A Short History of Dublin by Richard Killeen

Author:Richard Killeen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan

08

THE SUNSET OF THE CLASSICAL CITY

The Old Pretender, son of King James II, died in 1766, at which point Pope Clement XIII regarded the Stuarts as a busted flush and formally acknowledged the Hanoverian George III as the legitimate king. The final removal of the chance of a Stuart restoration had the effect of making the ascendancy even more secure in its historic triumph.

But security breeds another kind of confidence, the kind that allows for internal dissentions that had been suppressed in times of greater danger. The emergence of the so-called patriot interest in the Irish parliament in the last third of the century was no coincidence. Patriotism has often been called ‘colonial nationalism’. It represented a sensibility among some members of the ascendancy that Irish colonial interests had been subordinated to English interests, and that the larger kingdom had been oppressive and selfish in its dealings with the smaller.

Restrictions on the Irish cattle and woollen trades were resented, as was the regular practice of awarding plum positions in church and state to English candidates rather than Irish. Parliament itself was subordinate to Westminster. The argument was made that Ireland was a separate kingdom which should be ruled by her own people (meaning the Anglican elite who alone constituted the political nation in a pre-democratic age). These sentiments had been present throughout the century—the Wood’s Halfpence affair being the best example from an earlier generation—but the growing self-assurance of the ascendancy as a whole gave them renewed oxygen.

Benjamin Franklin visited Ireland in 1771 and found among the Irish patriots men of a similar temper to those Americans who chafed under British colonial exactions. When the American Revolution broke out four years later, it found ready support among ascendancy radicals. They forced the London government to abolish Irish export restrictions, so long a cause of tension between the two sides. The London government pulled regular troops out of Ireland to fight in America, leaving the country under-protected. Into this gap flowed a newly-formed Irish Volunteer force, which began to mobilise in 1778. It was an entirely Protestant body under landlord leadership and by 1779 it numbered about 40,000 members. This number increased by a half to 60,000 by 1782. It proved to be a powerful persuader for further concessions from London. In effect, the Irish patriots now had their own volunteer army.

They duly achieved their goal in 1782 when the Irish parliament achieved its ‘independence’ of Westminster. The statutes that had made Dublin subordinate legislatively were repealed and The Old House on College Green—as it was to be known in romance thereafter—entered into its brief pomp. It may have been free of Westminster, but it was not free of the Dublin Castle administration, which for the most part had no truck with patriot sentiment and which still controlled the levers of administrative power. There was a never-resolved tension between the two ends of Dame Street.

There were liberal elements in the Volunteer/patriot movement who wished to lessen Catholic legal disabilities. Gardiner’s relief acts of 1778 and 1782 represented the first formal easing of the Penal Laws.

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