The Irish Parliament had run its course, and had involved the unhappy
country in chaos, bankruptcy, revolution, and bloodshed. Lord Clare--a
late and reluctant convert to the policy of the Union--said in the Irish
House of Lords (Feb. 10, 1800)--
"We have not three years of redemption from bankruptcy, intolerable
taxation, nor one hour's security against the renewal exterminating
civil war. Session after session have you been compelled to enact
laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible
excesses of the mass of your people: and the fury of murder and
pillage and desolation have so outrun all legislative exertions
that you have been at length driven to the hard necessity of
breaking down the pale of municipal law, and putting your courage
under the ban of military government--and in every little circle of
dignity and independence we hear whispers of discontent at the
temperate discretion with which it is administered.... Look to your
civil and religious dissensions. Look to the fury of political
faction and the torrents of human blood that stain the face of your
country, and of what materials is that man composed who will not
listen with patience and good will to any proposition that can be
made to him for composing the distractions and healing the wounds
and alleviating the miseries of this devoted nation?"
Lord Clare's words--unanswered and unanswerable then and now--constitute
a sufficient comment on the foolish fable of later invention, that
Ireland was a land of peace and harmony, of orderly government and
abounding prosperity, when a wicked English minister came and "stole
away the Parliament House"--since which all has been decay and
desolation. The halcyon period is generally made to coincide with that
of "Grattan's Parliament"--of the semi-independent and quite unworkable
Constitution of 1782, which had been extorted from England's weakness
when Ireland was denuded of regular troops, and at the mercy of a
Volunteer National Guard, when Cornwallis had just surrendered at
Yorktown, and Spain and France were once more leagued with half Europe
for the destruction of the British Empire.
It is quite true that the latter part of the eighteenth century was, on
the whole, a time of considerable prosperity to certain classes in
Ireland--a prosperity varied by periods of acute depression and
distress. But that prosperity, such as it was, neither began with
Grattan's Parliament nor ended with it--had, indeed, no more connection
with the Irish Parliament in any of its phases than had the Goodwin
Sands with Tenterden steeple. With the exception of the respite between
the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution,
England was almost constantly at war, or feverishly preparing for war.
Simultaneously came the unprecedented increase of urban industry,
following on the invention of the steam-engine and spinning machinery.
The result was an enormous and growing demand for corn, beef, and pork,
sailcloth, stores of all kinds for our armies and fleets, a demand which
England, owing to the growth of her town population and the consequent
growth of the home demand, was unable adequately to meet.
Ireland reaped the benefit. As a largely agricultural country, she was
as yet little influenced by the discoveries of Watt, of Hargreaves, of
Arkwright, or of Crompton. But her long-rested soil could produce in
apparently unlimited quantities those very products of which the British
forces stood most in need. The fleets were victualled and fitted out at
Cork, and they carried thence a constant stream of supplies of all sorts
for our armies in the field. Indeed, so keen was the demand that it was
soon discovered that not only our own troops, but those of the enemy,
were receiving Irish supplies, and smugglers on the south and west
coasts reaped a rich harvest.
The result was obvious. Cattle graziers and middlemen made enormous
profits, rents were doubled and trebled. Dublin, Cork, Waterford,
Limerick and Belfast flourished exceedingly on war prices and war
profits. But there is no evidence that the mass of the people in their
degraded and debased condition shared to any extent in this prosperity.
It was at this very period that Arthur O'Connor spoke of them as "the
worst clad, the worst fed, the worst housed people in Europe."
Whiteboyism, outrage and lawlessness spread over the face of the
country, and, as Lord Clare reminded Parliament, "session after session
have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty
to repress the horrible excesses of the mass of your people." It has
been made a charge against the Union that during some disturbed periods
of the nineteenth century the United Parliament had to pass "Coercion"
Acts at the rate of nearly one every session. The complainants should
look nearer home and they would find from the records of the Irish
Legislature that during the "halcyon" days of "Grattan's
Parliament"--the eighteen years between 1782 and the Union--no less than
fifty-four Coercion Acts were passed, some of them of a thoroughness and
ferocity quite unknown in later legislation. The close of the nineteenth
century and the opening of the twentieth were, in reality, in spite of a
certain amount of agrarian crime, organised and subsidised from abroad,
a period of much greater peace and more widespread prosperity than the
bloodstained years that marked the close of the eighteenth century--and
of the Irish Parliament.
Another fiction regarding the Union may perhaps be worth notice. It has
sometimes been suggested that it was carried by a venal oligarchy in
opposition to the will of the great mass of the population, of the Roman
Catholic population in particular. This is precisely the reverse of the
truth. The oligarchy controlled the Parliament, and it therefore
followed that the uniformly corrupt traditions of the Irish Parliament
had to be observed in carrying the Union as in carrying every other
Government Bill throughout the century. But, so far from the Act of
Union being carried by landowners and Protestants against the will of
the Catholics, it was, as a matter of fact, carried with the ardent and
unanimous assent and support of the Catholic hierarchy, and against the
embittered opposition of the old ascendancy leaders, who feared the loss
of their influence of power.
The evidence on this point is documentary and precise. Indeed, no one
thought of doubting or challenging it at the time; Grattan contented
himself with denouncing the Catholic Bishops as "a band of prostituted
men." Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, was, as his correspondence shows,
a warm, consistent and active supporter of the Union. Dr. Dillon,
Archbishop of Tuam, wrote in September, 1799, that he had had an
opportunity during his recent visitation "of acquiring the strongest
conviction that this measure alone can restore harmony and happiness to
our unhappy country." His neighbour, Dr. Bodkin, Bishop Galway, wrote
that the Union was the only measure to save "poor infatuated Ireland"
from "ruin and destruction." Dr. Moylan, Bishop of Cork, was equally
emphatic. "I am perfectly satisfied," he says, "that it is impossible to
extinguish the feuds and animosities which disgrace this Kingdom, nor
give it the advantages of its natural local situation, without a Union
with Great Britain. God grant that it may soon take place!"
As for the feeling of the rank and file of the electors--under a very
widely extended franchise--two examples will suffice. In two cases--in
the County of Kerry and the borough of Newry--both open
constituencies--by-elections occurred during the passing of the Union
legislation. In both instances the Roman Catholic vote predominated, and
in both the feeling was so strong in favour of the Union that no
opponent dared to face the poll. In after years Mr. Maurice Fitzgerald,
the Knight of Kerry, recounted his experiences. "Having accepted
office," he says, "as a supporter of the Union, I went to two elections
pending the measure and was returned without opposition in a county
where the Roman Catholic interest greatly preponderated, and a
declaration almost unanimous in favour of the Union proceeded from the
County of Kerry. One of my most strenuous supporters in bringing forward
that declaration was Mr. Maurice O'Connell, uncle of Mr. Daniel
O'Connell, and my most active partisan was Mr. John O'Connell, brother
of Mr. Daniel O'Connell."
In Newry an attempt was made to put up an anti-Unionist candidate, but
the Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr. Lennan, met and repulsed the intruder in
militant fashion. "Mr. Bell," he reports to Archbishop Troy, "declined
the poll, and surrendered yesterday. The Catholics stuck together like
the Macedonian phalanx, and with ease were able to turn the scale in
favour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer."
To the Irish Catholic at the time of the Union, the Dublin legislature
was, indeed, in the words of Mr. Denys Scully, a leading Catholic
layman, "not our Parliament, for we had no share in it, but their
Club-house."
The summing up of the whole matter is perhaps best expressed in the
measured judgment of Mr. John Morley in his study of the life of Edmund
Burke. Burke, in an evil moment for himself and for Ireland, had lent
himself in 1785 to what Mr. Morley called the "factious" and
"detestable" course of Fox and the English Whig leaders in destroying
Pitt's Commercial Propositions.
"Had it not been for what he himself called the delirium of the
preceding session" (writes Burke's biographer)[13] "he would have
seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the
emancipation of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination
and for her installation as a corporate member of the Empire--the
only position permanently possible for her.... A substantial boon
was sacrificed amid bonfires and candles to the phantom of Irish
Legislative Independence. The result must have convinced Pitt more
firmly than ever that his great master, Adam Smith, was right in
predicting that nothing short of the Union of the two countries
would deliver Ireland out of the hands of her fatuous chiefs and of
their too worthy followers."
What would Mr. John Morley, the historian who wrote those words in the
prime of his intellectual strength and judgment, have said if any one
had told him that in his old age Lord Morley, the politician, would have
been actively engaged in assisting another generation of "fatuous
chiefs" and still more worthy followers to sacrifice the true interests
of Ireland in the pursuit of "the phantom of Irish Legislative
Independence"?