IRELAND BEFORE THE UNION

New Zealand Tablet, 17 June 1915, Page 19

IRELAND BEFORE THE UNION

The Mansion House, Dublin, contains a ‘ very precious memento of the Irish Parliament in the form of a magnificent portrait in his State robes (which he always wore when in the chair) of the Right Hon. John Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of ' Commons from 1785 till 1800. He was a determined and incorruptible anti-Unionist, who, on the destruction of the Irish Parliament, refused to surrender the mace to the Government authorities, declaring that he would only part with it at the request of the body from which he had received it. The mace and the Speaker’s chair are now pre;* served in the Irish National Museum. An attempt was made to bribe Mr. Foster into an acquiescence in the Union. Pitt wrote to Lord CornwaUis a * secret ’ letter before the first introduction of the measure of the Union asking him ‘ to hold out to Foster the prospect of an English peerage with some ostensible situation and a provision for life.’ After the defeat of the Union on its first introduction in 1799, Pitt’s desire to take vengeance on Foster amounted to monomania. In urging on Lord Cornwallis wholesale dismissals from office of the men who voted against the Union ,he was unable to reach Foster personally, but was anxious to strike at him through his son. ‘lt strikes me,’ he says, ‘as essential not to make an exception in the instance of the Speaker’s son. No Government can stand on a safe and respectable ground which does not show it feels itself independent of him.’ Mr. Foster sat subsequently in the English House of Commons.’