Thomas Moore’s wildly successful Irish Melodies (published between 1808 and 1834) set newly-composed poems in English to pre-existing Irish tunes and helped to shape the course of the century’s poetry. This chapter will begin with Moore’s work as a way to provide a capacious account of the relationship between poetry and the national question in the nineteenth century. Poems and ballads played important roles in both nationalist and unionist projects in the period, and this chapter moves between poets, editor, magazines, and anthologies in order to map the triangulation of poetry, politics, and sociality in the period.

Paul Cullen’s final years saw the apparently inexorable rise of the Home Rule movement, his own reluctant accomodation to that movement, as well as his attempts to co-opt it, not least through high profile and contested events such as the 1875 centenary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell. These years also saw the final resolution of the Callan Schools Affair, which had plagued Cullen for a number of years, including through a high profile trial, as well as one final political victory at the unlikely hands of a Conservative government that proved willing to make significant education concessions not long before Cullen’s own death in late 1878.

This chapter examines the origins of the Home Rule movement during the 1870s focusing on Isaac Butt’s pioneering vision of federalism as a constitutional solution to Ireland’s governance. The analysis reveals how Butt’s Irish Federalism (1870) proposed a radical reimagining of the United Kingdom’s structure,creating national parliaments for local affairs while maintaining an imperial parliament for common concerns. The chapter explores the intellectual foundations of this federalist model, showing how it emerged from earlier debates about representation while attempting to reconcile Irish autonomy with the Union. Butt’s federalist framework was fundamentally unionist in intent, seeking to perfect rather than dissolve the imperial connection. However, as the chapter traces, this nuanced constitutional position became obscured as the Home Rule idea was adopted by more radical voices who reinterpreted it along separatist lines. The chapter illuminates this pivotal transitional period when the constitutional experimentation of federlaism gave way to the more rigid nationalist/unionist binaries that would dominate Irish politics by the 1880s.