Ireland since 1800

Conflict and Conformity

K.Theodore Hoppen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317881926
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The second edition of this bestselling survey of modern Irish history covers social, religious as well as political history and offers a distinctive combination of chronological and thematic approaches.

Part One

Under Strain: From Union to Famine

Chapter One

Politics

O’Connell: Innovation and Ambiguity

The nature of political life in early nineteenth-century Ireland derived its particular flavour from the fact that conflict between those defending and those challenging the status quo was beginning to be conducted in a new way. But if this represented an innovation then the simultaneous survival of older forms of action and discourse meant that the ensuing reality was neither simple nor unambiguous. Almost every interest was engaged upon an attempt to rescue something from the wreckage of the 1798 rebellion and the consequent Act of Union of 1800, for these together constituted that remarkable equation – a defeat for almost everyone and a victory for almost nobody at all.

I. The Union and its context

The political and economic ascendancy of the landed classes reached its peak about the middle of the eighteenth century,¹ but from then onwards was increasingly challenged by a growing urban and trading middle class (which included many successful Catholic merchants). Simultaneously a widening rural unrest manifested itself through the activities of agrarian secret societies – first specifically and then generically known as Whiteboyism – which, though not aimed at landed proprietors alone, helped to destabilize the existing political culture in at first minor and then more serious ways. Furthermore, the various measures of Catholic relief passed by the exclusively Protestant Irish parliament in 1778, 1782, and 1793, which broadly allowed Catholics to hold land in the normal way and eventually granted them the vote, were actually imposed by the British government, so that articulate Catholics began more and more to see London rather than Dublin as the source of reform and political amelioration. But revolutionary events in North America and France encouraged those of more radical tendencies to look to new shifts and expedients.

The Society of United Irishmen established in 1791 as the chief focus for such aspirations was and remained an eclectic organization. Increasingly revolutionary – and as a consequence losing a good deal of moderate support – it contained representatives of the three major religious traditions in Ireland: Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland (Anglican), and Presbyterian. While much of its remembered rhetoric tended to stress the unity of all Irishmen, the various elements within it sustained distinctive and not always reconcilable ambitions, so that, for example, many Protestant United Irishmen looked to the establishment of an Irish republic in which they would play the dominant role regardless of the insistent fact that four-fifths of all those living in Ireland were Roman Catholics. Even those who thought like Theobald Wolfe Tone, the young Protestant lawyer who in 1792 became assistant secretary to the Catholic Committee (a body seeking greater political rights for the genteel sections of the Catholic community), were by no means innocent of such aspirations. But what Tone and others had come to realize was that effective revolution was impossible without mass support. It was, therefore, in part at least a sense of Realpolitik which persuaded them to overcome their aversion of the Catholic ‘lower orders’ – ‘the Irish, properly so called’ in Tone’s revealing phrase² – and to seek to connect their own movement with the gathering discontents of that great threatening backdrop to the febrile debates of the revolutionary intellectuals – the Irish countryside.

The Whiteboy-type unrest which had existed since the early 1760s in the South of Ireland³ was, however, almost entirely concerned with specific local issues: rents; the availability of potato ground for labourers; tithes; evictions; even the dues levied by the Catholic clergy upon their parishioners. Though obviously a disruptive force, it fired its ammunition in a scattered and disjointed manner and was generally strongest in those parts of Munster and Leinster where the United Irishmen were few and far between. However, in the mid-1780s there appeared a somewhat different movement in that frontier area of southern Ulster where, almost uniquely, Catholics and Protestants both constituted significant elements within the population. Here efforts by the gentry in Armagh to mobilize poorer Protestants by giving them weapons intermeshed with economic discontent among local weavers and sectarian disputes over land to produce an explosion of widespread unrest.⁴ Protestant organizations such as the Peep-of-Day Boys and Catholic groups like the Defenders effectively combined elements of Whiteboyism and distinctly sectarian attitudes. In addition, while the Defenders undoubtedly articulated notions of political revolution well before their association with the United Irishmen began around 1795, they did so in a traditionally Catholic manner which derived its inspiration from memories of earlier land confiscations rather than from Tom Paine, France, or the new America. Above all, they generally aspired to Catholic dominance (rather than mere equality), while the United Irishmen tended to envisage a republic in which Catholics would – at least for a time – continue to play an inferior role.

Although, therefore, the simultaneous development at all social levels of a bitter Protestant reaction, notably in the shape of the Orange Order founded in 1795, helped to push Defenders and United Irishmen together, the unresolved tensions of that alliance and a vigorous military response by the government ensured the failure of the revolutionary enterprise. It is in any case important not to exaggerate (although equally important not to minimize) the clarity of purpose of those involved. Many rank-and-file Defenders knew little of republics and cared less. Some merely wanted arms, others were motivated by the possibility of exciting activity for its own sake – a strand of attraction generated by almost all contemporary political or quasi-political organizations. Indeed, the fluidity of the whole business is revealed in the way in which members of even such antagonistic bodies as the Orange Order and the United Irishmen could sometimes happily switch from one to the other, as occurred so dramatically in various parts of the country during and after 1796.⁵

As it happened, government arrests and internal contradictions combined to ensure that the rebellion which broke out in May 1798 ‘was not a United Irish one … but a protective uprising which a spent United Irish leadership failed to harness’.⁶ Indeed, in a very real sense, the whole episode is best described, not as a single rising at all but more as a series of separate incidents based upon a kaleidoscope of local issues and imperatives. Whether this had always been the likely outcome remains a matter of debate. Certainly the problems involved in achieving any kind of all-Ireland mobilization were substantial from the very start and grew ever more so during the two years before 1798. While those with some kind of interest in rebellion were numerous enough, their disaffections consisted of materials not easily coordinated or reconciled. The United Irish societies of Dublin and Belfast developed along very different lines. The former, essentially a propagandist debating club whose members’ dramatic references to contemporary France disguised a firm adherence to the constitutional theories of Locke in preference to the democratic arguments of Paine, proved quite unable to establish daughter societies elsewhere in the South. By contrast, the Belfast society, made up largely of Presbyterian merchants and linen drapers, stood at the centre of a network of similar bodies spread throughout the eastern and central parts of Ulster.⁷ Again, the Catholic Defenders of Armagh and the surrounding areas – though temporarily integrated into the United Irish structure during 1795 and 1796 – depended upon sectarianism for much of their motivation and coherence and were thus significantly distinct from the single-mindedly agrarian secret societies of the rural South.

Nonetheless, neither the revolutionary sentiments nor the revolutionary actions of 1798 were simply matters of fissiparous localism. Those who took up arms constituted more than a rabble devoid of serious political aims; and it is clear that their aspirations encompassed imperatives that went beyond the merely sectarian,⁸ agrarian, or millenarian. Indeed, it is notable that Tipperary – the epicentre of contemporary agrarian disorder – was quiescent in 1798, while Wexford – a county remarkable for its agrarian harmony – rebelled.⁹ More remarkable (and innovative) still was the manner in which the United Irishmen were briefly successful in turning existing feelings of local identity into a bonding agent for political mobilization and military cohesion. ‘The sweet cry of the name of their native barony or village roused them at once,’ noted the rebel leader Miles Byrne. And at Gorey Hill in Wexford contingents marched into the rebel camp chanting the names of the places from which they had come.¹⁰

What, however, in the end torpedoed the chances of success was the way in which government repression succeeded in delaying things until the optimum moment for action had irretrievably passed away. In addition, the bad weather which prevented General Hoche’s substantial French expedition from landing at Bantry Bay in December 1796 was undoubtedly a heavy blow, while the death shortly thereafter of Hoche himself (the leader of the pro-Irish party in Paris) deprived Tone of his main supporter in revolutionary France. With the help of an augmented militia and the mobilization in October 1796 of an overwhelmingly Protestant yeomanry the government was able to undermine the organizational coherence of the United Irish system in North and South alike. By late 1797 most of its leaders had either been arrested or had fled abroad. Among their followers the long months of delay had seriously damaged morale just at the time when military counter-measures, now more overtly Orange than ever, were heightening religious tensions as the yeomanry briskly burned down Catholic chapels in southern Ulster and raised the sectarian temperature all round.¹¹

Ominously the centres of revolt in May and June 1798 were located in Wexford and parts of south-eastern Ulster – both of them regions containing substantial numbers of Protestants and Catholics.¹² The revolutionary contacts between the two areas proved virtually non-existent. Indeed, the rebellion(s) of 1798, though initially planned to demonstrate an essential unity among Irishmen of every belief and station in life, ended up by revealing the exact opposite. Neither the savage peasant populism that marked aspects of the Wexford rising nor the biblical millenarianism that, in the event, encouraged some northern Presbyterians to take part owed much to the United Irishmen. The hoped-for French help arrived too late, though General Humbert’s tiny thousand-strong army which landed in County Mayo in August showed what might have been achieved with larger forces more carefully despatched. The government received a severe fright, but emerged triumphant in the end. Tone was captured and committed suicide in prison having proved unable to ride the tiger he had so desperately attempted to mount.

While possibly as many as 50,000 men ‘turned out’ during 1798 – something of undoubt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Map
• Introduction
• Part One Under Strain: From Union to Famine
• Part Two Winners and Losers: From Famine to Partition
• Part Three Promised Lands: Ireland since 1921
• Bibliography
• Index