News of the sudden death a hundred years ago of the 45-year-old Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell shocked and amazed the public in Europe and the United States. Today he is little more than a name, associated with a sexual scandal which has been used as material for films and plays but largely ignored for its true importance: that it altered the course of British and Irish history. In ten years this half-American, half-Irish County Wicklow landlord with an English accent gave Irish nationalism its most effective political shape for centuries. In the 1880s his presence dominated British domestic politics. No prime minister could rule without taking into account how he might exercise his power next. Had he lived, the future of British-Irish relations could only have been different. Robert Kee, in his first major book on Ireland since The Green Flag and his television series for the BBC, Ireland: A Television History, here traces Parnell's early years in politics and his emergence in the context of the faltering state of Irish nationalism at that time. He stresses how ideally suited Parnell's personality was to bring it to life again. Ironically, it was the most personal feature of all in his life that brought the nationalist cause, for which he had done so much, to sudden halt. But its eventual partial triumph many years later was to be based on political foundations that Parnell had helped to establish.

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