From the late nineteenth century, Irish leaders of the Home Rule League, the predecessor of the Irish Parliamentary Party, under Isaac Butt, William Shaw and Charles Stewart Parnell demanded a form of home rule, with the creation of an Irish parliament within the British government. This demand led to the eventual introduction of four Home Rule Bills, of which two were passed, the Third Home Rule Act won by John Redmond and most notably the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (which created the home rule parliaments of Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland -- the latter state did not in reality function and was replaced by the Irish Free State), which was enacted.

The home rule demands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century differed from earlier demands for Repeal by Daniel O'Connell in the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas home rule meant a constitutional movement towards a national All-Ireland parliament in part under Westminster, repeal meant the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union if need be by physical force and the creation of an entirely independent Irish state, separated from the United Kingdom, with only a shared monarch joining them both.

•   1886: First Irish Home Rule Bill never made it through the House of Commons.
•   1894: Second Irish Home Rule Bill vetoed in the House of Lords
•   1914: Third Irish Home Rule Bill passed to the statute books but suspended, due to the intervening World War I (1914–1918) and the Easter Rising in Dublin (1916).
•   1920: Fourth Irish Home Rule Act (Government of Ireland Act 1920)

See:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Home_Rule_Bill