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which was directed wholly from London by the English Government.
Therefore the demand for "an Irish Parliament with full executive control over Irish affairs" is a demand for a Parliament possessing greater executive powers than Grattan's Parliament possessed.
Composition of Grattan's Parliament.
It is altogether impossible now to restore such a Parliament as Grattan's Parliament to Ireland, and it is a complete misrepresentation or misconception to pretend that conditions such as then prevailed could again exist in Ireland, There never was a body more intensely loyal and Imperial than the gentry who sat in Grattan's Parliament. Their descendants are still intensely loyal and Imperial, and they are the Unionists of Ireland, but in the Provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught they have been under the modern franchise deprived almost totally of political representation.
"The Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century was entirely a Protestant body. It was something like an enlarged Grand Jury, or like the present Synod of the Disestablished Church. It represented in the highest degree the property, and especially the landed property, as well as the intelligence of the country. It placed the management of Irish affairs in the hands of the Irish aristocracy and resident landlords with a large admixture of the leading Protestant lawyers, but their power was qualified by an inordinate number of nomination boroughs directly or indirectly under Government control.
"There is no inconsistency in maintaining that in the peculiar condition of Ireland such a Parliament was, or might be, a very efficient instrument of Government,
