The Old Irish Parliament House

The old Irish Parliament House on Dublin’s College Green is one of my favorite buildings in the whole world [as previously mentioned but not suitably expanded upon at the time]. Today the headquarters of the Bank of Ireland, it has a long and varied history, and its exterior composition is one of startling unity for a structure the components of which were designed by three architects.

The site’s history stretchs back before the Henrician schism, located just south of the Liffey river upon what was then known as Hoggen Green. A nunnery existed on the site which was supressed during Henry VII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. A large private house was then built on the site, set back from the street, eventually known as Chichester House. (My personal conjecture is that it likely incorporated some of the old convent). Among the esteemed inhabitants of the house were Sir George Carew, sometime Lord President of Munster, Sir Arthur Chichester, after whom the house was named, and the Church of Ireland Bishop Edward Parry is known to have had a lease on the place during his lifetime.

The building must have been seen as holding some public significance, not only because it was located adjacent to the University of Dublin (of which Trinity College is the sole constituent institution), but it was home to the Irish Law Courts for a time beginning during the Michaelmas legal term of 1605. The Irish parliament (at the time legally subservient to the English one at Westminster) started meeting there in the 17th century; to my knowledge the first time this happened was October 5, 1692, though it may have been earlier.

Into the next century the state of the building left much to be desired and the Irish parliament voted in 1727 to tear down Chichester House and construct the first purposely-built parliament building in the world. They commissioned one of their own number, a Member of Parliament by the name of Edward Lovett Pearce, well known as the leading proponent of Palladian architecture in Ireland. Parliament repaired to the Blue Coat School north of the Liffey while the foundation stone of the new structure was laid on February 3, 1729.

The façade and dome of Pearce’s original structure.

Pearce’s creation was fronted by an E-shaped Ionic collonade and portico facing what by then became known as College Green. What is somewhat odd, perhaps even off-kilter, about Pearce’s plan is the prominence it gives to the House of Commons, presumably at the expense of the House of Lords. The Commons chamber was on a direct axis with the front entrance while the Lords were pushed off the axis towards the east. This may have reflected the fact that Pearce was himself a member of the Commons, but it is also probable that William Connolly, the powerful Speaker of the House as well as Pearce’s political mentor, played a part in this seemingly inappropriate architectural distinction.

A section through the House of Commons chamber.

This inbalance is in contrast to the later Houses of Parliament at Westminster designed by Pugin and Barry, in which the Commons and the Lords are given virtually equal distinction in terms of the plan. Somewhat ironically, Pugin’s parliament, which has no real main façade, was designed somewhat to look as if it was constructed at different time periods (albeit with the external style all the same), though in reality except for Westminster Hall and some basements and crypts the entire structure was completed by a single architectural duo working at one time. Contrarily, the Irish Parliament building was constructed by three architects at three different times (though all within the same century) yet has been made to appear as if composed as a whole.

The plan of the building, with the walls of Pearce’s original structure shown in bold, the later additions lighter.

The House of Commons chamber was the centrepiece of the interior. It was octagonal, with the debating chamber divided from the visitors’ gallery by a collonade. Students from neighboring Trinity College were afforded the right of entry to the gallery if wearing their academic gowns, though the privilege was repealed in 1795 by Speaker Foster.

A painting of the Irish House of Commons assembled in 1780.

Though not short of classical white ornamentation, the Commons chamber retained green for the walls and other decoration and furniture, as the complementary red was used for Lords chamber. Thus began the precedent of daughter parliaments in the Empire and Commonwealth adopting the lower house green and upper house red typical in parliamentary design. (Though it should be noted that the Irish parliament was not a daughter parliament to Westminster, as it was of independent origin).

Alas, the magnificent chamber burned in 1792 and was rebuilt to a different, rectangular plan in 1796, just a few years before the Act of Union.

On a side note, a Cusack once held the office of Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, though Sir Thomas Cusack (previously a Justice and afterwards Master of the Rolls) was elected to the position in 1541, long before the body occupied Chichester House and its procedent. (Sir Thomas was shamefully deeply involved in implementing Henry’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in Ireland).

The Lords chamber for the Peerage of Ireland, like the Commons chamber, featured a coffered ceiling though, unlike the lower house, the ceiling was arched rather than domed. The chamber featured a raised dais in a recessed alcove on one end upon which sat the viceregal throne.

The flanking walls of the House of Lords featured, above fireplaces, two tapestries by John van Beaver depicting William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne (which occurred on this day in 1690).

The last session of the Irish House of Commons, August 2, 1800.

The building came into the Bank of Ireland’s hands after the Irish Parliament passed the Act of Union with Great Britain, abolishing itself and legally merging the Kingdom of Ireland with Great Britain. Irish MPs were now sent to the British House of Commons, while the Irish peers elected a smaller number of their group to be represented at the equivalent body in Westminster. Parliament sold its home to the Bank of Ireland, on the sole condition that it not be used for political purposes. Accordingly, the House of Commons was demolished and replaced with a banking hall.

The Lords chamber, however, escaped harm by being assigned a new use as the Bank of Ireland’s boardroom. The above photograph was taken during this usage.

Returning to the exterior, the Parliament House was joined on College Green by the West Front of Trinity College, constructed between 1752 and 1759 and partly seen in the print above. The construction of the West Front as well as the Dining Hall, Chapel, and othe structures behind it were lavishly funded by the Parliament. The result was that Trinity College in Dublin had buildings grander than any Oxford or Cambridge college of the day.

Like other prominent Dublin buildings of the age, Parliament House featured statuary by the sculptor Edward Smyth. At the summit of the façade’s central pediment was Hibernia, the allegorical personification of Ireland using the country’s Latin name. Hibernia was joined at the western base of the pediment by Fidelity, with Commerce completing the triumvirate on the eastern base.

The Lords desired an extension of their wing providing for a more suitable and exclusive entrance portico, and they commissioned noted Dublin architect James Gandon to design the eastern extension in 1785. Another extension, designed by Robert Parke in 1787, was added on the west side with a complementary portico built on a somewhat smaller scale.

The building, however, was not quite complete until the great sweeping curved walls which lend so much drama to the august building’s exterior were added. Gandon had built a curved plain curtain wall to cover up the awkwardness of how his extension met Pearce’s original building. Parke linked his structure’s frontage to Pearce’s by means of an ionic collonade. The result was generally deemd unattractive, and so both Parke’s collonade and Gandon’s plain curtain wall were replaced with matching curtain walls featuring Ionic columns with intervening niches.

This aerial photo shows the haphazard nature of the building’s interior plan, masked by the curved curtain walls flanking the main façade.

The combined result is the building we have today, after two hundred years still in the hands of the Bank of Ireland. The House of Lords chamber is open to the public during normal business hours. Inside the mostly-restored chamber is the woolsack on which the Lord Chancellor of Ireland once sat, as well as the mace of the Irish House of Commons, unused by today’s equivalent Dail Éireann owing to the republican reluctance to hark to Ireland’s glorious monarchic past, instead preferring invented Gaelic names and titles like taoiseach, tanaiste, and ceann comhairle.

The influence of Pearce’s original façade can be seen in Sir Robert Smirke’s British Museum in Bloomsbury, designed over a century later. Smirke’s façade is somewhat more elongated than Pearce’s. The arrangement at the British Museum with the round reading room, though quite similar to Pearce’s plan with its domed Commons chamber, cannot be attributed to that architect’s influence. Instead, it was suggested by Chief Librarian Anthony Panizzi, who thought the large square in the center of the Museum was a waste of valuable space. Panizzi commissioned Sydney Smirke, Sir Robert’s son, to design the round reading room which eventually became synonymous with the Library of the British Museum (now independent and off-site as the British Library).

An aerial view of the British Museum in Bloomsbury.

The Bank of Ireland is a fine building and it is Ireland’s loss that it no longer houses Ireland’s parliamentary body. Some would say that it is Ireland’s loss that it is no longer part of the United Kingdom, but in reality both countries have reached such low ebbs in the history of parliamentary government that it’s hard to justify that. Perhaps with a tinge of irony, the Oireachtas na hÉireann (Ireland’s current parliament) sits in Leinster House, itself built as a home for the Duke of Leinster – a member of Ireland’s House of Lords.