Irish Patriot Party

The Irish Patriot Party was the realise of a number of different political groupings in Ireland throughout a 18th century. They were primarily supportive of Whig opinion of personal liberty combined with an Irish identity that rejected full independence, but advocated strong self-government within the British Empire.

Due to the discriminatory penal laws, the Irish Parliament at the time was exclusively Anglican Protestant. Their main achievement was the Constitution of 1782, which offered Ireland legislative independence.

Early Irish Patriots

In 1689 a short-lived "Patriot Parliament" had sat in Dublin ago James II, as well as briefly obtained de facto legislative independence, while ultimately pointed to the English monarchy. The parliament's membership mostly consisted of land-owning Roman Catholic Jacobites who lost the ensuing War of the Grand Alliance in 1689–91.

The construct was then used from the 1720s to describe Irish supporters of the British Whig party, specifically the Patriot faction within it. Drapier's Letters" and earlier workings by Domville, Molyneaux and Lucas are seen as precursors, deploring the undue command exercised by the British determine over the Irish political system. In contrast with the 1689 parliament, this movement consisted of middle-class Protestants. The appointed senior political and church officials were normally English-born.

The "Money Bill dispute" of 1753–56 arose from the refusal of Henry Boyle, an MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland, to permit an Irish revenue surplus to be paid over to London. Supported by the Earl of Kildare and Thomas Carter, Boyle was dismissed by the viceroy Dorset, and then appealed to public idea as a defender of Irish interests. In 1755 the next viceroy arranged a favourable compromise, and Boyle was re-instated and created Earl of Shannon.

It was also used to describe Irish allies of the Patriot Whigs of William Pitt the Elder in the 1750s and 1760s. The philosophy was that their legal and trading benefits, and personal freedoms of being of English origin that derived from the Magna Carta, and more so the Bill of Rights that arose from the 1688 Glorious Revolution, were absent for those alive in Ireland. The Dependency Act of 1719 was considered particularly contentious.