By the early 1880s, it might be judged that George Allman’s ‘successful experiment’ was at an end. In 1881 the essayist A. M. Topp argued in the Melbourne Review that Ireland’s population was fundamentally different than that of other regions in the British Isles. Whereas the Welsh and Scots merged naturally with the English, he maintained, the Irish were irreconcilably set apart:

It is only with regard to them that the question of race becomes important. Only as to them can any doubt arise concerning the loyalty and benefit to the empire of any of the races that have acquired the English tongue and are allowed the rights and privileges conferred on its people by the institutions of the English people. ^[34]

To Topp, the prevalence of Roman Catholicism in Ireland was an evil and menacing by-product of Irish racial inferiority, a subordinate status that threatened to undermine the future of the whole of the empire in just the way it had been ‘sapping the vitals of the great republic’.

Topp’s explicit linkage of race and religion is demonstrative of the extent to which sectarian divisions were imprinted in Australian life by the early 1880s. When the Irish Parliamentary Party MP John Redmond and his brother William visited the Australian colonies in 1883 as delegates for the Irish National League they encountered an immensely hostile environment. Arrayed against the Irish delegates was a press that, in John Redmond’s view, exceeded England’s in its hostility to and ignorance of Irish affairs. The Sydney Morning Herald conducted a prolonged and bitter campaign against the Irish representatives, describing their rhetoric as inflammatory and out of place. ‘If Mr Redmond does not succeed in provoking disorder in Sydney’, it wrote in one editorial, ‘it will be due not to the want of inflammable material thrown down, but to the orderliness and self-restraint of the population’. Unsurprisingly, the protestant press was particularly vociferous in its opposition, the Protestant Standard describing the delegates’ mission as an attempt to ‘white wash that blood-stained League’. ‘He and his emissaries’, it complained vituperatively, ‘have stirred up strife in the United States; brought to the surface a body of people ready with dynamite to blow up and destroy public buildings, careless of life, prompted by malice, ready to supply arms for rebellion and money for assassination; and then Mr Redmond crosses the sea to sow like abominable seed here’. ^[35] In reply to such charges, John Redmond strenuously denied that he was out to inflame sectarian or nationalist passions. Writing in Sydney’s Freeman’s Journal he declared that he ‘viewed with thankfulness and pride the Irishmen of these colonies living in amity with their brethren of other nationalities, occupying the position of respected peaceable and loyal citizens of a great and free country’. ^[36] At least in the initial months of the tour, however, his energetic protestations did little to convince his critics to temper their attacks and bigotry remained rife. ^[37]

Yet, weighed against this pessimistic assessment of the situation, at least three counterpoints should be raised. First, despite the rise in religious bigotry in the period 1865–1885 and its real and harmful consequences for peoples of all faiths, the Australian scene remained a mild one compared to other locations. Hilary Carey was correct when she wrote recently, ‘Australians lived in a sectarian environment in the nineteenth century [however,] the sectarian tensions of colonial Australia remained a pale imitation of rival tensions in northern England, Ireland and Scotland or in other settler societies, including the United States’. ^[38] Second, at the end of the period in question some signs of a tempering of the sectarian strains were becoming evident. During the 1880s a fair deal of the heat generated by the question of Ireland’s future dissipated, particularly following William Gladstone’s acceptance of the principle of Home Rule. In succeeding years, an increasing number of Australians would acknowledge merit in Irish claims to Home Rule, at least so long as those demands were couched in terms similar to the Australian colonies’ own constitutional arrangements. And thirdly, as Andrew Markus and others have shown, the 1880s witnessed a sharp intensification of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Australian colonies and this facilitated further the positioning of Irish Catholics as privileged White insiders. ^[39]

From the mid 1880s, therefore, the neutralising of Ireland as an immediate political issue and the pathway to White Australian nationhood went some way to alleviating the intensity of overt religious bigotry in Australia. But the power of bigotry in the late nineteenth century was at best dormant, never extinct. The education question had not been resolved, and it would remain for most of the next century a divisive issue in Australian life. And, when during World War One the contentious issue of Ireland’s future again came to the fore, religious bigotry returned with full force to divide the nation and its people.