patriot and patriotism

patriot and patriotism. Patriotism, in an Irish context, generally refers to the new awareness of Irishness, and commitment to the defence of Irish interests, that emerged among Protestants during the 18th century. Some sense of Irish identity had existed among settlers or their descendants since the Middle Ages (see National Identities in Early and Medieval Ireland). Ireland's constitutional status as a separate kingdom had been defended by both Old English and New English opponents of Wentworth 1640–1, and was reaffirmed by the convention of 1660. The revolution of 1688, however, enhanced the status of the Irish parliament and encouraged novel constitutional aspirations, while Protestant selfconfidence grew with the final defeat of Catholic political power in the Williamite War. The revolution also made Ireland's long‐standing political subordination to England less tolerable because it was no longer mediated through the personal rule of a shared monarch. In particular, Irish Protestants resented the restrictions on Irish trade imposed by the Cattle Acts, the Woollen Act, and other measures, the subordinate status of the Irish parliament under Poynings's Law and the Declaratory Act, and the large numbers of Englishmen being appointed to desirable positions in the Irish civil, military, and ecclesiastical establishments.

In response to these grievances patriots argued that Ireland, though a possession of the British crown, was a separate kingdom, to be governed solely according to its own laws and institutions. Such ideas were first systematically outlined by Molyneux, with later contributions by Swift, Lucas, and others. Popular patriot sentiment was evident in the Wood's Halfpence affair (1722–5) and in the money bill dispute (1753–6). By the 1770s a patriot grouping had emerged in the Irish parliament, its members including Flood and Grattan in the Commons and Charlemont in the Lords. Between 1779 and 1782 the American Revolution, the Volunteer movement, and the free trade agitation provided the opportunity to mobilize public opinion, achieving commercial freedom and apparently extensive constitutional concessions (see legislative independence).

The patriot identity that thus emerged was complex and in some ways contradictory. Early patriot argument relied heavily on the claim that Irish Protestants, the descendants of Tudor and Stuart settlers, retained the inherited constitutional rights of Englishmen. Even as patriotism became more assertively Irish, moreover, the ‘nation’ to which it appealed remained a distinctively Protestant one. Some individual patriots, like Grattan, favoured Catholic relief, but others, like Flood, were strongly opposed. It is this sectional nature of patriot identity that is highlighted in the frequent use of the term ‘colonial nationalism’. Leerssen, in an alternative formulation, emphasizes the specific 18th‐century meaning of patriotism, as an attachment to a particular political community—not necessarily a nation—and its institutions. Yet patriot argument, as early as Molyneux's Case of Ireland, also based its constitutional claims on historical rights supposedly inherited from the Gaelic Ireland of the Middle Ages. By the end of the 18th century, moreover, a growing enthusiasm for Gaelic literature and antiquities, seen for example in the establishment of the Royal Irish Academy with the Volunteer earl of Charlemont as its first president, had given patriotism a cultural and historical dimension that brought it closer to modern nationalism.

Although Protestant opposition to the Act of Union testified to the continued strength of patriot sentiment, the passage of the act reflected the extent to which the robust assertiveness of the ‘Protestant nation’ had been undermined by the crisis culminating in the insurrection of 1798. The survival into the 19th century of a version of the patriot tradition can nevertheless be seen in the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s and in the initial support of some Protestants for the home rule movement of the 1870s, with the career of Charles Stewart Parnell as a last, if atypical, flourish.

Bibliography

Leerssen, J. T. , ‘Anglo‐Irish Patriotism and its European Context’, Eighteenth‐Century Ireland, 3 (1988)
Vance, Norman , ‘Celts, Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo‐Irish Literary Relations 1780–1820’, Irish Historical Studies, 22 (1981)