Owen McGee

A History of Ireland in International Relations


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Telegraph (later Telecommunications) Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), the Hague Conference on Private International Law (1893) and the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1899), which would virtually become a global body in the wake of the second Hague Convention of 1907. Present at the latter convention was a representative of a new Irish political party, Sinn Féin, which called for all Irish political representatives to abstain from the British imperial parliament and make a unilateral stand for Irish independence.130 This idea had first been championed many years before by Daniel O’Connell, an Irish advocate for Catholic liberties and eloquent critic of the international slave trade who had acquired Europe-wide fame as a political liberal during the 1830s and 1840s.131

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      By the turn of the twentieth century, Ireland occupied a very paradoxical position. The cultural Gaelic League had become the principal forum for Irish nationalism despite the fact that Ireland was, for all intents and purposes, an English-speaking nation. On an ideological level, its nationalist politicians saw hope in the rise of the democratic republic of the United States. They also valued the existence of Irish communities abroad and were disinclined to entirely disavow the legacy of past republican United Irish or Fenian conspiracies. Be that as it may, the reality of Ireland’s place in the Atlantic economy was governed purely by its membership of the British Empire. Therefore, Anglo-American relations formed an overarching context that essentially limited Irish ambitions.