DAVE MANS6LL French invasion of Ireland during the American war, and used it as a political threat to the seriously over-stretched English government to force it to remove discrimination against Irish trade in 1779. Three years later the Irish Volunteers were instrumental in forcing the English government to grant the Dublin parliament the right to make its own laws for Ireland. This inaugurated a twenty-year period of Home Rule which, linked with the increasing prosperity unleashed by the combination of the increasing trading and industrial capacity of the Presbyterian community and the removal of the penal trade laws, was to be turned by the nineteenth century Home Rule movement into a symbolic « golden age». The Home Rulers (who have their descendants today in the proponents of a 32-county Irish Socialist Republic) insisted, however, that the prosperity was due to the establishment of the independent Irish parliament, whereas the inverse of this was probably the case. The Presbyterian middle class centered mainly in and around Belfast, who had supplied the backbone of the Volunteers would not have agreed with the Home Rulers' analysis: they could plainly see that the Parliament was still unreformed and was the stronghold of the Anglican landowners whose power they needed to break to further their own development. To do this they were, under the influence of ideas emanating from the French Revolution at the beginning of the 1790s, prepared to fight for an independent bourgeois republic, and to enlist the aid of the small Catholic middle class which had emerged during tre 18th century to achieve this end. SECRETSOCIETIESAND TERRORISM The Society of United Irishmen was formed at Belfast in October 1791 by the mainly Presbyterian middle-class radicals, under the impulsion of a young Dublin Protestant (a descendant of one of Cromwell's soldiers) Theobald Wolfe Tone. Tone's programme was « to unite the whole people of Ireland. To abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of protestant, catholic and dissenter». Despite these high-flown sentiments Tone retained the ambivalent Protestant attitude to the Catholics. In his Journal for September 29, 1792 ho wrote: « I believe if the Catholics were emancipated ... in a little while they would become like other people». The Belfast radicals as a whole were prepared to work with the nascent Catholis middle class because they could see signs 66
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