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Foreword
On 22 February 1886, as Ian Chambers recounts in this fascinating study, Lord Randolph Churchill, a leading British Conservative politician, came to the Ulster Hall in Belfast to address a ‘monster demonstration’ of Unionists, determined to resist Gladstone’s proposal to establish a ‘Home Rule’ parliament’ in Ireland. In a celebrated speech, which lasted an hour and a half, Churchill ‘played the Orange card’ and rallied the predominantly Protestant Unionist community behind a cause which he asserted was of overwhelming global importance. The very survival of the British empire, he argued, was at stake, for if Ireland did not ‘remain an integral portion of this great empire’, it might become ‘the focus and centre of foreign intrigue and deadly conspiracy’ directed against the United Kingdom. Churchill—along with that substantial minority of Irish people who never subscribed to Irish nationalist aspirations—succeeded in his aim of dishing Gladstone, whose Liberal Party was split (with Joseph Chamberlain leading the Liberal Unionists out of the party), and the first Irish Home Rule Bill was defeated in parliament.
In February 1912, Randolph’s son, Winston, at this time a Liberal Cabinet Minister, came to Belfast to address a meeting in the Ulster Hall