John M. Lynch

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it was fashionable to speak of international problems in terms of "Questions" to be solved, the "Irish Question" proved particularly intractable for successive British governments. For Gladstone in 1886 it was "the long vexed and troubled relations between Great Britain and Ireland which exhibit to us the one and only conspicuous failure of the political genius of our race." He devoted much of his later political life to the question but his attempts to solve it were unsuccessful.