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Tone’s journey gave the year its international dimension. Having left the United States at the opening of January, he reached France in early February and devoted himself to persuading the Directory that Ireland was the vulnerable point in Britain’s Atlantic defences. His argument was at once Irish and strategic: a landing might assist an Irish rising, detach Ireland from Britain and weaken British maritime power. French officials already entertained such possibilities, but Tone proved an energetic and unusually well-informed advocate. He gained the support of General Lazare Hoche, an experienced republican commander, and during the summer was appointed a chef de brigade in the French army.
In 1795 the Kingdom of Ireland remained constitutionally separate from Great Britain, with its own parliament in Dublin, but it was governed within the British imperial state and during a European war against revolutionary France. The year was not yet one of general rebellion. Rather, it was a year in which hopes of reform were dramatically raised, then withdrawn; in which a new Catholic college was legally founded; and in which local violence in County Armagh gave institutional form to a durable Protestant association. These developments did not cause every later crisis by themselves, but together they made the political atmosphere markedly more fearful, divided and combustible.
The year opened with the culminating act of the Catholic Convention, the national gathering that had met in Dublin late in 1792. On 2 January 1793, five delegates—Edward Byrne, John Keogh, James Edward Devereux, Christopher Bellew and Sir Thomas French—presented the Catholics’ petition to George III at St James’s. The petition was the product of a carefully constitutional campaign. Its organisers did not claim a right to overthrow the existing order; rather, they sought relief from laws that made religion a barrier to full civil participation. The Protestant radical Theobald Wolfe Tone, then employed by the Catholic Committee, accompanied the delegation and helped connect Catholic claims with a broader demand for representative reform.
The contest over Catholic relief gave the year its sharpest political edge. On 20 January Dublin Corporation addressed George III in defence of the “Protestant ascendancy”, a phrase already current but given fresh political force by the corporation’s action. Its members presented Protestant control of church, parliament and public office as the essential safeguard of the constitution. The intervention showed how a municipal body, elected by a restricted urban electorate, could claim to speak for Ireland while excluding the great majority of its inhabitants from political power.
The Kingdom of Ireland possessed its own parliament at College Green, a fact of great importance in political argument after the constitutional changes of 1782. Yet legislative independence did not make the parliament representative of the island’s population. Executive influence still flowed through Dublin Castle, office, pensions and the management of borough seats. The political nation was overwhelmingly Protestant and propertied. Roman Catholics could not vote in parliamentary elections or sit at Westminster or College Green; the franchise and the structure of constituencies also excluded most poorer Protestants and Presbyterians. The country’s constitutional life therefore rested on a narrow social base.
The Irish parliament assembled on 5 February 1789 under the lord lieutenant, George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, marquess of Buckingham. Its immediate business was overshadowed by the unresolved question of the king’s health. Since George III could not personally direct government, politicians in Britain and Ireland had to decide whether the prince of Wales possessed an automatic right to act, or whether parliament should define and confer the regency.
The Irish parliament sat from 18 January to 28 May. Its proceedings belonged to a constitution celebrated by many Protestant patriots after 1782, when Britain had conceded Ireland’s legislative autonomy. But its electorate remained exceptionally restricted, its boroughs were often under aristocratic influence, and Roman Catholics were excluded from parliament. The year’s legislation accordingly offers a better guide to official priorities than to the experience or wishes of most inhabitants.
In 1786, Ireland stood in the unsettled interval after the constitutional victories of the early 1780s and before the more dramatic crises of the 1790s. Its parliament at College Green enjoyed a new measure of legislative autonomy, secured in 1782–83, but this did not make it representative of the island’s people. Political power remained concentrated among Anglican landowners, office-holders and borough patrons; Catholics, though forming the great majority of the population, could neither vote nor sit in parliament. The year is therefore best understood not as one decisive national turning point, but as a revealing cross-section: public institutions in Dublin acquired durable new forms while agrarian resistance exposed the strain beneath rural society.
