Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829

The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 (10 Geo. 4. c. 7), also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that removed the sacramental tests that barred Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from Parliament and from higher offices of the judiciary and state. It was the high point of a fifty-year process of Catholic emancipation which had offered Catholics successive measures of "relief" from the anti-Catholic civil and political disabilities imposed by Penal Laws in both the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Convinced that the measure was essential to maintain order in Catholic-majority Ireland, the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, helped to overcome the opposition of King George IV and the House of Lords by threatening to resign and retire the Tory government he led in favour of a new, reform-minded Whig ministry.

In Ireland the Protestant Ascendancy had the assurance of the simultaneous passage of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Its substitution of the British ten-pound, for the Irish forty shilling, freehold qualification disenfranchised over eighty per cent of Ireland's electorate. This included a majority of the tenant farmers who had helped force the issue of emancipation in 1828 by electing to parliament the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O'Connell.