"Although formally part of the same state, [Ireland after the Act of Union] was not and could not have been ruled in the same fashion as Great Britain".
The Act of Union had aimed to lessen the threat of Ireland being used to launch a military attack on Britain. It had aimed to uphold the privileged position of the colonists' descendants, the landed Protestant ascendancy; and it had meant that Ireland could be governed from London to rather than rule herself. All these were the features of a colony. Other features typical of a colony might be, perhaps: -a situation where the mother country benefits financially from the colony, and -the dependence of the colony on the mother country.
In most of the above criteria, however, Ireland became less like a colony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …
