Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
Thus, in 1815, Sir Henry Parnell's motion for a committee was rejected by a majority of 228 to 147; in 1816, on Mr. Grattan's similar motion, the vote was 172 to 141; in 1817, Mr. Grattan was again defeated by 245 to 221; in this session an act exempting officers in the army and navy from forswearing Transubstantiation passed and became law.
Under Grattan's Parliament Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors, though not its endowments, to Catholics. In 1795 a petition from Maynooth, the lay college in which was not till twenty years later suppressed by Government for political reasons, was presented to the Irish House of Commons by Henry Grattan, protesting against the exclusion of Protestants from its halls.
It is only through the pernicious habit of thinking of Irishmen as exceptions to all political rules that Grattan's Parliament is considered likely, had it lasted, to have come down to our time unreformed and unimproved.
The rapidity with which under Grattan's Parliament an emancipated Ireland ceased to be intolerant leads one to suspect that the bigotry of creeds which is attributed to us as a race is not a natural characteristic, but rather the outcome of external causes.
Of these was William Conyngham Plunkett, member for Charlemont, Grattan's old borough, a constitutionalist of the school of Edmund Burke, worthy to be named among the most illustrious of his disciples. In the same July, on the 7th of the month, on which the Irish elections were held, that celebrated Anglo-Irish statesman expired at Beaconsfield, in the sixty-seventh year of his age.
An international contract leaving them an independent Parliament with an Executive responsible to it, having control over domestic affairs, is their demand. Grattan's constitution comprised a sovereign Parliament with a non-Parliamentary Executive, in so far as the latter was appointed and dismissed by English Ministers.
Many of the chief English and Irish jurists of his time, Lord Camden, Lord Kenyon, Lord Erskine, Lord Kilwarden, Judges Chamberlain, Smith, and Kelly, Sir Samuel Rommilly, Sir Arthur Pigott, and several others, agreed fully in Grattan's doctrine, that the settlement of '82 was final and absolute, and "terminated all British jurisdiction over Ireland."
The troubles between England and her American colonies between England and France had led to the concession of what we now know as Grattan's Parliament the nearest form of Home Rule Ireland had ever enjoyed since her conquest by the descendants of the great Norman kings.
There are a great many Englishmen who think that when they show that Grattan's Parliament was a venal and somewhat disorderly body, which occasionally indulged in mixed metaphor, they have proved the impossibility of giving Ireland a Parliament now.
He was not restored by returning to patriotic opposition. Grattan's leadership proved permanent politically and historically. His name connotes the high water-mark of Irish statesmanship. The parliament which he created and whose rights he defined became a standard, and his name a talisman and a challenge to succeeding generations. The comparative oratory of Grattan and Flood is still debated.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking