Life
1740-1820; MA, TCD; fellow, TCD, 1766; DD, 1778; rector of Moy; wrote
on geology an agriculture; crucially instrumental in establishing the
yeomanry movement in resistance to the United Irishmen. DNB
Notes
Kevin Whelan, ‘Origins of the Orange Order’, in Bullán:
An Irish Studies Journal, 2, 2 (Spring/Summer 1996), p.19-36; esp.
p.29f., quoting: ‘I have asserted that religion has nothing to do
directly with the tumults and animosities in the county of Armagh and
consequently that Orange Men are unjustly branded and for inflammatory
purposes with the appellation of bigot and persecutor. Religion and its
attachments are not warmer now in the breasts of Protestants than they
were forty years ago: yet however severe the laws then were, the people
were not persecutors. To what other cause then are we to attribute the
present hostility of Protestant against the R. Catholic? 40 years ago
there were no Defenders no R. C. committees - no conventions - no insulting
and dangerous demands of Protestant property and political power, and
yet the present times have been much more indulgent to the R. Caths. But
I firmly believe there has not existed a single religious party in this
country for above twenty years. Our partys [sic] are all purely political
so that when the terms Protestant, Dissenting, or Roman Catholic interest
are used, the meaning is that the person using it wishes to have, or to
be supposed to have, that interest to support the point he is pressing,
whatever it may’. (N. Alexander, Report on Defenderism, Nov. 1797;
Whelan, p.29.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)