Boyce - Nineteenth-Century Ireland
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New Gill History of Ireland
Nineteenth
Century Ireland
The Search for Stability
REVISED EDITION
D. George Boyce
Gill & Macmillan
To J. C. B.
Contents
Note on Terminology
The Irish Parliamentary Party was also known as the Home Rule Party, the Nationalist Party, or simply as the Irish Party. All these names are used interchangeably in this book.
The terms Nationalist, Liberal, Radical and Conservative appear with an initial capital when they are used predominantly in the sense of denoting membership of specific political parties or groups. They appear in lower case when used predominantly in the sense of denoting allegiance to or support for each particular movement or ideology in general.
The term Protestant tended to be used by contemporaries (particularly in the earlier part of the nineteenth century) to apply exclusively to members of the Church of Ireland. In this book this sense of the word is retained in variations of the well-known phrase Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, but is otherwise avoided. The terms Anglican and Episcopalian are instead used interchangeably to describe the Church of Ireland, which is also occasionally referred to (before 1871) as the Established Church.
Introduction
The period covered by this book (17981923) both began and ended with a rebellion followed by civil war. In between stretched the Union linking Ireland to Great Britain.
One of the inescapable penalties of writing history is that the historian knows not only the starting-point of his or her journey but also the destination; and this knowledge invariably influences the choice of what are selected as important and significant events. The Union which was formally inaugurated with the creation of a United Kingdom parliament and a new Union flag on 1 January 1801 was broken in 1921 with the establishment of two new states, Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. The failure of the Union colours subsequent perception of it. It is tempting to regard it as in some sense doomed to impermanence; and this sense of failure influences its interpretation. Turning-points and crises are selected on the basis of Irelands eventually giving notice of leaving the Union; and a false unity is imposed on the period: the British context of Irish history sets the framework of discussion, even among those who regard its inception as an imposition and its ending as a blessing.
Certainly the political framework was very different. Ireland no longer had a parliament of her own, and was governed (through a species of administrative devolution) by Westminster. But Ireland, and therefore Britain, brought into the United Kingdom a whole set of special social, economic, political and religious developments, or half-developments, or suppressed developments, that make the dividing-line of 1800 less absolute than it at first sight appears. Irish society in the late eighteenth century was growing more complex, and certainly more volatile. Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter experienced new circumstances and explored different political optionsoptions denied them in the more tranquil years after the Glorious Revolution. Protestants were obliged to defend their political privileges, not only against Presbyterian radicals but also against the hitherto dormant Roman Catholics, increasingly emboldened by the support afforded them by the British government in their campaign for the removal of penal disabilities. And these were not only matters of high politics, to be decided between London and Dublin; they involved real public political debate, and eventually the intervention of radical societies. And they spread beyond normal political activity, as Catholics, for their part, developed a sense of solidarity in the face of Protestant opposition and government repression. What followed can be summed up without doing too much injury to the complexity of the problem: Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s witnessed the weakening of deference among many of her peoples, not least among the Catholics who formed the vast majority of her population.
This posed an important question: would the new habits of thought and behaviour find some sort of accommodation within the eighteenth-century Irish constitution? Or would they drive Ireland towards yet another confrontation, setting her divided people at each others throats and plunging the country into political crisis? It is possible to argue that the existing Irish constitution might have provided a framework within which a healed and settled constitution might have been created; that gradual reform (or even the speedier pace of reform that was seen from the late 1780s) would have brought within the boundaries of the political system those elements, mainly of middle-class status, from Catholic and Dissenter society that were foremost in demanding political change. But this is to ignore two important circumstances. The British governments desire to push reform onwards, even to the point of compelling the Irish parliament to pass a measure of Catholic Emancipation, collapsed in mutual recrimination in 1795.radical United Irish Society to Protestant Orange Societysometimes belonging to both at the same time.
When, in 1798, these crises came to a head, they resulted in a succession of bloody and confused events, dominated by a series of insurrections, local in nature, lacking in central co-ordination or unified aim, but administering a shock to the whole Irish political system. Britain felt that the confusion was not to be borne, and determined that the Irish parliament must be wound up and Ireland merged in the wider context of a United Kingdom. This would have the double advantage of restoring order to Ireland, while at the same time ensuring that she would not again offer a threat to British security in time of danger. It might also provide a remedy for that political deficit that Ireland always seemed to carry forward, namely her failure to discover what Edmund Burke called the ground-work of a constitution: a settled form of government based upon shared political perceptions. If the Union were accompanied by Catholic Emancipation (the right of Catholics to sit in parliament), then Catholics would reconcile themselves to its permanence, and Protestants of whatever kind would feel secure in a political arrangement that would leave them still a majoritya majority, that is, in the overwhelmingly Protestant United Kingdom with its Protestant king and constitution.
The Union, in this view, would place Irish Catholics rather in the position of the Protestant Huguenots in France; they would be a minority and therefore at the behest of the majority of British citizens. They could be advanced to full political rights. Or, then again, perhaps they might not be thus advanced. For if they were indeed like the Huguenots in France, then they might be regarded as an alien body, responsible in the past for civil war, insurrection and maybe even revolution: an unassimilable minority.
This proposition was soon to be tested in the great struggle over Catholic Emancipation. The long and ultimately successful campaign But OConnell implicitly, and later explicitly, challenged this idea, or at least the basis of the idea. For Grattan had always held that Roman Catholic freedoms were compatible with Protestant security, and he always assured the Irish parliament that he would not otherwise have supported the Catholic demand. OConnellism held that, notwithstanding the Act of Union, the Catholics were the real majority in Ireland, and that the Protestants were an artificial ascendancy in view of the fact that they depended for their position on the support and encouragement of Great Britain.
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