‘The Most Portentous Event in Modern History’: Ireland Before and After the Peterloo Massacre
This chapter looks at Irish responses to Peterloo. It looks at the relations between radical reformers and the movement for Catholic Emancipation. The kind of political repression that was enacted in Manchester in August of that year was more common in Ireland, and reformers made common cause with Irish Catholics, many of whom were beginning to migrate to the industrial towns of Northern England. Ireland gave English reformers a cautionary example of tyrannical government, while Irish writers and politicians saw in Peterloo an illustration of the English establishment's true coercive colours. There was however a deeper sense in which Peterloo and the Irish Question were imbricated in early nineteenth-century culture. The role of public speaking, the control of potentially subversive speech, and the challenge of radical politics to traditional standards of rhetoric and oratory were all brought into focus in the years leading to the massacre.