ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the basic divisions in Irish society, then illustrate how each group meshed with the others to produce their intriguing harmony. By the end of July 1782 the Williamite constitutional and religious settlement had been almost entirely dismantled and Ireland had entered that brief era of her history, before the Union of 1800, which historians have associated with 'Grattan's Parliament'. The downfall of the failing Irish regime was brought about by the Volunteer movement, the product of France's entry into the American war in 1778. Until the 1750s Dublin was a predominantly Protestant city and most of its citizens were Church of Ireland. The Catholic church should have died out in the eighteenth century as a result of laws forbidding consecrations by Catholic bishops or entry into Ireland by priests trained in Europe. The aristocracy's traditional division between 'Old English' descendants of the Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland and 'Old Irish' native élite still lingered.
