The Irish parliament, 161389

This book is a study of the Irish parliament as an administrative and legal institution. It is particularly interested in how parliament dispatched the business put before it, how its various parts interacted and how this colonial institution engaged with other elements of the administrative machinery both inside and outside the kingdom.

The Irish parliament was both the scene of frequent political battles and an important administrative and legal element of the state machinery of early modern Ireland. This institutional study looks at how parliament dispatched its business on a day-to-day basis. It takes in major areas of responsibility such as creating law, delivering justice, conversing with the executive and administering parliamentary privilege. Its ultimate aim is to present the Irish parliament as one of many such representative assemblies emerging from the feudal state and into the modern world, with a changing set of responsibilities that would inevitably transform the institution and how it saw both itself and the other political assemblies of the day.