The article highlights a striking tension: Wood’s coinage was officially defended as legal and of acceptable quality, yet it failed because confidence, consent and everyday acceptance could not be commanded from above. Swift’s campaign made refusal a shared civic action, although its language of whole people sat uneasily beside exclusions affecting Catholics and Dissenters. This suggests that the controversy was both an economic dispute and a lesson in the political force of trust. To what extent should the Drapier campaign be understood chiefly as resistance to monetary risk, or as a broader, though limited, expression of Irish collective political belonging?