Introduction

When Burke reminisced about Ireland in 1780, after fifteen years devoted largely to the politics of England and America, he claimed that on first entering Parliament ‘What was first and uppermost’ in his thoughts was the hope ‘to be somewhat useful to the place of my birth and education, which in many respects, internal and external, I thought ill and impolitically governed’. This is likely enough, for Ireland preoccupied Burke from his teens. His earliest speeches and writings, composed as an undergraduate, provide many criticisms of Irish society, especially its disregard for good taste, its low morals and economic backwardness. These points focussed, in the end, on the failure of the propertied order of Irish society to provide the leadership which their station made possible.

Did Burke react against that order? He had a sense of its potential for good. He mentioned the case of one gentleman who had benefited his tenants greatly by a benevolent policy of improving his estate. The example was not entirely isolated. Another observer suggested that ‘a man has a figure in his country in proportion to the improvements he makes’. When Arthur Young toured Ireland a little later (in 1776) he found a number of agricultural improvers at work. A few years before Burke himself had arranged that ‘one of the finest bull calves … of the short-horned Holderness breed’ should be sent to a cousin's farm.