Popular opposition to Irish home rule in Edwardian Britain

This book shows that from the start of the Third Home Rule Bill crisis, there was in Britain considerable popular interest in the Irish issue, and that the Curragh army mutiny of 1914 was not an isolated incident, but part of a wider popular movement. A well-orchestrated campaign of agitation led by Unionist leaders Sir Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law had so exploited patriotic and sectarian resentment at the prospect of Irish Home Rule that by 1914 the United Kingdom was on the verge of civil war. The book locates this movement at the end of a 'long nineteenth century', where communal and confessional identities were still as powerful as class, and where native hostility to Catholicism and Irish migration still prevailed.