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308 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
Almost all the documentors of Ireland’s history agree that the Act of Union was con- ceived and brought about by the British Government for its own ruthless ambitions and advantages, but of equal importance, they all further agree that it was also seriously flawed from conception. The treacherous failure to bring about the falsely promised Catholic Emancipation Act alienated most of the Irish population, alongside which, the continuing presence of a Lord Lieutenant in the country, something which neither Scotland nor Wales laboured under, demonstrated to many, that controlling and governing Ireland was looked upon by the British in a completely different light to that of the other countries which then constituted the United Kingdom. But, as the distinguished Belfast-born historian, James Camlin Beckett once noted: “The survival of a separate administrative system for Ireland had another, and a deeper, significance: it was both the symbol and the instrument of a con- tinuing Protestant Ascendancy...In every department of government, central and local, the Protestant landlords, their allies and dependants, remained in control.”
Yet, while most of what Beckett said is true, there is one very fundamental difference which resulted from the Act of Union coming into being-The Protestant Ascendancy no longer had its own Parliament and they now found themselves in roughly the same position as their disaffected Catholic countrymen, almost powerless, statusless, puppets, shackled into the Union and governed from London.
Some of the remnants of the fractured leadership of the United Irishmen, most espe- cially those who had escaped to the Continent after the crushing of the 1798 Rebellion, were of the belief that the renewal of hostilities between Britain and France, after the Peace of Amiens in 1802, would afford them, with French help of course, another opportunity to rid Ireland of British power. These disaffected exiles grounded their beliefs on (a) the proba- bility of Napoleon’s “Grand Army” effecting a direct invasion of England, something which Napoleon was apparently intent on, (b) the great public disenchantment of the Catholics at not getting their promised Emancipation on the passing of the Act of Union; and (c) the distress and consequent steadily growing dissatisfaction that was prevalent in Ireland since the Union came into law.
Several of the leading Irish exiles in France were given to understand that the peace made at Amiens would not last long and that another military expedition to Ireland was now a strategic part of Napoleon’s ambitious scheme to invade England. So, with the intention of reorganizing the United Irishmen Movement , Robert Emmet, a young Protestant man
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