THE SMOTHERER OF PARLIAMENTS? by Donal Kennedy

Reading a recent Perkins BLOG, I was distressed to read of Seamus Mallon, that after nearly twenty years decorating the green benches at Westminster he described the Parliament there as “the Mother of Parliaments” and that he did so in Dublin’s College of Surgeons, a very learned institution, famed for sharp wits and sharp knives.

For I had long been under the impression that, campaigning for the widening of the Parliamentary Franchise, the MP John Bright in a speech in Birmingham in 1865 had described ENGLAND (not Westminster) as The Mother of Parliaments. Two years Later Westminster widened the franchise and Manchester publicly restricted the windpipes of the Fenians Allen, Larkin and  O’Brien, about whom Irish Nationalist MPs used sing in Westminster. In fact Parnell first attracted the attention of the Commons and the admiration of his party by defending the characters of the hanged patriots in that Chamber.

Anyhow  I tried  to check my  understanding of John Bright’s Birmingham speech on GOOGLE and other sites. It seems he actually  described E England as the  mother of free nations.Perhaps that stretched the credulity of his compatriots . It might be remembered that this was about twenty five years before the Daily Mail was founded.. Anyhow the description of England as the Mother of Parliaments was ascribed to John Bright. The description of Westminster as the Mother of Parliaments has no known father and was probably ditch-delivered by a drab.

The idea of either England or Westminster as the Mother of Parliaments sits uneasily on history. Consider the Acts of Union with Scotland and England, the attempted strangulation of Dáil Éireann at “birth and later by the ‘Treaty'”. Consider the Attlee Government’s 1949 Ireland Act which fraudulently purported to vest sovereignty of the Six Counties in “The Parliament of Northern Ireland” how the Heath Government blew that Mickey Mouse legislature away a mere 23 years later, much as one could blow out a penny candle.

As for the extension of the franchise. So fearful is the Mother of Parliaments of the power of the public that, in 1981, a full 149 years after the Great Reform Act, and some, 115 years after John Bright’s Birmingham speech, it restricted the franchise because Republican prisoners were winning Parliamentary seats.

However sharp the instruments of the College of Surgeons, the non-unionist voters in the North of Ireland have guillotined the prospects of some not-so-great Pretenders.