The Irish Brunswick club movement of 1828–9 has been as badly served by posterity as by hostile contemporaries. O'Connell dismissed the clubs and their intention to unite all strands of Protestantism against emancipation with sanguinary and stereotypic euphemisms like ‘Bloodhound Clubs’ implying that they were merely the militant loyalism of 1798 resurrected. In July 1829 George Dawson damned the Brunswick ‘union’ as ‘a rope of sand’. Writing retrospectively, Colonel Blacker dismissed Brunswickism as an aristocratically dominated phenomenon which ignored plebeian concerns: ‘The thing flashed for a moment, and went out.’ Later historians of Orangeism agree, stressing Brunswick's social and organisational disjunction from the older organisation. Sibbett claimed: ‘Brunswick clubs were good; but Orange lodges were better … in the former the bond of union was weak, and men would come and go’, whereas Orangeism was ‘tried and tested’. Hereward Senior saw Brunswick as holding ‘little attraction for the peasantry’ unlike ‘the attractions of a secret society’. Recent work on Irish popular politics gives sparse attention to Brunswick, concentrating, understandably, on its successful rival the Catholic association. Yet such neglect perpetuates anachronistic interpretations, judging Brunswick through its failure to prevent emancipation, and fails to acknowledge its contemporary importance. The implied comparison with O'Connell's modernising Catholic democracy forecloses consideration of a movement that created 108 clubs in 12 weeks.