Irish self-government was one of the United Kingdom’s most divisive political questions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, touching a range of emotive issues: religion, nationhood, constitution, empire, and economics. Liberal attempts to legislate for Irish “Home Rule” in 1886 and 1893 failed, but in 1912 a weak Liberal government, dependent on the support of Irish Nationalist MPs, introduced legislation to re-establish an Irish parliament. What followed – political turmoil, private armies, the threat of civil war, and, ultimately, the partition of Ireland – makes the third Home Rule Bill one of the most exciting subjects in modern British and Irish history. To mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1912 crisis, St. Michael’s College Celtic Studies presents a one-day symposium featuring six historians from Ontario and Quebec, and a unique group of papers that will illuminate the economic, imperial, and Unionist dimensions of the Home Rule debate.

Speakers and subjects:

Leigh-Ann Coffey (Queen’s University)
“Home Rule revisited: the 1912 Home Rule crisis and southern Loyalist narratives, 1921-1939”

Prof. Kevin James (University of Guelph)
“The ‘Tourist Movement’ and the Home Rule crisis”

Prof. William Jenkins (York University)
“Immigrants and ethnics: the Toronto Irish and the Home Rule question, c.1900-1914”

Dr. Simon Jolivet (University of Ottawa)
“Tous pour le Home Rule à l’Irlande! Hidden divisions in Quebec’s support for Irish self-government”

Dr. Jane McGaughey (Royal Military College of Canada)
“‘Empire is a man’s business’: Unionist loyalties, imperial masculinities, and Ulster’s campaign against Home Rule”

Dr. Edmund Rogers (University of Toronto)
“Autonomy v. unity: Ireland and the tariff question in 1912”

Please contact Dr. Edmund Rogers (edmund.rogers@utoronto.ca) to indicate attendance or to request further information.