Though aligned mostly with the Conservative Party in Great Britain, the Irish Conservatives took independent stances on many issues, a fact made easier by the lack of rigid party voting at the time in the British House of Commons.
The loose support for Daniel O'Connell shifted during the Great Famine of 1845–48. The English TorySir Robert Peel's second ministry sent food shipments to Ireland from late 1845.[2] However Peel lost power in 1846 to the Liberal Whig Lord John Russell, when his party split over reforming the Corn Laws. Russell was an old ally of O'Connell, and his new government preferred a laissez-faire policy of not sending food to the starving poor.[3] Despite this, O'Connell's popularity held up remarkably well in the better-fed parts of Ireland.
Its main rival, the Liberals, lost out to Isaac Butt's Home Government Association (HGA) in the early 1870s, ironically, considering that the HGA was, to a significant extent, made up of former Irish Tories such as Butt himself.
Franchise reform, notably the Representation of the People (Ireland) Act 1868, the Ballot Act 1872 and the Representation of the People Act 1884 which increased the number of Catholic Nationalist electors, and the electoral triumph of the Irish Parliamentary Party under Charles Stewart Parnell, reduced its role as a major electoral force. By the 1880s, the electoral base of the Irish Conservatives had become restricted to Ulster and Dublin. In 1891, the leadership of the Irish Conservatives joined in the formation of the Irish Unionist Alliance (IUA),[4] a new political party which aimed to represent unionists across Ireland.[1] Numerous prominent Irish Conservative politicians subsequently sat for the IUA, including Edward James Saunderson and Walter Long, 1st Viscount Long. The IUA effectively continued the Irish wing of the Conservative Party, as its MPs took the Conservative whip at Westminster. The IUA dissolved in 1922.[5]
In the Irish Free State, the Irish Conservative Party did not re-establish itself and much of the IUA's Conservative electorate became supporters of Cumann na nGaedheal, forerunners of Fine Gael. In Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionist Party became the leading conservative unionist party for much of the twentieth century. The UUP's historical roots were in the Irish Conservative Party, and its MPs took the Conservative whip at Westminster until 1972. Since 1989, the Conservative Party has also had its own official section in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Conservatives.
