But the manifest reluctance with which the English government had
granted this partial relief encouraged the demand for farther
concessions. The Irish members, rarely deficient in eloquence or
fertility of resource, had been lately re-enforced by a recruit of
pre-eminent powers, whom Lord Charlemont had returned for his borough of
Moy, Henry Grattan; and, led by him, began to insist that the remaining
grievances, to the removal of which the nation had a right, would never
be extinguished so long as the supreme power of legislation for the
country rested with the English and Scotch Parliament; and that the true
remedy was only to be found in the restoration to the Irish Parliament
of that independence of which it had been deprived ever since the time
of Henry VII. They were encouraged by the visibly increasing weakness of
Lord North's administration. Throughout the year 1781 it was evidently
tottering to its fall. And on the 22d of February, 1782, Grattan brought
forward in the Irish House of Commons a resolution, intended, if
carried, to lay the foundation of a bill, "that a claim of any body of
men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to bind this
kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." This resolution
aimed at the abolition of Poynings' Act.
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