Anglo-Irish people denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until 1871, or to a lesser extent one of the English dissenting churches, such as the Methodist church, though some were Roman Catholics. They often defined themselves as simply "British", and less frequently "Anglo-Irish", "Irish" or "English". Many became eminent as administrators in the British Empire and as senior army and naval officers since the Kingdom of England and Great Britain were in a real union with the Kingdom of Ireland for over a century, before politically uniting into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
Marble bust of The V. Rev. Jonathan Swift, inside St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. Swift was Dean of St Patrick's from 1713 to 1745.
Statue of Anglo-Irish mathematician and theologian George Salmon (1819–1904), in front of the campanile of Trinity College Dublin, the traditional alma mater of the Anglo-Irish class. Salmon was provost of Trinity from 1888 until his death.
Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, from a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence
The Protestant Ascendancy was the sociopolitical and economical domination of Ireland between the 17th and early 20th centuries by a small Anglican ruling class, whose members consisted of landowners, politicians, clergymen, military officers and other prominent professions. They were either members of the Church of Ireland or the Church of England and wielded a disproportionate amount of social, cultural and political influence in Ireland. The Ascendancy existed as a result of British rule in Ireland, as land confiscated from the Irish Catholic aristocracy was awarded by the Crown to Protestant settlers from Great Britain.
Richard Woodward, an Englishman who became the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne. He was the author of some of the staunchest apologetics for the Ascendancy in Ireland.