These very specifically Irish circumstances, in which there was an initial and formative engagement with Enlightenment in the field of religious apologetics, were followed by the second stage of the Irish Enlightenment. This was a Social Enlightenment, in which — with the endemic Irish confessional tensions seemingly in retreat — “various figures reached out across the confessional divides to confront the economic problems which beset the country”. On the basis of rationalism and empiricism, a language of sociability and civility was formed and adapted to the circumstances of Ireland. It ranged over the domains of manners, improvement, aesthetics, and political economy. It was also deliberately non-confessional in character. What mattered was how people behaved, not what they believed.  This Social Enlightenment re-configured the settings of social interaction in Ireland.  Alongside the established venues of churches, libraries, and state-sponsored theatre, there now grew up unofficial networks of coffee-houses, taverns, bookshops, and theatres — a “counter public-sphere” which nourished association across confessional boundaries. This counter public-sphere had the best of intentions, aiming at “the polite reform of behaviour, the raising of educational standards, the extension of charity to the deserving poor, and the creation of commercial opportunity in mercantile associations.” What was not to like?

Plenty, apparently. This Irish Social Enlightenment unintentionally brought about the premature thwarting of the Enlightenment in Ireland before it had had a chance to send down deep roots. The third phase of Brown’s Irish Enlightenment, the “Political Enlightenment”, describes how the curtain fell on Ireland’s flirtation with enlightened modes of thought. It was the very ambition of the Social Enlightenment to transcend confessional division which, in the context of Ireland, provoked authoritarian revanche:

the un-confessional nature of the Enlightenment project posed a structural challenge to a state administration which rested its legitimacy on a claim to confessional supremacy. Ironically, the very power of the Enlightenment to posit political questions tore apart the Enlightenment settlement, grounded as it was on the presumption of social tolerance and the collaboration of empirical and rationalist methodologies. Hence the period of Political Enlightenment foreshadowed the movement’s close.

As those who were dominant in Irish public life around 1760 attempted to make sense of the thorny question of political identity — thorny always and anywhere, but particularly thorny then and in Ireland — what emerged was the impossibility of trust.  The Anglicans, in the end, and when push came to shove, would not incorporate with the Catholics and the Presbyterians. A gradual descent into violence followed, culminating in the “unseemly and violent” civil war of 1798. The remedy for that conflict — the Act of Union of 1800 — shifted the nature of the Irish problem:

the Act of Union . . . altered the question from one of confession and civility to one of sectarianism and nation. . . . The question “Who is Enlightened?” gave way to the toxic query “Who is Irish?”

This was the desolate endgame of the Irish Enlightenment.