The Celts: A Sceptical History by Simon Jenkins

Author:Simon Jenkins [Jenkins, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782838869
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

The lesson strikes home

One place where events in France were watched with keen attention was on the streets of Ireland. London’s disregard of the 1691 Treaty of Limerick were coming home to roost. There had been no promised advance in Catholic civil rights. There had been no extension of the franchise to Catholics or access to public jobs or land-holding. The Irish parliament, despite being packed with Protestants, remained shackled by Poynings’ Law. Its every decision was subject to a London veto.

Absentee English landownership had by now extended to virtually the whole of Ireland’s productive farmland. Catholic tenants were required to pay rents to English landlords and tithes to Anglican churches. The unfairness was ingrained and toxic. An additional source of Irish tension in England was the uncontrolled migration into England of landless Irish labourers. Squatter encampments sprang up wherever a canal needed to be built or a London estate extended. The infrastructure of Britain’s industrial revolution and of London’s bourgeoning middle class was largely constructed on Irish labour.

The result was rising anti-immigrant resentment. A modest parliamentary measure, the Papists Act of 1778 easing penal restrictions on Catholic employment in England and Ireland, was met, on its passing in 1780, with street demonstrations not seen in London since the Civil War. The so-called Gordon Riots attacked Catholic houses and churches with a violence exacerbated by the incompetence of London’s hopelessly amateur constabulary. When armed soldiers were summoned as a last resort, they killed some 300 rioters.

The Gordon Riots galvanised politics in Ireland at the very moment in the 1780s when London was losing control of America. A Patriot Movement was formed in which were joined not just Catholics but Protestants and Dublin’s Anglo-Irish community, all collectively exasperated at London’s draconian authority over their country. A senior MP in Dublin’s parliament, Henry Grattan (1746–1820), warned London to repeal Poynings’ Law and install home rule, or face another rebellion on the scale of 1641.

In 1782 the warning struck home and Pitt’s government conceded reform. A new act stated baldly that the ‘right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by His Majesty and the parliament of that kingdom [Ireland] … is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall, at no time hereafter, be questioned or questionable’. Poynings was repealed. The assertion of home rule seemed explicit and final. London had heard the message of America.

Although the Dublin executive was still appointed by London, the new ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ proved to be Ireland’s last chance of an orderly progress to self-government. In 1792–3, under Grattan’s leadership, it enacted laws extending the role that Catholics could play in Ireland’s political and economic life. In this it was supported by the viceroy, Lord Fitzwilliam. But London became increasingly hostile to this emancipation, aware of the strong opposition to it of the implacably anti-Catholic George III, who retained the royal prerogative to veto it and indicated he would use it. He was acting, so he said, ‘as guardian of the Church of England’.

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