THE ULSTERCONFUCT to the ve~ted interests in England which were principally responsible for the legislation restricting Irish economic develompment. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the parliament was fairly corrupt, particularly in the way that if allowed Ireland to be used as a source of revenue for political bribery in England. In 1720 the English parliament passed legislation which reaffirmed its ultimate authority over the Irish legislature and this aroused a storm of opposition among the Irish middle classes. Anti-English feeling took root and during economic crises in the 1720s the theory took firm hold that England was responsible (particularly by the Woolen Act of 1699) for Ireland's economic trouble. Failures of the grain harvest led to the belief that insufficient land was being tilled as comparet with being used to pasture cattle, and that this too was the fault of English economic oppression. Whether this retrospective analysis was correct is open to doubt, but the fact remains that a general opinion grew up among the Protestant and Presbyterin middle class that the Irish parliament was a corrupt tool of English policy holding up Irish development. The Presbyterians had two reactions to this parliament. On the one hand they began to emigrate to America in large numbers: the effect of this was to proportionately strengthen the Anglican ascendancy in Ireland, but also to increase radical agitation in England's American colonies which laboured under the same penal trade laws. The other reaction was to stay in Ireland and agitate for the independence and political reform of the Parliament to make it a genuine representative assembly, and for the removal of civil and religious disabilities from Protestant dissenters, and later in the century from Catholics. (The fear of Catholicism waned in conjunction with the waning of the Catholic Church's power on the Continent during the 18th century « enlightenment » ). The connection between the Irish Presbyterian radicals in America and the Presbyterian middle class remaining in Ulster led, in the last third of the 18th century, to a liberal movement of Protestant nationalism. This movement, largely middle class in origin but supported by a liberal element in the Anglican nobility and gentry spread throughout Ireland. When the American colonists decided to fight England for their independence in 1776 and enrolled French support, the Presbyterian radicals saw their opportunity. They took control of the Irish Volunteers, a citizen army raised to resist possible 65 5
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