McGrath, Charles Ivar

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McGrath, Charles Ivar
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McGrath, Charles Ivar

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  • Publication
    'The Grand Question Debated': Jonathan Swift, Army Barracks, Parliament and Money
    (Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2016)
    McGrath, Charles Ivar 
    Jonathan Swift made a name for himself in England in the years 1710-14 taking issue in print with, among other things, Standing Armies, the British National Debt and Westminster MPs who seemed too willing to vote new taxes at the behest of the Whitehall government. After more than a decade of silence on such subjects, Swift re-visited them in the late 1720s and early 1730s in relation to Ireland as part of his more general expression of anger at what was, in his eyes, fundamentally wrong with Hanoverian government in the British Isles. This article assesses his reasons for doing so, commencing with a detailed consideration of the 1728 Poem, 'The Grand Question debated: Whether Hamilton's Bawn should be turned into a Barracks or a Malt-House'. It then proceeds to examine in a series of other works by Swift up to 1733 the key emerging themes of government patronage of MPs in return for the voting of additional taxation and increases to the national debt and the expenditure of that increased income on the military, in particular for the building of a country-wide network of army barracks in Ireland. In so doing the article looks to address the place of such matters in Ireland, and how they help us better understand the nature of Irish society at that time.
      638
  • Publication
    English Ministers, Irish Politicians and the Making of a Parliamentary Settlement in Ireland, 1692-5
    (Oxford University Press, 2004-06-01)
    McGrath, Charles Ivar 
    In the first post-Glorious Revolution Parliament in Ireland in 1692, a constitutional crisis erupted over the House of Commons’ claim to have the ‘sole and undoubted right’ to initiate financial supply legislation in Ireland, and their rejection of the majority of the government’s legislative programme, including the most substantial provisions for financial supply. Not only did the ‘sole right’ claim result in the loss of desperately needed income for the government, it also represented an attack upon the existing constitutional framework in Ireland, in particular Poynings’ Law and the Crown’s prerogative in initiating legislation. The hasty prorogation of Parliament following these events led to political impasse in Ireland at the end of 1692. This article details the endeavours that were made to break that impasse, and examines the roles taken by leading English ministers, in particular those associated with the Whig party, and by a new generation of Irish politicians, many of whom were also whiggish in inclination, in the negotiation of a compromise settlement in 1694–5. The compromise solution eventually agreed upon in early 1695 resulted later in that year in the summoning of a new Irish Parliament, in which substantial necessary financial supplies were voted for the government. In the longer term, the 1695 compromise came to form the basis for a new constitutional framework for Irish executive-legislature relations that facilitated the advent of regular parliamentary sessions on a biennial basis in Ireland in the eighteenth century.
      332Scopus© Citations 4