achievement in 1829 was genuinely transformative: by organising the Catholic Association around the penny rent and the parish clergy, he created the first mass political movement in Europe and forced a reluctant Tory government to concede Catholic Emancipation, opening Parliament to Catholics for the first time since the Reformation. This proved that disciplined, peaceful pressure could win major change. Yet the same career exposed the ceiling of that method. The Repeal campaign deployed identical tactics, the monster meetings of 1843, but when the government banned the Clontarf meeting, O'Connell's commitment to legality left him no further move, and the movement collapsed. The judgement, therefore, is that O'Connell was the founder of modern Irish constitutional nationalism and won a great victory in 1829, but his failure on Repeal revealed that peaceful agitation could be checked by a government willing to use the law, a lesson the physical-force Fenians would later draw." This weighs success against failure and reaches a clear verdict.

Try this

Q1. What did Catholic Emancipation in 1829 allow? [2 marks]

• Cue. Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold most high offices.

Q2. Explain why the Great Famine caused such lasting bitterness towards Britain. [6 marks]

• Cue. The scale of death and emigration (a million each), the perceived inadequacy and ideological coldness of relief, the continued export of grain, and the sense of abandonment that fed later nationalism.

Q3. How far did the Fenians change the Irish question between 1858 and 1870? [20 marks]

• Cue. Weigh the failure of the 1867 rising against the Fenians' role in pushing Irish grievances onto the British agenda and prompting Gladstone's reforms. Reach a substantiated judgement.