Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland, 1801-1922 :: Government Politics Political Essays

Enhanced British Parliamentary cover on Ireland, 1801-1922The British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland (BPPI) are an inherent primary source for virtually every historian (and many non-historians) on the job(p) in most fields of Irish history, and the history of Anglo-Irish relations, during the completion of the compass north (1801-1922). We have identified some 13,700 official publications relating to Ireland from the House of Commons1 Sessional Indexes for this period, ranging in musical scale from short bills of a few pages and reports, to the massive social inquiries with volumes of minutes of consequence exemplified by the decennial censuses, the Poor Inquiry Commission (1836) and Devon Commission (1845) reports, each of which were multi-volume documents finishing thousands of pages. Subjects covered by BPPI range from government, politics and administration, to finance, agriculture and industry, communications, emigration, social conditions, pitiful relief and health, population, law and order, education, cultural institutions, religion and language. The types of evidence contained are super varied, from statistical series and accounts to lightly- or unedited transcripts of emigrants letters and witness interviews from crossways the social spectrum. Obviously the BPPI are elite documents, created by the Government, Parliament and invoke agencies for the purposes of governance, administration, and the creation of official knowledge. This naturally implies an official bias in what was estimate relevant of observation, what data was collected, and what was selected for publication. The principal value of the BPPI might thus be taken to lie in what they tell us about establishment knowledge, preoccupations, strategies and ideologies all crucial in themselves for an understanding of the British-Irish relationship in the period between the Act of Union and the Irish Revolution and the partition of the island in 1919-22. But the BPPI can also prov ide us with much more(prenominal) than the official view. British governance of Ireland took place in the mount of executive responsibility to Parliament, a body which contained growing numbers of oppositional and nationalistic Irish members who could demand returns of official data and serve on committees and commissions of inquiry, and beyond Parliament (however imperfectly) to an Irish as well as a British public opinion, increasingly conscious through the burgeoning popular press of the transactions of Parliament. Irish newspapers, for example, carried not only verbatim accounts of parliamentary debates, but retentive extracts from the BPPI, and debated their findings and implications in editorials. The BPPI were very much part of the public life of nineteenth and early 20th-century Ireland.