REPUBLIC OF IRELAND

Republic Of Ireland



Republic Of Ireland

History

On 1 August 1800 an Act of Union was proposed to establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Union would bring an end to the Irish parliament and install Irish political representation at Westminster. Under the terms of the Union, Irish representation in congress would consist of four spiritual peers, 28 life peers, and 100 members of the House of Commons. Opposition to the Union was strong and came from a variety of groups. Many Irish Protestant landholders, including members of the Irish parliament, disapproved of the Union because they had spent enormous amounts of money purchasing their seats in the Irish House of Commons. Irish Catholics also voiced their grievances to the Union. Catholics in Ireland had been subjected to the penal laws from 1571, and to the penal code between 1695-1727, which prohibited Catholics from voting, sitting in Westminster, holding office, and buying or inheriting property from Protestants. The Act of Union in many ways symbolized their continued social and political exclusion. Both Viscount Castlereagh, the Irish chief secretary, and the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, believed that the Union would help prevent further rebellions in Ireland, such as that of 1798, In return for accepting the Act of Union, Catholics in Ireland were promised emancipation (the granting of intense political and civil liberties to Roman Catholics) by Pitt and Castlereagh. However, King George III disagreed with Pitt and Castlereagh's theory of Catholic emancipation and once the Act of Union was implemented on 1 January 1801, George III replaced Pitt with Henry Addington, a staunch Anglican, as prime minister. In 1823, Daniel O'Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil formed the Catholic Association. The organization campaigned for the repeal of the Act of Union, Catholic emancipation, the abolition of the Irish tithe system, universal suffrage and a secret ballot for parliamentary elections. With support from both the Duke of Wellington, the then British Prime Minister, the Catholic Association helped to establish the approval of the Emancipation Act in 1829, which allowed Irish and English Catholics to sit in Parliament and most government offices. However, despite O'Connell's creation of the powerful Repeal Association in 1839, which campaigned for the abolition of the Union, the Act of Union remained in office until 1921.

Society

The Great Famine, also known as the Potato Famine or the Great Hunger had profound socioeconomic effects upon Irish society during the latter half of the nineteenth century. During the period 1845-1851, it is estimated that over one million people died of starvation in Ireland, while a further one million emigrated to the United States of America or elsewhere. Deaths from starvation were aggravated by an epidemic of typhus, from which some 350,000 people died in the years 1846-47. The primary cause of the Great Famine was the failure of the potato crop, Ireland's most valuable agricultural output. One acre of potatoes could sustain large rural Irish families with a source of food for over one year in the nineteenth century. In 1845, potato blight destroyed almost one third of the potato crop in Ireland, aided by unusually cool, moist ...