Professor Jacqueline Hill in a long career at what is now Maynooth University made a distinguished contribution to Irish history. Her scholarship on Dublin and Irish society in the long eighteenth century, most notably in her monograph From Patriots to Unionists, made a major contribution to our understanding of civic politics, patriotism and the muti-dimensional nature of Protestant Ireland. Articles on Protestant commemorations, the imperial dimension to Catholic relief and the print culture surrounding the 1753 Money Bill crisis, to highlight some personal favourites, similarly opened up new subjects and ways of understanding established questions. As an editor, she brought the New history of Ireland series to its twentieth-century conclusion and the diplomatic and organisational skills involved in that mammoth task were, as Vincent Comerford and Bernadette Cunningham make clear in their contribution to this festschrift in honour of Professor Hill, essential to her achievements as the longstanding secretary to the management committee of Irish Historical Studies and as the inspirational director of the Irish History Online database, an essential tool for all historians of Ireland.
This book, however, is a product of her collaborations, formal and informal, with her peers and colleagues in the study of Ireland’s long eighteenth century. The chapters in this book draw on key themes raised in Hill’s work to illuminate and rethink aspects of Irish political culture, particularly but not exclusively its urban character. Central to Hill’s study of Dublin Corporation were questions about how politics actually worked beyond the rhetoric of patriotism. Brendan Twomey in an illuminating chapter on the finances of Dublin Corporation, with specific reference to long-running wrangles over the supply of piped water to the city, reveals another side to Charles Lucas. He shows how Lucas’s critiques of corruption were rooted in the grubby politics of the corporation and that while Lucas’s polemical attacks on the aldermen brought new attention to the issue, they were also part of an established pattern of civic conflict over the city finances. Twomey refers to the ‘density’ of the city’s political culture in the early eighteenth century — a concept previously used productively by Padhraig Higgins for the 1780s — and this density or vibrancy is visible also in Mary Ann Lyons’s discussion of civic political rituals. Her essay builds on Hill’s pioneering essay on Protestant commemoration and civic ritual to consider how the corporation, as well as the city guilds, used public display, especially the ceremonial riding of the franchises, to assert their ancient rights and privileges. The assertion of ancient rights and privileges features in Colm Lennon’s discussion of the well-documented St Audeon’s Parish. He uses a combination of vestry and confraternity records to show how interdenominational interests could work together to provide welfare and support even as political divisions heightened. Emphasis is placed on the processes and realities of ‘getting on’ rather than on those of confessional division and antagonism. A micro-historical approach similarly informs the late Raymond Gillespie’s reconstruction of the life and death by suicide of the apothecary and former lord mayor, Mark Quin. Gillespie explores the possible reasons that drove Quin to his demise in Christ Church Cathedral. In doing so, he illuminates the nature of social relations amongst the Dublin civic elite and how the pressure placed on Quin to maintain his status as a public man coexisted with his family and business interests and a complex religious inner life.
The relationship between the public and private lives of the civic elite also informs Jonathan Wright’s thoughtful meditation on John Black III’s musings on the ‘improvement’ of Belfast. Black, a returned émigré who had made his fortune directing the family mercantile network from Bordeaux, turned his attention to his native city towards the end of his life, recording his observations in a journal and in his correspondence with his son George. Black’s view of Belfast’s future envisioned a mercantile oligarchy as the natural and moral leaders of the city rather than the narrow dominance of the Donegall family. Many of Black’s ideas came to fruition in the decades after his death and Wright traces how his ideas for improvement were both rooted in Black’s mercantile and intellectual experiences in Bordeaux, and how they became part of the wider mentalitié of improvement in Belfast. Belfast, he concludes was transformed but not necessarily improved. Dublin too famously went through a process of transformation in the late eighteenth century. James Kelly in a fascinating essay reconstructs how Dubliners and outside observers reacted to the ‘improvement’ of Dublin. Drawing on extensive newspaper and pamphlet sources, Kelly shows how contingent Dublin’s transformation was and how vested interests could frustrate, bemoan and enthuse about building proposals in their areas. He charts the enthusiasm visible in the sources about the growth of 1780s Dublin, but also how by the 1790s, contemporaries were worried about population expansion, rising house prices and ‘filthy and diabolical’ side streets (p. 142).
David Hayton and Toby Barnard turn their attention to provincial politics and to the impact of national issues in local contexts. Hayton charts how national tensons between Anglicans and Presbyterians over the repeal of the test clause played out at a local level in North Antrim in 1716. Drawing on the rich records of a politically motivated judicial inquiry into the alleged harassment of Anglican clergy by Presbyterian militiamen, he carefully explores how the echoes of printed and verbal disputes at national and county level reverberated at parish level in Ballintoy, County Antrim. Close attention is paid to the particular local geographies of religion, landholding and magnate power (in this case the Catholic earl of Antrim), in what is a nuanced discussion of the complex workings out of state power in a peripheral provincial context. The intricacies of provincial politics have long been a subject of fascination of Toby Barnard’s, and in his essay here he adds to his previous illuminating case studies focused on Youghal, County Cork and Limerick to consider mid-century Dungarvan. The rare survival of a poll book for the 1758 election in this pot-walloping constituency allows him to reconstruct the electorate and the ways in which competing political interests sought to include and exclude people from political participation. The intimacy of small-town life and the accommodations and stratagems adopted to preserve respectability and status are revealed through some extraordinary witness testimony, whether about the justification of mass attendance by ‘curiosity’ or about the internal living arrangements of urban houses. The business of politics when viewed through this lens becomes less about magnate power and more about intersecting and competing urban interests at parish and street level. Barnard’s reconstruction of Dungarvan’s political culture in 1758 is, thus, emblematic of the book’s wider argument about the sophistication and complexity of Irish political culture, an historiographical argument shaped by Jacqueline Hill’s work and one which on the basis of this book has much still to offer the student of eighteenth-century Ireland.
