Catholics in a Protestant country

the long version

"Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, writing in 1751, advised his son, Denis, to prepare himself for the rank he would be required to fill - 'that of a Roman Catholic in a Protestant country, that of one in a low way, obnoxious to the laws'. In this book on the role of catholics in eighteenth-century Dublin, Patrick Fagan challenges that description. In the first chapter he charts the course by which the city changed from being 70 per cent protestant and 30 per cent catholic in 1700 to a reversal of those proportions by 1800. This is followed by a chapter on the extent to which an ad hoc catholic lobby in the first half of the century operated to oppose, and sometimes to frustrate, anti-catholic measures by the Irish Parliament. There are chapters on the catholic presence in the medical professions throughout the century and on how catholics fared in the legal profession. There is an illuminating and revealing chapter on catholic involvement in freemasonry in Dublin, which deals also with the infiltration of the Dublin lodges by the United Irishmen and with Daniel O'Connell's membership of the masons. The final chapter explores the extent of catholic involvement in trade and manufacture in the city."--BOOK JACKET.