Imperfect Solution to the Irish Problem

Today’s installment concludes Ireland Joined to United Kingdom,
our selection from Ireland 1494-1898 by William O’Connor Morris published in 1898.

If you have journeyed through the installments of this series so far, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of six thousand words. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Ireland Joined to United Kingdom.

Time: 1800

Pitt was a large-minded and enlightened statesman; he certainly desired, when the Union was secure, to carry out the measures of relief for the Irish Catholics which, from the outset, he had had in view. He probably reckoned on his prodigious influence; but he had unhappily kept the King in the dark, though fully aware of the King’s sentiments; a ministerial cabal was formed against him; and George III, on a preposterous plea, pressed with the obstinacy of a distempered mind, peremptorily refused to listen to the Catholic claims. The subsequent con duct of Pitt in this matter has indisputably thrown a shadow on his name. He resigned his office, when he had persuaded himself that he could not carry out his Irish Catholic policy; he is entitled to every credit attaching to the act. But in a very short time he let his master know that he would not urge the question again; he supported a violent Anti-Catholic Ministry; he re turned to office, but took no steps to vindicate the demands of Catholic Ireland.

All this has exposed his memory to grave suspicion; and history can hardly withhold its censure. It is idle to say that he told Cornwallis that the Union was to be a Protestant one only: he held out hopes himself to the Irish Catholics; he invited Cornwallis to do the same; he carried the Union, to some extent at least, by obtaining Irish Catholic support, secured only by what were deemed promises that Catholic relief would certainly follow. In these circumstances, it was not enough to have simply abandoned the helm; he ought to have insisted on the King’s adopting his measures; and had he done so, he must have attained his object; and his subsequent attitude has a look of in sincerity, if not worse. We fear it must be said that, in his wish to accomplish the Union, he did not scruple to allow the Irish Catholics to entertain hopes which, he well knew, might not be fulfilled; that he all but pledged himself to them, through the Lord Lieutenant, though he felt he might not be able to redeem the pledge; and that he thought his conscience absolved by a resignation — which he took care should not last long — without even trying to give effect to a policy to which he stood committed as a man and a minister. The best excuses, perhaps, to be made for him are that, in his ignorance of Ireland and her real state, he did not understand all that was involved in the course he took, and that, in the death struggle of the rebellion, he believed it was his duty to become the head of the state, without regard to consistency or too line a sense of honor.

Under the Constitution of 1782 Ireland unquestionably made social and material progress; the ancient divisions of blood and creed, which for centuries have kept her races apart, and her feuds of class, had to some extent disappeared. In these circumstances it was not impossible, though in our judgment it was not probable, that Grattan’s ideal might have, with a free Parliament and a powerful landed gentry, the respect of a contented peasantry. But the French Revolution scattered these hopes to the winds; its destructive influence was as fatal, perhaps, in Ireland, as in any part of Europe; it blighted the fair promise of the close of the eighteenth century. We must add, too, that having regard to the relations it created between Great Britain and Ireland, the Constitution of 1782 was not likely to endure; it was hardly compatible with the security of the British empire; it was distrusted by British statesmen. Be this as it may, the French Revolution, searching Irish institutions to the very core, proved how errors of policy and faults of the British and Irish Governments prevented reforms which might, conceivably, have averted the disastrous events that followed. Rebellion, however, began to lift its head; a revolutionary movement to combine Irishmen in a league against England, the common enemy, and to stir up anarchical strife, was crossed and baffled by another movement, characteristic of the ill-feeling of the past; and the end was a horrible war of race and religion. For much that was done in 1798, Clare and the men at the Castle are to be severely blamed; but their position, we must recollect, was difficult in the extreme; and if they forced civil war to come to a head, they certainly prevented a worse catastrophe. As affairs stood when the rebellion had ended, a union had become a necessity of state, in the interest of Ireland and of Great Britain alike; but Pitt managed the settlement badly; and the Union was an ill-designed measure, carried by sinister means through the Irish Parliament, and accompanied by an act of wrong to Catholic Ireland, of which the results were long felt. Still Pitt must not be too harshly judged; in the existing state of the world he was bound to accomplish a union at almost any risk or cost.

Ireland entered into a union with England under unhappy conditions, and at an inauspicious time. The Catholic question was one of pressing importance, and, if unsettled, certain to cause trouble; the country required other reforms, the necessity of which had begun to be seen by some of the best men in the Irish Parliament. Ireland was in want of a strong but progressive government; but she had been united with Great Britain at the very time when the conflict with France was soon to become one of life and death; when all hopes of changes in the state seemed gone; when reactionary ideas had immense force; when unbending Toryism was supreme, nay absolute. And the reforms she needed were, in some instances, in direct conflict with British ideas; in others, were little understood by British statesmen; and Ireland was to be ruled by a Parliament that knew her not, and by politicians well meaning, indeed, but often ill-informed and without sympathy; it being doubtful, too, if in the peculiar state of her representation, she would possess sufficient influence of her own. The prosperity of Ireland had been largely destroyed; the land had been devastated by civil war; the dregs of rebellion lingered; animosities of race and faith had been fearfully revived; and the island was behind England in cultivation and wealth. These circumstances alone made it no easy task to govern Ireland well in an imperial Parliament, and by ministers dependent on it. If the Union was a necessity of the time; if, on the whole, it was to effect good, it was to be seen that it was not an unmixed blessing, and that it was to be accompanied, at least, with some real evils.

This ends our series of passages on Ireland Joined to United Kingdom by William O’Connor Morris from his book Ireland 1494-1898 published in 1898. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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