Union, Act of

Union, Act of (1800), in fact two identical measures passed in 1800 by the British and Irish parliaments. These created, with effect from 1 January 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Negotiated by Cornwallis and Castlereagh, under the supervision of the prime minister, William Pitt, the Union provided that Ireland should be represented in the House of Lords by four bishops and 28 representative peers, and in the Commons by 100 MPs. Initially each country retained its own financial system and national debt, with Ireland meeting two‐seventeenths of future expenditure. The two exchequers were united in 1817 and Irish and British taxation gradually brought into line. Protective duties on a range of manufactured goods entering Ireland were maintained at a reduced level until 1824.

The immediate occasion for the Union was the insurrection of 1798, seen as confirming the need for direct control of a neighbouring dependency whose instability had become a serious threat. But there had been concern, ever since 1782, at the fragility of the Anglo‐Irish connection in the wake of legislative independence. Opponents of the measure included not only the existing Whig opposition and threatened commercial interests, particularly in the city of Dublin, but also prominent former supporters of government, such as John Foster. These last were motivated partly by patriot sentiment but also by the fear that direct rule from London could not be trusted to maintain Protestant supremacy. Politically conscious Catholics, by contrast, generally supported the Union, in the belief, encouraged by government, that it would be followed by rapid progress towards full Catholic emancipation.

On 24 January 1799 the Irish Commons voted III to 106 to remove from an address to the lord lieutenant a reference to possible union. But when parliament reassembled in January 1800 there was a comfortable pro‐union majority. In the interval Cornwallis and Castlereagh had dismissed prominent anti‐unionists like Foster, while luring potential supporters with office or the promise of future favours. They also undertook to compensate patrons of boroughs for the loss of electoral influence. Nationalist historians and polemicists were later to claim that the Union had been imposed by bribery. Modern accounts suggest that the exchange of patronage for parliamentary support remained within the limits of 18th‐century convention, and emphasize the extent to which both sides engaged, through pamphleteering, petitions, and public meetings, in a competition for public opinion as well as parliamentary votes.

The Union did not succeed in making Ireland part of a unitary British state. There were suggestions, in 1800 and at intervals thereafter, that the Union had made a separate Irish executive unnecessary. But in practice Ireland's physical separateness and size (a population in 1800 half that of England, Scotland, and Wales), as well as its problems of political disaffection, religious conflict, and economic underdevelopment, ensured that day‐to‐day government continued to be conducted from Dublin Castle, under the direction of a lord lieutenant and chief secretary. During the 19th century government came to be characterized by a high level of state intervention, in education (see schools), public health (see Hospitals), and economic development, and by a degree of central control, which further highlighted Ireland's separateness from the rest of the United Kingdom.

Protestant opponents fairly quickly came to terms with the Union. The appearance from the 1820s of a politically mobilized Catholic electorate confirmed most in a belief that Ireland's continued membership of the United Kingdom represented their only security. Catholic enthusiasm for the measure, on the other hand, diminished when the declared hostility of King George III led Pitt to abandon plans for emancipation. Perceptions of the Union were also strongly influenced by the contrast between the prosperity that had apparently accompanied legislative independence and the industrial decline that followed the abolition of tariffs in 1824. In the 1840s O'Connell built up a formidable mass agitation in support of repeal. The 1850s and 1860, however, saw a fuller, though still incomplete, incorporation of Ireland into the politics of the United Kingdom, and it was arguably not until the rise of the home rule movement in the 1870s that it became clear that the Union had irrevocably failed to provide a generally accepted framework for Anglo‐Irish relations.

Bibliography

Bolton, G. C. , The Passing of the Irish Act of Union (1966)