220 Chapter X
Anglican monopoly, had anything to do with the government. It was a time of
prosperity for the manufacturing, trading, and landowning classes. The slow pro-
cess of integrating the Catholics into the community went gradually on. Catholics
were permitted to buy land in 1782. The strictly penal code against them was fi-
nally liquidated, though still with hesitation; for example, the movement to allow a
Catholic college in Ireland was defeated, and Catholics desiring higher education
for their children continued to send them to France or Belgium. Nor could any
Catholic vote for a member of Parliament until England was again at war, in 1793.
The era of Grattan’s Parliament was in fact one of increasing frustration. Even
the Irish Whigs found parliamentary autonomy disappointing. The Lord Lieuten-
ant, an Englishman, still reigned as viceroy at the Castle. He received his instruc-
tions from London, and his job, as before, was to get the Irish Parliament to con-
form to policies set in Great Britain. He had the same means of influence at his
disposal. There was less of cabinet responsibility in Ireland than even in England,
where it was embryonic; the doctrine of King, Lords, and Commons, of separate
and equal status of executive and legislative, applied to Ireland with full force. Nor
did abolition of the trade controls bring satisfaction, for Britain continued in the
old habit of considering Ireland strategically joined to it but economically foreign.
With really foreign countries the Irish now could trade without impediment from
Britain, and they now had commercial access to the British colonies, but these in-
cluded only the establishments in America and West Africa. That inescapable
Mother of Parliaments, sitting at Westminster, continued to forbid Irish trade in
the area of the East India Company charter, the whole region from the Cape of
Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan, and it also imposed high import
duties on Irish goods coming into Great Britain. Irish printed linens entering Brit-
ain paid a 65 per cent duty; British printed linens entering Ireland paid only 10 per
cent. The same disparities applied to many other products. Demands for an Irish
protective tariff collapsed under the fear of British retaliation. Demands for an
equalization of duties, which Pitt supported when he became Minister, were aban-
doned under the agonized outcries of British manufacturers. Manchester, just
launching into its famous industrial revolution, and not yet converted to free trade,
sent in a petition with 55,000 signatures against any tariff concessions to the Irish.^3
Nor did Grattan’s Parliament satisfy anyone slightly tinged with democracy. It
was the same old Irish Parliament, more independent than ever. It is not necessary
to take an Irish nationalist view of the matter. So moderate an observer as the
diplomat Harold Nicolson, in his life of his great- great- grandfather, the United
Irishman, Hamilton Rowan, observes that Grattan’s Parliament was nothing but
the Anglo- Irish vested interest more or less emancipated from higher control.^4 It
was the ascendancy governing the natives and the dissenters.
The Volunteers refused to disband. They persisted in their armed deliberations,
now urging reform of the electoral machinery of the Irish Commons. There were
henceforth two discernible currents in the program of electoral reform. One pro-
3 The petition was printed in the Annual Register, 1784–1785, 362–64. See also O’Brien, op.cit.
4 H. Nicolson, The Desire to Please: a Story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen (London
and New York), 1943, 66.