McClintock’s father, Member of the Irish Parliament for Enniskillen, 1783-90, and Belturbet, 1790-99, came from a well-established family of Scottish Protestant settlers. In 1766 he married a first cousin of John Foster* who, as Irish Speaker, appointed him chief serjeant-at-arms of the Commons and his two eldest sons John and William as deputies, for which they later received a joint pension of £2,545. McClintock, who had been present at the battles of Arklow and Vinegar Hill in June 1798, was reported to be the last person with the Speaker to leave the Irish House following enactment of the Union, to which he had been ‘consistently opposed’.
If we do not partake of the benefit likely to result from an Insurrection Act, you may expect to hear of dreadful results ... As government refused us the advantage of this law, the general observation among the people is that it will never be resorted to. We must have it, as every hour the lawless and diabolical spirit becomes worse.
Add. 40203, f. 169.
At the 1820 general election he served as a locum at Athlone for its patron Lord Castlemaine, a kinsman by his second marriage. He did not take his seat and by 16 May 1820 had vacated.
At the 1830 general election McClintock came forward for Louth on the Foster interest, headed since 1828 by the 2nd Baron Oriel, with the support of Roden, who was now vice-president of the Protestant Reformation Society. He described himself as a ‘constant resident in the county’, where his ‘ancestors had been long established’, and a ‘constitutional representative, anxious to improve every description of oppressive taxation’.
He was, of course, listed by the Wellington ministry as one of their ‘friends’, although this was later queried. He presented a petition for the abolition of slavery from the Wesleyan Methodist Society of Dundalk, 5 Nov. 1830. In his only known speech, 11 Nov., he rejected the charges contained in a petition presented by Daniel O’Connell against the Dundalk magistracy, who he insisted were ‘extremely active and zealous in discharging their duty in a proper manner’. He voted in the ministerial minority on the civil list, 15 Nov. He was granted a month’s leave on urgent private business, 2 Dec. 1830. He divided against the second reading of the Grey ministry’s reform bill, 22 Mar., and for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. 1831. At the ensuing dissolution he retired from Louth, where the Catholics had reunited, without explanation. Expectations that he would be Roden’s nominee at Dundalk proved to be false.