| Summary: | "The grand theme of modern Irish history is the political outworking-in a liberal democratic era-of the Catholic majority resentment of historic forcible dispossession. This resentment existed alongside an acute present sense of alienation derived from being a Catholic minority marooned in a majority Protestant state. This book is an attempt to examine the unfolding of this grand theme through the lives of two great Irish political leaders: Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant of Ascendancy stock, who built the Irish party in the 1880s into a major force in British politics, and John Dillon, an upper-middle-class Catholic, who was to be the last leader of the Irish party in Westminster. This text deliberately sweeps from broad social issues-in particular the Irish land question-to fine detail of personal behaviour and insider gossip. Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell is an attempt to re-create the intense drama of these two political careers in a way which illuminates the personal idiosyncrasy of high-wire leadership as it attempts to cope with wider tides of popular emotion. This book also details the emergence of the doctrine of consent as it affected north-east Ulster"--Publisher's description.
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