Isaac Corry was just 21 when he was first elected to the Dublin Parliament representing Newry.  His failed opponent challenged the result and fought a duel with Corry where the former was slightly wounded.

It is important to remember that though the Corry family looms large in Newry’s history (they were Needham favourites, Corry of the obelisk was a local magistrate for 38 years, the role of others now soon to be included, and they were merchants who helped to build Hill Street, for example), still even their most prominent member, this Isaac who rose to be Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, earns not a single mention in most general histories (e.g. the excellent and highly recommended ‘A History of Ulster’ by Jonathan Bardon [Blackstaff 1992]).  Corry, though not without ability, owed his appointment to his connections, and his future promotion largely to his veniality.  As Adjutant General of the Newry Volunteers, Corry was regarded as a ‘patriot’ (a term which then referred to loyalty to Britain and to Britain’s Parliament sitting in Dublin, though they would consider their patriotism to be best exemplified by their robust demands for greater independence from Westminster for the Irish Protestant nation that they embodied ).  Being of the merchant class, he campaigned with others in his first term for free trade and for legislative powers to be devolved to Dublin.  As stated already these were conceded to Dublin in 1776 and 1779.

In December of the latter year Sir George McCartney, an Ulsterman and a former chief secretary, was sent secretly to gauge the extent of support for the unification of the Dublin and Westminster Parliaments.  He reported that there was very little, but twenty years later a chastened Ascendancy was reeling from the 1798 Rebellion and the Irish Government had become almost totally dependent for military and financial support on Britain.  This puts Isaac Corry’s role as Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in stark perspective:  he effectively had to go to Westminster with begging bowl in hand for the finances to run Irish affairs. 

Lord Cornwallis was sent to crush the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 and to win support for the Union.  He affected the former with famine, fire, lash and sword:  the latter was brought about through the medium of such ‘patriots’ [i.e. members of the ruling ‘Patriot Party’ of Henry Grattan] as Castlereagh and Corry.  Military repression left Cornwallis cold but enforced relations with these others caused him to write; ‘negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven, I despise myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work.’  Reluctant M.Ps of the Dublin Parliament had to be cajoled, bribed, intimidated or otherwise corrupted.  Although Catholics, the great majority of the Irish nation, no longer had significant political or economic power, some among their number had influence and the hierarchy could not be ignored.  Penal laws were still in force, if not as rigorously enforced as formerly.  Still Catholic Emancipation was an important issue.  To some few, such as Pitt, the British prime minister, the issue was one of principle: to others, it was a matter of political expediency. 

Pitt attempted to have Catholic Emancipation enshrined in the Act of Union but dropped it at the instigation of Protestant hard-liners in the Dublin Government.  Pitt’s promise – later broken, but not by him – to effect emancipation immediately after the Union was sufficient to win the support of some Catholic men of property and of the Catholic hierarchy.  We know from hindsight that all the principal participants were dead before Catholic Emancipation was won in 1829, thirty years later, by the efforts of Daniel O’Connell.  Yet the very promise of imminent Catholic emancipation was enough to win the implacable opposition of the recently formed Orange Order. 

When in early 1800 the Union Bill passed by 65 votes in the Dublin House of Commons, the ‘dirty work’ was done, Castlereagh transferred to greater political affairs in England and Corry remained on in the diminished, administrative role as Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. 

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 Let us view all of this from a Newry late eighteenth century perspective.  For the previous two hundred years the Bagenals had ruled in the town and district.  The first of their line, Nicholas Bagenal had been given the Abbey and its lands by Tudor monarchs.  By the 1770s it had passed to the Needhams, their principal citizen being William Needham.  He was the cousin of William Pitt, then the prime minister of Britain.  Concerning Corry, the latter advised the former; ‘he may be of use to you and, if neglected, can certainly do you harm from the situation of his influence and connections; make up to him by attentions and seeming confidence.’    So it happened that in 1788 Corry was offered the post of Surveyor General.  William Drennan, resident of Newry and founding father of the United Irishmen, was warned by his sister that Corry was not really ‘a reform man.’  Corry’s family connections with the landed gentry were there for scrutiny.  Corry’s uncle Isaac was Lord Hillsborough’s agent:  his father Edward, and his predecessor also in the Newry seat, was the Needham’s agent. 

By 1795 Corry was a Privy Councillor and in January 1799 he was appointed Chancellor.  The situation in which this happened is revealing.  Sir John Parnell, the previous incumbent, would not do the will of the Imperial Parliament in the matter of Union.  He could be, and was, removed by it and replaced with its lackey, Isaac Corry.  Through the treachery of Corry and others, the Parliament would survive not another two years.  One measure he introduced, a tax on windows (and hence, light in homes!) proved highly unpopular not just with the landed classes with the largest homes, but with the merchant class from which he sprang.

In the February 1799 election the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, despite a formally neutral Church stance, encouraged Catholics (those very few, mostly landowners, with a vote) to support the staunchly pro-Union Corry, as also did the Bishop of Dromore, Lennon.  Catholic merchants of Newry wrote through Colonel Ross, to the Lord Lieutenant, disclaiming any involvement in the 1798 Rebellion.  Corry in a letter to Castlereagh, referred to the executed United Irishman Cochrane as; ‘..a low mechanic’.  Influential professional and merchant Protestants like Dr Black, Charles McClean, Henry Hearn and John Hagin were all tried and many others escaped abroad. 

The passing of the Union Bill in 1801 brought little reaction either in Ireland or Britain, to Cornwallis’s satisfaction.  Far more important to Ireland’s poor was the hardship and repression that continued and the effects of harvest failures (and burnings) and of wartime inflation.  Politics and affairs of state (then as now) were of little consequence to them, though these would move steadily centre stage in the coming century.

The first United Parliament collapsed within months on the issue of Catholic Emancipation.  Pitt resigned because the king vetoed the bill.  As already indicated Isaac Corry continued as Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer.  Irish seats in the Imperial Parliament were fewer; Newry had only one.  Corry lost out immediately.  However in 1802, despite powerful enemies, he was elected to sit for Newry in the British Parliament. 

It is a matter of no lasting relevance whether Corry had the Chancellor’s Road constructed to avoid contact with his constituents on his journeys to and from Dublin.  It may be so since his role as Yeoman Officer would have left him very unpopular for the brutality of the suppression of United Irishmen.  On the other hand, such a link road along the outer ridge of Camlough Mountain makes sense, and more so then, avoiding the descent and rise again that would have been difficult for horse-drawn transport. Today it is one of our more popular residential areas.

In England Pitt’s government returned in 1804 (without Catholic Emancipation). Corry lost out as Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer to his enemy (former friend) John Foster of Louth.   In 1806 he lost his Newry seat to Francis Needham.  He lost again in 1807.  Addington’s Government in England found him a seat and a minor Government job but these disappeared with that Government’s defeat.  By 1810 he had to sell Derramore House.  He died in

Though Corry was gone, the deleterious effects of his open treachery were to plague the Irish people for centuries, indeed up to the present day.  There was, for example, no home government to help mitigate the worst effects of the Great Hunger of the mid nineteenth century, or to attempt to staunch the haemorrhage of Irish people fleeing the country thereafter.  Most people now accept that demography will dictate the end of the Union within one or two generations at the most.  Perhaps we must wait until then to reassess the role of Isaac Corry in frustrating the will of the great majority of Irish people, that would outlive him by centuries.

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