Irish House of Lords
During the years Ireland was a separate kingdom, ruled by the English monarch, it was governed by an Irish House of Commons and Irish House of Lords, modeled after Westminster.[1]
Individuals would be made peers in the Irish peerage as a reward for merit, like winning a significant battle in wartime. Alternately peers were created in what we would now consider patronage, to pay off a political favour.
Earning an Irish peerage was considered much less prestigious that earning a peerage in the English House of Lords, or its successor the House of Lords of Great Britain.
After the Act of Union merged Great Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom all of the peers who sat in the House of Lords of Great Britain retained their titles and offices, while only a selection of the Irish Peers would sit in the new United Kingdom House of Lords.
References
- ↑ Lords of the Ascendancy: the Irish House of Lords and its members 1600-1800, F.G. James (Irish Academic Press, Dublin and The Catholic University of America Press, Washington £27.50), History Ireland. Retrieved on 2022-06-30. “What emerges from the narrative offered is that the Irish peerage remained small and the House of Lords relatively inconsequential until the early seventeenth century when James I and Charles I made an unprecedented eighty-five creations.”