The legal and constitutional relationship between Ireland and England (and latterly Britain) was unclear for many centuries. Although Ireland enjoyed a good deal of legislative sovereignty under Grattan’s Parliament from 1782, the Acts of Union in 1801 set up direct rule from Westminster. During the nineteenth century, there was a campaign and draft legislation for Irish Home Rule (which Dicey, an ardent unionist, vehemently opposed). This campaign is worth reconsidering in the Brexit/Scottish independence context, given the varied legal and constitutional arrangements that were explored and vigorously debated. However, Home Rule never came about, rendered pointless by subsequent events. Since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and devolution in 1998, Northern Ireland has a had a variegated but pragmatic settlement of consociation and compromise quite different from the traditional British constitutional settlement. The EU has played its role in the peace process, providing structures for its continuation. Brexit now presents considerable challenges for Northern Ireland and the Republic.

This chapter examines the self-descriptions used by petitioners when addressing Parliament. Through these labels, petitioners forged and asserted their collective identities and made claims on the state and the wider political community. Petitions did not merely reflect existing identities, but actively constituted them. The chapter first examines the broadening of the petitioning public. There was a shift from the typical mode of self-styling used by eighteenth century petitioners, which reflected perceived economic interests and the hierarchical structuring of local communities, to demotic, ostensibly egalitarian labels such as ‘inhabitants’ in the nineteenth century. The second half of the chapter examines how Catholics, Protestant Dissenters, and women, came forward as petitioners to claim rights and assert their collective identities. Supporters, opponents, and parliamentary advocates interpreted petitions in favour of Catholic emancipation as representing Irish Catholics as a collective force. Dissenters asserted their collective identity as petitioners claiming civil rights, but also in presenting themselves as moral authorities. Finally, women became more forthright in claiming rights as ‘women’ rather than limiting their interventions to moral and religious issues permitted by the norms of Victorian gender ideology.

This chapter focuses on the fortunes of Burke’s party engagements and his views on party in the decades after the Present Discontents (1770). America, India, and especially the French Revolution are treated insofar as they are related to party. The American Crisis gave coherence to both government and opposition, and because they had repealed the Stamp Act, the Rockingham Whigs could pose as the real friends of America. Following the French Revolution, however, Burke split dramatically with Charles James Fox, who had emerged as party leader after the death of Burke’s master Rockingham in 1782. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Burke contended that he had not abandoned his party’s principles and that it was the Foxite Whigs who had morphed into a new party. The chapter demonstrates, however, that while Burke believed that the French Revolution rendered old party battles largely irrelevant, he had not lost his confidence in the idea of party as such.