The Roman Catholic Church has withstood in Europe and in Ireland the fiercest storms. In France it has survived Voltaire and Lepaux, the French Revol… - John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

When Lord Grey came into office, and the Whigs, after sixty years of exclusion, began a new scheme of Irish policy, there were two prominent evils in the government of Ireland. The first was the corrupt and intolerant system of administration called Protestant Ascendancy; the second, the Irish Church Establishment. The first of these evils—called by Burke, Non regnum sed magnum latrocinium [not a kingdom but a grand theft]; and by Fox, a miserable monopolising minority—was quite as great a grievance to the people of Ireland as the second. It drove into rebellion such men as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Emmets, and Wolfe Tone. By a series of what were called by Irish statesmen 'ripening measures,' the disaffected classes were irritated, goaded, spurred into insurrection; and when they had rebelled, were tortured, massacred, and shot, till the spirit of disloyalty, if not extirpated, was terrified and subdued. Hence a state of government, which was described by Lord Redesdale as one law for the rich and another for the poor, and both equally ill administered.

For three hundred years the Protestant Established Church of Ireland has been the most odious and offensive emblem of the corruption and the intolerance of England. To have quietly removed this monopoly so offensive to the Irish nation, the target against which the arrows of Ireland's best archers were always aimed, without any of the rabbling which marked the expulsion of the English liturgy from Scotland, without disorder, without riot, is a great feat in the history of any statesman. No man can complain that he has been wronged, a nation may rejoice that she has been righted.

It is quite true that landlords in England would not bear to be shot like hares or partridges by miscreants banded for murderous purposes. But neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once, and burn their homes over their heads, giving them no provision for the future. The murders are atrocious, but so are the ejectments. The truth is that a civil war between landlords and tenants [in Ireland] has been raging for 80 years, marked by barbarity on both sides. I am willing to finish the contest.... But if stringent laws are required, they must bear on both sides in the contest.