ACTS OF the British parliament which dissolved more than 30 Irish marriages in the 20 years before Independence are among 2,900 obsolete Acts being repealed by the Statute Revision Bill 2012.
Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin has just published the Bill, which is the latest phase in a programme to revise Irish statute law, repealing almost 8,000 old Acts in the process.
The programme began in 2003, and already almost 5,000 old Acts have been eliminated by a previous Statute Revision Bill.
Those being repealed in this tranche include a large number of private and “local and personal” Acts, relating to land transfers, conferring of citizenship, setting up of institutions and divorces.
Before the introduction of judicial divorce in Britain, a marriage could only be dissolved by an Act of Parliament, an expensive and very public procedure, normally the preserve of the rich.
Nonetheless, a number of Irish people availed of it, not only those whose names indicate their association with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Gore, de Vesci, Beresford, Osborne etc), but also those who bore the names of well-known Irish families (Carbery, Irvine, McBride, Fitzgerald, Murphy, Donovan, Malone, McConnell).
The Personal Divorce Acts being repealed by the Statute Revision Bill go back to the 18th century. They include an Act “to dissolve the marriage of Matthias Finucane Esq, with Anne Finucane, otherwise O’Brien, to enable him to marry again and for other purposes”. It is not stated what the “other purposes” of the second marriage might be.
Mr Howlin said the Bill would specify about 790 pieces of old legislation that were being kept in force because they were still relevant.
“For example,” he said, “the Saint Stephen’s Green (Dublin) Act 1877, which regulates the Green, will be specifically kept in force by the Bill, as will another Local and Personal Act of that year, the Dublin Science and Art Museum Act 1877 which established the present National Library and National Museum.”
When the Bill was enacted the number of repealed Acts would reach 8,000, he said, as well as an additional 40,557 Acts which were deemed inapplicable and were implicitly repealed by the legislation.
A list of the pre-Independence legislation coming within the scope of the present Bill has been placed on the website of the Office of the Attorney General ( attorneygeneral.ie).