Life
1740-1820; MA, TCD; fellow, TCD, 1766; DD, 1778; rector of Moy; wrote on geology an agriculture; crucially instrumental in establishing the yeomenry movement in resistance to the United Irishmen. ODNB
Commentary
Kevin Whelan, ‘Origins of the Orange Order’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 2, 2 (Spring/Summer 1996), p.19-36; esp. p.29f., quoting: ‘I have asserted that religion has nothing to do directly with the tumults and animosities in the county of Armagh and consequently that Orange Men are unjustly branded and for inflammatory purposes with the appellation of bigot and persecutor. Religion and its attachments are not warmer now in the breasts of Protestants than they were forty years ago: yet however severe the laws then were, the people were not persecutors. To what other cause then are we to attribute the present hostility of Protestant against the R. Catholic? 40 years ago there were no Defenders no R. C. committees - no conventions - no insulting and dangerous demands of Protestant property and political power, and yet the present times have been much more indulgent to the R. Caths. But I firmly believe there has not existed a single religious party in this country for above twenty years. Our partys [sic] are all purely political so that when the terms Protestant, Dissenting, or Roman Catholic interest are used, the meaning is that the person using it wishes to have, or to be supposed to have, that interest to support the point he is pressing, whatever it may’. (N. Alexander, Report on Defenderism, Nov. 1797; Whelan, p.29.)
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