Deasy's claim that "the orange
lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty
years before O'Connell did"
is misleading at best. The Lodges, which were dedicated to
British rule and to Protestant domination of Catholics, did
strongly oppose the Union at first, but they quickly became
rabid supporters. The other claim—"I am descended from sir
John Blackwood who voted for the union....He voted
for it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the
Ards of Down to do so"—is simply false. Sir John was hurrying to
Dublin to vote no.
Catholics lacked the vote in the 1790s, and the Irish
Parliament in Dublin was stuffed with Protestant aristocrats
and landholders. Nevertheless, the ideal of an independent and
inclusive Ireland appealed to many Protestants of the
time—even in Ulster, as
is clearly demonstrated by the ecumenical orientation of the United Irishmen and its
eventual commitment to rebellion. Additionally, the Grattan
Constitution of 1782 had given the Irish Parliament a large
measure of independence, and many of its members were
reluctant to vote their body out of existence and cede power
to Westminster. But the British government was determined to
consolidate control of the island after the 1798 rebellion, and it
resorted to bribery on a massive scale, including promises of
peerages to members who would switch their votes. The first
vote in 1799 (the one that Sir John died trying to attend)
failed. The second one, in 1800, succeeded.
The Act of Union repeated the process that had united
Scotland with England in a "United Kingdom" in 1707. That
union proved more beneficial for Scotland than the Irish one
did for the Irish, but it was enacted by similarly disgraceful
means. Scottish legislators were bribed so massively that
Robert Burns could write,
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station.
But English gold has been our bane.
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
The 1800 legislation bequeathed to Ireland a legacy of bitter
contention between unionists and nationalists that was not
completely resolved even by the founding of the Irish Free
State in 1922. As for the magnificent Parliament building in
which the votes were taken, in 1802 it was sold to the Bank of
Ireland after the legislation made it useless. Gifford notes
that it was sold "with the stipulation that the chamber of the
House of Commons be altered so that it could not be used as a
place for public discussion and debate," and it remains a bank
today. The conversion into a banking establishment is apt,
Parliament having been, according to another line of the Burns
song, "bought and sold for English gold."
At the beginning of a section of Lestrygonians that teems with
political references, Leopold Bloom walks past "the
huge high door of the Irish house of parliament," the
narrative making no mention of the fact that the building is
now a bank. This is the entrance in the eastern portico on
Westmoreland Street, not the main southern entrance on College
Green. In Wandering Rocks Ned Lambert refers to the
moving of the bank from its old headquarters near St. Mary's Abbey, telling
Reverend Love that "the old bank of Ireland was over the
way till the time of the union."
If the Bank of Ireland stood as a striking symbol of
Ireland's loss of political independence, the rest of Dublin
in 1904 offered equally striking visual evidence of the
material effects of decommissioning the deliberative body. In
Dublin in Bloomtime, Cyril Pearl writes powerfully of
the economic impact: "In 1904 Sir Charles Cameron published a
horrifying report on the housing of the poor. Nowhere in the
world was the contrast between squalor and splendour more
acute or the distribution of slums more widespread. 'In most
cities,' he wrote, 'the purlieus are in a limited number of
districts, but in Dublin they are to be met with everywhere.
The lanes at the rear of such fashionable squares and streets
as Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square, Stephen's Green, Upper
Mount Street...are now occupied to a large extent by the
poorest classes.' So were many of the former mansions. More
than two-fifths of Dublin's 60,000 families—about 100,000
people—lived in single rooms, sometimes as many as ten or
twelve people to a room.
"The transition from mansion to tenement was the result of
the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish Parliament
and deprived Dublin of its 270 peers, its 300 members of the
Commons, and their innumerable hangers-on. (It was estimated
that each member of the Lords spent an average of £6,000 a
year, and each member of the Commons £2,500.) Until then it
had been an elegant, animated European capital—'the seventh
city of Christendom,' as Oliver Gogarty was fond of
intoning—proud of its culture, its architecture, its
hospitality, and its wit. After the Union, paralysis was
followed by decay and Dublin declined rapidly to the level of
a shabby provincial town, the general depression caused by the
Napoleonic war accelerating the process. 'On the last stroke
of midnight, December 31,' writes Maurice Craig, Dublin's most
eloquent biographer, 'the gaily caparisoned horses turned into
mice, the coaches into pumpkins, the silks and brocades into
rags, and Ireland was once again the Cinderella among the
nations'" (42-44).
