Irish Home Rule

Home rule refers to a demand in parts of the UnitedKingdom that the constituent nations (notably Scotland , Wales and Ireland ) be given self-government within the United Kingdom . It is often called devolution . Home rule also refers analogously to the process and mechanisms of self-government by municipalities in many countries with respect to their immediately superior levelof government (e.g., U.S. states , in which context see special legislation ). It can also refer to the similar system bywhich Greenland and the FaroeIslands are associated to Denmark .

Home Rule is not however comparable with federalism . Whereas states in afederal system of government (e.g., Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America ) have a guaranteedconstitutional existence, a devolved home rule system of government is created by ordinary legislation and can be reformed,or even abolished by mere repeal or amendment of that ordinary legislation.

Irish home rule

The issue of Irish home rule was the dominant political question of British politics at the end of the 19th and beginningof the 20th centuries.

From the late nineteenth century, Irish leaders of the Irish Parliamentary Party under Isaac Butt , William Shaw and Charles Stewart Parnell demanded a form of home rule, withthe creation of a subsidiary Irish parliament within the UnitedKingdom . This demand led to the eventual introduction of four Home Rule Bills, of which only two, most notably the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (which createdthe parliaments of Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland -- the latter state did not in reality function and wasreplaced by the Irish Free State ), were enacted.

The home rule demands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century differed from earlier demands for Repeal by Daniel O'Connell in the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas home rule meant a subsidiaryparliament under Westminster , repeal meant the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union and the creation of an entirely independentIrish state, separated from the United Kingdom, with only a shared monarch joining them both.

• 1886 First Irish Home Rule Bill never made it through the House of Commons .
• 1894 Second Irish Home Rule Bill vetoed in the House of Lords
• 1914 Third Irish Home Rule Bill passed but never came into force, due to the intervening World War One ( 1914 - 1918 ) and the Easter Rising in Dublin ( 1916 ).
• 1920 Fourth Irish Home Rule Act (Government of Ireland Act 1920)