From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism 1660-1840, by Jacqueline Hill, Clarendon Press, 444pp, £50 in UK
Compared with its architectural and physical development, the political evolution of Dublin has not been accorded the attention it deserves by historians. Important aspects of the politics of urban development in the 18th and 19th centuries have been convincingly reconstructed by Edward Mc Parland and Mary Daly among others, but Colm Lennon's The Lords of Dublin in the Age of Reformation (1988) is the only recent book-length study of a phase of the political history of the capital. It is now joined by another equally significant work. From Patriots to Unionists does not seek, as its author points out, "to provide a comprehensive political history" of Dublin between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries, but it does offer a persuasive interpretation of municipal politics during what it popularly known as the era of "Protestant Ascendancy".
While it is hardly possible to summarise a 400-page book accurately in a sentence, Dr Hill's thesis is that the oligarchy that took command of Dublin municipal politics in the late 17th century was displaced by a less elitist civic patriotism in the mid-18th; this occupied the ideological high ground for about a half century until it was forced on to the defensive in the 1790s, following which municipal politics became increasingly sectarian before the successors of the civic patriots of the 18th century found ideological security in unionism in the mid19th. From this bald summary, it may appear that the liberal openness that is traditionally identified with patriotism when it was at its acme in the early 1780s gave way to and elitist sectarian conservatism at the very time that the Catholic population, under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell, was seeking to democratise Irish politics. This is not an unsustainable view of Dublin municipal history between 1780 and 1840, but one of Dr Hill's most important achievements is to expose the assertive confessionalism that was a feature of Irish patriotism throughout its existence.
It is no surprise to read that the merchant patriciate that dominated Dublin Corporation for nearly a century following the introduction of the "New Rules" (1672) that determined the shape and character of municipal government until 1760 was firmly Protestant in outlook. But what Hill demonstrates is that the common councilmen who rose to eminence after that date perpetuated this tradition. Claims that Charles Lucas, who spearheaded the drive for municipal reform that brought civic patriotism into the ascendant in the Corporation (and who is the major character in a book whose primary focus is ideology rather than politics or personality), was not anti-Catholic are firmly discounted, and the continuing strength of this outlook is convincingly dissected. In reaching this conclusion, Hill both draws on and advances recent scholarship which challenges the previous orthodoxy that patriotism diluted the destructive denominational animosities that produced the Penal Laws.
To leading 18th-century Dublin politicians like Lucas and Edward Newenham, Catholics deserved to be excluded from the political process because they adhered to convictions and tenets that were incompatible with the Protestant constitution. Indeed, such beliefs not just survived the concession to Catholics of civil and religious rights, they became ideologically more potent as Protestant opinion in Britain as well as Ireland was prompted to become more conservative by its antipathy towards revolutionary France, its distress that the repeal of the Penal Laws did not reduce the threat to the continued security of what Irish Protestants now deemed their "ascendancy", and alarm at the activities of O'Connell. This was a prolonged process, but it was completed by the 1840s when they embraced unionism.
Hill's account of this, and her lengthy and authoritative analysis of the increasingly sectarian character of municipal politics in the early 19th century, are particularly strong and persuasive. However, some of the space given over to ideological concerns and to the provision of "economic and social background" might have been better utilised exploring municipal politics at a sub-corporative and guild level.
From Patriots to Unionists is a challenging and rewarding book, providing a convincing ideological architecture in which future studies of Dublin politics and Protestant patriotism can be set.
James Kelly's most recent book is That damn'd thing called honour: Duelling in Ireland 15701860