The Irish Question

On Saturday April 2nd, 1870, The Illustrated London News published an article about the first of The Irish Land Acts, The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1870. The Landlord and Tenant Act, though it was ultimately unsuccessful, was a major stepping stone for the Irish in terms of obtaining rights from the British. This act was so crucial to the Irish because it provided Irish tenants basic property rights and financial protection from their British landlords. In the decade prior to the act many Irish tenants were subject to exorbitant raises in the cost of their rent and even eviction in some cases. While this act may seem minor or even somewhat insignificant, it was an incredibly important moment in Irish history, especially when considering the fact that The Great Famine occurred three decades prior and nearly 25% of the Irish population either died or emigrated elsewhere. 

This article is particularly interesting because it was published months before the bill was actually passed, and the author voices the concerns of many British citizens regarding the bill. The author begins the article by stating that “Ireland is now everybody's greatest difficulty in political contemplation,” capturing the resentment of the bill by the British commonwealth. Rather than discuss what the bill entailed the author elected to write about an increase of violence in certain areas of Ireland, referring to the Irish as “lurking assassins, the midnight gangs of truculent savages.” The author ends the article with the sentence “eloquence, indeed is the Irishman’s worst enemy, as whisky was thought to be in a former age; it is quite as certain to poison his life, and to steal away his brains, if he once gets addicted to the taste in his mouth.” This article is appalling, with hateful propaganda like this being published by British newspapers on a regular basis, shaping the opinions of its readers with this racist rhetoric, it is no wonder that the Irish remained under the oppressive British rule for as long as it they did.