Emergency legislation and agrarian disorder in Ireland, 1821–41

Abstract

The repeated use of special legislation to suppress popular disorder in Ireland and the failure to provide any permanent remedy has been a recurrent theme of Irish history. Introducing the Catholic relief bill in 1829, Robert Peel stressed the ‘melancholy fact’ that ‘for scarcely one year, during the period that has elapsed since the Union, has Ireland been governed by the ordinary course of the law’. Catholic emancipation proved no more of a panacea than the Union before it. Ireland, as J.L. Hammond once observed, was ruled under the ordinary law for only five years of the first half of the nineteenth century. Approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, Samuel Clark tells us that governments passed or renewed thirty-five coercion acts between the Union and the Famine. But although this state of affairs has occasioned much comment from historians it has been subjected to little systematic analysis. There has, for example, been no attempt to emulate for the earlier part of the century Townshend’s examination of British policy in response to political violence after 1848. Such a project cannot be attempted in a single article but it is hoped that a brief survey of repressive legislation in the years from 1821 to 1841, and a more detailed look at that aimed at agrarian disturbances will help to fill this historical lacuna.