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difference between latent and manifest content had to be constantly negotiated by all writers.
    Throughout the eighteenth century, this gap exercised the framers of legislation as well as the authors of literature. On the ascendancy side, thePenal Laws implemented against Catholics who refused to work on their church holidays were somewhat undercut by a rider, to the effect that justices and constables who refused to implement the law would be jailed. The verbal harshness of the statutes was a reflection of their inoperability in a country lacking a comprehensive police force or a system of prisons. The very edict which repressed the Catholics into the officialunconscious, supposing such persons not to exist, seemed to concede the impossibility of its own consistent application. It implicitly acknowledged that it afforded only one perspective and that another, contrary view would be taken by many. 11
    On the native side, poets writing in Irish showed a penchant for covert statement. They praised the beauty ofCathleen Ní Houlihan when they really meant to celebrate Ireland. In what seemed like harmless love songs, they besought girls to shelter gallants from the storm, gallants who turned out on inspection to be rebels on the run from English guns. They decried the felling of the woods, but in this they were actually bemoaning the fall of the Gaelic aristocracy, whose evicted leaders often took refuge in the woods from which they launched revenge attacks. In both Irish and English writings of the period, the woods appear increasingly often as the unconscious, sheltering kerns, rebels and exponents of those desires punished by the

Puritans (many of whom came to Ireland withCromwell in the 1640s and later). In the settlers' texts, the clearing represented the daylight world of civilization and the conscious: and so the native who stumbled into the settlement and was promptly lulled off became a metaphor for the occupiers need to negate all illicit desires.
    In no set of writings is the notion of Ireland as England's unconscious more deeply or more sustained!/ explored than in those ofEdmund Burke. 12 He contended that what happened to the native aristocracy in Ireland under Cromwell and the Penal Laws befell the nobility of France in the revolution of 1789: an overturning of a decent moral order. He believed that the same sickness lay not far beneath the composed surface of English civil society, and that it was his duty to warn people of its likely long-term effects. Under the Penal Laws in Ireland a son, simply by convening toProtestantism, could usurp his father's prerogatives, or a wife her husbands, and this Burke saw as a blueprint for revolution. Within the Irish Anglican minority, for whom all the better postings were reserved, something like a career open to talents was possible: hence a coachmaker's son likeWolfe Tone, the Jacobin and rebel, could become a barrister-at-law. Burke was profoundly unimpressed by all this, seeing the Protestant ascendancy as nothing more than "a junto of robbers", a mercantile class which displayed the hauteur and ruthlessness of a fake aristocracy.
    Burke's empathy with India under occupation was also expressed in terms which vividly recalled the extirpation ofGaelic traditions by adventurers and planters. Few people were as rooted in custom as the Indians, but Burke complained that all this had been callously swept aside byWarren Hastings and the East India Company. "The first men of that country", "eminent in situation" 13 were insulted and humiliated by "obscure young men", pushing upstarts who "tore to pieces the most established rights, and the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations". 14 It was the same humiliation known by the princely Gaelic poets-turned-beggars; and Burke saw in Hastings the kind of profiteer who ripped a social fabric. Affecting aristocratic style, those expropriators were homo economicus hell-bent on breaking Brah-minism. To those who