Ivar McGrath

... all of these histories should be emphasised, providing, as they do, some account of all of the counties, county boroughs and borough constituencies, as ... Three more of the subscribers to a bank and the 1729 loan, Thomas Staunton, Thomas Napper and the private banker Daniel ...

Traditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their en...

The history of Poynings’ Law is complex and multifaceted. Much has been written about it, at times with the end result being a recognition that to investigate Poynings’ Law is to venture into a quagmire. At the same time, a number of important works have been published over the years that throw light upon specific periods in the history of that law. Until recently much of the focus has been on the period stretching from the passage of the law in 1494-5 up to 1641, with some significant excursions into the eighteenth-century history of the law.

The festschrift is an unwieldy format, stretching for intellectual coherence and, as individual contributors strike out in different directions, not always achieving it. But People, Politics and Power, a volume of essays in honour of James I. McGuire, is no omnium gatherum. McGuire has written for the most part on late Stuart Irish politics, parliaments and religion, and four (or five, if James Quinn’s concluding piece on the nineteenth-century nationalist Thomas Davis and ‘the patriot parliament’ of 1689 is counted) of the book’s ten essays deal with that period. Two others explore legal history – McGuire served as President of the Irish Legal History Society – while the later eighteenthand early nineteenth-century topics covered here – parliamentary divorce bills, Catholic disaffection, the Church of Ireland, and the act of union sit comfortably with the earlier themes. This collection coheres. Although the standard form of the festschrift, in McGuire’s case the volume of essays is a particularly apt salute. Beginning in 1973 with ‘Why was Ormond Dismissed in 1669?’ in Irish Historical Studies (a journal he would subsequently edit) the well-made, deeply researched, compact and incisive essay has been his genre of choice, and one in which he excels. The first contribution, John McCafferty’s ‘John Bramhall’s Second Irish Career, 1660–3’, pithy and concentrated, emulates McGuire’s virtues as an historical essayist, and refines our understanding of the early Restoration Church of Ireland. With the mass consecration of bishops in Christchurch cathedral in January 1661, followed a few months later by the mass expulsions from their livings of Presbyterian ministers in Ulster, the re-establishment of the Church in Ireland moved more swiftly and decisively in Ireland than in England. As archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, the old Laudian, Bramhall, it seemed, had got his way. But, as in England, as McCafferty shows, it was not as simple as that. Issues of jurisdiction, revenue entitlement, and title to land remained unresolved at his death. There could be no return to the status quo ante of the 1630s. The juxtapositioning of the next two essays, on Catholic lawyers, by Hazel Maynard, and on Outlaws, by Éamonn Ó Ciardha, nicely illustrates the range of Catholic experience in Restoration Ireland. Yet perhaps these groups were not so far apart as they appear. The experience of dispossession was central to both and both, staunch Stuart loyalists, surged under the late King James’s government. The careful scholarship and sharp focus of Charles Ivar McGrath’s ‘Alan Broderick and the Speakership of the Irish House of Commons, 1703–4’ is the essay which comes closest to the McGuire style. Detailed reconstructions of high political manoeuvre practically invite Namierite conclusions. The pursuit of office in such analyses sucks the ideology out of politics, but McGrath does allow that the ‘primary justification’ for Brodrick’s actions was what he considered, according to his own lights,

The origin and the purpose of the Irish penal laws have always been subjects of contention. These laws have often been viewed as a ‘rag-bag’ of legislation, lacking in government policy, without precedent or forethought, motivated by rapacity, unfavoured in England and yet tolerated in return for concessions by an Irish parliament greedy for Catholic land and wealth. However, in the context of the first two Irish penal laws of 1695, and most specifically the disarming act, this generality does not hold good. It is the aim of this article to show that the two penal laws of 1695, for disarming Catholics and prohibiting foreign education, were the result of a definite policy which existed in Ireland from the time of the Williamite war. This policy was built upon a previous tradition of English statutes and Irish proclamations. The pressure for this policy came not only from Irish Protestants, but also from English ministers and from the crown. And the prime motive was security of the P...

This chapter examines the process by which the principal of the Irish national debt was increased fourfold in 1729–1730 and the evolution in Irish taxation policy which accompanied that occurrence. It also assesses wider attitudes at the time towards parliamentary taxation and a national debt and the proposal for increasing it and offers a detailed analysis of the political and parliamentary activities relating to the increase in the debt, including the adoption of the concept of direct appropriation of taxation for debt repayment, and the emergence of the idea for establishing a sinking fund. Such considerations also take into account the wider economic conditions of the time and their impact upon public and political opinion. Ultimately, the chapter highlights how the actions of the Irish Parliament in relation to taxation and the national debt in the late 1720s and early 1730s represented a key moment in the evolution of fiscal policy and structures in Ireland and the extent to which public or more specifically Patriot opinion and wider political and economic considerations impacted upon that process.

Preface Part I: Contexts 1 Contexts 2 Religion 3 Politics Part II: Manpower 4 Barracks for a Standing Army 5 A Standing Army for Ireland 6 An Army for Empire Part III: Finance 7 Income, Expenditure and Taxation 8 The National Debt 9 The Public Creditors Conclusion

This dissertation is an examination of the Irish revenue system in the reign of William III, concentrating on the extent to which the period witnessed the development of a modem, professional system, and the forces that shaped that change. The work is divided into an introduction, nine chapters, a conclusion, and five appendices. Chapter one focuses on the establishment of a Williamite revenue administration during the Irish war, 1689-91, and the extent to which that administration maintained or altered the existing Jacobite administration. Chapter two details the different revenue branches in Ireland, their origins and legislative foundations, and the comparisons with the English revenue branches. Chapter three examines revenue yield and expenditure, and the extent to which the increased costs of government in the aftermath of the war necessitated an expansion of the revenue sources. Chapter four provides an assessment of the role of the English government in the Irish revenue esta...

Jonathan Swift made a name for himself in England in the years 1710-14 taking issue in print with, among other things, Standing Armies, the British National Debt and Westminster MPs who seemed too willing to vote new taxes at the behest of the Whitehall government. After more than a decade of silence on such subjects, Swift re-visited them in the late 1720s and early 1730s in relation to Ireland as part of his more general expression of anger at what was, in his eyes, fundamentally wrong with Hanoverian government in the British Isles. This article assesses his reasons for doing so, commencing with a detailed consideration of the 1728 Poem, 'The Grand Question debated: Whether Hamilton's Bawn should be turned into a Barracks or a Malt-House'. It then proceeds to examine in a series of other works by Swift up to 1733 the key emerging themes of government patronage of MPs in return for the voting of additional taxation and increases to the national debt and the expenditure of that increased income on the military, in particular for the building of a country-wide network of army barracks in Ireland. In so doing the article looks to address the place of such matters in Ireland, and how they help us better understand the nature of Irish society at that time.

This article examines the connection between issues of security, finance and the army in Ireland in the years 1714–16. The death of Queen Anne and succession of the first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in August 1714, offered renewed hope to the supporters of the jacobite cause in Ireland, Scotland, England and beyond. However, the threat of a Stuart restoration by force of arms served to galvanise the efforts of government in both England and Ireland in support of the Hanoverian succession, though the necessary military preparations and precautions resulted in increased public expenditure. In Ireland, the government's need to find new sources of revenue meant that parliament would have to be convened, which, in turn, necessitated compliance with a series of constitutional practices which had evolved since the 1690s in relation to Poynings' Law and supply legislation. Yet, despite a threatened jacobite invasion, factional political manœuvring, as ever, demanded compromise, though, ultimately, the wholly protestant Irish parliament took the necessary precautions to secure Ireland for the new Hanoverian regime by voting new taxes and facilitating the creation of a national debt in order to raise new regiments for the army. The coalescing of the issues of security, finance and the army thereby led to innovations in Irish parliamentary and financial practice which were to become key components of the constitutional framework in Ireland until legislative independence in 1782.