Irish Patriot Party
The Irish Patriot Party was the name of a number of different political groupings in Ireland throughout the 18th century. 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.
Irish Patriot Party
Due to the discriminatory penal laws, the Irish Parliament at the time was exclusively Anglican Protestant. Their main achievement was the Constitution of 1782, which gave Ireland legislative independence.
Early Irish Patriots[edit]
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. The parliament's membership mostly consisted of land-owning Roman Catholic Jacobites who lost the ensuing War of the Grand Alliance in 1689–91.
The name was then used from the 1720s to describe Irish supporters of the British Whig party, specifically the Patriot faction within it. 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. In contrast with the 1689 parliament, this movement consisted of middle-class Protestants. The appointed senior political and church officials were usually English-born.
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. In 1755 the next viceroy arranged a favourable compromise, and Boyle was re-instated and created Earl of Shannon.[1]
It was also used to describe Irish allies of the Patriot Whigs of William Pitt the Elder in the 1750s and 1760s. 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. The Dependency Act of 1719 was considered particularly contentious.
Act of Union[edit]
Following the Act of Union 1800, the Irish Parliament was abolished. A few Irish Patriots took up seats in the new unified British House of Commons in London, under the notional leadership of Grattan. Within a few years, they had become almost entirely submerged within the British Whig Party, with whom they were allied, and disappeared from the political landscape.
Legacy[edit]
Grattan's advocacy of liberal-minded moderate Irish nationalist self-rule with links to Britain had a resonance over the following century. It was taken up by Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association in the 1830s that intended to repeal the Act of Union; by the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s; and later by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) that campaigned for the restoration of Home Rule in Ireland. The IPP and its successors dominated the political scene in Ireland for decades until its defeat by the fully secessionist Sinn Féin movement in the 1918 general election.