[Music] On the cusp of a new century, Ireland is a country traumatized by violence. The surface calm masks the bitter division caused by a failed rebellion in 1798. The Protestant descendancy remains in power and the Catholic majority appear vanquished. But the coming century will witness an epic transformation. The great issues of land, of faith, and who should rule Ireland will give birth to a mass politics of a kind never seen before in Europe. It is a story that reveals itself in the impoverished countryside, but also in the halls of Parliament. From the streets of Protestant Olter to the most far-flung outposts of the British Empire, this is a story of conflict and above all change. It is the story of how modern Ireland was born. [Music] It lies here among 25,000 other acts of Parliament in a small room at Westminster. A piece of paper that sought to end once and for all England's problem in Ireland by making Ireland part of the Union. Here it is. This active union of Great Britain and Ireland that binds together two nations. You feel a real sense of excitement looking at this, touching it because you think of the great political campaigns that were inspired by the act of union, but also of the thousands who lost their lives in the struggle over what it represented. In the first article, it describes how from the first day of January 181 and forever after, Britain and Ireland shall be known as one kingdom, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. [Music] To this very day, men are willing to kill to try and break the Union. The Union passed into law at a time of international crisis. Britain faced war with France and Ireland was dangerously unstable. A Protestant parliament ruled over a Catholic people. but bring both factions into a larger kingdom and Ireland's claustrophobic hatreds would evaporate. That was the theory. And so Protestant landlords were cajol and bribed with money and perigages. And the Catholics promised reform of the remaining penal laws that excluded them from parliament and public office. Nowhere was news of the act of union greeted with more anticipation than in the leadership of the Irish Catholic Church. There was an understanding with the British government that with union would come the granting of Catholic emancipation, full political rights for Catholics. At a stroke, one of the most divisive issues in Ireland would be removed. Everything now depended on what happened next at Westminster. The prime minister, William Pit, had looked to the example of Scotland, safely ensconced in the Union since 1746. But Pit faced the opposition of anti-atholic forces in his cabinet, who encouraged King George III to oppose any change. The king believed that to grant full civil rights to Catholics would violate his coronation oath to uphold the Protestant faith. In the middle of an assembly of MPs, he stopped and shouted, "I will consider every man my enemy who proposes that question to me." Pit was humiliated and backed down. Pit resigned within the year. His failure changed the course of Irish history. Had emancipation been granted as was planned in the 1790s or in the early 1800s as part of the act of union deal, I do not think that Catholicism in Ireland would have taken on the shape it did and would have become so associated with politics and later on with nationalism. It was that crucial delay that drove Catholics into an alliance with forces which were not always cooperative with the British state. Catholic alienation would be deepened by economic decline. When the war with France ended in 1815, agricultural prices collapsed and a booming population increased pressure on the land. This was a perilous situation in a country already overwhelmingly dependent on farming. The land was subdivided into ever smaller portions. A foreign observer described how the system worked. A wealthy man would let out some land to four others. They in turn would rent it to maybe 20 and they to another hundred people. They would then let it out to a thousand poor laborers. Little wonder that the hunger for land would become one of the defining themes of the Irish [Music] story. The Catholic peasantry were a people without land, political rights or a champion. Their liberator would be one of the most remarkable figures of the 19th century, Daniel O'Connell. The typical 20th century figure that Okonnell would have the closest parallel to would be the late Martin Luther King in America. Uh King was able to mobilize and and politicize people who previously had been rather passive and and indifferent. Okonnell was born into the small Catholic elite that had kept its lands after the penal laws. He was brought up here in County Kerry but educated in France. There he witnessed the terror of the French Revolution, an experience that filled him with a lifelong dread of revolutionary violence. How would you describe Okonnell? Okonnell was a was a 19th century liberal. that is he believed in constitutionalism in uh human rights. He supported that sort of thing in other countries and wanted it in Ireland. In 1823, Okonnell brought the Catholic Church directly into Irish politics. His Catholic association used church networks to mobilize the people to campaign for emancipation. They started collections outside the church where the peasants could give a farthing a week, a penny a month, a shilling a year, and they could have a badge saying they were a member of the Catholic association. And his marshals in this, his priest captains were the clergy. The Protestant bishop observed, "There is what we have never before witnessed, a complete union of the Roman Catholics." Okonnell decided to provoke a crisis. He would challenge the law banning Catholics from Parliament unless they renounce their faith. In 1828 in County Clare, Daniel O' Connell became the first Catholic in Britain or Ireland to stand for Parliament in more than a 100 [Applause] years. Okonnell won easily, but he also had support in government. The crisis presented pragmatists in the British cabinet with the opportunity to repeal the remaining laws against Roman Catholics. Catholic emancipation enables and empowers a whole world of Irish Catholics who previously over the traumatic first 20 years of the union have not seen any element of power open to them. It it enables them to feel I think they have a stake. But there is a part of Ireland where the rise of Okonnell is greeted with fear. In Ulster, there were more than a million Protestants, descendants of the settlers who'd come in the 17th [Music] century. They ranged from landed gentry to farm laborers to factory workers. Many had prospered, creating thriving industry. Although some Protestant dissenters had led the rebellion of 1798, sectarian conflict with Catholics had helped to create a siege mentality among the growing Protestant working [Music] class. It's hard to think when you look at a shell like this that it once symbolized immense prosperity to Wolster Protestants. The world that they knew, the world that they felt secure in was dependent on the link with Britain. It was that which guaranteed their jobs, their education, their special place in society and of course their religious identity. When they looked around the rest of the island and they saw the rise of somebody like Daniel Oonnell, the growth in the power of the Catholic Church, they felt panicked. Okonnell's supporters attempted a political invasion of Olter. It failed, but sectarian fear escalated. Once you get clashes between large groups of people, then you get these general fears that actually quite simply they want to wipe us out. They've come here with a large group of people. We're defending this piece of space with our w with with with our group of people. It becomes a very elemental, very simple conflict. Okonnell failed to understand the power of Protestant fear. It was a failure Irish nationalists and British governments would continually repeat. And if Protestants were alarmed by the emancipation campaign, what Okonnell planned to do next would strike directly at the heart of the British Constitution. He was about to move from the politics of religion to those of union. Daniel Oonnell now set out on his most daunting campaign of all to repeal the act of union which joined Britain and Ireland together as one nation and under which this country was ruled from London. Now Okonnell wasn't a revolutionary. He didn't want Ireland to leave the wider British Empire. What his repeal campaign demanded was an Irish parliament where Catholics would hold power. The majority of Catholic bishops and priests supported the campaign and clerics went back into action to rally the people. Okonnell held some of the largest political meetings in European history. The greatest gathering was at Tara, seat of the old high kings, where Oonnell's carriage took 2 hours to pass through the crowd. [Music] [Applause] Okonnell stood here at Tara, reaching back into a mythic past to inspire his people. Reports from his supporters describe a crowd of a million people. Whatever about the exact numbers, it was certainly the largest gathering the country had ever seen. and it rattled the government. Within 3 months, Okonnell had been arrested and he would be jailed. The movement disintegrated. Mass demonstrations on their own could not win repeal. Okonnell needed political support at Westminster and he had none. Within 3 years, he would be dead, taken mortally ill on a pilgrimage to Rome. But the tumult of Okonnell's era had created a generation of more radical nationalists. Inspired by the Gaelic past, these young Irelanders sought an identity that was politically and culturally separate to Britain. Their leader, Thomas Davis, a Protestant writer and thinker, echoed an earlier generation of Irish Protestants who'd led rebellion against Britain. Righteous men, he wrote, must make our land a nation once again. That determination will be immeasurably deepened by the events that unfold in the fields of Ireland. Here, the rural poor subsisted on overcrowded land and depended almost entirely on potatoes for their food. In 1845, disease attacked the crop. Fiftoera infest would quickly become known as the blight. How did the blight work? What did it do to potatoes? Well, basically it ratted the potatoes. It it's uh it travel the spores that travel in the air and it comes in and it gets onto the st onto the leaf of the st and it travels down through the st down into the pater and basically rats the pater. The blight swept west across Europe killing 50,000 in Belgium and even greater number in Germany. In Scotland, tens of thousands immigrated to escape the hunger, but none of this compared to what would happen in [Music] Ireland. The first deaths occurred in 1846, and the Tory government of Sir Robert Peele responded by importing grain to keep food prices down and by putting the hungry to work, building roads and bridges so they could earn money to buy food. By the beginning of the following year, more than 3/4 of a million people were depending on public works. What is the prevailing mentality at that time towards something like a famine? Well, their initial response to a situation which isn't at all as bad as what it would become is uh I think fairly generous and uh positive. As the crisis developed, uh I think attitudes in London became uh less uh sympathetic. there's more exasperation and in certain quarters actually hostility and and frustration and a sense that the Irish are not grateful uh that they must do more to help themselves. By June 1846, there was a new wig government led by Lord John Russell. The wigs believed in the prevailing doctrine of Leafair, minimal state intervention. [Music] Saving the starving was not the government's job, but that of local landlords and of [Music] charities. And so as the crisis deepened, government support for public works was [Music] removed. Some landlords were generous and were bankrupted by the cost of relief. Others had no inclination to help and evicted the starving. Priests were heavily involved in helping the people. In Clare, one reported how half of his 10,000 parishioners were dead. Scores were thrown beside the nearest ditch, he wrote, and left to the mercy of dogs which had nothing to feed on. Food prices soared far beyond the wages of those still employed on public works. and government soup kitchens were closed after being open for just 6 [Music] months. Famine diseases like typhoid and cholera swept through the population. [Music] The workhouses paid for by the landlord's rates were besieged by starving people. Overcrowding became endemic in many of these places. Workhouses would become mansions of the dead. A visitor to the Fmoy workhouse wrote of how a pestilential fever was raging through the place and all the horrors of disease were aggravated by the foul air. On the day of that visit, 30 sick children were found crammed into just three beds. With crops failing, the poor fell behind in their rents. Tens of thousands were [Music] evicted. Skibberine in West Cork was one of the hardest hit areas. In 1847, Lord George Bentink told Parliament of news he'd received from a local clergyman. [Music] I have at this moment in my pocket a letter from the Protestant clergyman of Skibberine, the Reverend Richard Bole Townsend, in which he says that in the poor law union of Skibberine, 10,000 persons have perished from the famine. The Reverend Townsen became what we would nowadays call a humanitarian campaigner. From the rectory here at Skibberine, he wrote to newspapers and to powerful political figures. This son of the landed Protestant gentry took the full horror of the Irish famine to the heart of the British [Music] establishment. Towns end even traveled to London to lobby the permanent secretary to the treasury, Charles Trallion. Relief schemes were failing. He said emergency food supplies were needed. But Trallion saw the calamity in starkly different terms. God had sent the famine to teach the Irish a lesson. He wrote that calamity must not be too much mitigated. The real evil was the people's selfish, perverse, and turbulent character. To Irish nationalists, Travellion's callous words represented the true voice of the union with Britain. What is it that motivates Charles Trallion? He articulated ideas which I think were uh pervasive at the time. Things like self-reliance, market forces, small government, the dangers of overpopulation, the danger also of what economists would call moral hazard in the context of famine relief. The sense that if you relieve the Irish too generously, they wouldn't learn a lesson. And the same thing was going to happen uh in a in in a in a few decades again. [Music] Reverend Townsen's lobbying brought newspapermen and a number of influential public figures to West Cork. He showed them the cabins of the dying and the mass graves. Reverend Townsend brought his visitors to this graveyard. Here they saw the horsedrawn carts pull up with corpses. They saw them being emptied into the ground layer upon layer without coffins. In this one mass grave lie the remains of 9,000 people. By the time the famine was over, it was estimated more than a million had died of starvation and disease. [Music] Among them was the Reverend Richard Bole Townsend. He died from typhus contracted from those he had been helping. [Music] You're talking about a crisis which by world standards it's a big famine but by 19th century European standards it's absolutely uh unique. At that time Britain was capable of doing much more than it did. You know, I think one has to say that an entire class of small tenants and farm laborers vanished some landlords who'd been forced by the government to pay for relief went bankrupt. And there was a new phenomenon. Better off Catholics who bought land on bankrupt estates. [Music] More than a million of the poor took to the immigrant boats. Farewell to you, old der land. Since I must go away, I now shake hands and b goodbye and can no longer stay. Our big ship lies in deep lock foil bound for the New York shore. And I must come from all I love and lovely one more. [Music] For many immigrants, this was their last sight of the Irish mainland. Ahead of them lay the Atlantic with all its hardships. In one two-month period in 1847, nearly 5,000 people perished on the crossing. This mass migration wouldn't just change the story of Ireland, but of America, too. The story of Irish Catholics in America is a mix of romantic fable, phenomenal social advancement, and hard politics. A million and a half Irish left their own country for America during the years of the famine. By the middle of the 1850s, there were more Irish living in New York City than there were in Dublin. When they arrived here in their boats at the East River, they were the poorest of the poor, fanning out into the city. America was absorbing millions of refugees from hunger and political crisis from across the world. The Irish flooded into the cities of the American East Coast. This is now part of Chinatown, but back then it was called the Five Points District. Here the Irish jostled and competed with Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, with blacks who'd fled slavery in the south. Charles Dickens visiting here described it as a place that reaped of filth and dirt, where even the houses seemed old from debauchery. It was a place where only the toughest and the canniest survived. The Irish come off boats down in the East River here in the 1840s, the lowest in terms of social status. And yet within a decade that's changed. How do they do it? Well, they do it because they bring with them something intangible and that is a capacity for political organization which they have acquired under the tutorship in the way of Daniel Oonnell over the previous 30 years. No other people were able to organize themselves at so low a social level and within a decade of arriving they had become the driving force in New York politics. Many would find their political outlet in the salons of the American Democratic Party. But others among the Irish embittered by the cruelties of the famine were looking back towards home. [Music] The Fenian Brotherhood, founded in 1858, was rooted in the Young Ireland movement, which had launched a failed rebellion a decade before. They set about raising political support and funds for a new revolution. By 1863, they were powerful enough to command large audiences at meetings in the prestigious Cooper Union, one of the great theaters of American political rhetoric, where Abraham Lincoln had once spoken. [Applause] Tell me, in essence, what were the Fenians? Well, the Fenians were essentially the cry for revenge for the famine. That's what they were. and uh they were able to mobilize over here in America because they were beyond British jurisdiction. The driving force is getting money out of people. That's the ultimate test of organizational capacity to send back to Ireland and enormous amounts were collected. [Music] The minstral boy to the war is gone. In the ranks of death, you will find him. But it wasn't simply a question of money. Irishmen had also gained military experience fighting in the American Civil War. They would now try to strike at British power wherever they could find it. They hope in 1866 immediately after the end of the civil war that if they can invade Canada as the closest British position invade Canada invade Canada. How many of them were going to do that? Well, it wasn't all that well planned. Let's put it like that. How many men were they going to just over a thousand try to get into Canada and they had they won some skirmishes on the border. Uh but it didn't work out successfully and uh there was a second attempt which worked out even less successfully. [Music] But the Fenians understood the power of revolutionary gesture, the propaganda of the [Music] deed. In 1867, they carried out the first acts of Irish terrorism in Britain. [Music] When the accused were executed, they became martyrs whose deaths and ideas would inspire future revolutionaries. The idea that a self-elected elite will form a shock troop of the Irish nationalist advance. This idea is I think influenced by certain movements on the continent in the 1830s,4s50s. the the um anarchist movements. There are elements of all this in their structure of cells in their belief that you have to work by conspiracy. A gestural act of violence often against a symbolic target. This kind of revolutionary politics is part of the essence of feedism. [Music] A brief Fenian rebellion in Ireland was quickly crushed, but they would be hugely influential in a social revolution, a movement rooted, as with so much of the history of the Irish 19th century in the [Music] land. She's on American flag. These farmers in County Kerry are the descendants of men who were tenants on the estates of landlords. Even the largest tenant farmers couldn't claim to be secure from high rent increases or eviction. Sorry. [Music] And when the potato blight struck again and threatened another famine in 1878, a movement emerged determined to protect the farmers from eviction. The great movement for change would be built around the forefathers of men like these. The rural poor would be mobilized into a force that sparked phenomenal social change and created a political legend. It would be led by two men as different from each other as it was possible to be in background and personality. In 1879, a 31-year-old activist, Michael Davat, returned to his native county Mayo after spending seven years in British prisons for his part in a Fenion plot. David had come back to Mayo to rally farmers threatened with eviction and because he saw in the rural crisis the chance to put his own socialist ideas into practice. David was born in 1846 at the height of the famine. At the age of four, David's three sisters and his parents were evicted from their homestead in County Mayo. The family were forced in 1850 to immigrate to England. And all throughout his childhood, David was brought up with these images. And isn't the key thing that he grows up profoundly shaped by radical ideas of English socialism? Yes, that's true. In fact, his experiences would have been more in tune with the industrial working class of Lancaster. For him, that relationship between them and their landlord was no different from a relationship between the industrial boss and the industrial worker. David was a child of the industrial revolution and at the age of 11 had lost his right arm in a mill accident. Yet, this class warrior would form an alliance with an aristocrat. Charles Stewart Parnell came from a Protestant landowning family whose fortunes had declined after the famine. From his American mother, he'd inherited a strong anti-British sentiment and he would become a nationalist icon. Parnell and David are fascinating contrast in almost every way you can think. Parnell, an aristocrat, a dictator as he was well known as and even called one of his horses dictator. David, a socialist who becomes increasingly socialist with the years. But out of those differences came, I think a great deal of the strength of that astonishing decade of roughly 1880 to 1890 when such political success seemed to be within the grasp of the Irish nationalist movement. David admired Parnell's willingness to confront the government. The vehicle that would bring both men to the forefront of nationalist politics was the Irish Land League, which began from October 1879 to organize civil disobedience against increased rents and evictions. One of the first cases taken up by the league was that of a tenant farmer in Lunamore County Mail. Anthony Dempsey had fallen behind on his rent and faced eviction. These are relatives of Anthony Dempsey visiting his old cottage. Thousands of people gathered here to prevent the eviction of the Dempsey family. The biggest significance of it was that Charles Stewart Parnell came to this scene. So he would have come up the road down over that way. Yeah. And come up thousands of people. Yeah. We're led to believe that Parnell come up the hill there on a white horse. Now, is that is that kind of the Irish gift for romantic romanticizing things or did it really happen? I don't know. But it it it would have added to the whole occasion if it did happen. It um because that's how people saw him. Yes. Wasn't it? Yes. Yes. I mean, there's truth in that. They they saw him as the the night riding to rescue. Yes. when the police realized the the major in charge called off the eviction at that particular time. Vast sums of money were raised through the Fenian networks in America and used to subsidize evicted families. The league was both rural trade union and nationalist [Music] movement. A rent strike was declared. The League tapped into rural traditions of coercion against those it called the people's enemies. The land league develops a new tactic called boycotting or social ostracism. One of the other aspects of this was what became known as moonlighting where those who went against the unwritten law would revisit it at night or would receive letters or warnings about their conduct and even to have mock funerals kind of symbolize the end of them as members of the community. But transformation in Ireland is dependent on a parallel but very different revolution in Britain. It is the age of mass industrialization and rapid social change. In this evolving United Kingdom dominated by the forces of industry, the old Ireland of landlords seems out of step with the spirit of the age. Politics too was changing. The vote had been extended to factory and farm workers. Parnell's Irish party benefited from a new secret ballot which undermined the power of landlords to coers their tenants into voting for them. Irish nationalists were a force in Parliament. The struggle for land rights now moved to the Houses of Parliament. And it would take the energy and vision of a British prime minister to introduce legislation that would have a more far-reaching practical impact on the lives of rural communities than any other statute in the past century. William Uert Gladston was a combination of moralist and canny politician. In 1881, he introduced a land act which offered Irish tenants security from eviction and a means of controlling their rent. After further agitation, Gladston moved closer to meeting the key demand of David and Parnell, the right of Irish tenants to buy their own land. I think there's a strong argument for saying that the hinge on which modern Irish history turns is the land war of 1879 to 1882. From 1881 through to the land acts of the early 20th century, you have the British state enabling Irish tenants to buy out their holdings from the landlords and become small peasant proprietors as the phrase would of the day would have it. This has immense implications for the creation of a conservative with a small C rural pity bourgeoisi. The social revolution that begins with the land war isn't the creation of a socialist state as David would have wanted but it turned out to be a conservative revolution which is exactly what Charles Stewart Parl would have liked. [Music] There has been a long social revolution. The laws which forced Catholics and Presbyterians to pay for the upkeep of the Anglican Church have already been overturned. It was now no longer the state church. The Protestant ascendancy was being dismantled not by violent revolution but by acts of a British Parliament. The Catholic bourgeoisi of farmers, merchants and professionals were the rising force and their church already powerful would come to dominate Irish life well into the modern age. In the new confident church, Cardinal Paul Cullen had emerged as a princely figure. He was ordained the same year that Catholic emancipation was granted and rose to become Archbishop of Dublin and Ireland's first cardinal. Cullen set a mark on Irish Catholicism which was there until very very recently. He set up an institutional framework. uh the orphanages, the schools, the churches, the confraternities, all the paraphernalia if you like of Catholic life. His era was also hugely influential in shaping the personal and public piety of the Irish. There's a pretty fierce attempt to control the Catholic population on the part of Colin and the kind of men who came along with him. His interest is the security, the rights and the position of the church and he will be as tough as he needs to be to secure those Catholic interests. The story of the 19th century in Ireland is one in which power shifts decisively. The great issues of religious freedom of land have now been confronted. But there remains the most divisive question of all, home rule. Up to now, Ireland has been ruled from London. But the campaign to change that will lead to the division that persists in Ireland to this very day. The new campaign will be led by the hero of the land league, Charles Stewart Parnell. Under home rule, Ireland would stay in the empire, but it would be ruled not from London, but Dublin and by a nationalist dominated parliament. By 1885, Parnell was in a strong bargaining position. His party now held the balance of power in Parliament, and he found Gladston a willing partner. This deeply religious man was beginning to see Ireland as a divine mission and home rule as a means of repaying the Irish for the cruelties of the past. And there was a pragmatic consideration. Gladston needed the support of Parnell's MPs to keep his government in power. For moral and political reasons, Ireland mattered as never before. By 1886, Gladston was ready to put a home rule bill before the House of Commons. Parnell and his MPs listened intently as Gladstone declared that this was a golden moment which rarely returns. The British prime minister had placed his political prestige and the formidable weight of his oretry behind self-ruule for the Irish, but it wouldn't be enough. The bill was defeated by 30 votes. Many of Gladston's own liberal supporters, fearful that home rule could lead to the break up of the empire, voted against him. In Ireland, the bill raised sectarian tension. Many Olster Protestants saw home rule as simple Rome rule. On the day the bill was defeated, there were riots in Belfast. Here at Alexandra Dock, a rumor spread that Catholics had attacked an orangeman. Soon, hundreds of shipyard workers were streaming across the road. They set about the Catholics, beating them with whatever came to hand. The Catholic workers, some of them, jumped into the water trying to swim across the river. One man was drowned. By nightfall, rioting had spread across Belfast. [Music] Gladstone took an extremely myopic view, I think it has to be said, of olster resistance in which he was accompanied by Parnell, who simply took the line that Olster had played a a grand part in the 1798 rising and platonically was part of nationalist Ireland and these deluded unionists would would come and see this in time. As news of the defeat of home rule spread through the streets of Belfast, Protestants in workingclass areas came out to celebrate. They marched behind orange bands and they lit bonfires. As the smoke curled up into the sky, it could have been read as a warning of an age of violence and division that was to come. Parnell and Gladston were to make one more attempt at bringing about home rule. In December 1889, Parnell traveled to Harden Castle in Flinter, Gladston's country home. The Irish party leader came here to meet Gladstone. As the year ended and the possibility of a great new campaign for home rule bubbled in the air until calamity descended. It was the biggest sex scandal of its time. Parnell's nearly decadel long liaison with a married woman Katherine O'Shea became public when her husband from whom she was separated sued for divorce. Her husband was one of Parnell's MPs. Victorian opinion was scandalized by false stories about Parnell dawning disguises and fleeing down a fire escape. His party would now be confronted with a stark choice by the prime [Music] minister. Gladston realized that the forces ranged against Parnell were simply too powerful. And within his own party, the voices of the morally affronted were growing louder. He wrote to the Irish Parliamentary Party that if Parnell were to remain as its leader, his own position as leader of the Liberals would become impossible. In this way, Gladstone cut Parnell loose. But Parnell would not step down even after his former allies, the Catholic bishops, denounced him. At a bitter meeting in Westminster, he faced his MPs. Panell placed his leadership before the unity of the party and it split. The majority deserted him. He returned to Ireland to campaign facing often hostile crowds. His health worsened and he was dead within a year. Parnell's fall and destruction was a kind of classic tale of hubris. He was a titanic figure but the flaws in his personality were part of that titanic image that uh kinglyhoturp when he fought his last campaigns. One of his tactics was to pour scorn on the very thing that he himself had accomplished. He was now saying, "Look, it would never have happened. Never trust the British." He is reverting to an older Fenian style kind of rhetoric where Britain represents uh the infamous thing that you can never trust that will always do down Ireland. He's saying, "Now they've done down me." He had done himself down. Vast crowds attended Parnell's Dublin funeral. "A star has been laid low," wrote the poet WB Yates. [Music] The age of the political titans was over. Okonnell and Parnell. But the promise of home rule had prompted many nationalists to re-examine Irish identity. They reached back into the mythical past for inspiration. These cultural nationalists sought an Irish Ireland, an identity utterly separate from Britain. Gaelic sports were revived. The Gaelic Athletic Association repudiated English games in favor of sports like hurling. As James Joyce wrote, the racy of the soil were building up a nation once again. The movement became one of the most important organizations in Irish history. It also attracted radical nationalists. Several of the GAA's founding members belonged to the Fenian Irish Republican Brotherhood. The GAA would also become central to the first great campaign of cultural nationalism, reviving the Irish language. [Music] stretching back century over century, the Irish language had been the dominant tongue on this island. But by the late 19th century, that had changed. English was now widely spoken. [Music] Yeah. Well, the The attempt to revitalize the language led Douglas Hyde, a southern Protestant, to co-found the Gaelic League. Hyde was no revolutionary, but the movement attracted a growing number of militant nationalists. [Music] People like Douglas Hyde want to keep politics out of the Gaelic League, but politics are never going to be kept out of a movement part of whose rhetoric depends on the constant reiteration of Englishness as contamination. But this cultural renaissance isn't simply an attempt to create a nationalist myth of Ireland. The poet William Butler Yates is an Irishman rooted in the Protestant world but committed to nationalism. He writes in English but is inspired by Eastern mysticism, European modernism and Celtic mythology. Yates and his colleagues are imbued with the past but open to the world. It comes from the kind of interest in Irish literary origins which has been going on since the 1830s and 40s with translations of old sagas and with an interest in the literary content of of of the Irish language. And they're very alive to a European tradition. And I would say that one of the great inheritances they give to the Irish cultural tradition is that broadness, that sophistication, that Europeanness. The cultural firmament encompassed revolutionaries and moderates, mystics and scholars, and more than one literary giant. Yet for many Irish people, it was not the imagined Ireland of the cultural nationalists that framed their world view, but a British Empire that in the late 19th century had never seemed so powerful. The Dublin of the revival was an imperial city. [Music] From Queen Victoria's civil service to the traders and the military, the Irish were embedded in the imperial project. Ireland was part of the largest empire in history, covering nearly a quarter of the Earth's land mass. And it offered endless opportunity to the willing and the adventurous. In the East India Company, a sixth of the administration was Irish, more than any other group. Nor was Irish imperial involvement confined to the Protestant ascendancy class. Civil servants like the Corkborn John Pope Hennessy from a Catholic family rose to become a reforming governor of Hong Kong. Soldiers like Luke O' Connor from Ross Common joined the army as a private, won the first ever Victoria Cross, and retired as a major general. In 1897, here in London, the empire celebrated the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. Victoria could contemplate her vast dominions with confidence. Even in Ireland, so long, so troubled, the Pax's Britannica seemed secure. It would be shattered by events many thousands of miles away and they would resonate loudly in [Music] Ireland. At the southern tip of Africa, the Boore republics of the Free State and Transval had risen in revolt against the encroaching British Empire. [Music] Irishmen working on the mines joined the boores in this white man's war. Militant nationalists watching from Ireland would soon rally to the Boore cause. The man who would found Shinfane, Arthur Griffith, came here as did the great land campaigner Michael David who witnessed the British and the Boore fighting hand to hand. And the shopkeeper's son from County Mayo, John McBride, led a brigade on the Boore side. As McBride himself put it, fighting the British here in South Africa was the next best thing to fighting them in Ireland itself. Among those who flocked to the boar cause was an Irish American brigade drawn from the ranks of the old fenians. They joined the hundreds who are now fighting for the Boore president Paul Krueger. Re tell me about the Irish. What how how did the Boers view the Irish? How did they see them? Yeah, they they didn't take take to discipline very easily. The Bose actually thought them a bit rough and they were a bit scared of them. Of course, anybody who who had a dislike of the British and a mistrust of the British were very welcomed to the to the B course. My father who who met during the war met quite a few of them uh said he'd rather got the idea that the the or the impression that they were fighting against the British and not so much for a bull cause. Back in Dublin, the tenement children sang sound the bugle, sound the drum and give three cheers for Krueger. Give me a sense of the passions unleashed in Ireland by this conflict. In Dublin, which was the the core of the proour movement, the Irish Proour movement, there were the worst riots that had been seen in the streets of Dublin. The heroes of the Transval became for a season the heroes of Irish [Music] nationalism. But there was another Irish reality in South Africa. Far more Irishmen, some 40,000, fought on the British [Music] side. The conflict between different Irish allegiances would be exposed brutally in December 1899 at the Battle of Colenzo, one of the worst defeats suffered by the British. John McBride was present on the Boore side as they opened fire on the British positions. British troops were pinned down here in the long grass. Every time a soldier tried to raise his head, he ran the risk of being shot by a sniper from the hills above. By the end of the battle, 500 men were dead. 500 more were wounded. And by that stage, McBride would have known that many of those lying here were fellow Irishmen. [Music] These men were loyal to their regiments. You only have to count the number of VCs that were won uh in in these fields around us. You must remember that there are more Irish people, more Irish men buried in this valley than anywhere else on the African continent. The Boers lost the war, but they had, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, taught the empire no end of a [Music] lesson. The Bore War had proved that there was a dedicated minority of Irish committed to breaking the link with empire. And although in South Africa they were vastly outnumbered by those loyal to the crown, it was the enemies of Britain who would dictate events in the new century and propel Ireland into an age of violent revolution. [Music]