DAVE MANSE,LL to Ireland in the 19th century was ferocious anti -English nationalism and the know-how of slick party-political organization. Ironically the main inheritor of this skill turned out to be a member of the Southern Irish Protestant Ascendancy middle classes - Charles Stuart Parnell who, during the 18 80s took over both the Land League and the Fenians in the inte rests of the southern middle classes, and co-opted them into h is Home Rule (later Nationalist) party, one of the best-oiled parliamentary parties ever known. The home-rule movement had been founded by an other member of the southern Protestant middle class, Isa ac Butt, in 1870.A former Orangeman and Tory, Butt was distu rbed by the undertow of potential insurrectionism left by th e apparently moribund Fenians, but he was also worried by th e threat posed to the Irish landlord class by the increasingly de mocratic English parliament (the Church of Ireland had b een disestablished in 1869). The way out that he saw was to remove Ireland from English legislation by the setting up of an Irish parliament controlled by the landlord class. He ga ined the support of some of the Protestant landlords, but mainly of the Catholic middle class, who could foresee that a n independent Ireland would provide them with a good liv ing. On the whole this was a professional middle class - doctors, lawyers, money-lenders and priests who made a good profit out of selling their « services » to the Irish lower classes. Industry had declined badly in southern Ireland. Despite the fact that money was accumulating in the growing nu mber of banks there was an almost total lack of industria l entrepreneurs prepared to use it for the development of industry. The only highly developed industry was large-scale agr iculture, and Home Rule probably found its lowest support among the large-scale cattle farmers who relied on the English market. This lack of an effective middle class had left a vacuum quickly occupied by the Catholic church which too k on its social role, providing charity, education, etc. At the b eginning of the century the church had been liberal and so mewhat anti-Rome, but in the 1840s, in step with the reviva l of the power of tht Vatican it had become ultramontane, d edicated to the notion of a Catholic nation-state and to the fur therance of social Catholicism. This was mainly due to the retu rn from Rome in 1849of Paul Cullen, who became archbishop o f Dublin in 1852 and remained in that position until 1878 (he became Ireland's first Cardinal in 1866). Cullen transformed t he Cath82
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