Joyce also blamed England for what he saw as Ireland's backwardness. On July 1, 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne, the Protestant forces of King William III of England had defeated the Roman Catholic Jacobites of James II, causing the downfall of Catholic Ireland. Until 1922, when British Parliament granted independence to the country (while retaining control of what is to this day the province of Northern Ireland, the inhabitants of which tend to be Protestant rather than Catholic), Joyce's homeland would remain, in effect, a colony of England. Joyce and many other Irish saw this era of over 200 years as one of outright occupation by an overtly hostile enemy.
The period during which Dubliners is set follows the brutal so-called Potato Famine of the late 1840s — for which many Irish held the British responsible — after which a movement for Irish independence (led by the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell) occurred. This movement, however, failed ignominiously when Parnell was betrayed by his own countrymen, and in the Dublin of Joyce's novels, the defeat still stings. (For evidence of this, see "Ivy Day in the Committee Room.") The Irish Revival, a movement begun in the 1880s to foster understanding and respect for Celtic and Gaelic language and culture, is referred to in Dubliners as well (in "A Mother" and "The Dead"). From the very first story onward, the book is rife with examples, obvious and less so, of the treachery of England and the English, at least in the opinion of Joyce and his characters.
