The bond of a common grievance against the English foe was created by the gradual abandonment of the policy of setting clan against clan in favour of impartial confiscation of land from friendly as well as from hostile chiefs.

Secondly, when the English had destroyed the natural leaders, the clan chiefs, and attempted to proselytise their adherents, the political leadership largely passed to the Roman Catholic Church, which very naturally defended the religion common to the members of all the clans, by trying to unite them against the English enemy.

Nationality, in this sense, of course applied only to Celtic Roman Catholic Ireland.

The first real idea of a United Ireland arose out of the third cause, the religious grievances of the Protestant dissenters and the commercial grievances of the Protestant manufacturers and artisans in the eighteenth century, who suffered under a common disability with the Roman Catholics, and many of whom came in the end to make common cause with them.

But even long after this conception had become firmly established, the local representative institutions corresponding to those which formed the political training of the English in law and administration either did not exist in Ireland or were altogether in the hands of a small aristocracy, mostly of non-Irish origin, and wholly non-Catholic.