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270 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
ment did not have the power to enact any law or measure that had not first been approved by the English Parliament. This was a deep-rankling wound made all the more deeper by the passing of still another such act, a Declaratory Act known as ‘The Sixth of George 1.’ Passed in 1719, the act declared that the King, with the advice of the Lords and Commons of England “hath had of right, and ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people and the kingdom of Ireland.”
It furthermore declared that “the House of Lords of Ireland have not, nor ought to have, any jurisdiction to affirm or reverse any decree made in any court within the same kingdom.” This act was acquiesced by the Irish Parliament. In other words, while Poynings Law forbade the Irish Parliament to make any laws other than were approved by the English Parliament, the Sixth of George 1 gave the English Parliament the right to make any laws it liked for Ireland. So if the Anglo-Irish were smarting previous to the passing of the Sixth of George 1, when it was passed, they smarted more severely than ever.
Now by far the most remarkable man in Ireland in the first half of the eighteenth centu- ry and one who burned with indignation for the terrible wrongs inflicted on the Anglo-Irish, was the famous author and Clergyman, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Anything but an Irish nationalist, Swift, writing under the nom de pleume “W.B. Drapier” composed and published many lasting political essays and pamphlets which ex- posed those wrongs, with, it is said ‘a fine level of scorn that rose above the general level of rhetoric and abuse,’ which in turn, stirred the Anglo-Irish, and embittered and influenced them further against English misgovernment. On one occasion he wrote a series of danger- ously scathing letters, afterwards called “Drapier’s Letters”denouncing a scheme adopted for the supply of copper coinage for Ireland.
At the time, in 1723, the English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, granted an English ironmaster, William Wood, a patent to coin, in a debased copper coinage, £108,000 worth of Irish halfpennies and farthings; Wood and his associates stood to make £40,000 profit from this venture. The Irish Houses of Parliament regarded the contract with disdain and accused the patentee of fraud, asserting, correctly, that the terms of the patent, as to the quality of the coins, had been infringed. It was, however, the opposition outside Parliament that Walpole and Wood had seriously to reckon with, and Swift’s “Drapiers Letters” were written with such sharp-edged satire and such vehement opposition to the coinage, that the people refused to have anything to do with it, and the patent was withdrawn in 1725. It is
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