Chapter The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries of Irish Politics - Study Guide by History

further Catholic relief and the dismantling of Poynings' Law and the 1720 Declaratory Act. This was followed in 1783 with the British Renunciation Act.

Henry Grattan announced 'Ireland is now a nation', although this 'nation' was still exclusively Protestant. There was great belief in the idea of the 'Constitution of 1782' as a moment of great progress for Ireland. The Volunteers now turned their attentions, after winning legislative independence, to the cause of parliamentary reform.

This period was one of great social, political and economic transformation in Ireland, of a far greater magnitude in the long term than the fluctuations in Irish legislative institutions. In 1783 Ireland was still controlled by the Protestant Ascendancy that had been reinforced during the Revolution of 1688. The 'Constitution of 1782' was essentially a Protestant constitution that excluded Catholics and Presbyterians, although there were some developments in establishing greater rights for Irish Catholics during the 1780s and 1790s. The problem of Anglo-Irish relations lingered on as the Irish Parliament still came under the influence of the English-appointed executive of Dublin Castle. It is unlikely these issues would have been gradually and peacefully resolved, but any chance of that was brought to an end with the impact of the French Revolution. As conservative and reactionary defenders of the status quo froze with fear at the prospect of revolutionary spirit in Ireland, radicals were inspired by events in France.

The British government looked to appease Irish Catholics by persuading the Dublin Parliament to pass political reforms - for example the British Prime Minister William Pitt compelled the Irish Parliament in 1793 to pass the Catholic Relief Act allowing Irish Catholics the right to bear arms and the right to vote (if they qualified, which they overwhelmingly did not). The attempt to win Catholic support failed by 1795. In that year the lord lieutenant had promised full Catholic emancipation without authority cause Protestant outrage, and its failure to materialise spawned Catholic disillusionment. There was a growing belief in Ireland that change could only be achieved through revolution.

The revolutionary movement, the Society of United Irishmen (established 1791), came under an increasingly determined and militant leadership after 1795, which reorganised the movement with a complicated cellular structure and under Theobald Wolfe Tone became overtly republican and Catholic. During 1796- 97 the Society developed a military organisation and at the time of the "Great Rebellion" of 1798 claimed to have a membership of 250,000. The rising of 1798 was less a show of Irish defiance than a series of struggles between Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians, and though the rising incorporated all confessional groups, it assumed the character of a sectarian conflict.

The United Irishman Robert Emmet (1778-1803) was committed to a non-sectarian Irish republic. He had been in France during the 1789 Revolution and returned to Ireland in 1802 to lead a planned rising to remove Ireland from incorporation into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union. Emmet's rising failed to attract widespread support, but he led one hundred followers to attack Dublin Castle in 1803, and he became carved into the annals of the Irish nationalists' "struggle for freedom" with the tail of his speech:

'When my country takes its place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my my epitaph be written.'

Emmet was hanged for his leadership of the abortive rebellion.

The British government of Pitt had resolved that the incorporation of Ireland into the Union by 1800 as the only realistic way of averting further unrest. Ireland was to receive political representation at Westminster (100 MPs and 32 peers). The Irish Church was to be protected in its existing form, and fairer economic terms were agreed between Ireland and Britain. The Catholic hierarchy acceded to the Union on the agreement that it would be accompanied by full Catholic Emancipation. However Pitt failed to ratify the latter with George III, who was wholeheartedly opposed to the measure, which led to yet another sour taste from dealing with the British government for Irish Catholics.