ABSTRACT
The concept of Empire was increasingly important to the British ruling classes in the second half of the eighteenth century and Ireland was now at the very core of Britain’s imperial identity. The situation in Ireland was complex. Its population when William Pitt came to power was 4 million, more than half the population of England, more than double that of Scotland – and growing rapidly. About 80 per cent of Ireland’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. Pitt always saw England’s Irish question as a problem of economic relations. Pitt’s interest extended beyond ‘economic relations’ because he placed such store on effective Anglo-Irish co-operation. The Irish hated the idea of forcible contribution to the British defence budget, likening it ominously to George Grenville’s ill-starred proposals to tax the American colonies in the 1760s. By 1792 sufficient evidence of widespread disaffection in Ireland existed to sound alarm bells in Britain.
