9 - 1785–93: Indecision and an Act

Summary

By the mid 1780s Ireland and Britain were at peace with the world. The Volunteers had lost their raison d'être, and the debate over a militia in Ireland had been transformed. A militia was now clearly seen by all as an antidote to the residual Volunteering phenomenon. Establishing an Irish militia would defeat the political pretensions of the Volunteers and the small radical minority in parliament who still supported them. This situation politicised the Irish militia issue more heavily than had been the case since the 1760s. However, the fundamental constitution of the debate was now very different and, with Volunteering in decline, a militia was less of a necessity to their opponents than it had been a few years before. The apparent threat of the Volunteers, and lord lieutenant Rutland's obsession with displacing them with a militia, remained. In a broader context Ireland was being disturbed by the violent agrarian protests of the Rightboys in Munster, and sectarian clashes between Protestant ‘Peep o'Day Boys’ and Catholic ‘Defenders’ in the north. It was these events, coupled with his lack of confidence in the army, that prompted Rutland to fear in late 1785 the ‘reconstituting the Volunteer corps in all their dangerous and illegal extent’.

A month after Rutland's observation Thomas Orde finally finished the drafting of the militia bill he had sought to introduce into the Irish parliament at the beginning of the year. It was modelled on the 1762 Westminster act that had transformed the English militia into a permanent force.