ABSTRACT
It is reasonable to assume that his vision of Ireland, an oppressed and dangerous Ireland, was a permanent part of Burke's imaginative landscape. The established order in Ireland was the Protestant ascendancy, the legalized supremacy of the Protestant minority over the Catholic majority. Burke's view of Irish history, and his feelings about it, come to the surface in a remarkable unfinished letter to his son, Richard, written in 1792. The significance of Burke's Irishness in relation to his writings on the French Revolution has been generally underestimated or misunderstood. It is not surprising that in our own time the counter-revolutionary propaganda in Burke's late writings should have been used for the purposes of the cold war. The first to realize the possibilities of Burke for twentieth-century anti-communism seems to have been A. V. Dicey, who, in an article published in 1918 hit upon the effective expedient of substituting 'Russia' for 'France' in a number of Burke's most ardent counter-revolutionary invectives.
