It is easy to see turning-points in history where turning-points later turned out to have been; but to do so often misrepresents the way things looked at the time. The events of the year 1798 proved a major turning-point in the history of Irish nationalism. They left an inspiration, however vague and emotional, for the future; and more important they led directly to a Parliamentary Union with Great Britain, the long-term effects of which seemed to confirm Ireland as a province and not a country at all. But the last defeat in October 1798 of French attempts to assist rebellion in Ireland that year seemed to contemporaries only the end of one immediate cause for anxiety. Even this was revived within days when the news reached Dublin that yet another French squadron had actually anchored again in Killala Bay.
These were the same three ships that had brought Humbert in the first place. They had been back to France in the meantime and had now returned with some three thousand more men and supplies. When they heard of the defeats of Humbert and Admiral Bompard, they made good their escape without attempting a landing. But their reappearance emphasized what, for contemporaries, was the most important fact of all about the Irish situation at the time: the constant possibility, even probability, of the arrival on those discontented shores of a force from the great land power in Europe which was England’s enemy. The very real likelihood of invasion from France remained a most vivid threat at least until 1805.
In Ireland itself by the end of 1798 the original United Irish movement had been most effectively broken. Seventy of its most intelligent leaders were in prison, and others and many subordinate organizers were dead. But because of its obscure ties with the vast bodies of the Defenders, an internal as well as external threat appeared to pervade the situation in Ireland for a long time. While it was possible, on the one hand, to accept that the guerrilla activities of Holt and Dwyer and their men in the fastnesses of the Wicklow mountains were simply the dying echoes of an old convulsion, there were at first enough ominous new signs to keep alive a general apprehension too. So soon after the breaking of the rebellion as September 1798, a traveller on the mail coach between Cork and Dublin was stopped and held for thirteen hours while he was tried by a rebel court-martial consisting of two colonels, one major and four captains, and finally given a pass, permitting him to proceed to Dublin ‘free and unmolested by any of the Friends of Liberty’.1 The Quaker lady of Ballintore, County Kildare, who had herself experienced many of the terrible events of the early summer, felt that the business was by no means over that autumn. She could hear the sound of the trees being felled at night for pike handles and the creaking of the carts which took them away.2 The darkness was frequently lit up by the fires of houses burned by insurgents, and the funeral of a man who had been hanged moved through the village ‘with a kind of indiscreet solemnity’. During that winter of 1798–9, she wrote afterwards, ‘the country was far from being settled; it was like the working of the sea after the storm’.3
In February 1799 an English militia captain serving in Ireland wrote in his diary that ‘although this immediate neighbourhood and the Kingdom at large appears to wear a face of Tranquillity, it more resembles the Pause of Expectation and the silence of Fear …’.4 Whole bodies of the lower orders of Catholics, he added, were sworn United Irishmen. On 24 February a strong party of mounted rebels were encountered by a detachment of yeomanry some twenty-five miles from Youghal in County Cork. The yeomanry pursued the rebels so hard that many jumped from their horses into the River Blackwater where they were supposed drowned.5
In other parts of Ireland the outlook was equally uncertain. The Member of Parliament for Mayo had already reported that Ireland was ‘in a very precarious state that winter’6 and in the middle of March 1799 none of the main roads into Dublin itself were passable except to large parties or military escorts.7 In the North, though the short-lived alliance between Catholics and Dissenters continued to break up, Defenderism itself was again on the increase, particularly in Antrim, where many former United Irishmen were now absorbed into the Defenders. Nightly raids for arms were taking place there and a system of intimidation by flogging with the cat o’ nine tails began in macabre imitation of established authority. A rising was confidently expected for 10 April 1799 and special messengers were said to have been sent to the French Directory to arrange assistance. Bonfires lit the hillsides at night both in Antrim and Derry, when orders were said to have been received from France to hold themselves in readiness.8 Nor was the continuing threat of clandestine conspiracy confined to Ireland alone. Irishmen still composed a very large proportion of the seamen in the British fleet and late in 1798 and during 1799 numerous plots were uncovered among crews to seize British men-of-war in the name of the United Irishmen, run up the green flag and sail for French ports. Dozens of such prospective mutineers were hanged: others were flogged through the Fleet.
It is against this assumption of a continuously unresolved dangerous situation in Ireland for any foreseeable future that the political manoeuvrings which led to the Parliamentary Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and the abolition of a separate Irish Parliament after five hundred years, must be understood.
When the rebellion of 1798 took place, the concept of Irish nationality had twice been put forward, each time in much common nationalistic language but from different standpoints – that of the Protestant ascendancy, and that of the radical United Irishmen, also largely Protestants. Simultaneously with the United Irish movement, there had also sometimes emerged among the uncouth and ill-coordinated bodies of Defenders a vague awareness that the wants and grievances which were the source of their own political motivation could be thought of dramatically in terms of a green flag. Such dramatic coherence, however, containing perhaps the crude beginnings of a mass nationalism, had been abruptly and chasteningly shattered by the rebellion’s failure.
The strongest and most effective expression of nationality to date – that of the Protestant ascendancy – had been analogous to the colonial nationalism of eighteenth-century America. Since in Ireland, however, a quarrel with the mother country had been avoided, Irish patriots of this type had been able to feel that they had the best of both worlds, always emphasizing, like Grattan, their pride in Ireland as an independent sovereign country simultaneously with their sense of connection with Britain in the wider British Empire. But the rebellion of 1798 had exposed the artificiality in such thoughts, painfully emphasizing that only in the most highflown theoretical sense could they claim to speak for Irishmen as a whole.
The United Irishmen had put forward a more democratic version of Irish patriotism, using the same nationalistic phrases by tying them to Republicanism and to a proposed separation from Britain and the Empire altogether. The easy defeat of the rebellion, notable for the failure of the Irish masses to respond coherently to the new Republican appeal, emphasized that this too was unrepresentative and ineffectual.
Neither form of nationalism looked particularly convincing immediately after the events of 1798, and though obviously this conclusion did not present itself to contemporaries with simple analytical clarity, their uncertainty is plainly expressed in the eighteen months of political groping that took place before the passing of the Parliamentary Union.
The British Government had a practical problem to solve. Unlike the Protestant ascendancy, they had been getting the worst of both worlds. They had total final responsibility for the situation in Ireland and yet only an indirectly geared and cumbersome machinery with which to deal with it. And the one thing the outbreak of 1798 had proved conclusively was that the situation in Ireland needed dealing with. As a former lord lieutenant wrote at the time with the sense of urgent desperation about Ireland that so many people were feeling: ‘something new must be attempted’.9
Early in June 1798, even before the Wexford rebellion had reached its climax, Pitt, the British Prime Minister, was working on a plan for a union of the two countries’ parliaments. It was to be a few months before the British cabinet concentrated on the problem of getting the project accepted by Irish opinion. But thereafter it never once relented in its determination to carry the Union through.
The idea of a legislative union between the English and Irish parliaments was not a new one. Such a union had even existed for a few years in the time of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, but the status quo of two separate Parliaments had been restored with Charles II. Early in the eighteenth century before a sense of Irish Protestant nationality had developed very widely, the Irish House of Commons had actually unsuccessfully petitioned Queen Anne to extend the blessings of the new Anglo-Scottish Union to Ireland. In 1751, a pamphlet advocating a union had prophesied with some accuracy that the Irish (meaning the Protestant Irish) though not yet a nation, would soon be too vain and insolent to accept a union at all. One of the many replies to this pamphlet, which immediately expressed horror and contempt at the idea of a union, tried to formulate the mystical ambivalence which lay beneath the Protestant Irishman’s developing sense of nationality. Unlike America, which was a simple colony, said the pamphleteer, ‘Ireland should be looked on rather as a sister whom England has taken under her protection on condition she complies with the economy of the family, yet with such distinction and deference to show that they were once upon an equality’.10 By the end of the 1770s the emphasis had shifted: it was the equality of the present that was being stressed, and Protestant Irishmen were considering themselves Irishmen as proudly as the English considered themselves English. The idea of a union was hardly ever broached and then only to be mistrusted.
When, therefore, towards the end of 1798, the subject of a legislative union again began to be seriously put forward, there was a situation which in the light of later events seems a paradox: it was among the Protestant Irish gentry that the great body of opposition to a union was to be found. However, their opposition to it was not so solid or coherent as, in the light of former events, one might have expected. For rebellion had delivered a profound social shock to their whole way of thinking. And the notion of joint sisterhood in the British connection was already so well-established at the back of their minds that a shift of ground towards closer connection was still at least something conceivable.
Later nationalists often extolled eighteenth-century opposition to the Union as activated by patriotic principles analogous to their own, but the analogy is imperfect. Even Foster, the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, who emerged as the most implacable and influential of all the Protestant Irish leaders against the Union, was not unequivocally opposed to the measure on principle. Pitt, discussing the projected Union with him, found him ‘strongly against the measure of an Union (particularly at the moment), yet perfectly ready to discuss the point fairly’.11 And Protestants who had previously presented a single political front for legislative independence now divided not on principle but on how they assessed the chances of their own élite society surviving within the British connection in these troublous times.
Clare, the Chancellor (formerly Fitzgibbon) who had been urging Union since 1793, proclaimed predictably: ‘… it is utterly impossible to preserve this country to the British Crown, if we are to depend upon the precarious bond of union which now subsists between Great Britain and Ireland.’12 But many who had previously been among the foremost protagonists of legislative independence agreed with him and opted for a union. Sir George Hill on the other hand, the loyalist who had felt so vindictive about Wolfe Tone that he wanted him hanged with his neck stitched up, was strongly against it. The Earl of Charlemont, founder of the Volunteers of twenty years before, was against a union, as might be expected, but the terms in which he expressed his opposition are revealing. ‘Next to the liberty of my country,’ he wrote, ‘its perpetual connection with its beloved sister has ever been the dearest wish of my heart, the gratification of which could only have been endangered by the plan now in agitation, the disuniting union, a measure which I reprobate as an Irishman, and, if possible, still more as a member of the empire and an adorer of the British constitution.’13
Separation from the British connection was the last thing men like Charlemont and the Speaker, Foster, wanted; they opposed the Union just because they thought it was likely to bring that about. As Foster said: ‘If a resident Parliament and resident gentry cannot soften manners, amend habits or promote social intercourse, will no Parliament and fewer resident gentry do it?’14 J. C. Beresford, a man who had helped put down the rebellion with great savagery and from whose family riding school in Dublin the shrieks of the tortured had been clearly audible, was equally against the Union, whereas his father was strongly for it. In other words, the vast majority of opponents of the measure were not at odds with Unionists about the need for a connection. Their argument was that this was not the way to strengthen it. The Irish Parliament had shown itself impeccably loyal and resolute during the rebellion, and the rebellion had been broken militarily by Irish troops and the Irish militia. The withdrawal of most of the influential inhabitants which would inevitably follow a union ‘would leave room for political agitators, and men of talents without principle or property, to disturb and irritate the public mind’.15
However, even the anti-Unionists in their certainty about the disadvantages of a legislative union did not conceal an uneasy awareness of the need for a new approach in Ireland after the events of 1798. Ideas such as a reform of the tithes system, or some financial provision for the Catholic clergy, or an increase in the amount Ireland should pay Britain for her protection within the Empire were all put forward as a tentative basis of some comprehensive new deal universally acknowledged to be necessary.
Opinion about a union did not run clearly down any political or social dividing line. The most solid opinion seems to have been among the Orangemen, who were very generally described as being against it. This too may seem a paradox in the light of later events, but it was a logical attitude at the time, for the Orangemen simply represented the most extreme expression of the Protestant point of view, namely, that they held a dominant position in Irish society and the legislature as things were, and what they held they wanted to hold. Even in later times, after they had identified their interests with the Union they were always to make clear that, in the event of a clash between those interests and the Union, it was the Union they were prepared to sacrifice. But even the Orangemen were not now unanimous, for a Unionist supporter while accepting that they were chiefly against the measure thought they could be brought to be neutral though it was the utmost the friends of the Union could hope.16 The Masters of the Orange Lodge did in the end opt for neutrality.
The lawyers and bankers of Dublin, whose particularist interests were threatened, were outspoken against a Union. ‘We look with abhorrence,’ declared the bankers, ‘on any attempt to deprive the people of Ireland of their Parliament and thereby of their constitution …’ And they added that, ‘… impressed with every sentiment of loyalty to our King and affectionate attachment to the British connection’, to propose a union was ‘highly dangerous and impolitic’.17 For the Dublin poor, the Union did not seem an urgent issue one way or the other, though as Castlereagh wrote they might ‘easily be set in motion, should their cooperation become of importance to the leading opposers of the measure’.18 Indeed, siding with the bankers, they were within a short time to be triumphantly drawing the Union’s opponents in carriages from the Irish House of Commons and pelting Clare, its leading protagonist, with mud.
The mixture and confusion of opinions was observable not only in social and political groupings but geographically. Dublin, for instance, since it was going to lose its special status as an independent capital and the seat of the national legislature, was strongly against the Union. Cork, because it might hope by the Union to achieve something like parity with Dublin, was strongly for it. Elsewhere in Ireland opinion divided geographically in an arbitrary fashion, determined often by the individual opinions of whoever exercised great influence in any particular county. Sligo, Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Derry, Antrim and Cork were all reported as being in varying degrees for; Carlow, Cavan, Fermanagh, Roscommon, Kildare, Louth and Wicklow against.19 In the North, though the Orangemen were broadly against, the division of opinion was often determined by a straight conflict of view as to what the Union would or would not do to the linen trade. Thus some argued that within a union the linen trade would now all go to England, and since the linen trade in the North was flourishing this argument was said to be having some effect in promoting anti-Unionism. Others countered that the very security of their trade was bound up with the security of the British connection, and that only a union could ensure that. Linen merchants themselves were said to be too busy to take part in the argument very actively one way or the other, but on the whole they inclined to this latter view and favoured a union.
In short, the real argument about the Union was not over any major issue of national principle at all but over what its effects were going to be on certain interests. The largest single set of interests involved was that of the Catholics, who still had much to gain and many recent gains to lose.
All laws penalizing Catholics for the exercise of their religion or excluding them from ownership or other acquisition of land had long been abandoned. In 1793 they had been admitted to the vote on exactly the same terms as Protestants. However, no State or municipal offices were yet open to them (though they could be magistrates) and above all they were disqualified from entering Parliament by the need to make a formal abjuration of their beliefs in order to do so. The claim for rights of full equal citizenship with Protestants was obviously a matter of real concern only to the better-off Catholics, who incidentally had proved themselves zealously loyal to the Crown in the rebellion, with many fewer exceptions than among well-to-do Protestants. For the Catholic peasant masses Catholic Emancipation was, as it had always been, at best only a remote symbol of their own far more down-to-earth aspirations, and, as Thomas Emmet the United Irish leader had already remarked, they did not ‘give a feather for it’.** Deprived, by the defeat of the rebellion, of more dramatic hopes of seeing their down-to-earth aspirations realized, symbols were all that was left to them. But Emancipation was such an oblique one that, without anyone consciously to make it a part of their lives, as Daniel O’Connell was eventually to do, the strange rituals of the secret societies seemed to provide more satisfying evocations of their hearts’ desires.
Since the better-off Catholics all identified themselves as strongly as Protestants with the maintenance of the British connection, and yet had been admitted to a much smaller share of the pride in independent Irish nationality, they saw no objections to a union in itself. Their concern with the issue confined itself largely to whether or not it would make Emancipation more or less probable. But this was an extremely difficult question to decide. On the one hand, it might be said that if the Orangemen were mainly against the Union as likely to undermine their dominant position then Catholics should be for it. And on the whole this was the attitude which the majority of Catholics took up. It seemed to them that they were more likely to obtain from a united kingdom, in which they would be only a minority, those concessions at present withheld from them through fear of their majority in Ireland. On the other hand, this argument could be turned the other way round. It could and was argued by some Catholics that their numerical preponderance in Ireland gave them greater power to wring concessions either now or later out of an Irish Parliament alone. And certainly, if the future development of parliamentary institutions on democratic lines could have been foreseen, the argument for Catholic interests opposing a union would have been overwhelming. But, as things were, their best chance seemed to lie with the generosity of a united parliament in which they would escape from the narrow bigotry of the apprehensive Protestant minority which had so often thwarted them in an Irish one. The vote itself had, after all, only been given to Catholics because the British Government had put pressure on the Irish Parliament.
Pitt’s earliest ideas for a union had indeed been drafted on the assumption that the project would include Catholic eligibility for Parliament and all offices of state.20 He himself was in favour of this, but was not prepared to press it if it should make for difficulties. Difficulties in fact threatened on all sides from the king downwards. And when Clare went to London in October 1798 to add his weight to the argument against immediate Emancipation he was soon able to write back to Ireland that the Union was to go forward ‘unencumbered’ by it.21 Cornwallis, the lord lieutenant, though he also personally thought that Emancipation should have been part of the deal, accepted the decision. In order to convey some hint of flexibility for the future the stipulation in the Union arrangements that Irish parliamentary representatives must take the Protestant oath of supremacy was qualified by the phrase ‘unless it shall be otherwise provided for by Parliament’.
This rather vague and distant prospect of undefined hope suited the Catholic gentry and priesthood well enough. They were opposed to any further pressure for Catholic Emancipation at present on the very grounds that it would be ‘injurious to the Catholic claims to have them discussed in the present temper of the Irish Parliament’.22 And they officially decided to play things coolly. A meeting of influential Catholics just before Christmas 1798 to discuss the projected union decided it would be ‘inexpedient to publish any resolution at present’ and adjourned sine die.23
Responding to this careful attitude of the Catholics, both pro- and anti-Unionists set about wooing them. The prospects of Emancipation which the anti-Unionist Foster could offer were necessarily limited since the solid bulk of his support against the Union came from those who wanted to maintain the Protestant ascendancy. The government, on the other hand, though they could not offer immediate Emancipation, dropped vaguely encouraging hints about the future more and more frequently. As Castlereagh, the Chief Secretary, had put it quite candidly: ‘I conceive the true policy is by a steady resistance of their [the Catholics’] claims, so long as the countries remain separate, to make them feel that they can only be carried with us, through an union.’24 And Pitt’s speech for the Union in the British House of Commons was full of general hints that concessions to the Catholics could be discussed more safely within the constitution of a united kingdom than within that of Ireland alone. Of the lower orders of Catholics he said: ‘… A united legislative body promises a more effectual remedy for their grievances than could be likely to result from any local arrangements.’25
Since, not only with the Catholics but with all groups, it was a matter of persuading people that the Union would benefit their interests, the government embarked on a series of similar persuasive tactics in other directions. The chief material cause for complaint about the re-arrangements required by the Union was of course the inevitable reduction in the number of Irish parliamentary seats and in the power and influence that went with them. The three hundred seats in the Irish Parliament were now to be reduced to one hundred in the Imperial Parliament.**
But before Cornwallis and Castlereagh could start effectively deploying every technique of persuasion and compensation to placate the interests which controlled these seats, the strength of the opposition to the Union in the Irish House of Commons revealed itself. A motion to reject any discussion of the Union as projected in the king’s speech for the session of January 1799 was passed by 111 votes to 106. ‘We are yet a nation,’ wrote Charlemont to a friend. ‘The abominable project is defeated; I can think or talk of nothing else.’26 But within a week he was sounding more cautious: ‘I now begin to perceive that our victory though glorious is not absolutely decisive.’27
It was not only ‘not absolutely decisive’; eventual defeat was almost certain. The British Government had always ultimately held the Irish Parliament in its power through its control of the patronage system. The full range of patronage was now deployed by Cornwallis and his Chief Secretary, Castlereagh, to secure the objective on which the British Government had set its mind.
There were certain steps they could not take. For instance, when the Marquis of Downshire, an opponent of the Union, showed some signs of wavering if the Irish representatives in the new House of Commons were to be kept at their present figure of three hundred, it was clearly impracticable to meet him on the point. But where individuals might be influenced by rewards of title or office to support the Union every possible effort was made to make them do so. And since the chief arguments against a union were that it would work out against individual interests, to make it in individual interests to vote for the Union was not perhaps as despicable as it has sometimes been made to seem. Altogether, as a result of Cornwallis’s and Castlereagh’s ceaseless activity, sixteen important borough-owners were given English peerages, twenty-eight Irish peerages were created, and twenty Irish peerages were increased in rank. As a further general inducement to the Irish peers to seek their prestige within a union rather than outside it, twenty-eight of them were to be virtually nominated by the government as representative Irish peers in the British House of Lords.
This trade in inducements to vote was certainly a two-way one, and was conducted by the opposition just as vigorously as by the government, though clearly the same resources were not available to them. But direct money bribes were undoubtedly offered by the opposition; one man who had voted for the Union in the debate in 1799 voted against it in 1800 in return for a sum of £4,000, though even this man’s venality had its limits, for an attempt by the government to win him back once again by a still larger bribe is said to have been unsuccessful.28 Few direct bribes seem in fact to have been made by the government, though this accusation was often levelled afterwards. Financial compensation, on the other hand, was certainly offered to and taken by the owners of the close boroughs on the straightforward principle that such boroughs were private property like any other. It is illustrative of the inadequacy of the word ‘corruption’ for the whole procedure that one-third of those to whom such compensatory payments were made actually voted against the Union.29 Lord Downshire, who received the largest single payment of this sort, maintained his opposition to the Union to the end.
The government’s most effective single measure to secure the passage of the Union was the creation of vacant seats in the Irish Parliament, which were then filled with Union supporters before the crucial final debate. This was done partly by approaching men who, though they were not prepared openly to vote for the Union, were willing to accept rewards for vacating their seats – perhaps the most dishonest individual attitude to be found in all the various Union transactions. Exploitation of such moral dishonesty proved very effective. Altogether, including vacancies from deaths and other causes, one-fifth of the Irish House of Commons changed its representation in the eighteen months before the crucial debate took place in 1800 and many of the newcomers thus brought in for what proved to be the death throes of the Irish Parliament were Englishmen. Indeed, the very thoroughness with which Cornwallis and Castlereagh pursued their task itself converted many people in the end to the inevitability of the Union. Already by the end of June 1799 a correspondent was writing to Castlereagh that the impression that the Union would be passed was itself helping to do the trick. ‘Little alternative is left to people but to reconcile their minds to its advantages, and which they seem to do with a very good will.’30 And towards the end of September one of the under secretaries told him that even in Dublin the talk of the coffee houses was that the Union would be carried.31
Although Cornwallis and Castlereagh did their work extremely well – almost too well, for the king and the British Cabinet were slightly appalled when they realized the scale on which the Irish ministers had been offering rewards for support32 – Cornwallis himself had felt distinctly squeamish at times. ‘I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work,’ he wrote, but he added that what kept him going was the thought that without a union the British Empire must be dissolved.33 Castlereagh was less emotional. ‘The Irish government,’ he wrote, after the Union had been carried, ‘is certainly now liable to the charge of having gone too far in complying with the demands of individuals; but had the Union miscarried, and the failure been traceable to a reluctance on the part of the Government to interest a sufficient number of supporters in its success, I am inclined to think we should have met with, and in fact deserved, less mercy.’34 The final voting in the Irish House of Commons was conclusive: a majority of forty-six for the Union where only the year before there had been a majority of five against it. It was to come into force on 1 January 1801. And so, what one member of the British Cabinet described as ‘the greatest and most desirable measure which ever was in contemplation’ was brought into being. Something of this extravagant mysticism continued to surround the Union for the 120 years of its existence.
At once exaltation on the part of the British Government and the pro-Unionists achieved almost religious dimensions. According to Cornwallis, the Empire was now so completely united that the Union would remain ‘in all future ages, the fairest monument of His Majesty’s reign already distinguished by so many and such various blessings conferred upon every class and description of his subjects’.35 What had been achieved, Unionist supporters felt, was the almost magical formula which Pitt had expressed in a speech in the House of Commons: ‘the voluntary association of two great countries, which seek their common benefit in one Empire, in which each will retain its proportionate weight and importance, under the security of equal laws, reciprocal affection, and inseparable interests, and in which each will acquire a strength that will render it invincible’.36
Grattan, however, in his last speech in the Irish House of Commons opposing the Union, had struck a very different note.
The Constitution may, for a time, be lost – the character of the country cannot be so lost. The Ministers of the Crown may at length find that it is not so easy to put down for ever an ancient and respectable nation by abilities however great, by power and corruption, however irresistible. Liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heart re-animate the country …. I do not give up the country. I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead; though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life and on her cheek a glow of beauty …37
Both attitudes were misleadingly rhetorical. What golden beams of liberty, it might have been asked, had the wretched masses intoxicating themselves with the mumbo-jumbo of the Defenders ever known? The Constitution as it had existed for nineteen years was indeed going down but no ‘ancient and respectable nation’ had been truly identified with it – only the propertied classes, and many of these, even, without the right to function within it. The country in the sense that Grattan was talking about was indeed helpless and motionless but not in her tomb, or even in a swoon, for she had still to have life breathed into her.
The challenge to Pitt’s rhetoric lay in the future. It was not by any means inconceivable that the Union might turn out to benefit Ireland in the way he foretold. But whether or not she would acquire the promised invisible strength would depend entirely on the reality given to phrases like ‘common benefit’ and ‘equal laws’, and how exactly an attempt was going to be made to meet those ‘interests’ which were now to be ‘inseparable’ from the rest of Britain’s.
The fact that the Union was to fail the challenge of reality was not, as has sometimes been maintained, the result of treacherous English villainy. The Union was not intended as a trap for Ireland although it turned out afterwards to have been one. What was to make it fail was not villainy, or even neglect, but inability to understand until almost too late the fundamental problem of Irish society. This problem, so long evaded not only by the British Government but by Irish patriots themselves, was the historically conditioned land system which covered the greater part of the country. This system’s injustice, its lack of acknowledgement of any rights for those who worked the land and lived by it – as distinct from those who owned it – was the result of the ancient religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics long conceded to be irrelevant where land was concerned. The injustice was magnified by another historically conditioned factor: the absence of any alternative form of livelihood but land. The land system had to be changed, even at the cost of interfering with the rights of property, if the population of the country was ever to come within sight of the decent satisfactions of normal everyday life. When eventually understanding did break through and relevant action was taken, it was still just not too late to save the Union in its widest form and certainly not too late in any case to save the British connection through a joint Crown. That both were eventually lost was due to another failure, not this time of understanding, but of imagination.