Extinction Of The Irish Parliament
Above : Picture of John Foster
The day had now come (June 7th) when the final step was to be taken ; when the Bill for the Legislative Union was to be read a third time, and the Parliament of Ireland was to vote its own extinction. Before the report stage was witness the anti’Unionist members, unwilling to actually the rum of the cause, withdrew in a body. Thus, though the galleries were crowded, there were many empty benches on the floor of the House itself, when Lord Castlereagh moved the third reading of the Bill. Amidst a dead silence, John Foster, the Speaker, rose and asked the will of the House in the usual form : “As many as are of opinion that this Bill should pass say aye” The answer was given without enthusiasm, but there could be no doubt as to its nature. ” The ayes have it,” Foster announced. Such was the end of the Irish Parliament.
The proceedings in the Lords were little more than formal. There the third reading took place on June 12th. When all was over, however, nineteen peers, headed by the Duke of Leinster, head of the great Anglo-Irish family of the Geraldines, entered in the Journals of their House their solemn protest against the Union, ” the yoke which it imposes, the dishonour which it inflicts . . . the means employed to effect it, the discontents it has excited, and must continue to excite.”
The passing of the Act of Union appears to have been received by the country at large with a tranquillity which was scarcely to be expected, and for which the Ministers had scarcely dared to hope. It is perhaps to be accounted for partly by the exhaustion of a struggle long seen to be hopeless ; by weariness of a subject which now for almost two years had been constantly before the people ; most of all probably by the fact that, though, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Dublin Parliament had become for the educated classes, both Protestants and Catholics, an ever-increasing object of national interest and national pride, yet the exclusion from a direct share in its activities of the members of the Church to which the majority of the people belonged, had prevented it from being regarded as the Parliament of the Irish nation. In August the Act of Union received the Royal Assent and became law. On the 1st of January, 1801, it came into operation. Guns were fired to commemorate the event, and a new standard, on which for the first time the saltire cross of St. Patrick, red on a white ground, was joined with the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew, floated from the Castles of Dublin, London, and Edinburgh.