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explain events in places as far-flung as India or the Americas. The French terror, which he was quite sure no English audiences would willingly contemplate, he made available to his readers in a transposed account of life in post-Crom-wellian Ireland, a hell in the grip of "demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition". 21 The consequent suffering was as visible and tangible on the streets of rural Cork as in the suburbs of revolutionary Paris.
    Burke was, of course, no Irishseparatist. He believed that the link with England, though the cause of many woes, would be Ireland's only salvation. Nevertheless, as the product of an Irishhedge-school he had a natural sympathy, if not for revolution, then at least for those caught up in the stresses of a revolutionary situation.Conor Cruise O'Brien has inferred from this a conflict at the centre of Burke's writings between outer Whig and inner Jacobite: while the "English" Burke may on the surface be saying one thing, the "Irish" Burke may be implying quite another. 22 Thus, he questioned the common English view of the Irish as rebellious and emotional children, praising his people's self-restraint in the face of persecution. Taking up where Céitinn had left off, he attacked misrepresentations by more recent English historians: "But there is an interior History of Ireland – the genuine voice of its records and monuments – , which speaks a very different language from these histories from Temple and from Clarendon . . . [and says] that these rebellions were not produced by toleration but by persecution". 23 Burke contested English stereotypes of the Irish, because he saw in them

projections onto a neighbouring people of those elements which the English denied or despised in themselves: but he believed that, taken together, the English and Irish had the makings of a whole person. This would prove an attractive proposition for many nineteenth-century theorists, and was the psychological rationale which underlay the Act of Union.
    The Act of Union in 1800, which yoked the two countries together under the Parliament in London, represented a further integration of Ireland into English political life. It was the official response to the rebellion of 1798, a bloody uprising supported by radical Presbyterians, disgruntled Catholics and secular republicans, all of them inspired by recent developments in France. That insurrection had been crushed with matchless severity: the short-lived alliance between "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter", decreed by its republican leader Wolfe Tone against the strength of England, would never be achieved again. The history of Ireland in the following century would be concerned more with sorting out the differences of the Protestant ascendancy and their multitudinous Catholic tenants and underlings: for, although the Union might be said to have secured Burke's dream of an Ireland taking its place in a developing British scheme of things, his calls for the amelioration of Catholic grievances went largely unanswered. A further uprising, led byRobert Emmet (another idealistic Jacobin of Protestant background) was easily put down in 1803 – though the image of Emmet as doomed young leader prompted many English artists, fromSouthey to Keats and Coleridge, to rebuke themselves for their own failure to live up to such high romantic ideals.
    Only with the emergence of the great parliamentary agitator, Daniel O'Conneli, was hope of a kind restored. Disparaged by his English enemies as "the King of the Beggars", he was perhaps the first mass-democratic politician of modern Europe in the sense that he built his power on the basis of an awesome popular movement. By 1829, this proudly Catholic leader had secured emancipation for his co-religionists: the Penal Laws against them were finally broken. He next set his sights on repeal of the Union, holding monster meetings at symbolic historical venues across the country. Tens of thousands of