A Social Laboratory

When the new Union flag was unfurled for the first time on 1st January 1801, it was assumed that, now Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, the island would be ruled in just the same way as England, Scotland and Wales. But could it? The British ruling classes tended to regard Ireland as a place apart, inhabited by turbulent and backward people, constantly threatening the violent overthrow of law and order.

The first sign that Ireland would be treated differently was the retention of a separate administration in Dublin Castle. There would still be a Lord Lieutenant residing in the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. And he still had the support of a Chief Secretary, other ministers, and a separate civil service. This was not the case in Wales or Scotland.

A startling fact is that during the first 50 years of the 19th century ordinary law was in force in Ireland only for five years. During the other 45 years the government adopted special powers – then generally known as ‘coercion’ – to suspend trial by jury, to hold people without trial, and to send in armed Crown forces to restore order. The Protestant Ascendancy, for long the ruling class of Ireland, could be forgiven for thinking, with much satisfaction, that nothing much had changed.

Yet the Act of Union had been introduced because the British government had lost confidence in the ability of the Protestant Ascendancy to govern Ireland. In time successive governments, both Whig and Tory and, later, Liberal and Conservative, steadily undermined the powerbase of the Ascendancy. With differing degrees of enthusiasm, Westminster governments strove to be neutral and to detach themselves from dependence on Ireland’s Protestant elite.

To achieve this, governments had to take on responsibilities it would not think of accepting on the other side of the Irish Sea. Such a proactive approach could be very much to the benefit of the Irish people. Indeed, some historians argue that British governments were using Ireland as a ‘social laboratory’ for trying out national education, publicly-funded hospitals, independent policing, unemployment relief schemes, and the like, long before being introduced into the rest of the United Kingdom.

The man who really set this process rolling was Robert Peel. Peel arrived in Dublin as Chief Secretary at the age of 24 in September 1812. A virulent opponent of Catholic Emancipation, Peel soon attracted the vituperative denunciation of Daniel O’Connell. He described him as ‘Orange Peel, …a raw youth squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England before he had got rid of the foppery of perfumed handkerchiefs and thin shoes.'

But Orange, Peel was determined not to be. He sent out an order that members of the Yeomanry were not to appear at Orange parades in their uniforms. Seeing that Yeomanry – for the most part Protestant gentlemen and farmers – rarely acted with impartiality when called in to restore order, Peel decided to create a new force which would command respect from all sides of the community. In 1813 he proposed that the viceroy should appoint a specialist force of police to be sent into the most disturbed districts.

Though Prime Minister Lord Liverpool objected that this was ‘not English’, Peel got Parliament’s permission. The Peace Preservation Force, which later became the Irish Constabulary, came into being in 1814 – the first police force in any part of the United Kingdom. It soon proved its worth, often coping where soldiers were unable to do so. Since the new police force was independent of local landlord control, its very existence began a significant erosion of the power of the Ascendancy.

Peel was determined that there should not be jobs for the boys: 'We ought to be crucified if we…select our constables from the servants of our parliamentary friends.'

A terrible famine, followed by a typhus fever epidemic, swept the country in 1816 and 1817. Around 65,000 people died but the death toll might have been much higher had not Peel acted promptly. He set up a central committee and gave it the authority to distribute nearly £50,000 – which he extracted from a very reluctant Exchequer – to local relief committees. This kind of intervention was unheard of in other distressed parts of the United Kingdom. Peel followed this up by setting up local boards of health to set up publicly-funded fever hospitals.

After Peel left Ireland in 1818 there were few more such attempts at dynamic impartiality until the Whigs came to power in 1830. Grateful for the support of O’Connell as the Great Reform Bill being steered through Parliament, the Whigs felt obliged to do more for Ireland.

If the Whigs really could give ‘Justice to Ireland’, O’Connell concluded, then his demand for repeal of the Union could be parked for a long time to come.