It is necessary to enter into these details, because it was on the basis
of the years 1799-1800, and not on that of a year of normal expenditure,
such as was 1795, that Pitt and Castlereagh framed the financial clauses
of the Act of Union, which were to establish the taxable relations
between Great Britain and Ireland.

Having said so much we need not pause to consider how far the financial
clauses were justified. It will suffice to say that they provided that
Ireland should pay two-seventeenths of the joint expenditure of the
United Kingdom, together with the annual charge upon her pre-union debt.
One should add, however, that the Irish House of Lords protested that
the relative taxable capacities of Ireland and England did not bear to
each other the ratio which the Act enunciated of 1 to 7-1/2, but in
reality of 1 to 18.

It was no part of Pitt's scheme that there should be fiscal union. A
separate Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, drawing up an Irish budget
and regulating an Irish debt, remained after the union of the
legislatures. Speaking in 1800 on this very point Lord Castlereagh
declared that:--

"It must be evident to every man that if our manufactures keep pace in
advancement for the next twenty years with the progress they have made
in the last twenty, they may at the expiration of it be fully able to
cope with the British, and that the two kingdoms may be safely left like
any two countries of the same kingdom to a free competition."

The seventh article of the Act of Union, which comprised the financial
proposals of the Act, has been summarised as follows in the report of a
Royal Commission, to which we shall have occasion to refer later:--