ABSTRACT
After the 1798 rebellion, for a mixture of motives, it suited more than just the aristocracy and the Protestant landed gentry who ran the Irish Parliament that a complete unification of Great Britain and Ireland should occur. The rebellion, like so much violence in later times, was counter-productive to the attainment of rebel aims; the majority of the people, sick of troubles, made no significant protest. The Catholic bishops, many of whom had been trained in France and had witnessed the horrors of the French Revolution, shared the general mood and saw the Union as an opportunity to gain emancipation for members of their faith. It was left to William Pitt the Younger, who saw the practical realities of the independence which the Irish people nominally enjoyed, to decide that with a liberal distribution of cash and peerages he could peacefully redress injustices by uniting the two parliaments. Like the Norman Conquest before it, had the Act of Union gone the whole way it might have reduced the Irish Question to an acceptable level of bickering about the respective rights and duties of local councils and central government. As it was, it brought to an end the Protestant Ascendancy as a legal governmental entity. Henceforward Ascendancy was to be a social and economic phenomenon, its power and influence much diminished though never extinguished.
