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To contemporaries Ireland's contribution to Britain's security and wealth was of the utmost importance. Effective British control was therefore deemed to be essential. This control was seriously threatened in the last years of the American War when the Irish parliament, backed by a large movement of armed Volunteers, forced Britain to concede that its parliament had no authority over Ireland. Irish gains turned out, however to be limited. Britain still controlled the executive government of Ireland which was usually able to dominate a parliament elected by very few voters. Attempts to widen the Irish electorate, which were part of widespread movements of discontent, were defeated. In resisting popular turbulence the British regime increasingly identified itself with the maintaining the dominance of Irish Protestants over the Catholic majority of the population.

This chapter examines the contribution of Isaac Butt in the agitation for Irish self-government in 1870. Butt proposed not only the dismantling of the United Kingdom but its federalisation, with England, Scotland, and Ireland having local parliaments subordinate to Westminster. He also envisaged the Irish parliament having a house of lords with veto powers. Though the home rule of 1874 failed, it was a considerable achievement for Butt because it was particularly important in keeping the land question alive. The chapter discusses the split of the home rule party in parliament during the 1877 political campaign, and describes the conflict between Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell.

Chapter 4 charts the development of English state finance and policy towards Ireland during the first English Civil War. Following the outbreak of formal hostilities in England, the Adventurers seized control over parliament’s financial and military committees, using a network centred on Grocers’ Hall. The role of Grocers’ Hall is highlighted by demonstrating the process by which the functions of parliament’s Committee for Irish Affairs were transferred to it, leaving the Adventurers in command of parliament’s policy for Ireland. The Adventurers sent a naval task force to attack royalist targets in Ireland before the outbreak of war in England and worked to undermine Charles’ attempts to broker a ceasefire with the Irish rebels.

Clandestine marriages presented a problem for the Irish elite, and, in a bid to protect their property interests, this led the Irish parliament to introduce statutory measures to intervene in the previously private act of marriage. This chapter explores this unprecedented intervention in the marriage contract, which declared some marriages legally invalid, within the context of the development of statute law on marriage in the seventeenth century in Ireland. The problems of coverture, from the perspective of the Irish political elite, were the impact it had on the protection of protestant property interests. This is illustrated by the problem of the abduction of heiresses in Ireland. In the history of abduction, women feature as victims of their gender and legal status. The reputations, and sometimes the lives, of propertied women were endangered by the opportunism of socially and economically marginalised lower gentry, who regarded abduction, although illegal and often violent, as ‘strategies through which property could be gained’.

This chapter deals with the United Irish movement. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, long-term grievances over the domination of the Irish parliament by the Imperial government, and the subsidiary status of Ireland's economy to that of Britain, led to a movement for reform. These so called ‘patriots’ sought to take advantage of the climate of fear created in Whitehall by the events in America to obtain the lifting of trade restrictions and legislative independence for the Irish parliament. These dual objectives were achieved in 1779 and 1782 respectively. Yet the executive branch of the Irish government remained responsible to the Imperial cabinet. The Reform Act of 1782 failed to address the aspirations of the Protestant middle classes, which largely remained excluded from the political process. By the second half of the eighteenth century, middle-class resentment, particularly amongst the Presbyterians of Ulster, centred on the continued denial of political participation.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Irish question, and specifically, the governance of Ireland. Throughout the early nineteenth century, Americans of different political persuasions believed that Ireland would eventually achieve some form of national independence. This is because the proponents of Irish self-governance to back up their argument cite the prior existence of an Irish Parliament that had been bribed out of existence at the turn of the nineteenth century under a fraudulent Act of Union. They also identify widely-known figures, such as Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan, to support the contention that Ireland produced statesmen of substance who might populate another Irish Parliament to good effect. Moreover, observers of Anglo-Irish relations drew on Revolutionary-era connections between Ireland and colonial America to suggest a deep-rooted affinity between two provinces subject to the dictates of the London metropole.

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the divergent histories and symbolic associations of the neoclassical Stormont and General Post Office buildings, in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Completed in 1932, the Northern Irish Parliament buildings at Stormont were constructed as a bastion of unionism, designed according to the imperial neoclassical vision of Sir Arnold Thornely, but influenced by the idiosyncratic ideas of Sir James Craig, who is also buried on site in a manner analogous to classicizing hero cult. The General Post Office in Dublin, by contrast, although a colonial building in its 1818 origin, has become one of the most iconic representations of Irish independence as the headquarters of the 1916 Rising. Despite being bombed by British forces during the Rising, it has since been restored and divested of its colonial symbolism.