At the prime minister’s urging, Parliament rushed through a much harsher, much broader law: the Treason Felony Act, essentially making it a crime to be an Irish nationalist. Any slight against the Crown or Her Majesty’s government in Ireland would be considered grounds for a hard felony. This offense carried the penalty of “transportation”—the inventive British term for shipping someone out of the country to one of the Empire’s distant colonies, for labor or imprisonment. In fact, it was a vanishing.
