History
The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement contained little direct reference to public space, partly because the creation of the Parades Commission had already dealt with one central issue. However, it created a legal and institutional framework within which local authorities were required to address the broader question of shared space. This was the background to a long series of decisions on the flying of flags on official buildings, culminating in the mass loyalist protests of 2012–13. The same process led to the negotiated admission of republican and nationalist events to the city centre, while at the same time the Orange Order found itself struggling to reclaim the legitimacy it had once enjoyed without question.
Extreme political violence of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s forced radical changes in the use of public space. The Twelfth of July, formerly an unchallenged part of civic ritual, now came to be seen as problematic. The Lord Mayor’s Show, a celebration of commerce and unionism, dwindled before being revived as an apolitical, carnival-style event. St Patrick’s Day, formerly associated solely with Nationalism, was promoted, with mixed success, as a cross-community festival.
This chapter reiterates the main points of the book. Essentially, it confirms that while the Irish Parliament clearly was a colonial assembly in its origins and in its development, there is also a clear line of development that is more local and more organic than might first meet the eye. It brings together the many strands of the book to make some strong concluding statements about the nature of the institution and its place within the kingdom, its constitution, and the institutional history of Ireland.
Initially, this chapter discusses the position of the Irish Parliament within early modern Irish historiography and whether it has served Irish institutional history well. This is followed by a consideration of the development of parliamentary history in England, and whether there is a potential usefulness of applying such a historiographical model to Ireland. It also considers how an institutional history of the Irish Parliament might be written and to what extent this can be achieved, considering to what extent the relevant source material is available to us. The day-to-day records of the two houses, the parliamentary journals, are discussed in great detail – their original purpose and to what extent they might direct such an institutional study.
Traditional histories of parliament, whether Irish or otherwise, have generally treated them as political events. This book considers the seventeenth-century Irish Parliament as an ongoing element within the state. It considers the role of parliament within the context of an overall state apparatus of governance and charts its development over time. While parliament developed in conjunction with the Irish state, local politicians, and local institutions, it was also a colonial institution, taking direction from Westminster on how to operate. Whether by design or by chance, it resembles the Westminster model of parliamentary procedure, but it also had specifically Irish traits in how it dispatched its business. This book describes a developing institution chiefly through the work that it undertook. Most will be well aware of parliament’s work on legislation and the creation of law and also representation of communities and locations, but it spent large amounts of time hearing petitions and undertaking judicial work. It undertook these ever-increasing responsibilities with a growing group of parliamentary officers, who had a wide variety of powers and responsibilities. Naturally this led to a sophisticated set of procedures and privileges in undertaking this work in order to increase its efficiency and productivity. This book discusses topics and describes processes that are still very much a cornerstone for today’s parliamentary democracy in Ireland and will resonate in Irish institutional culture and elsewhere in the common law world.
The passing of legislation was of great importance to both government and community in early modern Ireland. It frequently was the mechanism by which grievances were addressed and also how finance was secured. This chapter considers the relevance of legislation and also the relevance of Poynings’ Law to the passage of legislation in Ireland. It also considers the relative importance of the creation of statute law in the Irish legal system. This chapter takes the reader through the various stages of legislation in the Irish Parliament, an area that has been relatively ignored when compared with the focus of studies on Poynings’ Law.
In a book that deals with procedure and focuses a little less on MPs and politics than other works, a chapter on the officers and servants of parliament brings light onto this sometimes forgotten corner of parliament. While nobody could fail to acknowledge the importance of the speaker of either house, this book brings a sharp concentration of the very important roles of the judges and other legal officers, on the all-important clerk and his juniors, and on the lesser officers of parliament. It discusses the role of the officers, their responsibilities, and the capacity for influence on political and other developments in parliament. It also describes the payment and other rewards they received for their work.
Petitioning, either as a general call for favour and assistance, or as the opening salvo in a legal action, was a common process in the Irish Parliament and there is strong evidence that it took up a considerable amount of time, frequently much more than legislation did. This chapter considers both the theory and practice of petitioning. It discusses how and why it happened, the methodology and materials of the process, the role of counsel, officers, and members. It also provides the statistical evidence of how the system worked and to what extent certain petitioners and types of petitions were more successful than others.
The two constituent parts of parliament were generally self-regulating in their behaviour. With the exception of statute law that did stipulate certain ways for parliament to behave, the Commons and the Lords organised the way they undertook their business and how their members should conduct themselves. This meant that parliamentary privilege for the member and the liberties of each house were jealously guarded. These were certain rights to avoid arrest, to be free from civil actions, and also for the house to dominate certain areas, for example appellate oversight of other courts or finance. The author convincingly asserts that while privilege could well be the domain of the petty and self-interested, its fundamental purpose was to preserve the individual roles and promote their smooth running.
Contemporary political discourse makes clear that confino is a contested memory. The collective memory of internal exile tends to be presented as inextricably linked to the Resistance, but the materials examined in this study resist such a neat identification. These texts describe divided memories through experiences that must be interpreted, remembered, and contested. Competing narratives call for a nuanced appreciation for the complexities of remembrance that are not fixed and cannot be reduced to a single moment, but instead are continuously being redefined. The ideals for what would become the European Union were first articulated in a manifesto written by exiles on the island of Ventotene. Today, geo-political and socio-economic challenges threaten the ideals of justice and freedom at the root of both European integration and the Italian constitution, which can also trace its influences to confino and to Ventotene. Divided memories of how Fascism suppressed dissent are changing the political course of Europe and Italy.