page_title: History of Ireland (1691–1800)
section_title: Culture
hierarchical_section_title: History of Ireland (1691–1800) / Culture
caption_attribution_description: See source website for additional information.
context_page_description: The history of Ireland from 1691–1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy. These were Anglo-Irish families of the Anglican Church of Ireland, whose English ancestors had settled Ireland in the wake of its conquest by England and colonisation in the Plantations of Ireland, and had taken control most of the land. Many were absentee landlords based in England, but others lived full-time in Ireland and increasingly identified as Irish. During this time, Ireland was nominally an autonomous Kingdom with its own Parliament; in actuality it was a client state controlled by the King of Great Britain and supervised by his cabinet in London. The great majority of its population, Roman Catholics, were excluded from power and land ownership under the penal laws. The second-largest group, the Presbyterians in Ulster, owned land and businesses but could not vote and had no political power. The period begins with the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the Williamite War in Ireland in 1691 and ends with the Acts of Union 1800, which formally annexed Ireland in a United Kingdom from 1 January 1801 and dissolved the Irish Parliament.
context_section_description: Some historians argue that there were two cultures existing side by side in 18th century Ireland, which had little contact with each other. One was Catholic and Gaelic, the other Anglo-Irish and Protestant. In this period, there continued to be a vibrant Irish language literature, exemplified by the Aisling genre of Irish poetry. These were dream poems, typically featuring a woman representing Ireland who pleaded with the young men of Ireland to save her from slavery and oppression. Many Irish language poets clung to a romantic attachment to the Jacobite cause, although some wrote in praise of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. Other, non-political poetry could be quite sexually explicit, for example the poem Cuirt an Mean Oiche (the Midnight Court). Gaelic poets of this era include Aogán Ó Rathaille and Brian Merriman.
  Anglo-Irish writers were also prolific in this period, notably Jonathan Swift author of Gulliver's Travels.  Of importance in the British Parliament, and in the history of conservatism, was political thinker Edmund Burke. One intellectual who crossed the cultural divide was John Toland, an Irish speaking Catholic from Donegal, who converted to Protestantism and became a leading philosopher in intellectual circles in Scotland, England, Germany and Bohemia.
  Much of Ireland's finest urban architecture also stems from this era, particularly in the cities of Dublin and Limerick.
caption: Jonathan Swift
exif: {}