Critically assess Dicey's arguments in relation to Ireland.

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Professor Paul Bew

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J. G. Colm Power

Critically assess Dicey's arguments in relation to Ireland

In his monumental review of Twentieth century Irish history, Joe Lee begins his first chapter by stating that: 'The Parliament Act of 1911 broke the power of the House of Lords to defy the popular will as represented in the House of Commons.' 1 This statement encapsulates in a sense the constitutional dichotomy with which Albert Venn Dicey was faced when he challenged the legitimacy of the Westminster parliament granting home rule to Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The whole basis and ethos of the House of Commons was experiencing a traumatic shift. The last bastion of direct political control still in the hands of the landed oligarchy had been emasculated by the Parliament Act. The House of Commons was dominated by factions and special interest groups; the most important being the Irish Parliamentary Party, with its demand for home rule about to be placed on the statute book. Ferdinand Mount described Dicey's opinion of the Liberal administration in these terms: '...the demoralising and degrading kind of government under men like Asquith...' 2 and though an avid defender of the primacy and efficacy of Parliamentary sovereignty - Dicey proposed the extension of the democratic process where changes to the British constitution were concerned. He believed that referenda should be conducted in order to counter what he described as '...the inordinate power now bestowed on the party machine...' 3 The crux of the matter lay in the fact that Dicey had to review and refine his views on the ultimate sovereignty of Parliament in the changed circumstances that the threat of home rule represented to his original thesis on the one hand; and the metamorphosis that had occurred in the nature of - and sectional political dynamics governing - the motivations of much of the elected representation in parliament. These changes became more pronounced following the Liberal party split over home rule in 1886 and the populist policies which Gladstone and the Liberal rump espoused. Ferdinand Mount claims that originally: 'According to Dicey, it was the untrammelled power of Parliament which was the secret of England's power and glory...' 4 and Dicey modified his constitutional views in response to federalist tendencies within the Liberal alliance and the Union. Dicey would have agreed with the classically liberal views of George Goschen, Liberal MP and political economist, who disparaged the rise of sectional interest and populism in British politics as divisive and as Jonathan Parry states: he believed that '...MP's were merely life trustees charged with perpetuating its authority. The principal of parliamentary government was that anti-social minorities of any sort were to be resisted.' 5 The changed political complexion that graced the House of Commons in the latter half of the Victorian period led Dicey to re-appraise his conclusions regarding British parliamentary sovereignty.

The Liberal party had progressively expanded and extended the electoral franchise during the Victorian period in line with the dominant Liberal ethos which envisaged extending suffrage and mass participation in the political process: this could only be successfully achieved in classical liberal terms by a concurrent rise in educational standards and the consequent adoption of the 'British way of life' (specifically non-conformist and Protestant in ethos) by the lower orders, and religious and ethnic minorities who constituted the bulk of the electorate in the burgeoning British democratic system. 'Notions of the civilising mission of British imperialism...' 6 were juxtaposed with the gradual disintegration of the propertied hegemony and its replacement by competing class and economic interests. The Liberal paradigm of Irish political development was evident as early as the Catholic Emancipation debate when the Whig leader Russell declared in 1826: '...the Catholics would become Protestants - at least ... less Catholic, and therefore more English.' 7 Ironically, this process had begun to display itself in sections of the Irish polity at the turn of the century when some nationalist commentators like A. M. Sullivan envisaged a Whiggish plutocracy in an Irish home rule context: 'The educated nationalists, the Protestant gentry, and the Northern commercialists could have assumed the government of Ireland with no urgent problems to face.' 8 But a contemporary of Sullivan - W. F. Monypenny, quoted by Paul Bew, identified the various unsavoury dynamics, from an Irish perspective, which the home rule crisis in 1913 unearthed and exposed: they state that '...all the various animosities of "race", "religion" and "class" were involved in the crisis...' 9 This negative view of Ulster Unionism in particular, must be leavened by reference to the strong Ulster Liberal Unionist tradition. Paul Bew quoted one of its progenitors A. C. Rentoul MP on the reasons for his allegiance to the Union: 'I defended the Union because I thought it was better for Ireland to be a section of a great prosperous Empire than to be a small self governing country.' 10
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To maintain its hegemony the British ruling class had the difficult task of reconciling plutocracy with democracy in a political atmosphere where the exploitation of sectional interests became more feasible and therefore more prevalent with the extension of democratic principles due in the main to electoral reform and increased suffrage. Gladstone's ideological background was decidedly un-Liberal and more akin to a conservative tradition which had severe problems '...adjusting to reformed politics after 1832.' 11 Therefore his approach to politics was to adopt a populist stance on many issues of government. Having only ever spent one month in Ireland ...

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