urban government in early modern Ireland developed in several dozen towns and proto‐towns along broadly English lines. The English influence came by two routes. First, there was the small number of centres, less than twelve, where there was some measure of administrative continuity from the medieval colony. (There were of course many other boroughs with medieval charters, or the claim to medieval borough status, which lacked any tangible legacy.) Secondly, there were the entirely new plantation boroughs of late 16th‐ or early 17th‐century creation which developed urban functions and local government relatively quickly—
Bandon, Londonderry (see
derry), Coleraine, and
Belfast for example.
The corporate character of individual towns varied widely but actual practice was to a great extent determined by the attitude of the dominant landowner in the neighbourhood—burgesses were tenants first, freemen second. Depending on the charter, the chief officer was designated mayor, provost, sovereign, or portreeve, and municipal functions were supposedly shared with a group, usually twelve burgesses in all but the largest centres. In most cases these became a self‐perpetuating group. At its simplest municipal governance was concerned with market regulation, the provision of petty justice, and the detention of malefactors, but in the larger jurisdictions the corporate framework allowed for much more diverse functions. However, even in these towns local government was rarely the exclusive concern of the municipal corporation; seigniorial manor courts and
parish vestries often assumed civic responsibilities, sometimes in the place of an active corporation.
Until the 1640s there was a sharp division between the corporations of the older towns, where there was an entrenched
Old English citizenry hostile to the state's religious policy, and those in the plantation towns where there were strongly Protestant but often quite independent civic leaders. The systematic expulsions of Catholics during or at the end of the
Confederate War opened several of the old towns to a new governing group. But
Restoration governments, confronted by religious dissent in some of these remodelled corporations, tightened their control over freeman admission and mayoral appointments, notably from 1671 (see
new rules). In turn
James II's government granted new charters in many cases and reopened civic office to those excluded since the 1640s. The last of the political twists came with the
sacramental test, which excluded dissenters from municipal office, permanently changing the character of local government in towns like Derry and Belfast.
In the larger Irish centres most Protestant freemen had at least nominal participation in local government through membership of chartered trade
guilds and with their civic freedom (which tended to overlap with trade freedom). In so far as all such towns were parliamentary boroughs, electoral calculation on the part of borough patrons (or aspirant patrons) overrode all other aspects of governance, and often quite distorted local constitutions. Some centres which were shackled by particularly oligarchic corporations—Belfast, Sligo, and
Limerick, for example—secured statutory ‘police’ commissioners or parish commissioners at the beginning of the 19th century to act in effect as a local governing trust. In the case of Dublin the powers of the aldermanic upper house had been diluted in 1760 after an effective campaign by the trade guilds, led initially by Charles
Lucas.
With the removal of statutory restrictions on Catholic civic freedom in 1793, municipal corporations had the option of formally admitting a larger share of their propertied citizenry; this in nearly all cases they declined to do. As a result Irish corporations came to be seen as bulwarks of Protestant reaction that deserved to be swept away in their entirety, this at a time when increasing numbers of the Catholic citizenry in nine of the largest towns were getting a taste for politics in so far as they were securing the parliamentary franchise as
40‐shilling freeholders. The long and highly political battle over municipal reform (not of course an exclusively Irish issue) was finally settled in 1840, and even then the diminished powers of the new, more representative corporations was a major disappointment to the reformers. However, the campaign had given rise to the mammoth parliamentary report on Irish municipal corporations (1835), still the fundamental primary source for pre‐reform urban history.
Urban government in independent Ireland reflects demographic and economic trends seen in many other European countries. Ever since independence there has been a drift of population from rural areas to large towns and cities. Expansion typically was accommodated by rather haphazard suburban development, which has created many serious infrastructural, social, and environmental problems. The fact that much urban growth has occurred outside the legal city limits has added to problems of co‐ordination between the separate local authorities involved. Inner cities have suffered from long‐term decay, traffic congestion, and population decline, although tax‐aided private redevelopment schemes have wrought a partial revitalization since 1986.
Urban government has suffered from the same malaise as the rest of local government. Elected members of city councils or corporations (legally, these are termed county borough corporations) have little administrative power, while the presence of a partisan national party spirit in council chambers has tended to inhibit an effective approach to strategic issues. Urban status is prized almost solely as a matter of prestige, rather than as conferring any significant increase in practical powers.
Bibliography
Jupp, Peter , ‘Urban Politics in Ireland 1801–31’, in David Harkness and Mary O'Dowd (eds.), The Town in Ireland (1981)
DD/ and David Dickson
