The Plot Against Ireland

In the late nineteenth century, the great Tory leader Lord Salisbury and his closest collaborators were haunted by the looming threat of Home Rule in Ireland. Salisbury, an anxious man obsessed by visions of social disintegration, was determined to undermine the legitimacy of what he saw as a revolutionary project, one that would damage the prestige and integrity of the British Empire, then at its zenith. He was willing to tarnish the reputation of the Irish leadership by any means necessary. Using blatant fabrication, espionage, and the help of The Times newspaper, the grandest members of the English political elite conspired to discredit the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, Charles Parnell. By publishing forged letters, Parnell was accused of complicity in the horrific assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Ireland's new Chief Secretary, and his colleague Thomas Burke, who were murdered as they walked unprotected in Dublin's Phoenix Park. Parnell was also linked to a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria. Culminating in a government commission and major libel trial, this dramatic episode in British and Irish political history exposes the lengths an Empire will go to survive, and also confronts the difficult question of Parnell's relationship to violence and Irish nationalism. The Plot Against Ireland reconstructs these largely forgotten and almost incredible events in Myles Dungan's mordantly witty narrative.