THE ULSTER CONFLICT of a break between that class and the Catholic Church which opened up the possibility of the Catholic population as a whole coming back into political life under liberal democratic influence. At first the Society of United Irishmen won wide support among the two middle classes and it constituted one of the levers which brought about the Catholic Relief Act of 1793. This legislation gave Catholics a parliamentary vote on the same terms as the Protestants (the « Forty-shilling freeholder franchise») but still did not allow them to sit in parliament. This, however, was the limit of success of the United Irishmen's legal assault on the power of the Anglican (increasingly Anglo-Irish) landlord class. From now on the movement diverged on how to rid itself of the yoke of that class: one section decided that the way forward lay in armed rebellion (with aid from the French); another section based in Belfast, decided that this strategy was increasingly unrealistic and that the best prospect lay in union with Britain which would automatically eliminate the Irish parliament and bring Ireland under the influence of more liberal British legislation. This ferment of radical ideas had not permeated the lower classes who had not been sharing, to any thing like the same extent, in the gradual improvement in Ireland's economy and were always the first to suffer in times of dearth. In the border counties of Ulster there was a history of strife between Protestant and Catholic peasants over the allocation of tenancies. In the 1760s and 1770s the Ulster peasantry organized secret societies know as Oakboys and Steelboys which protested against the leasing of land to Catholics, but directed their energies primarily against the landlords, as did the contemporary catholic secret society in Munster known as the Whiteboys. In both provinces the landlord-magistrate system of justice was paralysed by secret society terrorism. A generation later new disturbances broke out in Ulster when the Protestant peasantry began daybreak raids to disarm Catholic peasants who had acquired arms from the disbanded Irish Volunteers. This acq1:1isitionof arms by the lower classes gave a serious character to the ritual clash of mobs at fairs and cock fights, but these clashes were not necessarily along religious lines. The Presbyterian clergy and middle class radicals, in fact, tried to prevent the growth of distinct Protestant or Catholic bands, but the Protestant peasantry, who had acquired a consciousness of superiority over the Catholic over the many years that the Catholics had laboured under the penal laws 67
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