(OOC: ITTL there was no potato blight and no Troubles)
OOC: Makes sense to me!
OOC: That's not your problem. You don't get to decide how this thread goes down, it's a collaboration. Someone cited a PoD hundreds of years ago, go with that.
There is a misunderstanding on this site of what a DBWI is supposed to be. Don't perpetuate it.
OOC: TBH, I don't want to seem too argumentative here, but the truth is.....although collaboration is certainly the spirit of DBWIs, since Tripledot was the one who started the thread, he *is* allowed to have a degree of control over what's approved and what isn't.....at least within reason(in fact, that's usually how the best DBWIs turn out). With that said....
IC: Well, I'd imagine that you'd have to butterfly the compromises of the late 1790s, and 1820s, that started Ireland on the road to peace and prosperity, first of all. Wolfe Tone, after all, is hailed as a hero in both Britain and Ireland for a very good reason: he was the one who contributed the most to bringing peace and tranquility to the island.
But before that, the island was in turmoil after the American Revolution, and if Wolfe Tone had either been imprisoned, or died during the fighting, could that have potentially opened Ireland to a more successful Napoleonic intervention?
Famous American historian Anthony P. O'Toole, of the University of California, San Jose, seems to think so.
And an Ireland that gives in to French meddling is likely going to be a poorer Ireland afterwards-and what of the potato blight bug that was discovered in Mexico in 1835? Might that become a problem there, as it eventually did in the U.S. region of New England, and Australia in the 1880s?