It is a historical truism that the ‘Irish question’ dominated British parliamentary life during the last third of the nineteenth century. For good reason does Sir Robert Ensor give one of the chapters in England, 1870-1914 the title ‘The ascendancy of Parnell’. Yet it is the custom to treat the Irish nationalist contingent at Westminster as concerned only with Irish questions. It has been observed, to be sure, that the ‘Irish question’ had a highly significant impact upon English affairs. The Irish land acts of 1870 and 1881, for example, have come to be seen as a type of government intervention in economic affairs foreshadowing the twentieth-century welfare state. One aspect of the existence of an Irish third party at Westminster has, however, been curiously neglected, the impact of Irish M.Ps upon essentially English political controversies. It is with one such controversy that this paper is concerned, the notorious Bradlaugh case.