Irish Patriot Party

Irish Patriot Party

The Irish Patriot Party was the name of a number of different political groupings in Ireland throughout the eighteenth century. They were primarily supportive of Whig concepts of personal liberty combined with a Irish nationalism that rejected full independence, but advocated strong self-government within the British Empire.

As the Irish Parliament at the time banned Catholic membership, the elected members of the party were exclusively Anglican Protestant (Episcopalian). Their main achievement was the Constitution of 1782.

Early Irish Patriots

The name was first used in the 1720s to describe Irish supporters of the British whig party, specifically the Patriot faction within it. Swift's "Drapier%27s Letters" and works by Molyneaux are seen as precursors deploring the undue control exercised by the British establishment over the Irish political system. The appointed senior political and church officials were usually English-born. It was also used to describe Irish allies of the Patriot Whigs of William Pitt the Elder in the 1750s and 1760s. They tended to consist of middle-class Protestants. The philosophy was that their legal and trading benefits, and personal freedoms, of being English that derived from Magna Carta, and more so the Bill of Rights that arose from the 1688 Revolution, were largely reduced for those living in Ireland. The Dependency Act of 1719 was considered particularly obnoxious.

Grattan's Patriots

who dominated the party for most of its life.

Limited success

They came to prominence during the American War of Independence when they pushed for greater home rule for Ireland. With the threat of invasion by France in 1778, a large militia had been formed known as the Irish Volunteers. In the absence of the regular garrison, they served largely as a bargaining tool for the Irish patriot politicians in their bid to gain greater powers from London, without having to fire a shot in anger.

*They also wanted freer trade with the outside world, as Irish overseas trade had been greatly restricted since the 1650s by the Navigation Acts.
*While the Patriots and the viceroy-led Irish administration strongly disagreed with how the country should be governed, they shared a belief that Ireland should have greater self-government. Controls such as Poynings Law would have to be abolished.

Fearing a similar outbreak to the one which had just lost them the Thirteen American colonies, the British government agreed to their demands. Such was the influence of Grattan that the subsequent eighteen years of greater legislative independence were known as Grattan's Parliament. The high point came in 1782-83 when the sympathetic Fox-North Coalition government in London agreed that the Irish parliament would legislate exclusively for Ireland. Grattan also sought and obtained a declaratory Act that was passed by the British parliament on 22 January 1783, including this formula:

:"Be it enacted that the right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Parliament of that kingdom, in all cases whatever shall be, and is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time be questioned or questionable."

The only remaining constitutional link between the monarchies of Ireland and Britain was the Crown, represented by the viceroy. Grattan's view was that a beneficial link should be maintained with Britain, and compared his policy to Ireland's geographic situation in a neat formula::"The channel forbids union; the ocean forbids separation".

Problems

*From 1783-84 the Patriots could not agree how far and how fast the Penal Laws restricting Ireland's Roman Catholics should be reformed. Conservatives (including Flood) pointed to the Relief Act of 1778 and felt that enough had been reformed, but liberals including Grattan wanted to reform the tithe laws and to include Catholics in parliament. This division generally led to conservative majorities against reform until 1793.
*The viceroy increased the conservative majority by wielding patronage when required; MPs were effectively bribed by being given sinecure posts with large salaries.
*Grattan mistakenly preferred an opposition role and allowed the viceroy to nominate a conservative administration that was generally nicknamed the "Junta". He failed to reform the tithe laws in 1788 that were generally unpopular with poorer Catholics.

Consequently the reformist Patriots struggled in the following years to gain anything approaching a majority on social reform issues in the Irish House of Commons, though in 1793 another Catholic Relief Act was passed. In 1789 the reformist element formally established the "Irish Whig" party but soon lost goodwill in London for its views on the .

French revolution

The French revolution emphasised the Patriots' divisions, with conservatives generally following the views of Edmund Burke. The major reform of the Catholic Relief Act in 1793 allowed Catholics to vote, to practise as lawyers, to act as grand jurors and to enter Trinity College Dublin as students, but this reform had to be pushed along by London, no doubt to Grattan's embarrassment. Opponents of this reform spoke of the need to protect a "Protestant Ascendancy".

In 1795 the government funded a Catholic seminary, but earlier in the year it had quickly recalled a new viceroy Fitzwilliam who intended to effect further Catholic reliefs and to appoint Grattan to the administration. These interventions and the imposition of martial law in March 1797 caused Grattan and his supportive MPs to withdraw from parliament in May, and by then the civil unrest caused by the army, the militia, the Orange Order, the Defenders and the United Irishmen had made Ireland ungovernable.

The unsuccessful 1798 rebellion launched in May 1798 by the republican United Irishmen seriously damaged their cause. Although most liberal Patriots opposed the rebellion, they became tarnished by association, and support dropped for them. Some Patriot MPs of the 1780s, such as James Napper Tandy and Lord Edward FitzGerald, had become United Irish leaders in the 1790s. The Rebellion, which had been launched in co-ordination with a French invasion, provoked the British government of William Pitt into pushing through the 1800 Act of Union, merging the parliaments of Ireland and Great Britain into the new "United Kingdom". Naturally the Patriots opposed this in colourful debates in 1799 and 1800.

Act of Union and Legacy

Following the Act of Union in 1800, the Irish Parliament was abolished. A few Irish Patriots took up seats in the new unified British House of Commons in London, under the notional leadership of Grattan. Within a few years they had become almost entirely submerged with the British Whig Party, with whom they were allied and disappeared from the political map.

Grattan's advocacy of liberal-minded moderate Irish nationalist self-rule with links to Britain had a resonance over the following century. It was taken up by Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association in the 1830s that intended to repeal the Act of Union; by the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s; and later by the Irish Parliamentary Party that campaigned for a restoration of Home Rule in Ireland. The IPP dominated the political scene in Ireland for decades until its defeat by the fully separatist Sinn Fein movement in the 1918 general election.

ee also

* British Whig Party
* Patriot Whigs


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