“Inoperative But Insulting:” Residues of the Penal Laws, 1829–1920

Abstract

The Oxford Companion to Irish History’s entry on “Catholic Emancipation” credits the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 with having repealed the “remaining disabilities” in the anti-Catholic legal code. This is slightly misleading. The 1829 Act completed the process of repeal of an earlier generation of Catholic legislation, which had begun in the late seventeenth and insert: early eighteenth centuries, by removing the bar on Catholics sitting in Parliament and on holding civil and military office. But it also slipped in a secondary set of anti-Catholic laws. This later code involved the imposition of a further set of “disabilities”. The severe criminal penalties, imposed by the 1829 Act on recruitment by religious orders, were clearly “disabilities”; the ban in the Catholic Relief Act 1829 on Catholic bishops using their titles was a “disability”; the prohibition, included in the Catholic Relief Act 1829, on Roman Catholic clergy performing religious rites in public was a “disability”. These second-generation penal laws served a different objective to the security concerns which underlay the first-generation penal laws; the nineteenth century laws were more symbolic and cultural in intent.