The Office of the Surveyor General in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The story of the Surveyors General in Ireland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is interesting and at, at times, picturesque. Two of them (William Molyneux and Arthur Dobbs) have been — exceptionally for Irish architects — the subject of full-length published biographies. One of them (Arthur Jones Nevill) was one of only five members to be expelled from the Irish House of Commons in the eighteenth century. A motion to expel another (Sir William Robinson), admittedly after his retirement as Surveyor General, was defeated, the House satisfying itself with committing him to custody in Dublin Castle, and with resolving on 16 October 1703 that he was ‘unfit for any publick Employment in this Kingdom’. For the architectural historian there is the added interest that these men were responsible for the design and erection of remarkable buildings: the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the Royal (now Collins) Barracks in Dublin, parts of Dublin Castle, and at least one building of European significance, Edward Lovett Pearce’s Parliament House in Dublin. The background to such architectural commissions is inextricably connected with the history of the office of Surveyor General, yet this history has not, until now, been clarified.