The Ireland Series: Book 3, All Change

By Brian Igoe

This is the third in the series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. It takes us from what was a state of virtual slavery, the misery of the Penal Laws imposed on the Irish by the Government of England after the Williamite invasion of Ireland, to virtual freedom and prosperity with the Emancipation Act won by Daniel O’Connell. Along the way we witness the genius of Grattan, the beauty of the Georgian Dublin created by Gardiners, and the excitement of the French invasion and the affair of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. This whole period, 1690 to 1847, saw the greatest change in the fortunes of the Irish since the arrival of the Normans over six hundred years earlier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Igoe
• Release date: May 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301655168

Brian Igoe

You don’t need to know much about me because I never even considered writing BOOKS until I was in my sixties. I am a retired businessman and have written more business related documents than I care to remember, so the trick for me is to try and avoid writing like that in these books…. Relevant, I suppose, is that I am Irish by birth but left Ireland when I was 35 after ten years working in Waterford. We settled in Zimbabwe and stayed there until I retired, and that gave me loads of material for books which I will try and use sometime. So far I have only written one book on Africa, “The Road to Zimbabwe”, a light hearted look at the country’s history. And there’s also a small book about adventures flying light aircraft in Africa. And now I am starting on ancient Rome, the first book being about Julius Caesar, Marcus Cato, the Conquest of Gaul, (Caesar and Cato, the Road to Empire) and the Civil War. But for most of my books so far I have gone back to my roots and written about Irish history, trying to do so as a lively, living subject rather than a recitation of battles, wars and dates. My book on O’Connell, for example, looks more at his love affair with his lovely wife Mary, for it was a most successful marriage and he never really recovered from her death; and at the part he played in the British Great Reform Bill of 1832, which more than anyone he, an Irish icon, Out of Ireland, my book on Zimbabwe starts with a 13th century Chief fighting slavers and follows a 15th century Portuguese scribe from Lisbon to Harare, going on to travel with the Pioneer Column to Fort Salisbury, and to dine with me and Mugabe and Muzenda. And nearer our own day my Flying book tells of lesser known aspects of World War 2 in which my father was Senior Controller at RAF Biggin Hill, like the story of the break out of the Scharnhorst and Gneisau, or capturing three Focke Wulfs with a searchlight. And now for my latest effort I have gone back to my education (historical and legal, with a major Roman element) and that has involved going back in more ways than one, for the research included a great deal of reading, from Caesar to Plutarch and from Adrian Goldsworthy to Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni.

Book preview

This is a LiteBite Book, about the equal of fifty or so pages of a Paperback or Pocket Book. This one is 18,000 words.

The Story of Ireland ‒ Book Three. All Change.

Copyright © 2013 by Brian Igoe

Smashwords Edition

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is the third in the series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. It takes us from the misery of the Penal Laws to the (almost) victory of Daniel O’Connell, 1690 to 1847, a period which saw the greatest change in the fortunes of the Irish since the arrival of the Normans over six hundred years earlier.

Contents

Chapter 1. 1690 – 1782. Penal Laws.

Chapter 2. 1728 – 1791. Grattan

Chapter 3. 1720 – 1820. Georgian Dublin

Chapter 4. 1791 – 1798. The Year of the French

Chapter 5. 1775 – 1847. Daniel O’Connell

Chapter 1. 1690 – 1782. Penal Laws.

The Civil Provisions of the Treaty of Limerick were completely ignored. They might never have existed. The period from the Treaty to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 was a period of absolute rule, of political, economic, and social domination of Ireland, by the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ – the great Williamite Protestant landowners who were now proceeding to enclose large tracts of land, establishment Protestant clergy, and professionals. That rule was entrenched through a number of laws enacted between 1691 and 1728, collectively known as the Penal Laws. In summary, the main points were:

All Catholics were excluded from Public Office.

No Protestant could marry a Catholic.

Catholics were barred from holding firearms or serving in the armed forces

Catholics were barred from sending their children abroad to be educated.

Catholics were barred from membership of Parliament.

Catholics were barred from voting.

Catholics were barred from the legal profession and the judiciary.

Catholics were barred from entering Trinity College Dublin.

By an act called the Popery Act, when a Catholic died, his land was to be divided equally between his sons unless the eldest of them converted to Protestantism. If he did, he could inherit all the land. The act was said to be an application of the old Brehon Law provisions to the Irish, but the real objective – which was successfully achieved – was to increasingly diminish the size of Catholic landholdings.

Protestants who converted to Catholicism were (in effect) outlawed.

Catholics were barred from buying land under a lease of more than 31 years.

Catholics were barred from inheriting Protestant land.

Catholics were prohibited from owning a horse valued at over £5 (in order to keep horses suitable for military activity out of the majority's hands). £5 would be about $1,300 today.

Catholics were barred from teaching ‘publicly or in private houses ….. or instruct youth in learning within this realm’ upon pain of twenty pounds fine and three months in prison.

The Catholic hierarchy was banished, and Catholic Priests were banished unless they acknowledged William and Mary as King and Queen of England and Ireland.

In 1719 the English Parliament passed an Act entitled ‘Dependency of Ireland on Great Britain Act’ also known as the ‘Declaratory Act’. This Act clearly defined Ireland's dependent status and deprived its Irish House of Lords of appellate jurisdiction

In 1720 an Act declared the right of the British Parliament to actually pass laws for Ireland. It was a major extension of Poynings’ law of 250 years before, for where Poynings had envisioned merely a vetoing function for the English Parliament with the Irish Parliament maintaining a similar power of veto over English changes, this reversed the position. English Parliaments could legislate for Ireland. Although it made no practical difference in the day-to-day lives of Irishmen, it was the seed from which grew the independence movements of the next century.

Within 20 years of the Siege of Limerick absolute control was in the hands of the Ascendancy. And so was the land. Before Cromwell, just sixty years earlier, Catholics had owned 60% of it. By 1703 that figure was 14%. By 1776, 5%. These iniquitous pieces of legislation made life miserable for the labouring classes, virtually all Catholic. There were no schools for Catholics, they couldn’t vote, and the old Celtic society with its Priests and Brehons and kings was under siege. Increasingly, as the economic provisions bit into the prosperity of the Protestants, there were even fewer jobs. Their parcels of land were getting smaller and smaller as they were subdivided under the inheritance laws, so that it became impossible to plant enough barley and wheat to survive. There were fewer and fewer Priests as few were prepared to acknowledge William and Mary. And life for the Catholic gentry and landholders had become insupportable too – they couldn’t become lawyers or judges or join the army, couldn’t enter Parliament or attend the only major University in Ireland, couldn’t own a race horse or anything more expensive than a hack, couldn’t buy land or leave it to their eldest son…. curiously, if my own family’s experience is anything to go by, the regulation which lasted longest in folk memory was the one about horses, which my father was always quoting as an example of perfidious Albion abroad.

Hedge Schools. The law banned Catholics from being teachers, but it was a law never either observed or really enforced, and there are no records extant of prosecution of any teachers. It was not that there were no schools in Ireland open to Roman Catholic children, for the government