Irish Volunteers (18th century)

The Irish Volunteers were patriot militia formed in the Kingdom of Ireland during the American War of Independence. Massing under arms in the capital, and inspired by American example, in 1782 the Volunteers persuaded the British Crown to renounce its previously asserted right to overrule the Parliament in Dublin and to legislate for Ireland from Westminster. The movement subsequently split over the question of whether reform of Ireland's Parliament and Vice-regal administration should encompass emancipation of the Kingdom's Roman Catholic majority, Protestants alone having a right to vote, to assume office and to carry arms.

Following the onset of war in 1793 with the new French Republic, the government moved to suppress extra-parliamentary opposition and to induct Volunteers into a Crown militia. Concentrated among the Protestant "Dissenters" (Presbyterians) in Ulster, the more uncompromising elements entered into a republican conspiracy, breaking into open rebellion in 1798. In the wake of the rebellion, the Volunteer achievement, the "Constitution of 1782", was overturned by the abolition of the Irish Parliament under the Acts of Union 1800.

In Ireland, in the twentieth century, paramilitaries, both unionist and nationalist, claimed the Volunteers as precedent.