La 4e de couverture indique : "The Irish parliament - the Oireachtas - is nearing the centenary year of its foundation, making it one of the oldest continuously surviving parliaments in the world. As the most important national institution in the state, it plays an essential role in giving voice to a diversity of views and opinions, providing stable governments, approving law and national budgets and upholding democratic values. For much of its existence, however, and most pointedly in the context of recent banking and economic crises, it has been subject to criticism concerning its ability to adequately hold the executive to account, to act as a coherent policy-making forum, to meet the challenges arising from European Union membership, to embrace wide-ranging reforms and to develop with purpose and ambition. This comprehensive new volume considers all aspects of the Houses of the Oireachtas - including their evolution, composition, organisation, financing, administration and reform. Contributors include academics, administrators and sitting and former parliamentarians. Contemporary challenges brought about by transformations in media style, increased inter-parliamentarism and the changing character of politics are also addressed. The book questions a number of assumptions about parliament and its work, including the efficacy of the legislative and budgetary processes, the nature of executive-legislative relations and the perceived encroachment of the courts on the legislature. Combined, this wide-ranging and detailed study fills a long-standing void, and provides essential reading not alone for those interested in Irish politics and government, but also for students and scholars of legislative studies."

This is the fifth and final volume in the series of early statutes begun by the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1907. It contains the text, with English translation, of the statute rolls of the parliaments held in Ireland in 1484, 1485 and 1493, and the complete English text of the statute roll of Henry VIII's Reformation Parliament of 1536-7, the only such roll to survive the Four Courts fire in 1922. Several unpublished acts of the reign of Edward IV (1461-83) are also included. The earlier acts show the changes in the Irish political establishment from the supremacy of the earl of Kildare under the Yorkist kings to the Tudor reaction under Henry VII. The enactments of the Reformation Parliament include Henry VIII's assumption of the supreme headship of the church in Ireland and the consequent setting up of new administrative procedures, the beginning of the process of dissolving the monasteries, and provisions for the succession to the throne on the king's death. This edition will be of use to those working in the fields of medieval and early modern Irish history and to constitutional, ecclesiastical and legal historians.

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.

Poynings' Law (1494) was one of the most crucial statutes ever enacted by the Irish parliament, yet the law's crucial impact on parliament's operations from 1660 has never been examined systematically. James Kelly examines how Poynings' Law impacted on the legislative operations of the Irish parliament between the Restoration and the Act of Union, and he establishes how the Irish parliament contrived, first, by evolving a sophisticated heads of bills process in the late 17th century, second, by curtailing the power of the Irish privy council in the early 18th century, and finally, by securing the amendment of Poynings' Law in 1782, to achieve a degree of legislative independence that endured until the Act of Union. Based on a close and detailed scrutiny of the records of the Irish parliament and the systematic exploration for the first time of the voluminous records of the British privy council, this book provides a new, revealing perspective on the working of the Irish parliament, its relationship with the Irish executive and on the nature of the Anglo-Irish connection. (Series: Irish Legal History Society)

"This is the first modern scholarly edition of the acts of King James II's Irish parliament of 1689. Like all the official records of James's parliament, the enrolled copies of its thirty-five acts were ordered by William III's Irish parliament in 1695 to be 'openly cancelled and utterly destroyed'. But the text of twenty-five of these acts remains extant and it is from the earliest surviving copies that this edition has been compiled. It supersedes Thomas Davis's edition which was neither comprehensive nor based on the most authentic sources. The 1689 acts dealt with the land settlement, the war, taxation, the legal system and the constitutional relationship with England, religious liberty and tithes, trade and economic development, among many other topics. The acts show a Catholic governing class legislating both for present needs and for a Jacobite settlement that was not to be." -- Publisher's website.

Building on the success of the first two editions, Politics in the Republic of Ireland continues to provide an authoritative introduction to all aspects of politics in the Irish Republic.