Isaac Butt

Isaac Butt (6 September 1813 – 5 May 1879) was an Irish barrister, editor, politician, Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, economist and the founder and first leader of a number of Irish nationalist parties and organisations. He was a leader in the Irish Metropolitan Conservative Society in 1836, the Home Government Association in 1870, and the Home Rule League in 1873. Colin W. Reid argues that Home Rule was the mechanism Butt proposed to bind Ireland to Great Britain. It would end the ambiguities of the Act of Union of 1800. He portrayed a federalised United Kingdom, which would have weakened Irish exceptionalism within a broader British context. Butt was representative of a constructive national unionism. As an economist, he made significant contributions regarding the potential resource mobilisation and distribution aspects of protection, and analysed deficiencies in the Irish economy such as sparse employment, low productivity, and misallocation of land. He dissented from the established Ricardian theories and favoured some welfare state concepts. As editor he made the Dublin University Magazine a leading Irish journal of politics and literature. Early life Butt was born in 1813 in Glenfin, a district bordering the Finn Valley in County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland. Glenfin is a short distance west of Ballybofey, a town in East Donegal. He was born into an Ulster Protestant family, being the son of a Church of Ireland rector, and was descended from the O'Donnells of Tyrconnell, through the Ramsays. Butt received his secondary school education at The Royal School in Raphoe in the Laggan district of East Donegal, and at Midleton College in County Cork, before going to Trinity College Dublin (TCD), at the age of fifteen, where he was elected a Scholar, and president of the (extern) College Historical Society. Whilst there he co-founded the Dublin University Magazine and edited it for four years. For much of his life he was a member of the Irish Conservative Party, and he founded the conservative Ulster Times newspaper. He became Whately Professor of Political Economy at Trinity in 1836 and held that position until 1841. Legal career