When Mr. Deasy says to Stephen in Nestor, "You think
me an old fogey and an old tory," he sounds the novel's first
echo of struggles within the British Parliament to resolve the
question of Irish independence. The Conservative party, known
as Tories, generally supported the status quo in the 19th
century and resisted major social reforms. The most
consequential of these for Ireland, and doubtless the subtext
of Deasy's taunt, was the push for "Home Rule" in the 1870s
and 80s.
After the collapse of the Fenian
movement in the 1860s, momentum shifted toward parliamentary
action. A group of Irish political activists called the Home
Rule league sought to finish O'Connell's
work by repealing the Act of
Union passed in 1800 and creating a measure of Irish
representative self-rule within the United Kingdom, much like
the devolved national assemblies in Scotland and Wales today.
Home Rule was seen as a centrist course between the extremes
of Irish insurrection and British imperialism. It brought
together the great Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stewart
Parnell and the great English statesman William Ewart Gladstone,
who presided over Liberal governments as Prime Minister for
many of the years from 1868 to 1894.
Like English voters, Irish voters elected Liberal and
Conservative representatives to Parliament, but starting in
the 1870s they also began electing members of what was
successively known as the Home Government Association, the
Home Rule League, the Nationalist Party, and the Irish
Parliamentary Party (IPP), who advocated for self-rule, and
Unionists, who opposed it. The former cause proved immensely
stronger. In the 1885 elections the IPP won 85 of the 103
Irish seats.
In April 1886 Gladstone introduced legislation which he had
personally and secretively drafted. Called the Government of
Ireland Bill or, colloquially, the First Home Rule Bill, it
specified the composition and powers of an Irish national
assembly. He argued that Parliament could grant home rule to
Ireland honorably now, or find itself compelled to do so on
humiliating terms later. Parnell had strong reservations about
the bill's provisions, but committed to support it. The
Unionists and the Orange
Lodges voiced bitter opposition. When the measure came
to a vote, 93 of Gladstone's 404 Liberal MPs voted Nay,
dooming the measure to defeat. Ithaca cryptically
records one fictional person's expectations: Bloom's desk
drawer contains "a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written
by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of the
passing into law of William Ewart Gladstone’s Home Rule bill
of 1886 (never passed into law)."
The setback weakened Gladstone in the elections that were
held later in 1886. As for Parnell, the ordeal of his sexual
scandal in 1890 fragmented the IPP and crippled the Home Rule
movement.
Mr. Deasy seems to be using "tory" as a purported description
of himself much as he uses "fenian" at the end of the
paragraph to characterize Stephen—i.e., as a broad cultural
generalization rather than a specific claim of affiliation.
Deasy may vote Conservative, but he seems to be raising the
possibility that he does not. Stephen and his father Simon may
converse with revolutionaries, but both are Parnellites, not
bomb-throwers.
