Irish Patriot Party
They were primarily supportive of Whig concepts of personal liberty combined with an Irish identity that rejected full independence, but advocated strong self-government within the British Empire.
In 1689 a short-lived "Patriot Parliament" had sat in Dublin before James II, and briefly obtained de facto legislative independence, while ultimately subject to the English monarchy.
Swift's "Drapier's Letters" and earlier works by Domville, Molyneaux and Lucas are seen as precursors, deploring the undue control exercised by the British establishment over the Irish political system.
The "Money Bill dispute" of 1753–56 arose from the refusal of Henry Boyle, an MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland, to allow an Irish revenue surplus to be paid over to London.
Supported by the Earl of Kildare and Thomas Carter, Boyle was dismissed by the viceroy Dorset, and then appealed to public opinion as a defender of Irish interests.
The philosophy was that their legal and trading benefits, and personal freedoms of being of English origin derived from the Magna Carta, and more so the Bill of Rights that arose from the 1688 Glorious Revolution, were absent for those living in Ireland.
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.
The entire kingdom took up arms, regiments were formed in every quarter, the highest, the lowest, and the middle orders, all entered the ranks of freedom, and every corporation, whether civil or military, pledged life and fortune to attain and establish Irish independence."
The reformist Patriots struggled in the following years to gain anything approaching a majority on social reform issues in the Irish House of Commons, but in 1793 another Catholic Relief Act was passed.
The growth of the radical United Irish movement from 1791 upstaged Grattan by calling for a complete break with Britain and full emancipation for all religions in a new republic.
In 1795, the London government-sponsored reforms, to head off trouble, by repealing the Hearth tax and funding a Catholic seminary in the form of St Patrick's College, Maynooth.
The Rebellion, which had been launched in coordination 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".
