Page:Home rule; Fenian home rule; Home rule all round; Devolution; what do they mean?.djvu/30

26 which was directed wholly from London by the English Government.

Therefore the demand for "an Irish Parliament with full executive control over Irish affairs" is a demand for a Parliament possessing greater executive powers than Grattan's Parliament possessed.

It is altogether impossible now to restore such a Parliament as Grattan's Parliament to Ireland, and it is a complete misrepresentation or misconception to pretend that conditions such as then prevailed could again exist in Ireland, There never was a body more intensely loyal and Imperial than the gentry who sat in Grattan's Parliament. Their descendants are still intensely loyal and Imperial, and they are the Unionists of Ireland, but in the Provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught they have been under the modern franchise deprived almost totally of political representation.

"There is no inconsistency in maintaining that in the peculiar condition of Ireland such a Parliament was, or might be, a very efficient instrument of Government,