When John Denvir, the Liverpool home-rule campaigner, conducted his survey of the Irish in Britain, following the fall of Parnell, he noted three Irish populations in Cumberland. The first was, he claimed, Catholic and committed to the national cause; the second, also Catholic, was opposed to it; while the third he described with venom as ‘Orangemen’. Denvir went on to say: ‘There is no part of Great Britain where the Irish nationalists are better organised’, adding that many Cumbrian Irishmen could be relied upon ‘to give his vote for his country in the ballot box, or do a man's part in any field wherever the battle of Irish freedom has to be fought out’. Denvir was exasperated that the second group of Catholics shunned their nativity or came out after Gladstone's conversion ‘to proclaim themselves Irishmen, not from any patriotic motive, but that they might stab their country in the back by declaring that, though they were Irishmen, they did not want Home Rule’. Denvir argued that such a move served only to alienate them further, earning ‘from Englishmen even greater contempt than before, as men who are so degraded as to be willing to live in slavery themselves, providing they can still keep their feet on the neck of the “Papishes”’.

Denvir's observations highlight a number of the problems faced by Irish Catholics which are examined in this chapter. Perhaps, though, he laid insufficient stress upon the tensions inherent within Irish Catholic affinities. Not only was their religion the focus of indiscriminate attacks by native Protestants, but the relationship between Catholicism and national politics was far from smooth. The Catholic church hierarchy often perceived the national-political allegiances of the faithful as a source of consternation. From O'Connell to Parnell, no nationalist organiser received support from the church and most drew only opprobrium. This was especially the case when Ribbon and Fenian elements were active. Indeed, evidence suggests that clandestine republicans used Catholic community networks to recruit their compatriots and raise funds. This caused such alarm that the church's opposition to secret and oath-bound societies even led in the 1820s and early 1830s to the denunciation of emerging trade unions.