by Stephen Fife-Adams

Created on: December 22, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

When the British Parliament created the United Kingdom with the Act of Union of 1800, formally conjoining Ireland and Great Britain after several centuries of colonialism and nominal Irish home rule, the British had high hopes that the union would bring the obstreperous Irish to heel as faithful and dutiful participants in the burgeoning empire. Yet for the great majority of the Irish population, the union had little effect other than to bind them ever more tightly to a nation that exploited their land and labor while refusing them its liberties and opportunities. Nearly three decades later, the passage of Catholic Emancipation, which allowed Catholics to participate more or less fully in British civil society for the first time in nearly three centuries, once again seemed to hold out the possibility of reconciling the two nations. Yet this measure, coming too late and offering too little, likewise did little to improve relations. A study of key documents suggests that British policies toward Ireland during the period from 1800 to the mid-1830s failed because they were fundamentally anti-Irish and frankly exploitative, forcing most of the Irish populace into desperate economic circumstances. Because the British could never bring themselves to address the most serious concerns of the Irish people or to look beyond their own immediate comfort and security, many Irish came to the conclusion that the only hope for their own interests lay in devolution.

As with the Act of Union that had wedded England and Scotland nearly a century earlier, the Act of Union of 1800 was first and foremost an effort to remove an external threat from Britain's borders. Ireland had presented a continual liability to Britain's security since the age of the Tudors, which saw the establishment of the first English plantations and the first efforts to exert Protestant control over a passionately Catholic island. Irish Catholics had sided with the Catholic Stuart kings throughout the Seventeenth Century and had supported the Jacobite uprising of 1745. But the rebellion in 1798 of Theobald Wolfe Tone and his radical republican separatist group, the United Irishmen, had introduced two new elements into the long-simmering conflict that for Britain were untenable: first, Wolfe Tone's call for complete independence from Britain, and second, the arrival, by Wolfe Tone's request, of enemy French troops on Irish soil. These were the national security considerations that prompted action by Parliament

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