In 1814 John Giffard made an extraordinary retrospective claim about irish loyalism. He equated Orangeism's spread from Ulster to the rest of Ireland in 1797–8 with the fact that Dublin Protestants had an already extant model, having previously ‘observed the advantages which London derived from Mr. Reeves's association at the Crown and Anchor.’ Made as the French wars neared their end, Giffard's implication that Irish loyalists became ‘the Brethren of Britons’ at their commencement begs questions about the role of counter-revolutionary loyalism in shaping Protestant identity during the tumultuous years which saw two wars with France, two rebellions in Ireland and the Act of Union.

Though the contemporary parliamentary context of Orangeism facing hostile scrutiny certainly gave motives for Giffard to stress its Britishness, we should not underestimate genuine ideological imperatives. Contemporaneously satirised as ‘the Dog in Office’, Giffard's wider significance has only recently been recognised. Professor Hill identifies him with iconic figures like Musgrave and Duigenan, as central to the ‘ultra-Protestant’ grouping which emerged after 1801, all passionately committed to union with Britain and the Erastian church-state link, and utterly opposed to emancipation. Epitomising the fragmentation of the earlier broad patriotic consensus, Giffard was once an anti-government patriot who shifted political ground in 1788 when he assumed editorship of the Dublin Journal and was even rumoured to have coined the term ‘Protestant ascendancy’. Contemporary radicals and some historians have suggested he had a role in the origins of the Orange Order.