The system of papal provision (the practice of providing clerks to benefices with or without cure) was one of the most controversial features of papal relations with the European monarchies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Secular rulers naturally wished to have some control in the matter of clerical appointment, particularly when the benefice concerned was a bishopric or a great abbey. During the Western schism of the fourteenth century kings and princes had made gains in certain matters both of jurisdiction and administration at the expense of the central authority of the church. The struggles between the papacy and the councils in the first half of the fifteenth century left the secular rulers favourably placed to consolidate these advantages, obtained in many cases either by concession or by arrogation, until the crisis of the Reformation.

In the midsummer of 1763 six of the nine counties of Ulster temporarily passed out of the control of the landed élite and into that of the Hearts of Oak. People gathered in their thousands across most of Ulster, with the exclusion of Counties Antrim, Donegal and most of Down, to protest at the levels of the taxes levied by the grand juries, the collection of small dues by the clergy of the established church and the compulsory six days’ labour on the roads. At the time one Dublin newspaper expressed its horror at this outbreak among the ‘loyal Protestants of the North of Ireland’ and warned that ‘our neighbours [might] be glad to make a handle out of this to our great prejudice and scandal, as they did about the Whiteboys last year’. Among many observers the belief was that these embarrassing disturbances by Ulster’s Protestants, particularly by the Presbyterians — who had long been seen as a difficult element — should quickly be put down and the insurrection regarded as an aberration.

The scale of subsequent events in late eighteenth-century Ulster made it easier to forget the Oakboy disturbances. They were neither as long-lasting as the Steelboy outrages, nor as violent as the later clashes between the Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders. In the early nineteenth century the narrators of rural unrest, Richard Musgrave and George Cornewall Lewis, believed the Hearts of Oak disturbances to be of little importance, while historians like Lecky saw all agrarian rioters as largely cut from the same apolitical cloth. This was to remain the perception until the late 1970s and 1980s and a series of groundbreaking articles, several of them resulting from the research of James S. Donnelly. These showed a fresh insight into eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish agrarian troubles, accompanied by a willingness to use theoretical models of unrest in pre-industrial societies and the responses of their legal systems.

When questioned by a parliamentary committee after the rebellion of 1798, the United Irish leader Thomas Addis Emmet predicted that ‘if a revolution ever takes place, a very different system of political economy will be established from what has hitherto prevailed here’. Was there any real substance to this claim? Did Emmet’s words indicate that the republican leadership genuinely sought a radical reshaping of society, or was he simply indulging in empty rhetoric that a broken United Irish movement could never make good?

It has always been difficult to pin down the United Irishmen’s socio-economic views: their pronouncements in this area were few and were generally couched in vague terms. This is hardly surprising. Given that the society’s membership was far from socially homogeneous, the leadership no doubt recognised the difficulties involved in trying to produce an agreed programme of social reform. In an organisation one of whose earliest rules had been ‘to attend to those things in which we agree, to exclude from our thoughts those in which we differ’, it was generally judged prudent to steer clear of such a potentially divisive subject. Moreover, the readiness with which the government instigated prosecutions of outspoken radicals, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1793, made advisable a degree of caution in any statements which could be construed as threatening the established social order. Nevertheless, the society did address the issue of social reform from time to time, and individual United Irishmen also espoused a variety of proposals. This article will attempt to examine some of the strands of United Irish social thinking and to determine if the movement had such a thing as a coherent programme of social reform.

John Kells Ingram was born in County Donegal in 1823. His ancestry was Scottish Presbyterian, but his grandparents had converted to Anglicanism. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, the most prestigious academic institution in nineteenth-century Ireland. In a brilliant academic career spanning over fifty years he proceeded to occupy a succession of chairs at the college. His published work included an important History of political economy (1888), and he delivered a significant presidential address to the economics and statistics section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1878). Ingram influenced, and was respected by, many contemporary social and economic thinkers in the British Isles and elsewhere. In an obituary one of Ingram’s friends exaggerated only slightly in describing him as ‘probably the best educated man in the world’.

Yet contemporary perspectives on Ingram’s career were warped by one act of his youth which was to create a curious disjunction in his life. In 1843, when only nineteen years old, Ingram was a sympathiser with the nationalist Young Ireland movement. One night, stirred by the lack of regard shown for the Irish rebels of 1798 by the contemporary O’Connellite nationalist movement, he wrote a poem entitled ‘The memory of the dead’, eulogising these ‘patriots’. Apparently without much thought, Ingram submitted the poem anonymously to the Nation newspaper. It appeared in print on 1 April 1843 and, better known by its first line, ‘Who fears to speak of ’Ninety-Eight?’, became a popular Irish nationalist anthem.

Arthur Chanel Clery appears in James Joyce’s Stephen Hero among the students at University College, Dublin, as a platitudinous timeserver called Whelan who criticises Stephen Dedalus’s views on Ibsen and wants to be a county court judge. Clery became a Gaelic Leaguer, defence lawyer for 1916 insurgents, Sinn Féin Supreme Court judge during the War of Independence, Republican envoy to the Vatican during the Civil War, and — briefly — an abstentionist T.D. He was also one of the few nationalists of his generation to advocate partition, not as a matter of political expediency, but because he regarded the Ulster Protestants as a separate nation entitled to self-determination. This article traces the development of his political attitudes from his youthful advocacy of Christian democracy in response to snobbery and anti-Catholic discrimination, to his final years as an extreme Republican who called parliamentary democracy a sham invented by Freemasons to justify exploitation of the poor, and advocated a new Catholic social order which would combine the achievements of Lenin and Mussolini.