Nineteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland) Page 2

  This was the most extreme position; but for most of the century there was a ‘medium’, and that medium was the Union, with a British government that played the role of arbiter—not, of course, a disinterested arbiter, for British politicians had their own priorities and their own self-interest to consult. But the Union provided a constitutional framework which contained, and even constrained, conflict between the different groups of people in Ireland, without, however, finally smothering the debate on the constitution itself. Thus the Presbyterians of Ireland, at the beginning of the century, were content to turn in upon themselves, enjoy a sense of exclusiveness, fulfil their lives with deep theological disputes, advance themselves in economic and social terms, and play almost no discernible political role; yet when the Union was in danger, as it appeared to be in 1843, 1886, 1893 and 1912, the vast majority of Presbyterians sprang to its defence, abandoning both their political indifference and their political radicalism (or what was left of it).

  The debate on the constitution was itself a cause of instability; yet it was debated in mainly constitutional ways—through elections, parties, the British parliament, the press. But this debate had a Janus face, for the idea of violence, though it made little headway in practical terms until just before the Great War, was one that the contending political groups in Ireland did not, ultimately, rule out. It was indeed the last argument of Irish politics, the ultimate appeal, if matters came to a head, when one side or the other must be ruined. It helped to shape not only the form but the very establishment of the two new states that were built upon the wreckage of the Union in 1921–2. The ‘troubles’ which gave birth to twentieth-century Ireland, however, did not jeopardise that fundamental stability that was the product of the long revolution of the preceding century, when Britain sought to mediate the pace of change, and did so with some degree of success. The British parliament gave Ireland not only reforms but also a long experience of political and constitutional government. Ireland’s own political leaders were skilled in using that British system, while at the same time seeming to reject its ‘Saxon’ values, or, in the case of the Protestant Conservatives and Unionists, exploiting it as best they could, while embracing (apparently) those values. Yet neither side ultimately controlled that parliament and government, however much they might exert influence over the British Conservative and Liberal parties. This meant that at various times, and especially when British parties thought in terms of the ‘national’ interest (that is, the interests of England, the predominant partner in the kingdom, as Lord Rosebery termed it), all political groups in Ireland were capable of feeling persecuted, by each other and by the British. This helped to create a strong sense of grievance, as both Catholics and Protestants felt uneasy about the intentions of a government which they did not elect but which could play a decisive role in their future.

  Many of the problems of nineteenth-century Ireland were carried over from the conflicts of the 1790s. But the Union placed them in an entirely new context. Ireland was deeply influenced by British government, society and culture. Her politics, economics, literature, all were dominated by her powerful neighbour. This domination was to continue beyond the end of the Union and was to shape the destinies of the states that were founded in its shadow.

  1

  The Union:

  Prelude and Aftermath,

  1798–1808

  On 9 January 1798 the first session of George III’s sixth and last Irish parliament opened. A few months later it stood as helpless witness to the outbreak of the most ferocious and dangerous rebellion in Ireland since the seventeenth century; and within two years it was to undergo dissolution and the absorption of its members into the united parliament of Great Britain and Ireland.

  The rebellion not only ended the life of the Irish parliament; it ended too the assumptions that the average educated and politically aware observer might have entertained about the likely future of his society: that on the whole the end of the eighteenth century was better than the beginning; that by and large Irishmen were settling down into a tolerable, if not yet tolerant relationship with one another; and that, as the author of a preface to an edition of Molyneux’s Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England put it in 1770, ‘the two sects are insensibly gliding into the same common interests’.1 Positive evidence was to be found in several important manifestations of the new spirit. When Catholic political activity began to revive in an organised form after 1759, it was eased towards a spirit of loyalty by the papacy’s decision to withhold recognition in 1766 from the heir of the Old Pretender;2 a good Catholic could, and indeed should (in the eyes of his church), support his lawful sovereign, George III; and Catholic bishops warned their flocks of the danger to the king’s happiness threatened by the American rebels in 1778.3 The Volunteer movement, which swept across Protestant Ireland at the time of the American War of Independence, revealed not only a spirit of self-reliance on the part of its members, but also a commendable openness to the claims of Catholic and Dissenter to a share in political power. It might even be claimed that Ireland was more tolerant than England, notwithstanding that English Protestantism and constitutionalism rested upon a surer foundation. For, despite the anxiety of many members of the Irish parliament at the Catholic relief acts drawn up by the British government and passed in 1778 and 1782,4 there was no Irish equivalent of the Gordon riots that reduced parts of London to ruin and cost the lives of some 450 people in June 1780.

  Ireland’s failure to follow the English example of frequent rioting must not, however, obscure the great dilemma in which the Irish political ruling class found itself in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and which England did not share. The Irish political nation, the people who held exclusive membership of the Irish parliament, were like their English counterparts in general social background and outlook. They moved easily in society on both sides of the Irish Sea; they were, like the English gentry, both cosmopolitan and yet highly parochial. They too had the sovereign, King George, as their monarch in their kingdom of Ireland; they also had their state church, the Church of Ireland, to which they gave unenthusiastic but formal support as a pillar of the constitution. In contrast, Protestant Dissenters, in Ireland as in England and Wales, were effectively excluded from political power, from holding civil and military office under the crown (in Ireland until 1780), and from municipal corporations. They were not subject to the same legal disabilities as Catholics, but no Dissenters sat in the Lords and very few in the Commons. Their social and economic status in any event precluded them from any effective political role, except as members of the county electorate in counties in the north of Ireland. Furthermore, they had to pay tithes to the Church of Ireland. But they could be relied upon to support the Protestant interest, especially in time of trial; and they were a people whose general respectability seemed to deny Jonathan Swift’s claim that they were an angry cat in full liberty. (In fact most of those who were liberty-minded emigrated to America.)

  But Irish Anglicans were not in other respects as happily circumstanced as their English brethren. The distribution of population in Ireland showed marked imbalances. Anglicans claimed about 14 per cent of the population of Leinster and had a strong representation in Dublin; but in the south and west they comprised only about 3 to 5 per cent and lived amongst an overwhelmingly large Roman Catholic population. And even in Ulster, where 45 per cent of Anglicans lived, they were surrounded by a Presbyterian community that made up 99 per cent of the total of Irish Presbyterians.5 Where Anglicans were strongest, so therefore were Presbyterians. And in the late eighteenth century Presbyterians could no longer be relied on to behave themselves. They were becoming politically alert, active in radical politics, and critical of the unreformed and unrepresentative nature of the Irish parliament.

  Nevertheless, it was impossible to envisage a state without a state church; and while the Church of Ireland had its critics, it could take comfort in its constitutional security and in the general, if unfo
unded, belief that the obvious errors of Roman Catholicism would, in an age of enlightenment, erode the religion of the overwhelming majority of the people of Ireland. But by the end of the century it was clear that the Irish Catholic would not suffer the fate of a disappearing species. On the contrary, his faith and endurance, his support of his religion, his courage in the face of adversity, held out new and alarming possibilities for the Church of Ireland, and indeed for Protestants in general. The hierarchy was loyal; but it was hard to know what kind of sentiments and beliefs lurked below the surface, and what kind of impact these might have on the social fabric of Ireland. And this was not only a matter of the Catholic religion; Irish Protestantism too was beginning to undergo a change that was to make the politics of religion a major concern in the Union period. The easy latitudinarianism of the Church of Ireland invited the attention of those, inspired by the English Methodism of John Wesley, now active in Ireland, who held that faith, salvation, and a probing attitude to religious truth were inseparable from the life of the church. And when to this evangelical movement was added the special character of Ireland, the awareness of the vast bulk of the unconverted Roman Catholic people still stubbornly clinging to their religion, the threat to the truth of revealed religion from these people, then the evangelical tendencies noticeable in the late eighteenth century had important implications for the relationship between the religious denominations of Ireland.6

  The Roman Catholic was, therefore, the object of attention from many quarters in the decade before the Union. Above all, he was the object of attention from a British government anxious to enlist his support in the years of crises as the French Revolution stood forth as the enemy of political establishments all over Europe; and he was the object of attention too from those sections of Irish Anglican and Presbyterian opinion which hoped to relieve him of his remaining political burdens either for the sake of liberty and enlightenment or as a means of enlisting his political support for a radical reform of the whole Irish representative system. Radicals hoped that the instrument of reform would be the Volunteer companies formed during the American crisis and now infiltrated by men from the lower orders of society.

  Some Catholics were willing to acknowledge that the atmosphere had changed, or was changing, for the better: in 1792 Bishop MacMahon of Killaloe declared that the generous subscription of the grand jury of Clare towards a school which he had set up in Ennis was an example of ‘what liberal sentiments at present subsist betwixt Roman Catholics and Protestants’. But, again, there were signs of the crucial shift in posture that would shape Irish religion and society under the Union. Just as Protestant evangelicals were unhappy about the latitude of their practitioners of religion, so a first sign of the new aggressive style was detectable in the person of Thomas Hussey, who became Bishop of Waterford in 1797. Hussey expressed strong displeasure at Catholic children attending Protestant schools, and he believed that denominational differences were central to Irish life. In the wider political sphere, he was also a characteristic figure, in that while he was a conservative abroad, he cast himself as a radical at home—radical, that is, in his criticism of government policy, and contemptuous of any deferential sentiment that the government hoped might follow from concessions made to Catholics.7 It would have been difficult, in any case, for a society so divided as Irish society was in the eighteenth century, with a clear line distinguishing those who were within the constitution, enjoying legal and civil rights, and those who were not, to cope with the tides of change. It was even more difficult for such a society to adapt to change in an age of radical thought and revolutionary fervour.

  In general, Catholics seemed a passive people, willing to wait gratefully for what the Irish parliament, prompted by the British government, would concede to them, or willing to co-operate with the Volunteer movement in such a way as to demonstrate their virtue as active but not over-demanding suppliants. But Catholic political activity was not narrowly confined to the world of high politics and government decisions, nor even to the popular movement of the Volunteers. The Catholic Church was not usually associated with populist or democratic behaviour in the history of Europe; but in Ireland the case was different. The experience of a large, universal church, representing the majority of the people, but deprived of its livings, administrative arrangements and any state connections, was an unusual one, and one which shaped the special role of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The church depended upon popular support; and even though this at times was lacking, even though priest and people could find themselves locked in conflict when clergy sought to condemn or suppress agrarian organisations,8 it survived bad times and gave Irish Catholicism its peculiar character as a deeply emotional, non-intellectual and democratic force. Irish priests, and even Irish bishops, were all too often found on the side of the underdog. But this democratic experience was combined with a strong sense of history and past wrongs and humiliations; injustice, when based on the past, was not easy to remedy in the present, because concessions scarcely compensated for wrongs which ought never to have happened in the first place: a sense of grievance was not the same thing as a complaint, and was not necessarily subject to legislative solutions.

  Two other social developments were to influence Irish politics both before and after the Union, as far as Catholicism was concerned. The first was the tendency of peasant communities to form agrarian secret societies for mutual protection and, if need be, for mutual aggression against their enemies: these being variously defined, and including Catholic as well as Protestant farmers; Protestant landlords; and Anglican tithe-gatherers. These societies, of course, invited the hostility of the Catholic clergy, but they were nonetheless associated with the Catholic religious/political experience, with the sense of past expropriation—even when that expropriation was, strictly speaking, the lot of the Catholic landowner, not the landless labourer, cottier and peasant. To win for Ireland the double victories of ‘one religion’ and ‘ownership of the soil’ seemed a natural conjunction of aspirations.9 Tom Dunne has uncovered a poem by the Gaelic poet Micheál Óg Ó Longáin, in which Ó Longáin combines ‘an old dream of driving out foreign settlers and the Whiteboy argument of social justice’, looking to a time ‘when the Cross will guide us to victory / And will plant the tree of sweet liberty’.10 And after the Union, when the grand design of religious and economic triumph faded, secret societies still existed and brought areas of the country into disorder and a kind of primitive terror.

  The second development was almost the opposite of peasant organisation. Ireland had developed a Catholic middle class, excluded from the parliamentary and municipal franchise, from state and municipal office, and from the commission of the peace, but able to make money out of respectable activities such as medicine and commerce (though not yet the law). Catholics also profited from the cattle-grazing business. Such people were bound to question the ground of their exclusion from all political life. The Catholic middle classes were soon to achieve prominence in the campaign for the mitigation of civil and legal disabilities. In the process they shouldered aside the less vigorous, more deferential Catholic landowners who up to 1792 were the leaders of the Catholic Committee, a body founded some years earlier to represent Catholic political interests. Ultimately this newly emerged class would comprise Daniel O’Connell’s most fervent supporters and loyal lieutenants. This experience, this participation in group activity, in signing petitions, in urging the Catholic case to both the Irish and, above all, the British parliament, helped to build a sense of solidarity that straddled the Union but was profoundly changed by it. The Union, with its guarantee of at least a framework of political stability, enabled vigorous, disruptive and even illegal means to be employed without the danger of a breakdown of order and a dissolution of the fabric of the state, such as happened in 1798.

  A breakdown was not far away when the Irish parliament met in session in January 1798. Indeed, it had been threatened for the past decade, and in some areas of the country had actually occur
red. County Armagh in particular was notorious for disturbances and sectarian clashes, with Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys and Catholic Defenders contesting territory, or at least the domination of territory, in an area where the two religious groups were so evenly balanced that each might with confidence engage his opponent. In September 1795 the most serious engagement, the so-called ‘Battle of the Diamond’ in the north of the county, precipitated the foundation of the Orange Order, a body drawing its main strength from the lower orders of society, but with the gentry willing in many cases to give its approval to a movement which it could hardly resist and which it might with profit aspire to lead.