Byrne's Dictionary of Irish Local History (43 page)

park
. In medieval documents the term refers to the engrossing of open-field strips. Thus a park is an enclosed field. (Otway-Ruthven, ‘Enclosures', pp. 35–6.)

parliament
. The word parliament means parley or discussion so any meeting could be called a parliament. In medieval times it referred to a formal meeting of the king in council with attendant judges to consider petitions for redress of grievances. The king could, of course, call upon anyone he chose to assist in council and the need to involve men of consequence in decisions about military matters led to an enlargement of that body. The summoning of magnates and ecclesiastics to the Irish council in 1264 represented the appearance of the first recognisable Irish parliament. Under feudal law freemen could only be taxed by their consent and this principle ensured from 1297 that representatives of the counties and liberties (the commons) became an indispensable part of every parliament. Burgesses (representatives of the towns) and clerical
proctors
(representatives of the lower clergy) appeared later. In the late fourteenth century the lords were detached from the council to become a distinct house but made little impact until the sixteenth century. Notwithstanding these developments, the
justiciar
(the king's representative in Ireland) continued to summon the
great council
– a body which comprised much the same personnel as parliament and performed similar functions – to deal with military affairs. Important medieval legislation included the
Statutes of Kilkenny
, an attempt to halt the creeping Gaelicisation of the colony, and
Poynings' Law
, a Tudor initiative intended to curb overly independent chief governors but which severely limited the ability of the Irish parliament to originate legislation. Poynings' Law and the 1720 British
Declaratory Act
ensured the formal subordination of the Irish parliament to Westminster until both were repealed in 1782–3. In a practical sense, however, the Irish legislature was not toothless. From the seventeenth century Poynings' was partially circumvented by the practice of transmitting heads of bills (see statute) and truculent parliaments could and did refuse to vote subsidies in an effort to force the administration to compromise. Administrative counter-measures included sweeteners such as the grants of sequestered monastic lands which eased the passage of the Henrician church reformation laws. Later, offers of pensions, sinecures and government posts were freely employed. Stiff measures could also be brought to bear to ensure the successful passage of legislation. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries government majorities were ensured by the creation or elimination of boroughs and the opposition of the clerical proctors to the Henrician reforms resulted in their expulsion from parliament. Until the eighteenth century parliament met only when there was business to be transacted or when the crown was in need of subsidies or taxes. Long intervals, sometimes of up to 25 years duration, separated successive parliaments. After 1713, however, parliament assembled every second year and from 1785 it met annually. In according parliament an eight-year duration, the 1768
Octennial Act
abolished the law which allowed for dissolution only upon the death or proclamation of the sovereign. From the seventeenth century it is possible to refer to a parliament of all-Ireland in the geographical sense but it could never be described as a representative assembly. Native Irish representatives hardly ever appeared in it, Catholics were edged out in mid-seventeenth century and eliminated entirely by its close and the Catholic franchise was denied absolutely from 1727. Throughout the eighteenth century it was the exclusive organ of the Protestant landed ascendancy. Over two-thirds of the seats in the commons were filled by the nominees of
borough
patrons and the remainder were elected on a narrow property-based franchise. Until the late 1760s the business of ensuring parliamentary majorities for government bills was managed by
undertakers
(usually the speaker of the house of commons) in return for a share in the disposal of patronage and a say in policy. Thereafter the task of managing parliament was assumed by the now permanently resident lords lieutenant. Patronage and bribery were part and parcel of the way in which accommodations were reached in the eighteenth-century parliament. That reality is reflected (albeit to an unprecedented level) in the promises of office, favour and compensation which seduced many members to vote for the extinction of their national assembly in 1800. A more public-spirited concern for enhancing the role of parliament and improving the social and economic condition of the island is revealed in the ‘
sole right
' and ‘
Woods Halfpence
' controversies, opposition to the pension list, the introduction of (modest) Catholic
relief acts
and the campaign of the ‘
patriot
'
party
to secure better trading conditions and legislative freedom. Party-style politics was a late development, members usually voting as individuals or on the basis of kinship or sectional interests. An embryonic Whig-Tory division emerged in England and Ireland (1704–1714) over the controversies regarding the royal succession, religious toleration and the role of parliament but lapsed after the Tories were excluded from office. Although an Irish Whig party was formed in 1789 the party system developed much slower in Ireland. The enlargement of the franchise and the home rule crisis in the 1880s provided the basis for the emergence of disciplined, highly-organised popular political parties with elected members of the Nationalist and Unionist parties pledged to work and vote along party lines. The transactions of both houses of the Irish parliament from the mid-seventeenth century to the
Act of Union
can be found in
Journals of the house of commons of the kingdom of Ireland
(19 vols, Dublin, 1796–1800) and in
Journals of the house of lords of the kingdom of Ireland
(8 vols, Dublin, 1783–1800).
See
afforced council, cess, franchise, lords,
Parliamentary Register
, privy council, statute, tory, whig. (Johnston-Liik,
History
; Richardson and Sayles,
The Irish parliament.)

Parliamentary Gazetteer of Ireland (1845–6)
. A three-volume social, economic, topographical and administrative gazetteer which contains a vast amount of information and statistics relating to pre-famine Ireland. The opening chapter comprises an extensive description of Ireland together with the results of the 1831 and 1841 censuses and innumerable statistical tables on all aspects of contemporary Irish life. Separate articles are given for each province, county, barony, parish, island, town and sizeable village. In 1998 the gazetteer was re-issued in a six-volume edition.

parliamentary papers
. Broadly speaking, the parliamentary papers of Great Britain and Ireland embrace everything officially published which concerns parliament and its working. In a narrow and strict sense they are taken to refer to the 7,000-volume bound set or ‘blue books' (so called because many were bound in blue) which commenced in 1801 and includes papers (bills, reports and returns) presented to parliament in response to an order, an act or an address. To these were added papers printed by royal command. Using the broader definition, parliamentary papers can be usefully divided into two categories: papers which relate to the agenda, proceedings and debates of the house and papers which give information to the house to inform the legislators. Agenda, proceedings and debates papers include all the papers one would associate with the actual conduct of parliament. They include minutes, agendas, notice papers, votes and amendments. The official account of proceedings can be found in the journals of the house and
verbatim
records of debates are published in
Hansard
. Minutes of standing committees appointed in each session to deal with public bills are also printed and circulated. The second category – information papers – may arise from within the house or from without. Public and private bills, the reports of committees of the whole house,
select committee
reports, returns (papers required by parliament from government departments) and act papers (papers presented to the house by order of an act of parliament and which it has ordered to be printed) are generated from within. The reports of
royal commissions
of inquiry and departmental committees, however, are externally generated.

This vast archive is one of the most important and detailed sources for Irish social, political and economic history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has one major deficiency – it is not easy to extract what you are looking for. There are sessional and consolidated indexes (shelved at the librarian's desk in the National Library) but the method of referencing is complex and confusing. A major royal commission on poverty in Ireland like the
Poor Inquiry
, for example, will not be found in the indexes because it is listed under its longer official title. Likewise for the
Devon
and
Bessborough
commissions. Intimidating they may appear but the parliamentary papers contain so much evidence of a local nature that it is inconceivable that any historian of the nineteenth century could neglect them. Fortunately, the unwieldy indexes have given way to a number of more user-friendly search guides. Although not yet widely available, Chadwyck-Healey's
Index to the house of commons parliamentary papers on CD-Rom
, 1801–1999 is the most advanced research tool available for locating relevant parliamentary papers. It provides speedy access to the papers through a multi-search facility which allows readers to search by key word, title keyword, title, paper type, paper number, session, chairman and year. The fourth volume of Peter Cockton's
Subject catalogue of the house of commons parliamentary papers, 1801–1900
(Cambridge, 1988) contains a listing (with full referencing) of parliamentary papers relevant to Ireland. For convenience, papers are organised thematically under five headings: Government and Public Order; Agriculture and the Land; Trade, Industry and Transport; Legal, Social, Administration, Education; Health and Religious Affairs. Each heading is subdivided alphabetically into individual topics and is arranged in the same order as the nineteenth-century bound volumes: bills, reports of committees, reports of commissions and accounts and papers. Cockton also cites the filing number of the Chadwyck-Healey microfiche edition of the parliamentary papers. The Maltbys' thematically-arranged breviate of official publications includes a wide selection of Ireland-related papers, each of which is accompanied by a summary. Susan Parkes has produced a helpful catalogue (with detailed summaries) of parliamentary papers touching on Irish education. In an effort to make parliamentary papers more accessible Irish University Press (1968) reproduced almost 5,000 papers in 1,000 volumes under 36 thematic headings. The IUP series overcame the problem of related papers scattered over many volumes by bringing them together in single or serial volumes.

Parliamentary papers should be cited accurately to facilitate readers who wish to examine the original. The form is: session/paper number/ volume number/ volume page number. Example:
Eleventh report of the commissioners of the board of education in Ireland
, HC 1810–11 (107) VI. 35. Here the session number is 1810–11, the paper is numbered 107 (sessional paper number 107), the volume number in the bound set is VI and the volume page number on which the report begins is 35.

Paper numbers may be contained within round or square brackets. Round brackets are used for house papers which begin numbering anew at the start of every session. Square brackets are employed to denote papers presented by royal command such as royal commissions of inquiry. Unlike house papers, command papers are numbered continuously over many sessions. There have been five separate series since 1833 when square brackets were first employed and the command numbers themselves were only printed on the papers from 1870 together with the legend C for Command (Cd. from 1900, Cmd. from 1919 and Cmnd from 1956). Example:
Report of Her Majesty's commission of inquiry into the working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870, and the acts amending the same
, HC 1881 [C2779] XVIII. I.

The most accurate means of identifying a paper is by its sessional year and paper number but the sessional year and volume number serves as the call number in the National Library of Ireland which holds the vast bulk of parliamentary papers. (Ford,
A guide
;
Idem, Select list of British parliamentary papers
; Maltby,
Ireland in the nineteenth century
; Parkes,
Irish education
; Shearman, ‘The citation', pp. 33–7.)

Parliamentary Register of Ireland
. A record of the proceedings and debates of the Irish house of commons during the last two decades of its existence. Words spoken by members in both houses of parliament were privileged and their publication was prohibited. Nevertheless, as in England, the practice developed of memorising the speeches of members, recording them in shorthand or obtaining the speakers' written notes and then publishing them for popular consumption. Inconsistency in recording members' orations was matched by inconsistency in reporting them. Some speeches are given
verbatim,
others reported indirectly and others again are simple summaries. The 17 volumes of the
Register
contain a great deal of biographical as well as political material and therefore are a useful source for examining the relationship between representatives and their borough or county constituencies.

parochial survey
. A three-volume survey of 79 parishes published by William Shaw Mason between 1814 and 1819. Mason compiled the survey with the assistance of local Protestant clergymen who provided information about the name, situation, extent, division, climate and topography of their respective parishes. Respondents were also invited to make suggestions for the amelioration of conditions in the locality. Perhaps reflecting the varying degrees of enthusiasm amongst the contributors, the survey is uneven. Some accounts are quite comprehensive, others are brief and not very illuminating. (Mason,
A statistical account,.)