his paper considers how recent research is changing our perceptions of Irish identities in the eighteenth century. It assesses how those identities were affected by the upheavals of the 1790s and the Act of Union of 1800 and offers some reflections on how far those changes were the result of the Union or of broader factors at work. In the autumn of 1798, the British government brought forward a proposal for a legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland. It was presented as the solution to a number of Ireland's ills, above all to the differences and divisions that had recently culminated in rebellion in 1798. A Union would, among other things, restore harmony and stability in Ireland by offering a new context for the solution of one of the most contentious political issues in the 1790s: the Catholic question. In a United Kingdom, Irish Protestants would be reassured by being part of an overwhelmingly Protestant population, and would consequently be prepared to accept the extension of full political rights to Catholics in place of the partial enfranchisement that had existed since 1793.