witness the Presbyterian-turned-Anglican Revd. John Cleland, sub-sheriff and land agent of the Lord Londonderry, was "withering" and all were acquitted. There was some disquiet over Curran's representation of Peter Finnerty, charged for seditious libel in publishing an attack on the judges in the trial of William Orr and on the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who had refused to grant Orr a reprieve. Curran appeared concerned less with acquitting Finnerty than with re-trying the case that had sent Orr to the gallows, and in maximising the embarrassment of the government. Finnerty was sentenced to a session in the pillory and two years in prison. In 1802, Curran won damages from Major Sirr, who in 1798 had fired the fatal shot in the arrest of Lord Edward FitzGerald. Curran represented a proven loyalist who had collapsed a treason trial by convincing a jury of the "infamous" character of Sirr's key witness. Sirr and his colleague were alleged then to have used wrongful arrest, imprisonment incommunicado, and condemnation to hanging as means of extortion and personal satisfaction. Curran used the occasion to underscore that these were the same illegitimate methods used to suppress the United movement. Niles' Register of 24 March 1821 was to describe Sirr as "this old sinner, given to eternal infamy by the eloquence of Curran'". It was rumoured that had the rebels succeeded in 1798, they would have nominated Curran to a governing committee of one hundred. Response to Emmet's Rebellion Curran was bitterly disappointed by the Act of Union of 1800 that abolished the Irish Parliament in favour of representation at Westminster, and which he had anticipated would be the result of failure to reform. Under the Union, he declared, “The instruments of our government have been almost simplified into the tax gatherer and the hangman, . . . and our persons are disposed of by laws made in another clime". Although in its wake his house was searched and he was brought before the Privy Council to answer inquiries, Curran had no truck with the attempt by Robert Emmet in July 1803 to mount a new insurrection in Dublin. That, in the course of the hapless rising, the rebels murdered his friend Lord Kilwarden confirmed Curran in his rejection of physical-force republicanism. Nonetheless, he had been prepared to defend Emmet until interrogators revealed that his daughter Sarah had continued in a romantic relationship with the defendant. Curran