I see your ‘what if Ireland was all still part of the UK?’ and ‘what if Ireland was reunified?’ TLs and raise you… whatever this insanity I’ve spent the last few days making and writing up is. Is it realistic? Probably not. Was it a blast to write and make a map for? Absolutely.
*
Ireland is, by some definitions, the second-oldest part of the former British Empire to establish its political independence after the United States. Henry Grattan, considered by most Irish people to be the father of the nation, led his followers to push for dramatic reforms of Irish politics to secure political independence from Great Britain in the late 18th century in the form of home rule for the island and emancipation of its large Catholic and Presbyterian population.
Ironically there had been rumblings in the British government about the idea of bringing Ireland into a united polity with Britain, but public opinion of incorporating millions of Irish Catholics into the country’s population and putting them on equal footing legally was not exactly positive, and King George III eventually outright rejected the prospect of Catholic emancipation and pledged to defend the Church of England. This prompted an uprising from the Catholics and Presbyterians throughout the island, and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger was left on the back foot, conceding the right of home rule to Grattan’s government on the condition he brought down the rule of law.
Grattan did just that as Prime Minister, and this is where his legacy becomes complicated. He crushed the uprising with the support of British soldiers, but proceeded to institute substantial reforms to the Irish Parliament to extend certain civil rights to (mainly richer) Catholics and Presbyterians. Consequently, the first prominent partisan political movements emerged in Ireland at this time- as well as Grattan’s
Patriot Party becoming the vehicle for many of the newly enfranchised Irishmen, the Protestant elite began to drift to the Irish branch of the
Tories (becoming the
Conservatives at around the time of the Tamworth Manifesto to capitalise on the image change of the British party) while more radical Irishmen backed the
Liberals, who were by contrast more distinct from the Whigs and soon ascribed themselves to Chartism. These would eventually die out as Irish politics became more and more irrevocably separate from Britain's, though
Vanguard is descended from the Ulster Protestants and Presbyterians who ancestrally favoured the Tories for their support for close ties to Britain.
Until Grattan’s death in 1820, the Patriots were untouchable, but afterwards Irish politics became complicated; subsequent Patriots like Daniel O’Connell came from the country’s Catholic majority background, and had to balance prostrating themselves to Westminster with serving the increasingly distrustful public. At the 1846 snap election held in the midst of the Irish Famine, O’Connell was forced out of power by the emergence of a new party,
Clann na Talmhan (Irish for ‘children of the land’) founded by his rival Thomas Davis.
Davis would never get a chance to lead Ireland, but he represented Clann’s ideal for a multi-ethnic, Gaelic-speaking Ireland in popular memory (an ideal which it is often argued fell to other parties as it turned into an agrarian vehicle). His protégé, former Liberal William Sharman Crawford, would be the one to lead the party in power, and helped it to pass agrarian reforms which alleviated the effects of the Famine to a degree despite Westminster’s disastrous mishandling of the crisis. So it was that Clann was established as the great rival to the Patriots, with the two sides establishing a strong divide between the rural parts of Ireland (which swore loyalty to Clann for saving them from famine) and the large towns and cities (which longed for the pledges to provide urban welfare made by new Patriot leader Isaac Butt).
Factional struggle among the mostly ‘Young Ireland’-dominated Clann led the Patriots to re-establish power in the late 1860s, and Butt instituted a sort of Irish form of the ‘one-nation Conservatism’ being practiced by Disraeli on the other side of the Irish Sea. They would lose power again to the Clann as a consequence of Butt’s death and the rise of the National League, but this new government would come crashing down when then-Prime Minister Charles Parnell was implicated in an affair in 1890, and two years later the Clann would return under the leadership of John Dillon.
Dillon and the Patriots’ new leader John Redmond would become the dueling heads of Irish politics at the turn of the 20th century, with Redmond returning to power a number of times and establishing a reputation for somewhat greater sympathy from the British government compared to Dillon. His leadership would come to a head in 1916, when the Easter Rising broke out against Irish conscription in the First World War and his government had all its heads imprisoned (though not executed as the British government urged).
The Irish losses in the war were famously catastrophic, and much like many other British dominions, public anger was intense- so much so that after the war ended, a new party briefly burst onto the political scene.
Sinn Fein, led by the radical Pádraig Mac Piarais, won an overwhelming victory, but it soon became clear its goal of full Irish independence from the Empire was one that not only would not be countenanced by Britain, but one many voters felt misled about. The party would collapse, though its stated goals remain an inspiration to the nationalist movement to this day, and the modern Sinn Fein formed in the late 1960s draws much of its inspiration from Mac Piarais' government's goals.
During the poverty of the 1920s, rural socialism began to arise in Ireland, with the
Labour Party coming to power for the first time in 1927 under Thomas Johnson. It would be cast out by a grand coalition of the Clann and Patriots in the wake of the Great Depression, with the Clann’s new leader Éamon de Valera pursuing a nationalist course without the militancy of Sinn Fein (though ironically de Valera had been implicated in the Easter Rising and had had to renounce Sinn Fein after its electoral rout). His big success was securing almost complete legal autonomy for Ireland through the Statute of Westminster in 1931.
His government’s history in the Second World War, however, is significantly murkier. De Valera refused to send Irish troops to war given the atrocities they had faced previously, and declared neutrality. At the time, this was in line with Irish public opinion, but his efforts to censor critics through emergency powers, and the revelations of atrocities by the Nazi regime, horrified the Irish public and dismantled his reputation for many.
When the first postwar elections were held in 1948, voters were deeply dissatisfied with the course the Clann and the Patriots had taken, and Labour’s William Norton won a convincing victory. The first Norton government also passed the electoral reform which established Ireland’s modern political system- the university constituencies were abolished and the voting system was changed to a mixed-method proportional one, where voters would elect one local member in a first-past-the-post constituency and a number of regional members based on their province (aside from Belfast, Cork and County Dublin, which were afforded their own regional constituencies).
Norton would remain in power, first alone in minority and then in coalition with the Patriots, until 1957, when the Patriots abandoned Labour under Seán Lemass and successfully formed a minority government supported by the Clann. This government laid the groundwork for Irish involvement with the EC (aided by the position of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that Ireland could be a source of European trade for Britain even if the EC did not admit it) and began to liberalise the economy, though socially the country remained extremely conservative.
This began to change in the late 1960s as Labour’s Noël Browne led a more reformist left-wing government, though he brought the country into conflict with Christian orthodoxy. Browne had previously come into conflict with the Church over the foundation of the Irish Health Service (SSE), but was regarded by the nation as the ‘father of universal healthcare’. Even so, he shocked the public with a prominent speech he gave in his hometown of Derry on the issue of his social reforms in which he declared, ‘Doctrine does not define Irish law, Ireland defines Irish law.’
Ireland subsequently defined that it did not want Browne to stay in power, and his goals would be abandoned by the subsequent Clann government of Bob Cooper, which spent most of its time dealing with the economic hardships of the 1970s recession. After his popularity declined, the Patriot Garrett FitzGerald ran for Prime Minister in his place and was able to hold onto power until 1987 with the Clann’s support, but at that election those two parties were heavily punished.
In their place, not only had Labour achieved a resurgence, but the new liberal party the
Daonlathaithe (Democrats), led by Patriot dissident Desmond O’Malley, had surged to third place in their support. The 1987 election is often nicknamed the ‘Spring Tide’, both due to being held that March and because of Labour’s Dick Spring becoming Prime Minister. The Spring government successfully passed the reforms Browne could not, including fully decriminalising abortion and homosexuality, liberalising civil divorce, and conducting a substantial ethics reform.
The early 1990s recession deflated support for Spring soon after his re-election, and despite the selection of his popular deputy Mary Robinson as Ireland’s first female Prime Minister softening the blow to Labour at the subsequent 1996 election, the fact remained that Labour had lost power. Surprisingly, however, the Daonlathaithe remained strong enough to hold the balance of power, though they then crippled their reputation by first aligning with the Clann’s Alan Dukes and then abandoning them for their old allies the Patriots, after being courted by Bertie Ahern.
Ahern would see the country through a fairly prosperous decade in which the Patriots remained the strongest force, before the onset of the Great Recession severely hampered him and his party. Labour made a comeback under the populist Eamon Gilmore, forming a government after the 2010 election with the Clann’s support, only for the popularity of both parties to decay as their declared defiance to European mandates on Ireland was proven to be exaggerated and they struggled to halt the country’s economic hardships.
Subsequently, the Patriots regained power in a coalition with the Clann, led first by Mary McAleese and then by Leo Varadkar, the first gay Prime Minister of Ireland. Losses to Labour and other left-wing forces led them to have to rely on the support of independents and smaller parties at the 2019 election, and enjoyed a surprise turnaround thanks to the popularity of how its Health Minister, the Patriots’ Robin Swann, handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
This led Varadkar to call an early election once vaccine rollout had mostly been completed in early 2022, and secured an upswing for the Patriots against Labour compared to 2019. Notably, the government surprised observers by successfully depriving independents of any seats in the House for the first time in over 45 years. Ironically, this left the Patriot-Clann coalition in a bit of a precarious position, as they were even more dependent on minor party support than before and the remaining minor parties were reluctant to outright support the new government.
In a striking turn of events, however, Labour leader Róisín Shortall reached out to the government to propose a policy of ‘constructive opposition’. Under this policy, Labour would support the government on certain votes which its members believed would be beneficial to the Irish public, particularly SSE and welfare reforms that would improve public access to these provisions. Varadkar initially rebuffed her, but after the government failed to win an initial vote in the Commons a few days later and with the agreement surprisingly popular with the public, he accepted.
The policy only lasted until Shortall stood down as Labour leader, with her successor Aodhán Ó Ríordáin withdrawing the agreement as part of his leadership campaign platform, but it gave the government a stable enough footing to establish itself in government, and Varadkar was able to secure the Greens’ and Phobail’s support for continued confidence and supply.
(Oh, and in case you can't distinguish the Patriots from Sinn Fein here's a winner only map. I might change one of their colours if people think it's an especially big problem.)
