Union had been vainly prayed for by the Irish Parliament
at the time of the Scottish Union. Most thoughtful students, not least
among them Adam Smith,[56] had seen in it the only cure for the evils
which afflicted the hapless island.
Meanwhile, in 1782, the dominant caste utilised the Ulster volunteer
movement to wrest from Great Britain, then in the last throes of the war
against France, Spain, and America, the independence of the Irish
Parliament. Theoretically co-equal with the British Parliament,
Grattan's Parliament was, in practice, kept by bribery in a position
differing very little from that of Canada before the rebellion. Still
the new system in Ireland might, under conditions resembling those of
Canada in 1840, have gradually evolved into a workable scheme of
self-government. But the conditions were too different. A temporary
economic revival, indeed, followed the removal of the crippling
restrictions upon Irish trade. But, politically, the new system began to
break down almost from the start. Its entanglement in English party
politics, which geography made inevitable, lead to deadlocks over trade
and over the regency question, the latter practically involving the
right to choose a separate sovereign.
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