That devolution to a local authority, or to local authorities, is the proper remedy for evils affecting Great Britain and Ireland, has been, for various reasons, admitted by responsible statesmen during the last fifty years. As long ago as 1865 the late Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, enquiring why “a people with so wonderful a soil, with such enormous resources (as the Irish) lagged so far behind the English in the race?” and examining critically all the usual reasons assigned, came to the conclusion that the cause was not to be found in any of them, but was to be sought for in the system of government. “I am afraid,” he said, “that the one thing which has been peculiar to Ireland has been the Government of England.” About the same time Lord Beaconsfield went so far as to indicate his desire for a federal arrangement. In a conversation with the American Ambassador in London in the early ’seventies he stated that: “If he had to deal with the situation he would propose to place Ireland in a similar position that New York held in the Federal Government.” In 1879 Mr. Gladstone advocated devolution, and devolution on federal lines, for the relief of Parliament.
“I desire,” he said, “I may almost say I intensely desire, to see Parliament relieved of some portion of its duties.... We have got an over-weighted Parliament; and if Ireland, or any other portion of the country, is desirous and able so to arrange its affairs that by taking the local part, or some local part, of its transactions off the hands of Parliament, it can liberate and strengthen Parliament for Imperial concerns, I say I will not only accord a reluctant assent, but I will give a zealous support to any such scheme.”
After indicating that the only limit he knew to the extension of local government was the limit imposed by the necessity of maintaining the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, he went on to say:
“I will consent to give to Ireland no principle, nothing that is not upon equal terms offered to Scotland and to the different parts of the United Kingdom. But I say that the man who shall devise a machinery by which some portion of the excessive and impossible task now laid upon the House of Commons shall be shifted to the more free, and therefore more efficient, hands of secondary and local authorities, will confer a blessing upon his country that will entitle him to be reckoned among the prominent benefactors of the land.”