Butt, Isaac

Barrister and Home Rule Party leader Isaac Butt (1813–1879) was born on 6 September in Glenfin, Co. Donegal. The only son of a Church of Ireland rector, Butt attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he helped to found the Dublin University Magazine in 1833. Butt was appointed professor of political economy at Trinity in 1836 and was called to the bar in 1838. He began his political career in the 1840s as a conservative opponent of Daniel O'Connell's Repeal movement. Elected MP for Youghal as a Liberal-Conservative in 1852, he moved to London and lived there until he lost his parliamentary seat in 1865. During this period Butt fathered two illegitimate children and ran up huge debts that left him in a precarious financial position for the rest of his life.

While in Parliament, Butt championed the rights of Irish tenants, and after 1865, at great financial cost to himself, he further enhanced his reputation with Irish nationalists by defending many Fenians in the trials that followed the suppression of the Irish People in 1865 and the failed rising of 1867. In 1868 Butt assumed the leadership of the amnesty movement, which sought the release of the imprisoned Fenians. In the following year Butt also became a leader of the Irish Tenant League, which campaigned for tenant-right legislation. After Gladstone's government failed to satisfy either of these movements, granting only a partial amnesty in 1869 and passing the limited Land Act of 1870, Butt argued that only a domestic Irish parliament could redress Irish grievances and launched the Home Government Association in 1870.

Although Butt was elected MP for Limerick in 1871, at first few other Home Rule candidates were successful. However, when the Catholic middle classes joined the new Home Rule League, and Fenians gave it their tacit support, Butt and his followers captured over half the Irish seats in the 1874 general election. Because the Home Rule Party was ill-disciplined, Butt accomplished very little. Soon some of Butt's impatient followers, led by Joseph Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell, challenged his hesitant leadership by engaging in parliamentary obstruction. Although Butt retained control of the Home Rule League until his death on 5 May 1879, leadership of the Irish national movement had passed to Parnell in 1878. Butt won the support of Fenians, tenant-right advocates, clergy, and middle-class Catholics for a Home Rule Party, but because of his indecisive parliamentary leadership he failed to bring Home Rule any closer.

SEE ALSO Fenian Movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood; Home Rule Movement and the Irish Parliamentary Party: 1870 to 1891; Land Acts of 1870 and 1881; Parnell, Charles Stewart; Tenant Right, or Ulster Custom; Primary Documents: Resolutions Adopted at the Home Rule Conference (18–21 November 1873); Speech Advocating Consideration of Home Rule by the House of Commons (30 June 1874)

Bibliography

Comerford, R. V. The Fenians in Context. 1996.

Thornley, David. Isaac Butt and Home Rule. 1964.

Patrick F. Tally

Butt, Isaac (1813–79). Founder of the Home Rule movement. At the outset of his political and legal career, Butt was a vigorous defender of an Orange Toryism. Increasingly, however, his unionism and his commitment to property right were tinctured with a strong national feeling: this was encouraged by the haphazard nature of government action during the years of the Great Famine. Defending the Young Irelanders in May 1848, he urged that the detrimental economic consequences of the British connection might be offset through a subordinate parliament in Dublin. Although he sat for Youghal in the House of Commons (1852–65), he languished for a time on the margins of national politics. His defence of the Fenian conspirators in 1868 restored his patriotic reputation. His federalist sympathies and broad political appeal were most clearly evident in his Home Government Association (1870): he was returned to Parliament in 1871 as a Home Ruler, representing Limerick. Butt helped to create a national organization for his cause through the Home Rule League (1873), but by the time of his death in 1879 he had been superseded by angrier and more militant lieutenants.

Alvin Jackson