Page "Government of Ireland Bill 1886" Paragraph 11

When the bill was introduced, Charles Stewart Parnell had a mixed reaction.

He said that it had great faults but was prepared to vote for it.

In his famous Irish Home Rule speech, Gladstone beseeched Parliament to pass it and grant Home Rule to Ireland in honour rather than being compelled to one day in humiliation.

Unionists and the Orange Order were fierce in their resistance ; for them, any measure of Home Rule was denounced as nothing other than Rome Rule.

In the staunchly loyalist town of Portadown, the so-called ' Orange Citadel ' where the Orange Order was founded in 1795, Orangemen and their supporters celebrated the Bill's defeat by ' Storming the Tunnel '.

This was the headline in the local paper where it was reported that a mob attacked the small Catholic / Nationalist ghetto of Obins Street.