From 7 July to 8 August 1835 – three years after his return from America and the same year as publication of his Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through Ireland with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. The two vigorous visitors followed a circuit that took in Dublin, Waterford, Killarney, Galway, Castelbar, and back to Dublin. With his nose for idle aristocracies and protracted conflicts, Tocqueville interrogated Protestants and Catholics alike on the prospects for Protestant-Catholic harmony in Ireland. On 11 July Tocqueville interviewed Thomas Kelly, inspector for Ireland's newly established (Anglican) national schools. He asked Kelly whether the restoration of an Irish Parliament (which Irish nationalists, including Daniel O'Connell, were then starting to demand and which would now surely include a Catholic majority) would shift the balance of power. Kelly replied that “it would be a complete revolution, a reverse tyranny just as great as before” (Tocqueville 1991: 523). He meant that Catholics would take vengeance for years of Protestant misrule.

Like Kelly, Tocqueville's Irish informants generally agreed that the Protestant aristocracy had governed Ireland badly for several centuries. But they saw little possibility of a peaceful settlement in which Protestants and Catholics would run the country together. Since Catholic Emancipation (1829), indeed, Protestant landlords had been expelling their small Catholic tenants, who had lost the vote in the deal that gave richer Catholics the right to hold many public offices. Divisions between rich and poor were growing sharper, and even more clearly marked along religious lines.