HISTORY: Proceedings of the Irish House of Lords 1771-1800 (3 vols.) Edited by James Kelly Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1,831pp, €180: NOTHING COULD be further removed, it would seem, from the modern Houses of the Oireachtas than the old Irish House of Lords that voted itself out of existence with the Act of Union in 1800.
There is, however, one obvious link. Leinster House, where the Dáil and Senate sit, was the townhouse of the Duke of Leinster, a Whig peer in the Irish House of Lords, located on College Green in the building now occupied by the Bank of Ireland.
He attacked the passing of bills with too great celerity, opposed the Union, and in the debate on the Catholic Relief Bill in 1793 cited several examples from Germany and Switzerland of power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics. He was also the father of Lord Edward FitzGerald.
Leinster once declared that he had no confidence in his relation Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State in Lord North’s Administration and responsible for both Ireland and the colonies, “for I have ever known him to be the tool of administration and he has been a principal cause of the loss of America”.
Hillsborough Castle is occupied today by secretaries of state who have not been as successful at losing Northern Ireland, though, as Lord Mornington observed in 1781, “Ministers in general had considered their residence in Ireland as good Christians do the world as a passage to a better place”.
Not having constituents to attend to, peers would sit up to 100 days a year, including Saturdays, Mondays and August, though, given the slowness of travel, sessions were more concentrated and recesses longer. More bills were passed in those days, and were scrutinised closely for their effects on property. Peers never tired of pointing out that parliament existed to represent property, not people. Yet, no democratically elected chamber, or gathering of Republican Socialists, could compete with the Lords’ devotion to “the Revolution”, that of course being the “Glorious” Revolution of 1689, which delivered all power and property into the hands of a tiny Protestant elite. The merits of devotion to constitutional politics does depend on the nature of the constitution.
A debate in 1786 throws an interesting light on the origin of the free envelope scheme, today a working tool of TDs and Senators. First known as "the indulgence of franking", and originally granted in England by King's letter, the united Cromwellian Parliament of 1656 ordered, not only that all letters sent by members to any part of England, Ireland and Scotland should be delivered free of postage, but also that all letters directed to members should be brought tothe bar of the House and delivered free.
The idea of free postage on the public’s letters to members has somehow become lost in the march of progress.
Some procedures and debates have faint modern echoes, such as Lord Aldborough’s bill of 1783 for “the retrenchment of the national expenses, and for the reduction of useless officers and boards, sinecure places, pensions and additional salaries”.
Lord Powerscourt in 1783 maintained: “It is not unconstitutional to say the parliament is corrupt. No man can deny it”. One would like to think that nowadays there is much greater determination to prevent that, and also that politicians are no longer able to aspire to membership of the upper house “as a reward of their labours and a completion of their repose”.
Speaker Foster at the bar of the Lords explained a money bill, for which a second chamber had no competence, that relieved breweries of all taxes, so as to give beer a decided advantage over spirits as this would be conducive to “sobriety, tranquillity and content”, including of the political variety. In 1797, one peer denounced the various abominable abuses committed in the management of the Foundling Hospital, but went on to suggest sinisterly that to put aside the existence of some poor diseased infants with a pistol “would be a humane act, to relieve them from their torture”.
There was a Wide Streets Bill in 1796, in the words of Lord Chancellor Clare, “to counteract the mischief of gratuitous legal opinions given extrajudicially”, and he asked Lord Farnham, “did the noble earl suppose that the builders of Dublin would turn knights-errant and lay out their money without hope of profit?”
The Lords’ relationship with the press was prickly. Lord Mountgarret won warm press support, but none from colleagues, when he attacked new taxes on newspapers, as designed “to put additional shackles on the press, lessening the consumption of them”, and the Administration for getting “even” with the press for “all the trouble and galling uneasiness it has occasioned to them”. The House had what a few even today might envy as the power to arrest and bring editors and printers before them for “audacious” libels and “outrageous” distortions, to fine them £500, and commit them to Kilmainham Jail for six months.
If Grattan’s parliament was long lamented by Nationalists, no sentimental regrets attached to the House of Lords. The patriotic and radical voices, like Lord Moira and Bishop Law of Killala, were few. Lord Clare ridiculed pretensions to constitute “an independent Irish nation”, and reminded peers that the motley crew of adventurers who were their ancestors were “an English colony settled in an enemy’s country”.
The House castigated the democratic ideals of the United Irishmen, by pointing to the reign of terror in France, and subsequent “military usurpation”. Lord Yelverton and others repudiated the notion of any social contract, “our constitution is in fact the offspring of divine wisdom, acting upon human affairs”, while Lord Clare castigated the principle of consent as subversive, and tending towards individual representation.
The Act of Union was seen by Lord Donoughmore as accommodating the extension of Catholic privileges without endangering the Protestant establishment.
James Kelly and the Irish Manuscripts Commission have done a major service by editing these excellently referenced volumes, mainly from press reports at the time (the official journals reported decisions, not debates), thus making the House of Lords debates during the critical last quarter of the 18th century much more accessible to historians.
Martin Mansergh is Minister of State with special responsibility for the OPW and the arts