ABSTRACT

The revival of Protestant social and religious prejudice was hardly encouraging to the declared aims of the United Irishmen: ‘to unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, Dissenter’. The loyalty of Catholic leaders, and the turbulent times, pushed the British Government into the role of supporting Catholic rights against the wishes of most of its usual followers in the Irish Parliament; and relief legislation passed in 1778 and 1782 met strong opposition from MPs. The Protestant nation was as much the victim of the radical doctrine espoused by O’Connell that numbers, not property, entitled a section of the nation to regard itself as ‘the people’ as it was the victim of the nationalist view that the Catholics were the Irish, properly so called.