independence with parliamentary reform. Flood proposed to abolish the "pocket boroughs" that allowed the aristocracy, already seated in the Lords, to nominate and control two-thirds of the Irish Commons. When the Ascendancy lords, confident of the return from America of a British garrison and appreciative of liberally-dispensed Government favours, affirmed their confidence in the existing "Constitution", Curran was persuaded of the need to look to the Kingdom's wholly disenfranchised Catholic majority. Speaking on the tenth anniversary of 1782, Curran credited the achievement of legislative independence to a "partial union" between Protestants and their Catholic "fellow countrymen". The Patriots accepted the support of Catholics, but with neither "the justice or gratitude to let them share the fruits of the victory", had allowed them to "relapse into their former insignificance and depression". The result was an Irish Parliament as much "at the feet of the British Minister" as it had been when formally subordinate to Westminster. This was the essence of Wolfe Tone's Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791): without the complete emancipation that would allow Catholics to act in a true union with Protestants, the Ascendancy would continue misrepresent Ireland and subordinate her interests to those of England. It was a question, Curran insisted, not merely of Catholic "sufferings or their relief":[A] partial liberty cannot long subsist ... alienation of 3 millions of our people, subserviency and corruption in a fourth ... [T]he inevitable consequence would be an Union with Great Britain. And if anyone desires to know what that would be, I will tell him. It would be the emigration of every man of consequence from Ireland; it would be the participation of British taxes, without British trade; it would be the extinction of the Irish name as a people.Identified with the patriot Whig opposition of Henry Grattan, a personal friend, Curran pressed the case for Catholic Emancipation. After the extension (under pressure from London) of the limited right to vote in 1795, this focussed on removing the sacramental bar to Catholics sitting in Parliament and taking public office. At war with Republican France, and satisfied that it had done enough to secure the loyalty of wealthier Catholics and their bishops, the Government suppressed further agitation. In February 1796, Curran protested the Insurrection Bill, which empowered magistrates to order transportation, as "a Bill for the rich, and against the poor.”What is a Bill which puts the liberty