Catholic Convention

The Catholic Committee was a county association in late 18th-century Ireland that campaigned to relieve Catholics of their civil and political disabilities under the kingdom's Protestant Ascendancy. After their organisation of a national Catholic Convention helped secure repeal of most of the remaining Penal Laws in 1793, the Committee dissolved. Members briefly reconvened the following year when a new British Viceroy, William Fitzwilliam, raised hopes of further reform, including lifting the sacramental bar to Catholics entering the Irish Parliament. When these were dashed by his early recall to London, many who had been mobilized by the Committee and by the Convention, defied their bishops, and joined the United Irishmen as they organised for a republican insurrection. Early years By the mid 18th century, agitation in the Catholic cause had begun to shift from the gentry to the rising merchant and professional classes. In 1757 the Catholic Committee was formed by Charles O'Conor; others involved included the historian, doctor, and activist John Curry and Thomas Wyse of Waterford. Prebendary of Cullen, John Carpenter, future archbishop of Dublin, also joined the Committee. In 1760, at a meeting at the Elephant Tavern on Essex Street, Dublin, Wyse submitted a plan for a more permanent Catholic Committee, made up of clergy, nobility, and representatives of the people. Before long, every county in Ireland had a committee usually headed by Catholic merchants and landed gentry. These were based locally on county lines. O'Conor's support for the first Catholic Committees from 1758 was copied nationwide, resulting in the successful, but slow, repeal of most of the Irish penal laws in 1774-1793. London's hostility toward Catholics, never as intense as that of the Irish Ascendancy, moderated when, after the death of the Old Pretender in 1766, the Papacy recognized the Hanoverian succession. The British government, in turn, gratified Catholic opinion with the passage in 1774 of the Quebec Act. This not only guaranteed free practice of the Catholic faith in the formerly French North-American province but, in a precedent seized upon by Irish Catholics, removed all reference to the reformed faith from the oath of allegiance required in taking public office.