page_title: Representative peer
section_title: Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: Representative peer / Ireland
caption_attribution_description: Irish House of Lords interior shot (small) Jtdirl's image. no c/r
context_page_description: In the United Kingdom, representative peers were those peers elected by the members of the Peerage of Scotland and the Peerage of Ireland to sit in the British House of Lords. Until 1999, all members of the Peerage of England held the right to sit in the House of Lords; they did not elect a limited group of representatives. All peers who were created after 1707 as Peers of Great Britain and after 1801 as Peers of the United Kingdom held the same right to sit in the House of Lords.
  Representative peers were introduced in 1707, when the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland were united into the Kingdom of Great Britain. At the time there were 168 English and 154 Scottish peers. The English peers feared that the House of Lords would be swamped by the Scottish element, and consequently the election of a small number of representative peers to represent Scotland was negotiated. A similar arrangement was adopted when the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in January 1801.
  Scotland was allowed to elect sixteen representative peers, while Ireland could elect twenty-eight.
context_section_description: Irish representation in the Westminster parliament was outlined by articles IV and VIII of the agreement embodied in the Acts of Union 1800, which also required the Irish Parliament to pass an act before the union providing details for implementation. 
  Irish peers were allowed to elect twenty-eight representative peers as Lords Temporal, each of whom could serve for life. The Chamber of the Irish House of Lords, located in Parliament House on College Green in central Dublin, housed the first election, attended by the peers or their proxies. The government mistakenly circulated a list of the successful candidates before the vote. The Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper in Ireland was responsible for electoral arrangements; each peer voted by an open and public ballot. After the Union, new elections were held by postal vote within 52 days of a vacancy. Vacancies arose through death or, in the case of Baron Ashtown in 1915, bankruptcy. No vacancy was created where a representative peer acquired a UK peerage, as when Lord Curzon was made Baron Scarsdale in 1911.
  The Lord Chancellor of Great Britain—the presiding officer of the House of Lords—certified the vacancy, while the Lord Chancellor of Ireland directed the Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper to issue ballots to Irish peers, receive the completed ballots, determine the victor, and announce the result, which was then published in both The Dublin Gazette and The London Gazette. Roman Catholic peers could not vote or stand for election until the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. The process of being recognised by the Westminster Committee of Privileges as an elector was more cumbersome and expensive than being recognised as a (British or Irish) peer, until the orders drawn up in 1800 were amended in 1857. Successive governments tried to prevent the election of absentee landlords.  An exception was Lord Curzon, who won election as a representative peer in 1908, despite never having claimed the right to be an elector; he had been refused a peerage of the United Kingdom by the Liberal government of the day.
  The Acts of Union united the Church of England and Church of Ireland, whose bishops and archbishops had previously sat as Lords Spiritual in their respective Houses of Lords. In the united Parliament, there were at first four Irish prelates at any one time, one archbishop and three diocesan bishops, who sat for a session before ceding their seats to colleagues on a fixed rotation of dioceses. The rotation passed over any bishop already serving as an elected representative peer, as when Charles Agar sat as Viscount Somerton rather than as Archbishop of Dublin. The rotation was changed by the Church Temporalities Act 1833, which merged many dioceses and degraded the archbishoprics of Tuam and Cashel to bishoprics. No Irish bishops sat in Westminster as Lords Spiritual after the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871, brought about by the Irish Church Act 1869, although Robin Eames, then Archbishop of Armagh  was made a life peer in 1995.
  Following the establishment of the Irish Free State in December 1922, Irish peers ceased to elect representatives, although those already elected continued to have the right to serve for life; the last of the temporal peers, Francis Needham, 4th Earl of Kilmorey, by chance a peer from an Ulster family, died in 1961. Disputes had arisen long before as to whether Irish representative peers could still be elected. The Act establishing the Irish Free State was silent on the matter, to some seeming to mean that the right had not been abolished, but the Irish Free State (Consequential Provisions) Act 1922 had abolished the office of Lord Chancellor of Ireland, whose involvement was required in the election process; the office of Clerk of the Crown had also been abolished in Ireland. After 1922 various Irish peers petitioned the House of Lords for a restoration of their right to elect representatives. In 1962, the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform again rejected such requests. In the next year, when the Peerage Act 1963 (which, among other t
caption: The Chamber of the Irish House of Lords in Parliament House on College Green in Dublin was the location of the first election of Irish representative peers.
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