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“‘The Paternal Care Of A Patriot Legislature’: Legislative Instructions, Rhetorics Of Representation, And The Contested Boundaries Of The Political Nation In Revolutionary War-Era Ireland, 1779-1785”, Ian Mclaughlin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper revisits a long-neglected controversy over the use of legislative instructions during the Irish Free Trade crisis and explores its impact on the debate over Parliamentary reform in the first years of Grattan’s Parliament. I argue that the episode exposed significant tension between the Parliamentary and popular wings of the Patriot movement—one that most accounts of this era fail to note—while also leading to a major rethinking of traditional notions of representation. Importantly, Irish constituents went beyond defending their simple right to author instructions (as their American and English counterparts had done before), instead advancing them as a novel …