History of Ireland (1691–1800)
During this time, Ireland was nominally an autonomous Kingdom with its own Parliament; in actuality it was a client state controlled by the King of Great Britain and supervised by his cabinet in London.
In the wake of the wars of conquest of the 17th century, completely deforested of timber for export (usually for the Royal Navy) and for a temporary iron industry in the course of the 17th century, Irish estates turned to the export of salt beef, pork, butter, and hard cheese through the slaughterhouse and port city of Cork, which supplied England, the British navy and the sugar islands of the West Indies.
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne wondered "how a foreigner could possibly conceive that half the inhabitants are dying of hunger in a country so abundant in foodstuffs?"
In the 1740s, these economic inequalities, when combined with an exceptionally cold winter and poor harvest, led directly to the famine of 1740–1741, which killed about 400,000 people.
Methods used by the secret societies included the killing or maiming of livestock, tearing down of enclosure fences and occasionally violence against landlords, bailiffs and the militia.
In practice, the viceroys lived in England and the affairs in the island were largely controlled by an elite group of Irish Protestants known as "undertakers.
The king and his cabinet in London could not risk another revolution on the American model, so they made a series of concessions to the Patriot faction in Dublin.
Protestant pamphlets emphasized the positive aspects of the Glorious Revolution; liberty from absolutism, the preservation of property and a degree of electoral power.
In the early part of the 18th century, these Penal Laws were augmented and quite strictly enforced, as the Protestant elite were unsure of their position and threatened by the continued existence of Irish Catholic regiments in the French army committed to a restoration of the Jacobite dynasty.
However, after the demise of the Jacobite cause in Scotland at Culloden in 1746, and the Papacy's recognition of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1766, the threat to the Protestant Ascendancy eased and many Penal Laws were relaxed or lightly enforced.
This militia, up to 100,000 strong, was formed to defend Ireland from foreign invasion during the American Revolutionary War, but was outside of government control and staged armed demonstrations in favour of Grattan's reforming agenda.
For the "Patriots", as Grattan's followers were known, the "Constitution of 1782" was the start of a process that would end sectarian discrimination and usher in an era of prosperity and Irish self-government.
Corn laws were introduced in 1784 to give a bounty on flour shipped to Dublin; this promoted the spread of mills and tillage.
In 1791, a small group of Protestant radicals formed the Society of the United Irishmen in Belfast, initially to campaign for the end to religious discrimination and the widening of the right to vote.
In the words of Theobald Wolfe Tone, its goals were to "substitute the common name of Irishman for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter" and to "break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils".
The United Irishmen were banned after Revolutionary France in 1793 declared war on Britain and they developed from a political movement into a military organisation preparing for armed rebellion.
However, these measures did nothing to calm the situation in Ireland and these reforms were bitterly opposed by the "ultra-loyalist" Protestant hardliners such as John Foster.
The United Irishmen, now dedicated to armed revolution, forged links with the militant Catholic peasant society, the Defenders, who had been raiding farmhouses since 1792.
Thereafter, the government began a campaign of repression targeted against the United Irishmen, including executions, routine use of torture, transportation to penal colonies and house burnings.
County Wexford in the southeast then saw the most sustained fighting of the rebellion, to be briefly joined by rebels who took to the field in Antrim and Down in the north.
Being the largest outburst of violence in modern Ireland, 1798 looms heavily in collective memory and was commemorated extensively in its centennial and bicentennial anniversaries.
The British response was swift and harsh: days after the outbreak of the rebellion local forces publicly executed suspected United Irishmen in Dunlavin and Carnew.
[15] Government troops and militia targeted Catholics in general and the rebels on several occasions killed Protestant loyalist civilians.
In Ulster, the 1790s were marked by naked sectarian strife between Catholic Defenders and Protestant groups like the Peep O'Day Boys and the newly founded Orange Order.
Many Irish language poets clung to a romantic attachment to the Jacobite cause, although some wrote in praise of the United Irishmen in the 1790s.
By its close, the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy that had ruled the country for 100 years was beginning to be challenged by an increasingly assertive Catholic population, and was ended by the Acts of Union 1800 that created the United Kingdom from January 1801.
