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On 5 January, the Currency Act of 1825 took effect in Ireland. It assimilated Irish currency to that of Great Britain, establishing sterling as the uniform money of account throughout the United Kingdom. This was not simply a matter of coin in a purse. The Irish pound had stood at a different value from sterling: a British pound had formerly been reckoned as £1 1s. 8d. Irish. The new arrangement required contracts, rents, debts, bank business, public accounts and ordinary commercial calculations to be understood in British currency. The Act expressly sought to prevent disturbance between debtors and creditors, but its practical effect was to make Ireland’s financial language more directly uniform with that of Britain.
The central political event was the Unlawful Societies (Ireland) Act, which received royal assent on 9 March. It extended earlier restrictions on bodies claiming to represent the people or to seek redress of grievances in church or state. Its immediate political target was widely understood to be the Catholic Association, founded in 1823 by O’Connell, Richard Lalor Sheil and others to press for Catholic Emancipation. Its provisions also bore upon Orange organisation. The law did not grant Catholics the parliamentary and office-holding rights they sought; instead, it attempted to remove the national political machinery that had made those demands so powerful.
