Irish House of Lords

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Irish House of Lords
the monarch or inheritance of a peerage
Meeting place
Lords Chamber, Parliament House, Dublin
Footnotes
1In 1800
See also:
Parliament of Great Britain
The House of Lords entrance to the Parliament House (east view). The entrance, which was part of an extension to the original building, was designed by renowned architect James Gandon by 1789.

The Irish House of Lords was the upper house of the Parliament of Ireland that existed from medieval times until the end of 1800. It was also the final court of appeal of the Kingdom of Ireland.

It was modelled on the

Act of Union 1800 abolished the Irish parliament, a subset of Irish peers sat as Irish representative peers in the House of Lords of the merged Parliament of the United Kingdom.[2]

History

The Lords started as a group of barons in the Lordship of Ireland that was generally limited to the Pale, a variable area around Dublin where English law was in effect, but did extend to the rest of Ireland. They sat as a group, not as a separate House, from the first meeting of the Parliament of Ireland in 1297. From the establishment of the Kingdom of Ireland in 1542 the Lords included a large number of new Gaelic and Norman lords under the policy of surrender and regrant.

Religious division was reflected in the House, but as late as the 1689 "

Roman Catholics, while the administration and a slight majority in the Commons were Anglicans, adherents of the Church of Ireland. In 1634 the campaign to secure "The Graces" came to a head. Most of these Catholic lords lost their titles in the ensuing 1641 rebellion, notably during the 1652 Cromwellian Settlement. These dispossessed lords were regranted their titles (if not always their lands) after the Restoration of 1660 by the Act of Settlement 1662. Others took the losing side in the Williamite War in Ireland
(1689–91), and a much smaller number of them were re-granted their lands in the 18th century.

By the 1790s most of the Lords personified and wanted to protect the "

Earl of Kildare
had been created in 1316.

Following the

Lord Curzon, were still able to stand for election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom (not being UK peers) if they were not a representative peer. This was a convenient way of giving a title for reasons of prestige to someone who expected to sit in the British House of Commons.[3]

Today the 18th-century

Irish Parliament building on College Green in Dublin is an office of the commercial Bank of Ireland
, and visitors can view the Irish House of Lords chamber within the building.

Function

The Parliament of Ireland was a

English Privy Council
; main debates before this stage were thus technically on "heads of bills". Following approval the Parliament of Ireland voted on the formal finalised "bill" (which could only be rejected or passed unamended).

The Lords was the highest

court of appeal in Ireland, same as the Lords were in England. However, the controversial British Declaratory Act 1719 asserted the right of the Lords in Westminster to overrule the Irish Lords. The Irish Patriot Party secured the repeal of the Declaratory Act as part of the Constitution of 1782
.

The House of Lords was presided over by the

Speech from the Throne by the Lord Lieutenant
, who sat on the throne beneath a canopy of crimson velvet.

Sessions were generally held at

Irish Houses of Parliament
in the 1730s.

See also

Footnotes

  1. JSTOR 175512
    .
  2. ^ E.M. Johnson-Liik History of the Irish parliament in 6 vols. (Belfast, 2002).
  3. ^ "The Irish Peers and the House of Lords - The final chapter". Burke's Peerage. Archived from the original on 19 August 2010.

External links

Journals of the House of Lords
Vol 1 Vol 2 Vol 3 Vol 4 Vol 5 Vol 6 Vol 7 Vol 8 Proceedings 1634–1800; printed 1779–1800; large (~1 GB) PDF files from the Oireachtas library
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