Type: Article
Murphy, Seán. ‘Irish Jacobitism and Freemasonry’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 9 (1994), Pp 75-82..
Only recently have historians recognized the subject of Jacobitism in Ireland, and the history of Freemasonry has been even more overlooked. Formerly believed to have originated in England, Irish Freemasonry has been shown to come from Scotland around 1600, arriving in Ireland in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods. This article explores the intimate and significant links between Irish Jacobitism and Freemasonry from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Murphy defines Jacobitism and Freemasonry, provides documentary evidence of their earliest references in Ireland, linking both movements to the Stuart dynasty, and discusses the influence of Jacobitism in the development of Freemasonry in Ireland. Murphy concludes that, awareness of the Jacobite legacy of politicisation and mixing of creeds is vital to understanding the extraordinary proliferation of radical and republican Freemasonry, which marked first the Volunteer and then the United Irish movements in the latter part of the eighteenth century.