Parliament House () is a building on College Green in Dublin which housed the Parliament of Ireland from the building's completion in the 1730s until the parliament's abolition under the Acts of Union 1800. The building has been owned by the Bank of Ireland since 1803 and served as its head office until the 1970s.
It was architecturally influential as the world's first purpose-built bicameral parliament house.
History Chichester House The building was originally the site of Chichester House, which was built in the early 17th century on Hoggen Green (later College Green). It was built by Sir George Carew, Lord President of Munster and Lord High Treasurer of Ireland, and had been constructed on the site of a nunnery which had been disbanded by King Henry VIII at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. Carew's house, was named for its later owner Sir Arthur Chichester, and was a building of sufficient importance to have become the temporary home of the Kingdom of Ireland's law courts during the Michaelmas law term in 1605. Most famously, the legal documentation facilitating the Plantation of Ulster had been signed there on 16 November 1612.
This building was adapted for use by the Irish Parliament in the 1670s having been formerly noted as a 'hospitall' on John Speed's Map of Dublin (1610). The structure was flanked by rows of gabled houses known as Dutch Billies, which were demolished and replaced by the Wide Streets Commission with the westerly Turnstile Alley significantly widened and straightened to become Foster Place in the 1780s and with buildings on the easterly side demolished to widen College Street and later create Westmoreland Street in the 1790s.
Plans for the new building
Chichester House was in a dilapidated state, and unfit for official use in spite of remedial works having been carried out on the building by Thomas Burgh from 1701 to 1714.
The ancient Palace of Westminster, the seat of the English (before 1707) and, later, British Parliament, was a converted building; the House of Commons's odd seating arrangements were due to the chamber's previous existence as a chapel. Hence MPs faced each other from former pews.
In spite of this fact and the calls to upgrade and retain the building, in 1727 parliament voted to spend £6,000 on a new building on the site. It was to be the world's first purpose-built two-chamber parliament building.
The design of this building, one of two purpose-built Irish parliamentary buildings (along with Parliament Buildings, Stormont), was entrusted to an architect, Edward Lovett Pearce, who was a member of parliament and a protégé of the Speaker of the House of Commons, William Conolly of Castletown House. He won the competition to design the building beating, among others, established surveyor and architect Thomas Burgh.
During construction, Parliament moved into the Blue Coat Hospital on Dublin's northside for a period.
Parliament House (1729-39)
The foundation stone for the new building was laid on 3February 1729 by Thomas Wyndham, 1st Baron Wyndham, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
All of the top craftsmen, builders, masons and surveyors of the day worked on the building including most notably Richard Castle as assistant draughtsman.
Following the death of Lovett Pearce in December 1733, construction continued under the supervision of Arthur Dobbs.
Once completed, the building became home to the two Houses of Parliament, serving as the seat of both chambers (the Lords and Commons) of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Ireland for most of the 18th century until that parliament was abolished by the Act of Union of 1800, when Ireland became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Gandon extensions (1782-89) Later in the century, James Gandon designed the House of Lords entrance portico on Westmoreland Street facing down College Street as well as the screen walls connecting with the older House of Commons entrance and a new commons entrance on Foster Place. All of this work was completed between 1782 and 1789. It appears that the majority of this work was carried out after 1787 as an illustration from Henry A. Baker in that year shows the original appearance facing onto College Street without the houses cleared and without any new portico or screen wall.
Robert and Edward Parke extensions (1787-93) Around this time, Robert Parke (1787–92) and later his successor Edward Parke (1787–93) also carried out works on the House of Commons and are often credited with designing an ionic colonnade around Foster Place. This also followed the collapse of the dome over the commons in 1792 following a fire. The colonnade appears to have never have been popular however and was filled in with a matching screen wall to match the Gandonian appearance of the Eastern screen wall a decade later when Francis Johnston was making alterations for the Bank of Ireland.
Design Pearce's design was revolutionary. The building was effectively semi-circular in shape, occupying nearly 6,000 m2 (1.5 acres). Unlike Chichester House, which was set far back from Hoggen Green, the new building opened directly onto the Green. The principal entrance consisted of a colonnade of Ionic columns extending around three sides of the entrance quadrangle, forming a letter E (see picture below). Three statues, representing Hibernia (the Latin name for Ireland), Fidelity and Commerce (later carved by Edward Smyth) stood above the portico. Over the main entrance, the royal coat of arms was cut in stone.
According to Patrick Wyse Jackson, curator of the Geological Museum at Trinity College Dublin, the granite used in the central 'piazza' of the Parliament House may have come from the Baltyboys quarry close to Blessington, where contemporary documents show that one William Borrowdale was paid £6-16s-2d for 'mountain stone' on 24 December 1729. It is known that granite quarrying had been taking place in west Wicklow since the early 1700s from several openings at Baltyboys, and "from 1740 in more significant volumes at Woodend and Threecastles nearby and then from Golden Hill."
The Parliament House is also noteworthy for its decorations, which, unusually, were carved from granite as opposed to a more malleable stone. Wyse Jackson notes that "they would have been difficult to produce, on account of the coarse texture of the rock, and so reflect the considerable skills of the stonemasons. It is unusual to find granite so delicately carved".
The building underwent extensions by architect James Gandon, between 1785 and 1789 he added a new House of Lords entrance at the east of the building, facing onto Westmoreland Street. Unlike the main entrance to the south, which came to be known as the House of Commons entrance, the new peers' entrance used six Corinthian columns, at the request of peers who wished their entrance to be distinct from the Ionic columns of the main entrance. Over this, three statues by Edward Smyth were placed, representing Fortitude, Justice and Liberty. A curved wall joined the Pearce entrance to Gandon's extension. This masked the uneven joins of some of the extensions, as shown below. The wall, built of granite was also inset with blind niches.
Another extension was added on the west side into Foster Place, designed in 1787 by architect Robert Parke; while matching Gandon's portico, he tried a different solution, linking the other portico to the main Pearce one by a set of Ionic columns in a colonnade.De Breffny, pg.190. The result was poorly received and when the Bank of Ireland took over the building, it employed Francis Johnston to create an architectural unity by replacing this set of Ionic columns by a curved wall in line with Gandon's original design. Ionic columns were then added to both curved walls, giving the extensions an architectural and visual unity that had been lacking and producing the building's ultimate exterior.
The interior contained one unusual and highly symbolic feature. While in many converted parliamentary buildings where both houses met in the same building, the houses were given equality or indeed the upper house was given a more prominent location within the building, in the new Irish Houses of Parliament the House of Commons was featured, with its octagonal parliamentary chamber located in the building's centre. The smaller House of Lords was given a lesser position nearby.
The original, domed House of Commons chamber was destroyed by fire in the 1790s, and a less elaborate new chamber, without a dome, was rebuilt in the same location and opened in 1796, four years before the Parliament's ultimate abolition.
Materials Patrick Wyse Jackson, curator of the Geological Museum in Trinity College, assessed the building in 1993 and noted the following: "It has a façade forty-seven metres long with a portico supported by impressive Ionic columns. The building has Calp Limestone rubble walls, which have been faced with Portland Stone. If you look closely at this stone you will find that it is full of shells, predominantly fossils of oyster shells... (The interior) contains a fireplace of black Kilkenny Marble. The Cash Office is floored in a chessboard pattern with slabs of Cork Red Marble alternating with Portland Stone."
Pearce's design copied
Pearce's designs came to be studied and copied both at home and abroad. The Viceregal Apartments in Dublin Castle imitated his top-lit corridors. The British Museum in Bloomsbury in London copied his colonnaded main entrance. His impact reached Washington, D.C., where Pearce's building, and in particular his octagonal House of Commons chamber, was studied as plans were made for the United States Capitol building. While the shape of the chamber was not replicated, some of its decorative motifs were, with the ceiling structure in the Old Senate Chamber and old House of Representatives chamber (now the Statuary Hall) bearing a striking resemblance to Pearce's ceiling in the House of Commons.
The uniqueness of the building, the quality of its workmanship and its central location in College Green, across from Trinity College Dublin, made it one of Dublin's most highly regarded structures.
Public ceremonies
Much of the public ceremonies mirrored those of the British Houses of Parliament. Sessions were formally opened by a Speech from the Throne by the Lord Lieutenant, who "used to sit, surrounded by more splendour than His Majesty on the throne of England".Unsourced eighteenth-century quotation used in the Bank of Ireland, College Green, an information leaflet produced by the Bank of Ireland about the Irish Houses of Parliament. The Sovereign's official representative, when he sat on the Throne, sat beneath a canopy of crimson velvet.
As in the English and British parliaments, the House of Lords was presided over by the Lord Chancellor, who sat on the Woolsack, a large seat stuffed with wool, which was seen as a symbol of economic success and wealth. At the State Opening of Parliament, Members were summoned from the nearby House of Commons chamber by White Rod, (as opposed to Black Rod in Westminster).
In the Commons, business was presided over by the Speaker, who in the absence of a government chosen from and answerable to the Commons was the dominant parliamentary figure. Speaker William Conolly remains today one of the most widely known figures ever to be produced by an Irish parliament, for his role in Parliament and for the wealth that allowed him to build one of Ireland's greatest Georgian houses, Castletown House.